Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. —Michael Crichton, National Press Club, 2005

Read more here.

It was Michael Crichton who first prominently identified environmentalism as a religion. That was in a speech in 2003, but the world has moved on apace since then and adherents of the creed now have a firm grip on the world at large.

Global Warming has become the core belief in a new eco-theology. The term is used as shorthand for anthropogenic (or man made) global warming. It is closely related to other modern belief systems, such as political correctness, chemophobia and various other forms of scaremongering, but it represents the vanguard in the assault on scientific man.

- Sådan indleder John Brignell, der er professor emeritus of Industrial Instrumentation ved the University of Southampton i Storbritannien en længere artikel, hvor han afdækker lighederne mellem religion og økologisme. Underoverskrifterne i Brignells analyse kaldet Global Warming as Religion and not Science er Faith and scepticism; Sin and absolution; Proselytes and evangelists; Demagogues and hypocrites; Infidels and apostates; Sacrifice and ritual; Prophecy and divination; Puritans and killjoys; Censorship and angles; Control and taxation; Contradictions and irrationality; Wealth and power; Confession and salvation; samt Envoi.

Findes også her som PDF.

Set via www.eco-imperialism.com

Et Brignell-citat:

It is a curious repetition of history that those who advance the hypothesis that the sun is the controlling element in changes of climate are vilified, just as Galileo was, for supporting the Copernican heliocentric description of the solar system. Yet the sun is clearly the driver for climate – if it stopped shining, the earth's temperature would drop to near absolute zero. In the establishment dogma the sun is barely mentioned, while the puny efforts of mankind are gratuitously magnified out of proportion. In a scientific approach to climate, a full understanding of the behaviour of that solitary driver would be the first prerequisite, but this is waived in the interests of piety; so leading solar researchers have been deprived of funding...

Besøg Kyoto Kritik.

I recently came across an interview with best-selling author Michael Crichton, posted on a website called The Daily Ablution. Unlike Lovecraft and King, Crichton doesn’t specialize in the horror genre, though his books are certainly full of frights. This is the guy, after all, who gave us “Jurassic Park” and “State of Fear.”

“From this I conclude fears are a matter of fashion. Worries are like clothing styles, they come and go, rise and fall, based on what the worry fashion leaders tell the herd of independent minds to fear this year. GM is fashionable to fear. But that will change".

- Det skriver Dean Kleckner i dagens kommentar - Fashionable Fear.

[Overskriften er naturligvis inspireret af Huey Lewis & The News ].

Besøg Kyoto Kritik.

In the mid-1990s the use of ground boreholes as a clue to paleoclimate history was becoming well-established. In 1995 David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, published a study in Science4 that demonstrated the technique by generating a 150-year climate history for North America. Here, in his own words, is what happened next.

Those wanting to “get rid of” the MWP run into the problem that it shows up strongly in the data. Shortly after Deming’s article appeared, a group led by Shaopeng Huang of the University of Michigan completed a major analysis of over 6,000 borehole records from every continent around the world. Their study went back 20,000 years. The portion covering the last millennium is shown in Figure 4 (side 6). The similarity to the IPCC’s 1990 graph is obvious. The world experienced a “warm” interval in the medieval era that dwarfs 20th century changes. The present-day climate appears to be simply a recovery from the cold years of the “Little Ice Age.” Det skriver Ross McKitrick.

Læs mere om Huangs boringer og resultater her.

Huangs hjemmeside

David Deming fortæller mere om hans oplevelser med klimajournalister og klimapolitiske kolleger her. Et par citater fra teksten, der også handler om Michael Crichtons roman State of Fear::

From 1100 to 1300 AD, the population of Europe increased from about 40 to 60 million (Moore, 1995). The surest sign of the warming climate in Europe was the settlement of Greenland by Vikings from Iceland. The Greenland settlements reached a height of prosperity in the 12th and 13th centuries when 3,000 colonists occupied 280 farms. The settlements came under duress in the late 14th century due to the onset of Little Ice Age cooling; they finally perished in the 15th century. The existence of the MWP was recognized in the climate textbooks for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be "gotten rid of"....

Four years later, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas (2003) reviewed more than 200 previous studies and concluded that the evidence for the existence and global extent of both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age was well established. It was hardly a controversial result, yet the Soon and Baliunas (2003) paper was greeted by a firestorm of controversy. Three editors of the academic journal in which the study had been published resigned in protest (Regalado, 2003, p. A-3).
Writing in the June 24, 2003, internet version of Scientific American, reporter David Appell explained Soon and Baliunas' sin.

Soon and Baliunas had committed the cardinal sin of violating the new consensus....