Burn, Baby, Burn!

or

Global Warming Theorists’ House of Cards Goes Up in Smoke!

A formerly prestigious research institution has just published a paper that says the sudden and dramatic increase of forest fires in 1987 is linked to Global Warming.

Well… Aren’t you going to panic? Surely there must be someone you can vote for to help you calm yourself.

PFKAS (Persons Formerly Known As Scientists) no longer have any shame. You’d think they all suddenly got sucked into a movie where they metamorphose into teenage girls dressing for the Prom. These scientists pander (troll) for grant dollars with no regard for how badly their credibility is trashed.

While most scientists have real jobs where reality and accuracy play a role, climatologists enjoy working in a profession which pays people in advance to predict the future and never docks their pay when they are wrong.

There isn’t any real reason to take this new “paper” seriously or to try to highlight where these scientists are wrong. This is because the entire paper is a brainstorming session listing “hypotheses” about why statistical data appears to show a “link” between various measurements. For instance, the statistics show an apparent correlation between forest fires and DCKAGW (Data Commonly Known As Global Warming). Any scientist not trying to justify his request for another grant can tell you that two graphs showing a matching pattern only demonstrate that the statisticians have found a way to present data so that the patterns look like they match. The two datasets are only “linked” if you can manipulate the factors and “produce” a change in the target dataset as a direct result of a change in the primary factor.

The trouble with climate data is that we don’t have anything that can really be called a “dataset”. Our situation is not unlike the time before Louis Pasteur proved that invisible “germs” caused some diseases and that limited exposure to specific germs led to immunity against specific diseases. My “Green” friends will immediately leap upon this sentence as an admission that Global Warming is still a grave threat even though we don’t yet know exactly what causes it or what it causes. Unfortunately, they ignore the fact that all these “Green” researchers are analogous to Snake-Oil Salesmen and other charlatans instead of heroes standing on the shoulders of Pasteur. You can’t be a real scientist and guilty of bald-faced lying.

What “facts” do we actually know about “climate” and other natural phenomena? Without doubt we know that “Acts of God” have always tended to be catastrophic and highly destructive. Humans have used their intelligence to learn how to mitigate the destructiveness of these events by avoidance, buffering and insulation. Humans have also used their intelligence to carry out catastrophic acts that have been highly destructive. If this is intentional we call it “warfare” and if it is unintentional we call it “product liability”.

We have long been able to prevent floods in our living rooms by installing roofs. This has also directly caused a warming (or cooling) globally of our work environment. When we have allowed these intentional acts to spill over and impose more widespread changes on our shared environment, we call it “pollution”. But when “nature” spills over and imposes sudden changes on our shared environment we call it an “Act of God”.

Today we have a situation where we can’t agree on whether God or Mankind is imposing the greatest change on our environment. Interestingly, it is the same people who say that we humans do NOT have to live the way God commands us to live who argue that humans are making the greatest contribution to Global Warming. That is funny. After all, it was God who first commanded humans to enforce product liability regulations controlling human activities. And it is humans who don’t believe in God who now want government agents to force citizens to undertake actions which will certainly cause catastrophic economic damage worldwide and yet they don’t want those individual agents to bear any personal liability at all for their actions.

By the way, you probably are thinking that those scientists who reported on the correlation of Global Warming with forest fires since 1987 are deliberately not mentioning the elephant in their living room. I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt. The “elephant” is this: forest fires are one of nature’s key methods to load carbon into the atmosphere. That is, forest fires cause global warming by raising the CO₂ levels in the atmosphere. Because of this carbon loading, plants are able to grow at economically feasible rates. And much of the data about global warming is based on measurements taken after the upsurge in forest fire activity in 1987. Though it would appear that GW enthusiasts are deliberately being stupid by failing to mention this in their recent scare-paper, I won’t go so far as to accuse them of such perfidy. Instead, I think they genuinely are stupid and not just pretending to be. No, seriously, they just all believe that you are stupid!