Democracy Has Prevailed.

September 28, 2010

Trib's Anti-Science

Yesterday, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review wasted some ink and paper (and I guess bandwith) trying yet again to debunk the science of climate change:
The scientific bankruptcy of blame-mankind global-warming orthodoxy is made plain by a Canadian climatologist's observation that every United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) prediction and projection has been wrong.

Writing for Canada Free Press, Dr. Tim Ball, a former University of Winnipeg climatology professor, demolishes IPCC's "settled science."

Among his devastating points: Climatology, which studies "one of the most complex systems in nature," suffers from scientific overspecialization. That means lots of researchers know lots of minutiae but don't understand how those minutiae fit together in the real world.
And so on.

Funny that I've never seen on the venerable pages of the Trib any mention of the not-so recent report by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA for short) that climate change is "undeniable." Not even a snarky editorial about it (as far as I know - someone please correct me if I am wrong here. HAS the Trib ever mentioned the NOAA "undeniable" report??)

But they'll go all the way to the Great White North to find a climate skeptic at a conservative Canadian newspaper.

What does that tell you?

Should tell you lots.

1 comment:

EdHeath said...

The Canada Free Press is evidently a conservative newspaper, and Tim Ball is pretty clearly a conservative writer, with a specific agenda. He is not, as far as I can see, a scientist who has seen the truth or anything like that.

That said, in the Trib piece Ball also said:

"Another major problem for the IPCC is its very definition of "climate change," which assumes mankind's to blame. Yet nobody knows just how much climate changes naturally, so there's no baseline against which to gauge human activity's effects."

In point of fact, we have the whole of climate sciences analysis of history - things like tree ring data, ice cores from various locations like Greenland, the Arctic and the Antarctic and all of the written history of weather conditions. Surely we have a fair amount of data of how climate change occurs naturally.

One cheery thought, if the Republicans take the House, that will mean another two years before the US does anything about greenhouse gases.