April 15, 2014

They're Not Even Trying To Be Scientific

From today's Tribune-Review:
Its “science” increasingly has come under fire. And the court of public opinion more and more is not on its side. So what's the foundering United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to do? Why, go for broke, of course. After all, the world should be very, very, very, VERY afraid.

On Sunday, the panel lamented that while not enough is being done to combat supposed “man-made” climate change ( n é, “global warming”), all is not lost — if only super-duper drastic measures are implemented now, now, NOW!

The “scientists” of global warming religion now insist that, even despite mitigating efforts, global greenhouse gas emissions have accelerated drastically since the turn of the century. And to limit the increase in the “global mean temperature” to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, they say greenhouse emissions would have to be reduced by up to 70 percent by 2050 and by up to 100 percent by the end of the century.
Notice all the irony quotation marks around the words:
  • science
  • man-made
  • scientists
  • global mean temperature
It's a rhetorical device meant to undermine the validity of the word being quoted.  It's the difference between saying that:
  • Scaife's Tribune-Review brings you the news.
  • Scaife's Tribune-Review brings you the "news".
See?

But they've long since offered up any evidence to back up their assertions that climate science is merely "science" (since there isn't any evidence to back up that assertion).  They've now embarrassingly reduced themselves to irony quotation snark.

Meanwhile reality says:
The globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature data as calculated by a linear trend, show a warming of 0.85 [0.65 to 1.06] °C3 , over the period 1880 to 2012, when multiple independently produced datasets exist. The total increase between the average of the 1850–1900 period and the 2003–2012 period is 0.78 [0.72 to 0.85] °C, based on the single longest dataset available.
And the IPCC has offered up a neat graph:


Science!

So unless Scaife's braintrust can come up with some actual science (ANY actual science!) showing that this is all wrong, we'll have to continue to calling bullshit on their bullshit.

1 comment:

  1. Ya know, for us media consumers, this whole debate should boil down to the question of motivation on each side of the aisle and/or which scenario is most likely.

    "Man-made climate change" could be a great big conspiracy by the uber rich, old money, green energy machine in attempt to undermine and overtake in the biggest coup ever, the traditional fossil fuel energy market. So large, in fact that it has wormed its slimy tentacles and corrupted almost every crevice of the science community to garnish its propaganda machine. You should see the fields upon fields of slave labor driven solar panel manufacturing facilities in India these bastards command! And our only defense against is the fair and balanced (it'd be absurd to think biased) local media.

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