Judith Curry had an excellent piece in The Wall Street Journal the other day called "The Global Warming Statistical Meltdown":
A growing body of evidence suggests that the climate is less sensitive to increases in carbon-dioxide emissions than policy makers generally assume—and that the need for reductions in such emissions is less urgent.
Just so. With every month, the alarmist thesis seems more obviously insufficient, and the recent, very belated explanation for the 18-year-old warming "pause" - that the heat is merely hiding Godzilla-like in the ocean depths, biding its time - isn't holding up too well either.
The science may be increasingly unsettled, but the politics permits no doubts. Last week, John Kerry gave a speech on "climate change" at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and dismissed the skeptics:
What happens if they're wrong? If they're wrong - catastrophe. Life as you know it on Earth ends.
John Kerry is America's Secretary of State. That's to say, he presides over a department whose abandoned diplomatic compound in Tripoli is currently a playground for Libyan jihadists, whose consular officials facilitated the entry into the United States of an Ebola-bearing Liberian, whose continued occupation of the most expensive embassy in the history of the planet is dependent on ISIS stopping its annexation of Iraq at the gates of the Green Zone ...but John Kerry is focused like a laser on climate change.
So too is Chuck Hagel:
Drastic weather, rising seas and changing storm patterns could become "threat multipliers" for the United States, vastly complicating security challenges faced by American forces, the Pentagon said in a new report on the impact of climate change released Monday...
In remarks released alongside the 20-page report, Hagel said the Pentagon is nearly done with a survey that will assess the vulnerability of its military installations to climate change. He cited the Hampton Roads region of Virginia as an example of an area that has both military bases and recurrent flooding, adding that defense officials are developing plans to address a projected sea-level rise of about 1.5 feet in the next 20 to 50 years.
Chuck Hagel is America's Secretary of Defense. That's to say, he presides over a department whose desultory air strikes can't prevent ISIS taking Kobani and slaughtering thousands ...but he's focused like a laser on "developing plans" to address sea-level rise in the Hampton Roads area circa 2050.
In Michael Crichton's novel State of Fear, there's a Martin Sheen-like star (a TV president) whose environmental activism takes him to a remote South Pacific island. There's a lovely moment when "Ted" walks into the village clearing, sees the smiling faces of the natives, and thinks they're pleased to see him because he's a Hollywood celebrity. In fact, they're smiling because dinner has just walked in:
He saw that Sambuca was grinning at him, revealing a row of yellow pointed teeth. And then Sambuca held up a knife so Ted could see it, and smiled again, and with two fingers grabbed the flesh of Ted's cheek and sliced it off with the knife. There was no pain, surprisingly no pain but it made him dizzy to see Sambuca hold up the bloody chunk of his cheek and, grinning, open his mouth and take a bite. The blood ran down Sambuca's chin as he chewed, grinning all the while.
Ted isn't a president; he just plays one on TV. But John and Chuck are supposedly real politicians, and they're as vaingloriously unaware as Crichton's telly prez. If it's unlikely that they'd ever jet in to a remote island and get eaten by cannibals, it's not entirely beyond the realm of fancy to imagine them landing in Kobani for the Syrian Climate Change Conference just as the head-hackers march in sharpening their scimitars. Alas, it's all kinds of other folk who'll be bearing the brunt of the absurd and self-indulgent priorities of the Kerry-Hagel political class.
~Meanwhile, Dr Michael E Mann, inventor of the global warm-mongering hockey stick and the world's most unexonerated man, will be banging the drum for vintage-1998 retro-climate alarmism in Los Angeles next week. Here's how UCLA is promoting the event:
Mann shared the Nobel Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and is the author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From The Front Lines and Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming.[*SEE UPDATE BELOW]
Er, no. Dr Mann has never "shared the Nobel Prize" with the IPCC or anybody else. He is not a Nobel Prize winner, and has been told to knock it off with the fake Nobel claims by both the Nobel Institute and the IPCC. Misrepresentation of credentials is one of the most serious types of academic fraud, yet, for seven years, on an industrial scale, Mann has passed himself off as being part of the same pantheon as Banting, Einstein and Rutherford - and continues to do so, despite having been told to cease and desist.
But, if he really believes he's a Nobel Laureate, there's a simple way to prove it. When he flies to LAX for his UCLA gig, why doesn't he take the Nobel medal with him? Like authentic Nobel Laureate Brian Schmidt did, until the TSA spotted it:
'They're like, "Sir, there's something in your bag." 'I said, "Yes, I think it's this box."
'They said, "What's in the box?"
'I said, "a large gold medal," as one does.
'So they opened it up and they said, "What's it made out of?"
'I said, "gold."
'And they're like, "Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?"
'"The King of Sweden".'
Michael Mann will be waiting a long time before he can use that line - although I suppose, having declared himself a Nobel Laureate, there's nothing to stop him declaring himself King of Sweden.
Incidentally, at this year's Nobel ceremony, I gather Mann's amended complaint against me was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature ("A master of fiction at the height of his imaginative powers!").
~Thanks to readers around the world for supporting my pushback against Doctor Fraudpants by picking up SteynOnline gift certificates and our exclusive line of Mann vs Steyn trial merchandise. Under the procedurally tortured path this thing is taking to trial, there'll be oral arguments on the issue of SLAPP appealability (don't ask; it makes my eyeballs bleed) in court on November 25th. I do hope Dr Mann brings his Nobel medal along.
*UPDATE! UCLA has now changed their text to "Mann contributed to the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007". Which is rather encouraging: it suggests that Mann's misrepresentation of his credentials is becoming too widely known to be, as the eco-types say, sustainable.
