NoFrakkingConsensus
4/9/2011
…When Frontline interviewed Timothy Wirth, the man who orchestrated Hansen’s 1988 Congressional testimony, he described the sequence of events this way:
We knew there was this scientist at NASA, you know, who had really identified the human impact before anybody else had done so and was very certain about it. So we called him up and asked him if he would testify. [bold added]
One scientist. Who felt certain about his own theories. That’s what triggered the global warming frenzy. Hansen’s testimony transformed him into a media darling, a scientific superstar. So where, precisely, does courage come into it?
Hansen has hardly been toiling away in obscurity – or poverty. For decades he has been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award…
…instead of doing the hard work of selling each of those measures to the public on its own merits, the Worldwatch Institute is trying to sneak them in through the back door – by presenting them as necessary responses to human-caused climate change.
The problem with this argument is that lefty eco activists were pushing those same solutions long before global warming became the cause du jour. A while ago I wrote a blog post titled Global Disaster Is So 1976. I pointed out that people were talking about worldwide catastrophe back then, too. I noted that the answers being proposed included lifestyle changes such as eating less meat…
Read the entire article at NoFrakkingConsensus
H/T Blazing Cat Fur, where the reader will find several other links to excellent related articles, including this one by David Evans (“Climate models go cold”), which begins:
The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic. Watching this issue unfold has been amusing but, lately, worrying. This issue is tearing society apart, making fools out of our politicians.
Let’s set a few things straight. The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant…
