Angry in the Great White North

One of the most striking things about the Climategate scandal is the way climate alarmists react to good news.

Think about it.  According to climate alarmists, the planet is in danger of burning up because of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, existing in excess amounts because of human activity, trapping heat and driving temperatures up.

It'll be the end of civilization!  It'll be our doom!

But the data is not supporting this prediction.  Instead, there seems to be a cooling trend.  Other so-called predictions have not panned out.

This is good news, right?

We're not burning up!  We'll be OK!

Alarmists ought to be dancing in the streets.  They claim to have seen the future and it was a bad one.  They, of all people, ought to be the most relieved, having been most acutely aware of what might have been.

But they're not happy.  Not in the least.

The Earth is safe?!  Ah, crap!  Shhh, maybe nobody knows yet.

That is the most depressing thing about this whole sorry mess.  It reveals an inconvenient truth.

The alarmists were never out to save the planet.  Oh, the useful idiots like Al Gore and Stephane Dion insist that this is the goal, but people like them were never the leaders.

The true goal was to wreck the industrialized West, and level the technological and financial differences across nations by transferring vast amounts of wealth from rich nations to poor nations, under the guise of carbon offsets.

This is not news.  Accusations like this have been made for some time, sometimes supported by accidently candid comments from the alarmist crowd.   Still, these were accusations...the alarmists insisted that it was about saving the planet.

But now, for the first time really, we can say we know this claim by the alarmists to be untrue.  Why?  Not because the alarmists have suddenly confessed.  That would be too easy.

Instead, they reveal their true motivations in the way they react to the data in front of them.

Kevin Trenberth, head of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder Colorado, a lab paid for by the National Science Foundation, a taxpayer-funded agency of the US government, wrote in an email:

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.  Our observing system is inadequate.

For Trenberth, this is particularly galling, since he believes that nothing can stop global warming:

Global mean temperatures have risen and the last decade is the warmest on record...  The long lifetime of several greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide lasts for over a century) suggests that we can not stop the changes, although we can slow them down.

Of course, in Trenberth's private email quote above, he admits that the data does not support his public assertion that global mean temperatures are rising.

So again I ask, why is Trenberth not celebrating?  Why is he not declaring, with some suitable caution, that it would appear that there is some hidden or misunderstood mechanism that is compensating for the warming effect climatologists had predicted?  Why is he not sighing a very public sigh of relief that the danger has been overstated, or perhaps that it was never really there, and that he and his fellow climatologists will redouble their efforts to truly understand what apparently they had grossly misunderstood?

Because none of this was ever about understanding climate, or even about science.  Or maybe it started that way, but it has long since changed.

Instead, the climate alarmists used global warming to justify their new world order.  They connected the science to their leftist self-loathing politics, thinking the science would support their political agenda.

But tragically for them, that's not what happened.  Instead, the politics acted like prions, those squiggly proteins that infect living tissue.  A prion comes in contact with other proteins and induces them to fold into the same abnormal form as the prion itself.   These bent proteins are stable in the extreme, making it extremely difficult to control them and contain them, and their effects irreversible.  They, in turn, induce more bending of proteins, until the organism dies.

Mad-cow disease and the human variants are blamed on prion infections.

It seems these climatologists are suffering from a similar affliction, which I am calling "mad-climatologist disease", or MCD.  These climatologists allowed their politics to touch the science, but the science became infected and bent out of shape by the politics.  Like biological prions, the changes induced by MCD political prions are more or less permanent, and these former scientists have lost the capacity to alter their scientific conclusions.  The data doesn't show global warming?  Then the data is bad, and it must be altered, hidden, and if necessary, destroyed, in order to preserve and protect the madness-inducing MCD political prions.

These climatologists are write-offs.  The twisting affect of their politics has wrecked their ability to perform credible science.  All that can be done is to isolate them from the rest of the scientific community so that MCD spreads no further.