Ignorance And Cronyism Are The Only Settled Sciences

By Derek Hunter

Sunday, April 27, 2014

An honest debate with a progressive is almost as rare as a verified sighting of Bigfoot.

You’d have better luck getting a devout Scientologist to say L. Ron Hubbard was a horrible writer than you would to get a progressive to admit the “science” behind climate change is not all it’s cracked up to be. For one thing, it is based on models of what could happen in 100 years, even though those models are mostly unreliable when you use them to map what happened in the last 30. That’s right, the vast majority of “climate models” predicting doom and gloom, the basis for Democrats’ oppressive legislative and regulatory push, can’t accurately predict what happened in the past, let alone predict the future. Yet, they demand it’s a moral imperative we act now.

As we traverse our second decade of “we have only 10 years to act” hysteria, the planet forgot to warm, and hasn’t since 1998. But this fact of science hasn’t deterred the “Party of Science” from pressing forward. And why would it?

The science is settled … just like it was back in the 1970s when the same people, with the same level of certainty, were predicting an ice age and famine. When that “settled science” didn’t pan out, they flipped the script. Global cooling was out; global warming was in. The only thing that didn’t change was the “solution” – a more powerful and intrusive regulatory state.

Isn’t it amazing how the exact opposite problem can have the same solution?

Of course it can’t – not really, anyway. But you, the great unwashed public, aren’t supposed to question your betters – the progressives who only want more control over your life and money “for your own good.”

This is how the modern American left works: Declare something a moral imperative, offer a “solution” that just happens to dovetail with your long-desired agenda, denounce anyone who questions either the problem or the solution as an “other.”

Now people who like a little proof with their science are called “deniers,” a la “holocaust denier.” Progressives have given up on proving their theory and have resorted to name-calling. A child would be grounded for tactics New York Times columnists and Editors-In Chiefs of corporate-sponsored websites regularly employ. Looking at you, Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein.

Krugman, a true believer in climate change who regularly spews about the need for bigger government to “fix it” and noted poverty pimp, is a temper tantrum with a byline, a bearded buffoon unable to communicate like an adult with anyone who dares not agree with him. He’s cited by the media more often than he’s sighted on it because of his unpleasant disposition and inability to be civil. Now he’s off to add a quarter million dollars to his bank account over the next nine months to study income inequality at City University of New York. This is in addition to the tens of thousands he get per speech, book royalites and his Times salary. Presumably his CUNY duties will consist of him looking in a mirror while recent graduates unable to find work stand behind him. Who knew there was so much money in pimping the poor?

Klein is an unaccomplished, uncredentialed “journalist” who runs Vox, a blog that appears to be a wholly owned subsidiary of General Electric, a company that stands to make billions if so-called “green” technology becomes federally mandated.

I don’t question Klein’s belief in “climate change;” he’s not a noted questioner of authority or thinker – outside of the coffeehouse set from the Beltway to Brooklyn. But I do question his motivation for dedicating so much time and effort to an issue which polls just this side of thumb-wresting regulation with the American people. If anyone remotely connected to an oil company is forever tainted by it, as progressives insist, does Vox receiving untold millions from “green profiteers” General Electric puts the stench of payola on every word Klein and his friends write?

I believe “Big Green” money drives not only Vox, but most of the left’s coverage of this fraud. Sure, there’s a healthy dose of not giving a damn whether this makes sense or not because it grants government an ever-growing amount of control over people’s lives. And there’s a dash of delusional belief thrown in for good measure. But, for the most part, it is money, lots and lots of money, that drives the left on this, and most, issues.

What’s amazing is how ignorant they expect people to be when it comes to science. Few people are scientists, but we understand the concept.

Science is the seeking of truth, a never-ending quest for understanding. It is rarely “settled,” and is never, ever a majority vote.

How accepting of majority vote would progressives be if pro-lifers flooded the field of biology and overwhelmingly said life begins at conception? They’d reject that in a heartbeat. Would they consider themselves “deniers”? Of course not. They’d demand “proof.” (Which, if provided, they’d promptly reject.) So why should the vote of people whose very livelihood is dependent upon government grants to study climate change be taken at their unproven word?

The list of “settled science” overturned by continued study is legendary (Earth the center of the universe, anyone?). Yet we are expected to unquestioningly bow and surrender more of our lives and liberty to a show of hands from people who can’t explain why the problem they claimed would doom us all 20 years ago hasn’t occurred in 17? Hell no!