Posse Incitatus

...or we shall surely hang seperately

Via the Hated Instapundit, we learn that the warmist front is beginning to crack.

The danger all along would be that, even in the face of the incriminating emails and code, the CRU conspirators would hold together and come up with a common story.  By being consistently brazen, they might have been able to stall an unwilling officialdom and at least muddy the issue enough to get away with some token reproaches for sloppy work.

But the implied destruction of Freedom of Information Act materials changes the game.  This is a criminal matter, and tenure won’t protect faculty who countenance such behavior.  Professor Michael Mann works for Penn State, a land-grant university that receives considerable government funding.  That makes him particularly vulnerable.  In times of tight budgets, it only takes a couple of enterprising legislators to force embarrassing testimony from university officials on why their employees are flouting transparency laws.

Again, the crime isn’t the issue – it’s the coverup.  The public remains divided about global warming, but there is complete unanimity in favor of obeying FOIA requirements.

Right now, in college campuses across the country (and perhaps the world), university presidents are looking with apprehension at their climate studies departments and wondering if they will be called to testify at the next state budget hearing about FOIA compliance.

As sure as the sun rises, you can bet that more than a few Republican state legislators are salivating at the opportunity to make liberal professors sweat at the next Higher Education Appropriations Subcommittee hearing.

Excrement, as the saying goes, rolls down hill.  Thus the presidents are contacting department chairs, demanding to know the full story.  The chairs in turn are pushing their underlings to come clean.  As anyone with even a passing knowledge of faculty politics knows, there are plenty of factions who would be eager to snap up funding/facilities/prime office space, and they need little encouragement to turn up the heat on their rivals.

These rivalries extend through all of academia, and one can rest assured that the case is being built that University A, which is implicated, should be punished by having its money taken away and given to smaller University B, which is untainted and would do oh so much better.

Adding to the mix is the fact that NASA is now facing a FOIA lawsuit – and unpleasant questions may surface there as well.  The fact is, there is nothing in FOIA that would exempt climate research materials – you can’t even claim that it would endanger patents.

The pressure to turn “state’s evidence” is therefore enormous.  Watch for more academics to claim that they were intemperate, perhaps a little mean-spirited, but it was the other guy who totally broke the law.

The necessity of deceit

The release of the Climategate emails has been called a “smoking gun” for the global warming/climate change movement. It is perhaps the perfect metaphor, because the science behind gun control relies on similar deceptions.

Long-time readers may be shocked to know that once upon a time, I was what could be called a centrist on gun control: I supported the free use of hunting and sporting weapons, but thought that handguns and automatic weapons should be heavily regulated.

That was a mainstream position during the 1980s when I was growing up and the “science” of the time labored heavily to back it up. Shotguns were (and still are) fine for taking game or defending the home – and they weren’t particularly threatening. “Assault weapons”, on the other hand, were the province of survivalists and militia crazies. Just ban ‘em.

So went my thinking.

That began to change during the debate over the Assault Weapons Ban in the 1990s. For the first time, I began to actually study the matter and learned that the science wasn’t as solid as it seemed. When John Lott’s massive study on the effect of shall-issue laws burst onto the scene, I was skeptical but willing to be convinced if the facts were there.

Lott’s academic reputation has taken a (not entirely undeserved) beating since then, but what really pushed me into the gun rights camp was the compulsive dishonesty of the gun control advocates. These guys couldn’t ever make an honest argument; everything they said was twisted, spun or blatantly false. This got me to thinking: if your position is so strong, why weaken it with lies?

This is pretty much my rule now, and it has served me very well. Whether dealing with gun control or climate change, you can tell the strength of the argument by how much its supporters have to distort the truth to make it.

The question of climate change is, from a purely scientific perspective, a very difficult one to answer. The only way that we can even approach the truth is to take an open, collaborative attitude to research – basically we have to use the classical scientific method.

This method, where data is openly shared, where theories are constantly questioned – is what has allowed the Western world to make the quantum advances it has in less than a century. What the Climategate emails show is that the supporters of the globalwarmism are not interested in real science. Their agenda is too important.

