Global Warming Flunks Cross-Examination

By Jack Dini – A law professor has subjected global warming to the kind of cross-examination to which American attorneys routinely subject hostile witnesses. The result? “On virtually every major issue in climate change science, the reports of the IPCC (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and other summarizing work by leading climate establishment scientists have adopted various rhetorical strategies that seem to systematically conceal or minimize what appear to be fundamental uncertainties or even disagreements.”

In other words, in a document of  79 pages containing 343 references, Jason Scott Johnston, Professor and Director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania busts climate science. (https://www.probeinternational.org/UPennCross.pdf)

The bulk of his paper proceeds by cataloguing and illustrating with concrete climate science examples, the various rhetorical techniques employed by the IPCC and other climate change scientists/advocates in an attempt to bolster their position, and to minimize or ignore conflicting scientific evidence.

Johnston reports, “Insofar as establishment climate science has glossed over and minimized numerous fundamental questions and uncertainties in climate science, it has created widespread misimpressions that have serious consequences for optimal policy design. Such misimpressions uniformly tend to support the case for rapid and costly decarbonization of the American economy, yet they characterize the world of even the most rigorous legal scholars.A more balanced and nuanced view of the existing state of climate science supports much more gradual and easily reversible policies regarding greenhouse gas emissions, and also urges a redirection in public funding of climate science away from the continued subsidization of refinements of computer models and toward increased spending on the development of standardized datasets against which existing climate models can be tested.”

He concludes, “As things now stand, the advocates representing the establishment climate science story broadcast (usually with color diagrams) the predictions of climate models as if they were the results of experiments—actual evidence. Alongside these multi-colored, multi-century model—simulated times series come stories, anecdotes, and photos—such as the iconic stranded polar bear—dramatically illustrating climate change today. On this rhetorical strategy, the models are to be taken on faith, and the stories and photos as evidence of the models’ truth. Policy carrying potential costs in the trillions of dollars ought not to be based on stories and photos confirming faith in models, but rather on precise and replicable testing of the models’ predictions against solid observational data.”

As Joanne Nova has noted, “No one is pushing anything, it’s not polarized or written to entertain, yet at the same time, it has compelling clarity.” It’s worth checking out if you are concerned with the global warming issue.

Comments

comments