Jim Manzi, ever the provocateur, has stirred up quite a reader debate on the science of global warming. But it turns out he’s the real shill:
Conservatives and scientists who object to the canards about “settled,” “consensus” science are derided as shills, as being in the pay of Big Oil and Big Auto. Now cometh Manzi, who up front tells us he’s got skin in the game, as a paid “helper” of a carbon-sequestration start-up.
So . . . why is he not a shill? Why should we uncritically accept his self-serving arguments — especially when he uses the cheap rhetorical device of claiming conservatives just don’t “get it?”
The idea that we should unilaterally cripple our economy and surrender our liberty over an unproven, unprovable hypothesis is a moral and intellectual abomination.
Well, except Manzi doesn’t advocate any self-crippling. He simply thinks that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. According to this reader, if Jim just read the right blogs, we wouldn’t be having this debate:
Manzi’s awkward attempt to equate climate skepticism with a denial of evolution belongs on Daily Kos, not National Review.
The supposedly settled science of global warming has been exposed repeatedly and thoroughly by reputable scientists, statisticians, and programmers as a mishmash of unsupported assumptions, amateurishly improper statistics, incompetent coding, deliberately altered data, and outright lies. It’s a house of cards that would tumble easily if enough conservative politicians and business leaders had the courage to attack it.
The evidence against catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is overwhelming and freely available at dozens of reputable and scientifically sound websites. How can Manzi not be aware of them? Climate Audit (voted best science blog on the Internet) contains probably the most thorough demolition, particularly of the sometimes laughably incompetent statistical methods employed by climate “scientists.”
But there are many, many more: CO2 Science, Lubos Motl, Roger Pielke Jr. and Sr., JunkScience, and the Heartland Institute, to name a few. Surfacestations.org shows in vivid jpegs how the weather stations that provide the flawed temperature data underlying the global warming movement flagrantly violate World Meteorological Organization standards.
I go to NRO for analysis of current political issues by experts. With the dozens of real climate experts available who are also decent writers, why do you clutter your site with this clown Manzi?
What I want to know is, where can I get a pair of those big, floppy shoes — a question for another day.
Only elites believe in global warming, notes this reader:
Am I missing something here? A majority of Americans still do not believe in global warming, despite all the lecturing by Al Gore, et al., — and I attribute that fact to the arguments made by conservatives. The only place where it has won is among the political class.
So what are they doing wrong exactly?
Hear, hear, says another. Conservatives shouldn’t surrender — global-warming enthusiasts have already lost the most important battle:
The argument over global warming is whether people are actually willing to pull out their wallets and sacrifice their chosen energy-dependent lifestyles “for the planet.” And that is an argument that the global warmists have never won. With the recent super-spike in oil prices, their argument to make fossil fuels even more expensive and inaccessible does far worse than ring hollow. They’re getting the snot beat out of them.
Look no farther than the U.S. Senate, which recently declined to act on global warming in the midst of our current oil-price crunch. Senators are political animals, and they read the polling numbers, and then act more or less accordingly.
Just check out the recent Gallup polling that, for the first time ever, shows a large majority (57 percent) of the American public wants more oil, more drilling, more fossil fuels, and they want them now and they want them cheaper. Numerous other polls have indicated that people may say they’re “concerned” about global warming, but when asked to put a price tag on their concern, their concern suddenly shrinks to Lilliputian proportions.
Not to mention that as time goes on, the real science is increasingly debunking virtually all of the global warmists’ canards and dogma. Like, for example, the fact that the earth has cooled over the last ten years, whereas atmospheric CO2 concentrations have risen significantly over the same period. These two facts together completely disprove the entire global warmists’ theory, to wit, that the only “forcing factor” that matters in controlling climatic temperatures is the concentration of greenhouse gases, and particularly the concentration of CO2. The global warmists promised us ever increasing temperatures unless we abandoned our carbon-fueled ways. They were wrong. That argument is over now.
The proof is in: Other stuff controls our climate.