The New McCarthyism

Jay Ambrose, writing at the New York Post tears into Newsweek magazine and the global warming true believers today, calling them new McCarthyites. He is relentless in this one, but misses noting the really big news of the week, unfortunately.

August 12, 2007 — NEWSWEEK magazine, which tells us in a recent edition about a "well-funded," global-warming "denial machine," is itself something of a trashing machine, a journalistic pretender that mistakes smear for substance.

The stumbling, bumbling exercise in ad hominem McCarthyism takes it as an unchallengeable truth that global warming is a human-induced catastrophe that could be readily prevented, and concludes there is just one way to explain the "naysayers" to this holy writ: They are part of a "well-coordinated," heavily financed scheme cooked up by self-serving corporate interests to dupe the public and confuse or buy off politicians.

The article not only fails to make so sweeping a case, but skips over a fact that the rawest newsroom rookie should have picked up - namely, that the Chicken Littles have outspent the cited think tanks and other groups in trying to inflict everyone with the willies, scientific exactitude be hanged.

As some of the skeptics have noted in response to Newsweek's nastiness, the expenditures of the doubters are in fact dwarfed by the multimillions skillfully deployed by environmental groups. Sure, some corporations have sought to persuade lawmakers and the public that the alarmism is itself a danger, and why not? These businesses could be badly damaged by some suggested policies that, in terms of actually achieving anything, might be little more than voodoo dances.

Newsweek thinks they would be jim-dandy. On the basis of what analysis? Nothing precise is offered.

That is, of course, the nasty little bit of misdirection that the cultists do not want you to know. There is an enormous amount of money in play from people, groups and corporate interests who want the global warming frenzy to benefit them. For instance, Ambrose offers this interesting tidbit:

If the magazine thinks that is how the world works, why didn't it similarly point out that NASA's James Hansen, a supporter of John Kerry in the last presidential election and one of the most outspoken scientists about the threat of warming, received a $250,000 prize from the Heinz Foundation, administered by Kerry's wife?

James Hansen's big contribution to the global warming liturgy of the true believers is the US climate data of course. (Well, that and his much-reveled in role as "heroic martyr".) Which was just quietly corrected by NASA when it turned out to be incorrect. If a global warming skeptic, Steve McIntyre, had not been relentless about tracking down the weird jump in the data, the false information would have continued to be holy writ. It would seem that a man who is responsible for false data being accepted as holy truth - while getting a big chunk of money from an interested party would be worthy of note. (If the situation were reversed, you can bet the true believers would be screaming for an auto de fe.)

Side note. I only noted one left-leaning sites's mention of the correction of the erronious data. The argument there was that, hey, this only affects US data. But an intellectually honest scientist, when told that a fairly large amount of some of the best and most complete data in the world was subjected to a systematic error would have to ask whether all of the global data was subject to the same flaw. Not dismiss the one known - major -error as a one-off and maintain that all the rest is still good.

Oh, and as to Newsweek's charges that anyone who is questioning the "settled" science is on the take, all I can say is the pay sucks.

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  By Rich Horton, Sunday, 12 August , 2007 @ 10:04 am

  Actually the news of likely outright fraud in a lynchpin study used by IPCC types was the REALLY big news this week. (See here, and my take here.)

  The fact that so much of the raw data and the methodology are kept hidden from outside reviewers should raise a red flag for anyone interested in actual science.

Other Links to this Post

1. Blue Crab Boulevard » Must Be The Day For It — Sunday, 12 August , 2007 @ 8:18 am