Defenders of the myth of "consensus science", such as Chris Mooney, have attempted to minimize each new revelation of incompetence and bias in climate change pronouncements. But today, the London Telegraph exposes yet another parade of errors in the IPCC report of 2007 upon which so many scare stories have relied. Skeptics of the alarmist view on global warming have been held to punctilious footnoting and have been tormented over "peer-review", which is hard to acquire in such drum-beating advocacy journals as Nature or Science. But, meanwhile the IPCC has used unsubstantiated alarmist statements from graduate student dissertations, the opinions expressed in activist group newsletters and faulty computer models to reach many of its conclusions.
English and Canadian papers are doing a better job of covering this scandal than are their American cousins. Bloggers, as the Spectator"s Matt Ridley observes, have pushed the British press to do its duty. They have been less successful in the United States. That is especially unfortunate in that many billions of dollars of U.S. government research money have been committed to projects that rely on official assumptions of human-induced global warming. That doesn't even touch the money that alarmists would like the government to spend to save the planet--at the expense of the private economy and ordinary taxpayers.
Why aren't these matters under official U.S. investigation? Probably because the media here are still cowed by the public relations activities of the climate change alarmists, skillfully advanced by Fenton Communications and its deep-pocket clients. Another problem is that Congress and other authorities lack the independent professional expertise to do a proper investigation. Regardless, they had better find the people to do the job. The issue isn't going away.
A few years ago Mooney and his associates, with the help of such professional organs as the Columbia Journalism Review, successfully lobbied editorial boards and science writers not to publish the views of skeptics of such "settled science" issues as the ability of neo-Darwinism to explain evolution, the necessity of using embryonic stem cells to conduct medical research and, of course, radical, human-caused climate change and the economic "reforms" required to reverse it. To give the skeptics on such issues space to express their objections in their own words, he told credulous media, was equivalent to listening seriously to flat-earth proponents.
On case after case, Mooney and Co. have been shown to be wrong. Too bad it takes scandals to show how wrong and why. The explanations come in two words: ideology and money.
