As an aside, it was revealed that Jonathan Gruber, now-famous designer of the Obamacare “delivery system”, and wannabe political analyst, uses a proprietary computer modeling system as does the climate science industry. This is big. A clue, for you Ellery Queen types.
For several years now, the climate science “industry” has been coming unraveled, in part because of the absence of true scholarship (junk-in, junk-out) in much of the scientific studies and reports coming from the academy to fortify and augment their basic assumptions, which go back at least three decades. The fact that most of these fraudulent studies were not self-reported inside the academy, or by peer reviews, but rather by uninvited sneaks, as Rich Weinstein has turned out to be, tells us almost as much about this depth of this fraud as the tell-tale failed numbers do.
The best common sense argument against global warming, or “climate change” as it is now called, since your outside cats already know it isn’t getting warmer out there, has been “Hey, look out the window”. Temps have leveled, and begun to fall since 1998, which makes sense since America shut off the “pollution faucet” in the 1970s. I know. I was in the state-agency pollution business when EPA was formed in 1970.
Until Clinton, EPA and environmental issues were all about cleaning up old waste sites from prior generations, and preventing leaching into the waterways. The original EPA act of 1970 had pretty much fixed air quality. Or so we thought. Reagan’s major EPA mission was what was called “Super Fund” management, and environmentalists were angry that he would not be more proactive in extending EPA’s regulatory control. Or that he was in office in the first place.
Air pollution in America, which seems to be the controlling issue over modern climate change politics (especially since China and India have kicked their economies into high gear), was reduced almost 95% from 1970 to 1992. If you think of global temperatures dropping slowly, as would a pot of boiling water on a stove, which would still be decreasingly hot for several minutes after turning off the burner, 1998 sounds about right for air temps to have finally cooled back to un-manmade levels in the United States. The American industrial revolution began in the 1880s and ran gangbuster until 1970, and this was the same period when cities began keeping temperature records. There’s scant evidence as to what air quality (mostly wood smoke) was like prior to the 1880s, and most respiratory ailments were undiagnosed, unless TB or pneumonia. So you can see the need, and benefit, for modern climatologists to use computer models to tell us what air and water quality and temps might have been like, then work those models forward. (Junk in.).
Until the 1990s, for the most part, climate science had been in the realm of the real, where there were known temperatures to compare against known temperatures. Evidence. It was a manageable science based on known parameters. What might have happened had Henry David Thoreau not built that fire out by Walden Pond in 1853 was never a kind of speculation environmental scientists would peer into. But now that it is both politically and financially profitable to do so, such Victorian integrity is no longer viable.
Two things occurred in 1992 that changed all this idyllic vision of science. One was Bill Clinton, who was a big-government easy touch for environmental interests. He introduced new environmental legislation, and taxes, most of which would be passed onto consumers, to in essence reduce emissions another 1%-2%, but at a cost almost double what it cost to get rid of the first 95%. (In the Democrat Party, they call this “fund-raising”, only we didn’t know it at the time.) And in order to justify this, Clinton inserted “the children” into the justifications, citing a new war on respiratory ailments, such as asthma. The Democrats also knew most people had short memories (over half the voters were still in grade school when EPA was formed and the real environmental crisis, about which Kerry and Obama go and on about today, was a genuine concern.) or that the bureaucracy now was taking (and still climbing) up to 40% of tax dollars in their management fee to run new environmental programs.
The second Big Thing that occurred was computer modeling, which had begun as a design technique for engineers, architects and car makers, to envision how a building might look, inside and out, before actually breaking ground. Now, the auto industry has had some spectacular failures because they tried to design a car by committee, but what architects and engineers had that other disciplines who took up computer modeling didn’t have was three-four generations (over a century) of skill and experience in building skyscrapers, so that every design still had to meet the criteria of humans who knew where to hammer the nails and drive the rivets. Architects only get one shot at getting it right, so live by the rule “junk-in, junk-out” and are therefore religious in preventing the former from ever happening. After all, the proof was in the pudding.
Climate scientists, and others it seems, i.e., healthcare modelers, such as Jonathan Gruber, were never held to any such standard of criticality of failure…in part because, in their business, failure was entirely in the eye of the beholder, and entirely political.
Gruber comes to us to now as a warning at least, and an opportunity at best, for he is like a rare bug that has been found in the barren desert, known to exist, but never seen, so speculated about only in theory. Thanks to Rich Weinstein we now have some idea how these buried nests of arthropods live; how they build their colonies, how they mate and procreate, and how they feed, which according to Gruber, is very well.
We also know they only exist in the wild as mild-mannered academicians, but, if the need arises, are subjected to rigorous trials in their habitat, the best of the lot then promoted to the laboratories of GovLabs, Inc. for essential modification, all to fulfil some political purpose.
One of them was bound to escape the nest and surface, arrogance and hubris as effective as catnip, in getting them to rise to the surface, and thanks to the hard work of Weinstein, we now have one in captivity, and know the answer to many of the questions people have been asking about the behavior of these arthropods for several years. The game is afoot.
Gruber let the cat out of the bag, with a trail of breadcrumbs that I hope serious students of government crime and academy reform will use to some greater public good. Now people much smarter than I can begin making their own computer models to determine how and where these bugs breed, and survive, then find their nests and smoke them out. Truth-in, junk-out.
