The Making of a Global Warming Skeptic

There seems to be some collective brain fart in the minds of the people at Hadley CRU (HadCRU) at East Anglia.  And with Michael Mann at Penn State University, the author of the Hockey Stick, who also seem to be the ringleader, the Little Engine That Could of the AGW paradigm.

To be honest, they all seem wrong thinking about several things, but the one I am addressing here is that they seem to believe (at least for public consumption) that all of the people who don’t agree with them are sitting down every other day for a conclave with oil industry CEOs and plotting to kill the planet.  As in shooting Bambi.

Well, I know that there is not one oil magnate who even knows who the hell I am.  Nor middle management, and probably not even any rowdies out in the oil fields.  I am not paid to think the way I do, and in fact, run a lot of  gauntlets among friends when I bring up the topic.  On some of the blogs I like to spend time on the most, I dare not overtly declare my position on AGW, for fear of forever being labeled a troll.  Being a global warming skeptic does not win friends or influence enemies very much.  Or at least, not until recently…

The CIA, Secrecy and Doom

How long do we have before we follow the Soviet Union into oblivion, turning the U.S. into an anarchic state ruled by gun-slinging plutocrats?  That is what happened in Russia, post-1991.  Are we due for the same experience?

Do you all think that is pretty insane thinking??

Well, how many of you were thinking in 1988 that by the end of the following year the USSR would fall apart?  Even if you were in the intelligence community, you missed all the signs.   Everybody did.

We all gave the CIA a pass then, didn’t we?  They should have seen things, with all their analysts that we pay a LOT of money to analyze such events.  How did they miss it?  Incompetence?  Did they get caught with their pants down?  Where were all their moles?  All their sources?

Whaa??? Does that link under 20th century history raise an eyebrow or two?

Go ahead and doubt it.  Dachau?  The poster boy for Nazi atrocities?  Innocent?  Misunderstood?   You are certainly wondering what I am smoking, aren’t you?  Well, the last time I smoked anything at all was a very long time ago.  So, no, that isn’t it.

I do mean exactly what I say.  Dachau has gotten a bad rap.  Dachau was not an Auschwitz, nor was it a Bergen-Belsen.

“Ach du lieber!” you are saying, “Ziss guy iss a holocaust denier!”

If I was, I wouldn’t have all kinds of trepidations about posting this.  But, having found out what I found out, I feel obligated to relate it to the wider world.  This post is the first of my attempts to do so.  Please bear with me, be at least a little open-minded, and trust that I have, in fact, looked quite carefully into this and that what I relate here is essentially the truth of the matter.

On Science and Science Writers

I ran across an article, Quantum theory via 40-tonne trucks: How science writing became popular, by Chris Chown, a science writer for The Independent, a popular English newspaper.

In it Chown talked about the physicist Richard Feynman, whom Chown was fortunate enough to have had as a professor while at Caltech, and about communicating science subjects to people.  After reading it I had to write my reaction as a comment, which triggered a dialogue of sorts with someone who apparently was a self-appointed attack dog defending science from an attack by me that wasn’t even an attack.

The exchange follows below the fold:

QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS, IT IS ALL A SEARCH FOR QUESTIONS. . .

How many of us are on a quest for answers!

We want to know WHY this is such and so, and why THAT is allowed by our self-conceived Supreme Being, WHEN our life’s purpose will be known (ladies, I’ve known few of you who don’t ask for that one).

The mentally lazy and indolent are not a part of this discussion, except to point out that many of them are satisfied that things are set up in a semi-sane way and that all they have to do is deal with what is in front of them.  In that they are actually correct: Yes, the universe is set up well.  Yes, if they deal with what is in front of them, they are accomplishing much of why they are here in the first place.

SOME of us are not satisfied with that approach, though.  We have to ASK questions; we have to know WHY, we have to inquire, we see mysteries and we want to tackle them!  Hells yeah! as my son would say.  Every inquirer, I love you all.

Whether it is in research into technological machining in ancient Egypt (however they managed to do it), or a Starchild skull, or the existence or not of the human soul, or what the f___ crop circles are, inquiring people are my kind of people:  people looking for answers.

I am writing this to point out something I’ve found over the years, though – that it is all really about asking the right questions…

AN INTRODUCTION: FOUR OF MY FAVORITE SMART GUYS/HEROES

Welcome to my corner of the blogosphere, where any subject can come up – and probably will.

This is my first post. . .

I thought I’d start out with heroes.   We all have heroes.  Heroes are the people we respect the most and want to be like.   None of these people – the ones you know or the ones you don’t know yet – are perfect, and if they were, I doubt if I would want to emulate them.  They are just people who followed the facts to where the facts led them, and when they found themselves in some odd place, coming to some even odder conclusions, these four people didn’t back down.

That counts with me – big time.  That takes courage.