Climate scientists might be expected to bask in the spotlight after their decades of toil. The general public now cares about greenhouse gases, and with a new Democratic-led Congress, federal action on climate change may be at hand.<\/p>\n
Problem is, global warming may not have caused Hurricane Katrina, and last summer’s heat waves were equaled and, in many cases, surpassed by heat in the 1930s.<\/p>\n
In their efforts to capture the public’s attention, then, have climate scientists oversold global warming? It’s probably not a majority view, but a few climate scientists are beginning to question whether some dire predictions push the science too far.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Or indeed, whether they were science at all.\u00a0 Given the revelations over the past few years – that catastrophe advocates believe it acceptable to fudge science to affect policy – it’s a legit question.<\/p>\n
“Some of us are wondering if we have created a monster,” says Kevin Vranes, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado.<\/p>\n
Vranes, who is not considered a global warming skeptic by his peers, came to this conclusion after attending an American Geophysical Union meeting last month. Vranes says he detected “tension” among scientists, notably because projections of the future climate carry uncertainties \u2014 a point that hasn’t been fully communicated to the public.<\/p>\n
The science of climate change often is expressed publicly in unambiguous terms.<\/p>\n
For example, last summer, Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, told the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce: “I think we understand the mechanisms of CO2 and climate better than we do of what causes lung cancer. … In fact, it is fair to say that global warming may be the most carefully and fully studied scientific topic in human history.”<\/p>\n
Vranes says, “When I hear things like that, I go crazy.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As he should.<\/p>\n
Among enthusiasts, global warming (like so many other of the millenarian left’s pet causes) has taken on all of the worst aspects of organized fundamentalist religion; unassailable dogma (enforced by ostracism or worse), paranoia about dissenters, and downright anger about probing the “faith’s” origins.<\/p>\n
While we’re a long way from answering the questions about global warming (is it man-made, or part of a natural climate oscillation), expect global warming fans to be about as graceful about the debate as snake-handlers are about those who question their<\/em>\u00a0approach to blind faith.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Don’t get me wrong –\u00a0I probably verge on being one of Rod Dreher’s “crunchycons”.\u00a0 I generally try to leave as small an environmental footprint as I can.\u00a0\u00a0Not so much so I can be smug about my environmental consciousness as for\u00a0basic ethics\u00a0and, mainly, economics; it’s cheaper.\u00a0 When I practice it myself, anyway.\u00a0 Spread over an entire […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}