Tweet

Local Regina publication, Prairie Dog Magazine, is laying down the gauntlet by asking climate change skeptics to record their doubts on paper.

The magazine has created a declaration that outlines various scenarios for rejecting scientific consensus and has mailed it to several public figures who have openly expressed skepticism on the issue of global warming, including Stephen Harper, Margaret Wente, Rex Murphy, Tim Ball and Ross McKitrick amongst others. 

The plan to check in with the skeptics in 10 years is all about “accountability” and the magazine states that should they be wrong they will give credit where credit is due. And if they’re right…..it’s a sad bet to win.

Tweet

Climate conspriricists pounced at the opportunity yesterday to draw grandiose conclusions from the illegal hacking of private emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. 

They wasted no time declaring global warming a vast science-wing conspiracy, orchestrated by a powerful handful of white-coats who, when not publishing in reputable peer-reviewed science journals, were (gasp) emailing each other to talk shop and vent about climate skeptic “idiots” (how un-PC).

The scandalistas say little about the fact that this breach of security and publishing of private communications is a crime, content to enjoy the opportunity to cherry-pick a few lines from these internal emails to push the skeptic theory of a sinister master plan by mainstream scientists to warn humanity that man has altered the climate in dangerous ways.

The Telegraph’s resident skeptic blogger, James Delingpole, immediately labeled this episode “Climategate,” pondering whether this is “the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming.’”

Tweet

He may only be part of a noisy minority, but Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) isn’t about to let his fringe status get in the way of his latest skeptic shtick.

As he did last year, Inhofe, writing under the guise of the Minority on the Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, has penned another anti-global warming screed with the help of his staffer, Marc Morano, entitled “UN Blowback: More than 650 International Scientists Dissent over Man-Made Global Warming Claims”. And, like last year, Inhofe’s laughable attempt at a serious “report” falls flat on its face upon any close scrutiny.

While there is much that could be singled out for ridicule in the senator’s report, I’ll focus on what I’ll call the skeptics’ “greatest hits” (i.e. the wrong-headed arguments they’ve been trotting out for months, if not years, to “prove” their point).

Let’s start with the claim made in the report’s title: that “half of warming” is due to solar forcing.

Despite being debunked over and over again, skeptics like Inhofe have latched onto a few studies published during the last decade that purported to show a link between solar activity – cosmic rays, in particular – and rising greenhouse gas emissions. (The idea being that cosmic rays helped water droplets form in the atmosphere, leading to increased cloud clover and, thus, lower average temperatures.)

Tweet

At some level, it’s hard not to feel an ounce of sympathy for global warming skeptics. Surely it must take a lot of resolve and perseverance to keep pushing an idea that everyone else (presumably, they, too) knows is blatantly false. That is, until you actually start reading some of the material they try to pass off as sober-minded research.

What I find pathetic is not so much the content, which, as we all know, is easily disprovable, but the fact that their views have barely evolved over the years – even as the science has progressed and become less vague. A perfect example of this regressive mentality is a speech that was recently given by Kenneth P. Green, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Tweet

“With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it.” – Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), July 28, 2003.

Few issues in recent memory have riven the body politic as profoundly as climate change. A matter, which, by all accounts, has long been considered fait accompli by the scientific community, has – to the outside world’s great surprise – remained a point of deep ideological dissent within the United States.

Tweet

November 7, 2006 was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day for a lot of Republicans. It's the day the Democrats won the majority in the US Senate and House. Über-conservative Republican Senator Rick Santorum was one of the Republicans who lost his seat that day; it was the "largest margin of defeat for an incumbent Senator since… 1980." Ouch .

Determined not to be relegated to the "where are they now?" column, Santorum has been keeping his conservative fan club happy with his semi-regular opinion pieces in the Philadelphia Inquirer. He pontificates on his favorite subjects, like "family values " and "evildoers ".

However, today Santorum digresses, and puts on his "clean coal" salesman hat.