Thursday, February 05, 2015

Playing Politics with the Weather

Playing Politics with the Weather | National Review Online:
"To this end, McCarthy repeats the claim made by NASA GISS that 2014 was the hottest year on record.
The Daily Mail was virtually the only newspaper to point out the deceitful nature of the claim. NASA’s announcement did not explain that, based on its own figures, there was only a 38 percent chance that the 2014 record was accurate. 
If it had adhered to IPCC standards on the treatment of uncertainties, the NASA press release would have had to qualify its announcement by saying,
“2014 is about as likely as not to have been the hottest year.”
One of the most damaging casualties of the climate wars is scientific integrity.
When a public scientific agency such as NASA subordinates its integrity to a political agenda and when climate scientists use their standing to criticize one side in a political debate but fail to correct the errors and exaggerations made by their partisans in the political arena, the public loses faith in science.
 Republicans expressing doubt about claims of future catastrophic climate change are condemned for being “against science,” while the media give those on the alarmist side a free pass, whatever foolish or wrongheaded things they might say.
A commonly deployed distortion is the extreme-weather gambit. 
The IPCC has formally stated that it has “low confidence” in observed changes in climate extremes (defined as extreme weather or climate event) since 1950; despite this, alarmists continually make unsubstantiated claims to the contrary, a theme of Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech at the climate conference in Lima two months ago. 
No climate scientist called out Kerry for saying a year ago that “the science is absolutely certain,” a ludicrous claim to make about a relatively new field studying a system characterized by, in the words of the IPCC, “chaotic variations on a vast range of spatial and temporal scales.”"

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