Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog

Speaking of “Talking Points”

Do our beliefs form the basis of our partisan and ideological affiliations? Or is it vice versa?

There’s been a lot of recent evidence not only that Republicans disproportionately disbelieve the evidence for man-made global warming but that their skepticism is growing. I think that trend is fairly classed under the general heading of Republican/conservative hostility to science. But the other point interests me no less.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that Mr. Marshall didn’t spend his thanksgiving in a cave somewhere either in a cave or somewhere neither of those phone network maps have coverage and did in fact hear that there is some new “global warming news” out there.

Don Surber states the obvious:

That is ironic because it is the left — not the right — that is ignoring the growing body of evidence that discredits the theory of anthropogenic global warming. Climategate revealed that data supporting this theory is corrupted by the political agenda and quest for government grants by proponents of anthropogenic global warming at Penn State and at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.

Today I’m am over an 1:15 into Morning Joe and no mention, the media is doing it’s best to totally ignore this story in keeping with its niche market model. I presume that Marshall has decided to do the same. He should take a lesson from Paul Mirengoff at Powerline:

In the law, the discovery of this sort of intentional document destruction would quite likely give rise to some form of “adverse inference instruction,” wherein the judge would instruct or encourage the jury to assume that the discarded evidence was harmful to the case of the party that destroyed it. I might be hesitant to apply this logic to the world of scientific inquiry were it not for the fact that the CRU scientists have demonstrated as little regard for honest adjudication of their position as your run-of-the-mill spoliator of evidence.

To be sure, the current head of the CRU was not in charge when the data were thrown away in the 1980s. Moreover, climate change was not such a heavily politicized issue in those days.

Still, Roger Pielke, the Colorado professor who asked for the records, is quite correct when he says that the CRU is basically insisting that we trust it, a demand that’s inconsistent with the scientific method for resolving debates.

One need not be a hard-core global warming skeptic to question whether we should alter the way we live in response to predictions based on findings that cannot be checked because the raw data was intentionally destroyed by the outfit that made the findings.

Ah but one apparently does need to be a person not wedded to the hard core left for their readership or customer base. When you don’t care about your credibility anything is possible.