From Boston University Professor Angelo Codevilla’s “America’s Ruling Class- And the Perils of Revolution” (July – August 2010 issue). In The American Spectator (online version).

That is why the ruling class is united and adamant about nothing so much as its right to pronounce definitive, “scientific” judgment on whatever it chooses. When the government declares, and its associated press echoes that “scientists say” this or that, ordinary people — or for that matter scientists who “don’t say,” or are not part of the ruling class — lose any right to see the information that went into what “scientists say.” Thus when Virginia’s attorney general subpoenaed the data by which Professor Michael Mann had concluded, while paid by the state of Virginia, that the earth’s temperatures are rising “like a hockey stick” from millennial stability — a conclusion on which billions of dollars’ worth of decisions were made — to investigate the possibility of fraud, the University of Virginia’s faculty senate condemned any inquiry into “scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards” claiming that demands for data “send a chilling message to scientists…and indeed scholars in any discipline.” The Washington Post editorialized that the attorney general’s demands for data amounted to “an assault on reason.” The fact that the “hockey stick” conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are on record manipulating peer review, the fact that science-by-secret-data is an oxymoron, the very distinction between truth and error, all matter far less to the ruling class than the distinction between itself and those they rule.

Thomas Sowell writes in the National Review

The ‘Science’ Mantra

Excerpt:

Today, politicized “science” has too big a stake in the global warming hysteria to let the facts speak for themselves and let the chips fall where they may. Too many people – in politics and in the media, as well as among those climate scientists who are promoting global warming hysteria – let the raw data on which their calculations have been based fall into the “wrong hands.”

People who talk about the corrupting influence of money seem to automatically assume that it is only private money that is corrupting. But, when governments have billions of dollars invested in the global-warming crusade, massive programs are underway, and whole political careers are at risk if that crusade gets undermined, do not expect the disinterested search for truth.

Among the intelligentsia, there have always been many who are ready to jump on virtually any bandwagon that will take them to the promised land, where the wise and noble few – like themselves – can take the rest of us poor dummies in hand and tell us how we had better change the way we live our lives.

No doubt some climate scientists honestly believe that global warming poses a threat. But other climate scientists honestly believe the opposite. That is why the raw data have had to be destroyed before the latter get their hands on it.

This is tragically the case as regards many other issues, besides global warming, where data are made available only to the true believers and kept out of the hands of those who think otherwise.

When climatologists such as John Coleman debunk AGW, the believers contest that he is not the right kind of scientist to dispute the “science”.  He is after all “just a weatherman”.

Al Gore is certainly no scientist and has less credentials than John Coleman on the subject.  Yet he is considered an authority on the subject by the believers. The “science” is debatable; the “certainty” is disturbing. Gore has consistently refused to debate the issue. “The debate is over” is certainly not the language of science. Nor is treating skeptics like heretics.

Climate Gate has shown that even “scientists” can be biased by the influence of money.  For every “scientist” that supports AGW there is a “scientist” debunking it.

The greater fallacies in the AGW argument are fallacies of logic, not science.  The idea of certainty in such a hugely uncertain and massive realm just defies common sense.

Science welcomes skepticism, religions generally do not.

George Will writes on Climate Gate in the Washington Post; The Climate -change travesty

Excerpt:

Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate-change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million Americans in 2050, so Obama’s promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.

Were their science as unassailable as they insist it is, and were the consensus as broad as they say it is, and were they as brave as they claim to be, they would not be “goaded” into intellectual corruption. Nor would they meretriciously bandy the word “deniers” to disparage skepticism that shocks communicants in the faith-based global warming community.

Bjorn Lomborg is an economist who writes on global warming.  He acknowledges that the global warming exists, but he doubts the severity of the problem and the potential for success from many of the misguided policies being proposed.

In the 8/28/09 Wall Street Journal Lomborg  notes in “Technology Can Fight Global Warming” that there are many much less costly solutions to the problem than onerous policies that restrict growth and seem nearly politically impossible.  Increase planting of trees, for example,  would absorb expelled CO2.

More intriguing is a proposal from J. Eric Bickel and Lee lane to have boats spray seawater into clouds above the ocean reflecting more sunlight back into space.  While costing billions it would seem small compared to the costs of the growth killing government proposals.  Similar proposals have been made to lighten the color of our asphalt and roof tiles to reduce heat absorption.

While these proposals are questionable the idea of seeking better and more cost effective solution in applications of technology rather than in cumbersome and destructive government policies is worthy of strong consideration if we can extract political ideology from the science.