Anyone who has even casually encountered the global warming
industry knows that this crowd's first response to any challenge,
of any sort, from any source, is to go ad hominem.
Ad hom is a way to change the subject by
people for whom the facts are not helpful. As we also see in the
case of EPA getting caught suppressing the sole substantive
report submitted as part of its "internal deliberation" over
whether to seize the energy sector of the economy, it also
reveals staggering ignorance about the issue on a par with
President Obama's recent
claim that carbon dioxide, eh, "contaminate[s] the water
we drink and pollute[s] the air we breathe." He said,
opening a Perrier and exhaling a sigh...
They know what they need to know, and that is that it has been
decided that this is the vehicle for long-desired "social
change", and whatever means that are necessary will be employed.
Facts and logic are, to these people, for losers.
We see it again today, in a Washington
Times story about
the suppressed report. There we read that a spokeswoman for EPA
administrator Lisa P. Jackson, who made the determination that
CO2 threatens the world, "noted that the memo's author,
Alan Carlin, is an economist, not a climate scientist". Funny how
people tasked with certain jobs become unqualified only when they
are inconvenient.
Carlin is, indeed, a PhD economist from MIT, which he obtained
after earning a degree in physics from Cal Tech. Both of which
probably explain why he holds the job he holds, to review such
proposals. But this reflexive ad hom begs
several obvious questions, none more obvious than what makes
Lisa P. Jackson a climate scientist? [she's a chemical
engineer]
For that matter, who the hell are Barack Obama, Henry Waxman, Ed
Markey, Nancy Pelosi...need I continue? They all apparently are
perfectly suited to reach informed judgment on the issue. Waxman
is a scientist (bachelor's in political science, UCLA ‘61)
like Batman's
a scientist. Freeman Dyson, meanwhile, is "just a physicist".
Clearly, our governmental Solons are qualified by means of
agreeing that this issue must be ridden to achieve the desired
"change".
As I detail in Red
Hot Lies, this ad hom addiction
doesn't serve the alarmists well. For example, when assailing
critics of the IPCC report to which EPA admittedly outsourced its
decision making and which was written by 52 government
representatives as part of a process expressly chartered to
support a future global warming treaty and not, as
EPA claims, peer-reviewed (many peers did review it, and we
learned through a FOIA threat that just like EPA's reviewer
they rejected it, only to be ignored. That's a
lot of things, but peer review isn't one of them).
Naturally, some of us wondered about the amazing qualifications
which must attach to these "world's leading climate scientists"
behind the IPCC who are not to be
challenged -- what it must take to become
qualified to speak! -- only to discover they were no such thing,
but did include some anthropology teaching assistants and the
like (really).
Team Soros were particularly adamant about an economist daring to
opine - as with EPA today, as part of its deferring instead to
the IPCC (remember that) - sniveling "since when have
economists, who are pervasive on this
list, become scientists, and why should we care
what they think about climate science?" Hmmm.
The fellow posing as the IPCC's chief "climatologist"
(New York Times andUSA Today), or the UN's
"chief climate scientist" (AP)? Oh. Right. He's an economist.
The alarmists, and now the Obama Administration
through-and-through, are bullying, sneaking, dissembling and on
occasion openly lying to the public to get their way. You've got
a little bit of time left to be outraged. I and my colleagues are
flattered that so many people just assume we're handling these
things, and the public can go about their lives. I have a life on
the outside, too, with a wife and children. So, please, when this
comes down, don't call me. We told you.