They are driven by a moral certitude that is so overwhelming that it renders facts unimportant – it’s bigger than such trifling considerations. There is also a “bunker mentality” at work. These people simply cannot handle the thought of being proved wrong. They must be right, they have to be right, they know they are right – so they believe they are permitted to use any means necessary to win the public debate.

A few years ago, gun control was starting to falter. John Lott’s research had broken the debate wide open. Other criminologists, like Gary Kleck, were asking very uncomfortable questions about whether guns caused or prevented crime.

As the debate raged, the gun control advocates received news that powerful help was on the way: Michael Bellesiles was doing ground-breaking research to prove that guns in colonial America were rare and barely utilized, in effect undermining the core arguments in favor of the Second Amendment.

Bellesiles was an immediate hero and a great many academics fell over themselves praising him. His book, Arming America, won top prizes and became an instant best-seller.

And then it all fell apart, and it was the scientific method that brought him down. As more academics sought to replicate his research (in this case his sources rather than equations or methods), problems began to appear. His defenses became more convoluted and resulted in a series of embarrassing excuses and walkbacks until even his own institution was forced to fire him for academic misconduct. His prize was rescinded; his publishing contract terminated and he went from rising star to the Stephen Glass of the history profession.

Bellisiles misconduct also brought a great deal of discredit to the gun control supporters who had endorsed him and caused a new level of scrutiny on the science behind previous studies. It is no coincidence that public support for gun rights is now at an all-time high, and that even for Democrats, gun control is now a dead issue.

Climategate may have a similar effect. The warmenists in academia have been increasingly shrill and demanding over the years. Like gun control advocates, they had a set of policies they wished to see enacted and, like gun control researchers, they profited handsomely from the resulting attention.

Of course, their policies would have utterly reordered society to an extent far exceeding anything contemplated by gun control advocates. A natural response – a rational response – was to question if all this was really necessary. Was the science sound?

The answer is: we don’t know. But “not sure” isn’t enough to justify a transformative global government that will tax and regulate every single human activity. So these folks set out to prove the science was settled even though it wasn’t.

I suspect that like gun control, the climate change movement is now headed for hard times politically. A good many scientists may be sympathetic to the case (and grants and power) accorded by the global warming theory, but the sheer crassness of the behavior illustrated by these emails will cause them to hold back. Their entire profession has been brought into disrepute.

In a time of tight government budgets, the public is ill-disposed to funding junk science. They will have to police their own – whether through tenure hearings or Freedom of Information Act investigations – or the whole university edifice will take irreparable damage.

The public is rightfully skeptical of people who have to cheat to win. Fabricating and distorting data is no way to win an argument over the long term. The intellectual argument for gun control collapsed because of it. Climate change may go the same way.

The end of the eco-apocalypse

Here is a thought experiment.

Imagine that a few months from now, someone somewhere makes a breakthrough discovery in energy technology that solves all of our power needs without using fossil fuels or generating carbon dioxide as a byproduct.

I’m not going to explore possible technologies that make this happen, that would be beside the point. Just assume (like any good Star Trek fan) that the technology exists and it works.

Now ask yourself: how would the environmental movement react?

I think that there would be monumental denial (in the psychological sense). I don’t mean at the instant of the announcement, I mean once the full implications dawned on us.

I mean, if fuel is essentially free of cost, why not build the biggest car you can? If energy is no longer polluting, what purpose does Earth Hour serve?

These people have a lot emotionally invested in the eco-apocalypse they have convinced themselves is just around the corner. Do they become like Shakers and gradually disappear? Do they find some new cause to champion? Do they smash the new engines that took away their favorite nightmare?

At some point, I think that the technology will be found.  And when it does, a lot of the rationale for the green movement - and the control it has tried to exercise over our lives - will vanish.

Greenpeace had better start diversifying its portfolio.

Get some, Tom Cruise...b*tch of scientology...

Hello out there in internet land.  Sithkitten here.  I think most of you know that I absolutely hate scientology.  So, when I find interesting videos out there that rip on this Kool-Aid Cult, I have to link and repost.  Do you know why scientologists don't like psychology?  Because everytime a true believer visits someone with a professional background in psychology they tell them they are frijeeking nuts...not to get too wrapped up in technical jargon.  Katie, you apostate, don't drink the Kool-Aid!