WSJ editorial stupidity

Where to start flaming yesterday’s op-ed, The Science of Gore’s Nobel, by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.? Here’s how I read it, paragraph by paragraph [Note, I'd like to include his actual words for comparison, but I think it's long enough as it is.]:

I’m a Republican, my job as an objective journalist is to mock Gore because he lost an election and now he’s turned his sights to educating the public on climate change.

Gore’s Nobel isn’t for science, though the Liberal media will portray it that way [BS, the media will portray it as "for popularizing the idea that climate change is an imminent global crisis."], in fact no one has ever won a Nobel for science [bold-faced lie, the IPCC shared the award, for the science]. Scientists have been studying global warming for over a century, and here I am, still trying to deny it.

To confuse the issue, let’s bring up other science that’s completely irrelevant to this issue. And, for good measure, more mockery with my witty, “how this honor has befallen the former Veep”. [He just can't stand to see Gore win a Nobel Peace Prize, can he?]

People form opinions based on what the media and other people tell us. I’m going to use perfectly valid science to imply that even though the Liberal media and the public are finally on side with the climate change issue, that they’re wrong.

Gore is single-handedly manipulating the global media to provide a barrage of scientific data, but believing it is just as silly as believing that we really landed on the moon.

The scientists who claim a consensus exists only asked themselves, they didn’t ask any of the denialist kooks.

Scientists are non-scientific, they don’t look for proof, they just make up a hypothesis and then stick with it regardless of the evidence, especially hypotheses like global warming, which is just a scientific conspiracy to get funding for their research projects.

The Liberal media jumped right on the bandwagon, blindly toeing the line. [Do you realize the IPCC was established in 1988, and it took 19 years to get to the current level of public acceptance of the issue?]

Republican politicians and Big Energy lobby groups, on the other hand, are “sophisticated” and “on a higher intellectual level”, because they’re used to pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Congressman John Dingell (D – MI) said, “The world is great at agreeing on things that are wrong,” [Look at him, all objective, quoting a Democrat. See the Gristmill interview to see how Jenkins is blatantly mis-characterizing what was said.] and by that, he must have been talking about the scientific consensus on global warming, but then, he confronts Congress with “a rational approach to climate change” which doesn’t make sense if he really doesn’t believe the consensus.

Dingell is a cynical, manipulative politician [because he's a Democrat] who wants to “embarrass those who offer fake cures for climate change”, but I know that the ultimate goal of global warming conspirators is to destroy the North American car manufacturers and send the world into a crippling global depression.

To prove my point, I will mis-quote a colleague of Al Gore’s, who therefore must be disreputable, to imply that he still has doubts about the whole thing, yet still wants legislation to destroy the US. [Read this article to see where he stands, in his own words.]

Mr. Khosla is manipulating politicians into believing the firehose of non-scientific scientific data and ill-informed public opinion to advance his personal agenda.

In the remote chance that the government decided to take action, the “green energy lobby” would pocket $400,000,000,000 a year, but don’t ask where that number came from. And the impact on global emissions would only be 4%, but don’t ask where that number came from. So, because the US can’t save the world single-handedly, we should do nothing at all.

The only reason Al Gore doesn’t run for president is 1) that he couldn’t win and 2) he would ruin the economy by imposing the costs “supposedly” necessary. Instead, he can just be the angry lunatic ranting about something that my extensive scientific training tells me will turn out to be fraudulent.

Just you wait until the world goes into the next ice age, you’ll see. How do I know this is gonna happen? Because it’s happened before, before industrial civilization. It just seems to me like the Earth is too big for us little humans to have any impact. [It's not.]

My own gut feel is much more valid than reams of scientific evidence. The Earth has gone through warmer and cooler periods in the past, so even though this one coincides with our industrialization and is proceeding far faster than ever before, I’ll be vindicated when the doom-sayers are proven wrong. Then they’ll have to shut-up and stop trying to save the world.

And I won’t have to be ashamed of myself every single day because a Democrat won the Nobel Peace Prize working for something that I’m actively working against.

In all, it’s a shameful piece of lies, distortions, mis-information and partisan politics.

But don’t take my word for it, here’s another analysis.

It’s been quite a week in the atheosphere…

First, we have Pope Benedict XVI criticizing atheism (did you know that he was a member of the Hitler Youth? I didn’t. You may also remember when he expressed “sadness and repentance” for the Catholic Church’s insufficient resistance to Nazi ideology, meanwhile, wartime Pope Pius XII is on the path to sainthood.) I could go on and on and on about the Catholic Church, their pedophile priests and genocidal stance on condoms, but Greta Christina does a good job addressing this one.

Then irreligion.org found an old article about the Vatican astronomer who dismisses Creationism as “a form of superstitious paganism”.

The New York Times spoke out strongly against the Texas Education Agency , but who will ever forget how Barbara Forrest pwned them?

These are just 3 stories from the week, but I got particular pleasure in reading each of them, given that two of my biggest reasons for blogging are the absurd theist claim of morality, and the willful ignorance that is creationism/ID.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

With the current climate change meetings in Bali getting so much well-deserved (and much-delayed) attention, I was looking in Wikipedia, and a surprising fact hit me – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created in 1988! So it’s taken 19 years to get the current level of public acceptance of the issue! The first Assessment Report in 1990 was pretty clear on the issue, and the 3 subsequent reports have been more & more specific.

BTW, I find it a little off the mark to see the following in the Criticism section of the Wikipedia entry on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change: “In November of 2007, it was estimated that that year’s conference would release the equivalent of 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide”? (that’s what it said as of 2007-12-04, anyway). Yes, many human activities create CO2 — the average person creates almost 1kg of CO2 every day, just by being alive. The point is, how are we going to solve the problem without having the meeting? If you think along the lines of carbon credits, of those 100,000 tonnes of CO2, how many would’ve been released anyway? The planes were probably already scheduled, the people would’ve been going about their lives at home, so the overall CO2 equation isn’t as bad as it might seem. Anyway, we’re talking about a once-a-year meeting, dealing with countries producing thousands of megatonnes of CO2 worldwide annually. You can criticize the various countries for acting out of narrow, short-term self-interest or criticize the enemies of the process for standing in the way of meaningful action, but this criticism suggests you’re still part of the problem, not part of the solution.

It’s like something I read this week, where the suggestion was that it’s better to drive to the store because your car would create less CO2 than the production of the food energy needed to walk there. First of all, the writer looked at the entire  production chain of the food, but not that of the gasoline, so the comparison is wrong and misleading. Second, if you take the argument to its next logical step, if that person just stayed home and starved to death, he or she would produce even less CO2. I think it’s disingenuous to suggest that taking the car is better for the environment than walking. Again, part of the problem, not yet part of the solution.

To show how easy it is to be part of the solution, when it was time to replace my wife’s Camry Solara, we bought a Camry Hybrid, and according to fueleconomy.gov, we should save about 3 tonnes of CO2 a year (they’re both Camry’s, so we didn’t give up anything, and the Hybrid is cheaper in every way than the Solara). Add to that 6 tonnes saved by me buying a Prius, and we’ve cut our emissions by 9 tonnes (while saving over $3,000 a year in gas, even at today’s price). This represents a real cut of 50% without changing our lifestyle at all, so I don’t understand why everyone thinks this is gonna be such a painful process.

I know hybrid cars aren’t the ultimate solution, but it’s a first step in the journey of 1,000 steps.