By Rich Lowry
Friday, February 27, 2015
Let the climate inquisition begin. The ranking Democrat
on the House Natural Resources Committee, Raul Grijalva of Arizona, has written
to seven universities about seven researchers who harbor impure thoughts about
climate change.
One of the targets is Steven Hayward, an author and
academic now at Pepperdine University. As Hayward puts it, the spirit of the
inquiry is, “Are you now or have you ever been a climate skeptic?”
Grijalva’s letters were prompted by the revelation that
Wei-Hock Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
and a skeptic, didn’t adequately disclose support for his research from energy
interests.
Soon’s lapse aside, the assumption of Grijalva’s fishing
expedition is that anyone who questions global-warming orthodoxy is a greedy
tool of Big Oil and must be harried in the name of planetary justice and
survival.
Science as an enterprise usually doesn’t need political
enforcers. But proponents of a climate alarmism that demands immediate action
to avert worldwide catastrophe won’t and can’t simply let the science speak for
itself.
In fact, for people who claim to champion science, they
have the least scientific temperament imaginable. Their attitude owes more to
Trofim Lysenko, the high priest of the Soviet Union’s politicized science,
than, say, to Gregor Mendel, the founder of modern genetics, whose work was
shunned by Lysenko for ideological reasons.
Consider the plight of Roger Pielke Jr. of the University
of Colorado Boulder, who has done work on extreme weather. He, too, is on the
receiving end of one of Grijalva’s letters.
At first blush, Pielke seems a most unlikely target. It’s
not that he doubts climate change, or even doubts that it could be harmful. His
offense is merely pointing to data showing that extreme weather events like
hurricanes, tornadoes, and droughts haven’t yet been affected by climate
change. This is enough to enrage advocates who need immediate disasters as a
handy political cudgel.
It can’t be Apocalypse 100 Years From Now; it has to be
Apocalypse Now.
Eager to blame the ongoing California drought on climate
change, John Holdren, President Barack Obama’s science czar, challenged Pielke
on droughts, citing various research showing that they may be getting worse.
But the bible of the climate “consensus,” the U.N.’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says that “there is not enough
evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale
observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the
20th century.” Even Holdren’s long written response to Pielke is full of
stipulations of uncertainty.
To move a political debate, this simply is not good
enough. It is impossible to scare people with a long list of methodological
imponderables and projections showing far-off harms, should the modeling hold
up over eight decades. The imperative is to show that, in Holdren’s words,
“climate change is an urgent public health, safety, national security, and
environmental imperative” (emphasis added).
It has to be counted a small victory in this project that
Pielke will no longer be an obstacle. Citing his harassment, Pielke has sworn
off academic work on climate issues. And so the alarmists have hounded a
serious researcher out of the climate business. All hail science!
The other day, the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri,
quit amid a sexual-harassment scandal and noted in his letter of resignation:
“For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and
sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion.”
Is it too much to ask that the man in charge of a project
supposedly marshaling the best scientific evidence for the objective
consideration of a highly complex and contested phenomenon not feel that he has
a religious commitment to a certain outcome?
Why, yes it is. The kind of people who run inquisitions
may lack for perspective and careful respect for the facts and evidence. But
they never lack for zeal.
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