DC Trawler

Because $cience! Climate Change Cash

Derek Hunter Contributor
Font Size:

Climate Progress, the “Green” arm of the activist charity the Center For American Progress, is very upset with Congressman Larry Bucshon (R-IN). They’re actually upset with everyone who refuses their progressive dogma, but that’s beside the point. What sin did the Congressman commit? He mentioned the green in the “Green movement.”

At a hearing yesterday, Bucshon questioned the integrity of climate data because the very livelihood of many of those scientists is completely dependent upon the money spigot from government to remain open.

In an exchange with White House Science Advisor John Holdren, Bucshon said, “Of all the climatologists whose careers depends on the climate changing to keep themselves publishing articles? Yes, I could read that, but I don’t believe it.”

goracleThis was too much for the true believers of Holy Church of Global Warming to take. I believe questioning the huge amount of cash in their church is a violation of the 7th commandment, as decreed by Pope Albert Goreus IV.

But why? If the data is irrefutable, why does it keep getting refuted? We are at least 15 years into the first warnings of only having “10 years to act before it’s too late,” yet the sky hasn’t fallen. There has been no “global warming” for 215 months, Antarctic ice is at record levels, and none of the doom and gloom predictions have come to pass.

Why not?

Well, much like the Obama administration had to cover the reality of their failed stimulus bill by inventing a new unit of measure to gauge success — the “saved or created” job — true believers simply move the goal posts. The predictions they posit are for the distant future and, therefore, are un-disprovable.

No one knows what will happen in the future. If I say the Earth will be destroyed by a cataclysmic event in 100 years and provide a bunch of specific details as to how and why, I’d get some attention and a lot of scorn, but I couldn’t be disproven. If I predicted that destruction as a result of an alien invasion I’d still get attention, but that would be it. If I presented it as due to global warming, claiming mass extinction, cities under water, and hundreds of millions of deaths, I’d get the attention AND government grants to study it.

Both are predictions, but one is based in lunacy, the other “science.” There’s very little difference between the two because neither can be proven or disproven, but one has the stamp of “science” attached to it, and for those who want to believe humans are a virus unleashed on the sweet, pure Earth, that’s enough.

The “solution” to this future problem is always current action. “We must act now to stave off devastation in the future,” is a constant refrain of true believers. But, curiously, those “solutions” neatly dovetail with what progressives have sought and failed to get for decades, starting back when “climate change” was simply known as the seasons.

Higher taxes, more regulation of businesses, more control over people’s lives, an ever-growing government are all the prescriptions for preventing this predicted future calamity. They’re also things progressives have been seeking for the better part of a century and failing to get.

The same people whose mantra used to be “You can’t legislate morality” claim it’s immoral to not act now for what they claim will happen in the future. They use “science” to back them up, but it’s future science based on models of what might happen in the future if we don’t act now! Unprovable, but can’t be disproven either.

It becomes, at that point, a matter of faith, not science. It’s every bit a religion as any other.

pope-goreTrue believers have gotten better at their racket, learning from their mistakes. Prediction windows that used to come to pass quickly, proving them untrue, are now much longer — 20, 50, 100, or more years. They’re close enough to feel immediate, but far enough away that they’ll be forgotten should they not come to pass. They’re modern snake oil salesmen, having long since left town when your ailments aren’t cured by their tonic. But they’ve got your money, and the money is always key in a con.

So back to the money we go. Climate Progress was upset that Congressman Bucshon would question the motives of people required by their job to publish studies and obtain grants to fund their work. But if the “science is settled,” as they claim, why continue the study? Couldn’t those scarce resources be better spent elsewhere, someplace the science isn’t settled?

Of course it could. But that would put a lot of people, scientists dependent on that money, out of work. They have a financial interest in perpetuating the “need for further study.” As such, that fact, coupled with their past failures, necessitates skepticism. Skepticism is the cornerstone of science, after all, or at least used to be.

Science, to hear progressives tell it, is not proving a hypothesis and being able to repeat those results, it’s majority vote. But it’s only majority vote if you get to pick the voters. Not every scientist gets a vote, not even every climate scientist gets a vote. They pick who gets to vote, and doing that gives you the Saddam Hussein-type result of “97 percent of scientists agree!”

If you want to test progressive’s theory of “majority vote = science” there’s a simple way to do it. Encourage pro-life Christians to enter the field of biology, flood the zone. Then offer to take a survey of biologists on when life begins and base abortion policy on what a majority of them think. Yeah …

That’s what “climate science” has become — true believers, dependent upon something existing, ignoring evidence to the contrary, and demanding more money and influence.

Climate change is a religion, a rabid wing of the progressive church of more government control and centralized power. It’s about money, not science. Congressman Bucshon is correct to question the motives of people whose careers are reliant on that government spigot remaining open pushing an agenda that keeps their coffers full. It’s just good science.