Peter Gallagher

• In response to an alarm that is not ring­ing: Tem­per­a­ture trends over the past cen­tury or more (not to men­tion high-quality satel­lite data from the past thirty years) are almost indis­tin­guish­able from flat, (0.6°C over the whole of the 20^th cen­tury) except when por­trayed as dra­mat­i­cally scaled anom­alies based on arbi­trary base­lines—that, even so, show no warm­ing trend in the past seven years
• With­out any regard to the rel­e­vant con­text: The paleo-climate record is undis­puted. Our cli­mate con­tin­ues to warm (slightly) as the planet recov­ers from the last ice-age; another ice-age cycle seems highly likely (soon in a geo­log­i­cal time-scale); direct evi­dence of cli­mate his­tory shows at least 8 warm­ing (up to +6°C from today’s lev­els) and cool­ing (up to –12°C from today’s lev­els) cycles over the past 800-thousand years that very likely have solar or galac­tic ori­gin, and cer­tainly have noth­ing to do with human influence
• Adopt­ing pre­scrip­tions dreamed up by the adher­ents of a the­ory that is dis-confirmed by its own pre­dic­tions and has no sup­port other than some mod­eled ‘sce­nar­ios’ that pre­dict warm­ing that has not taken place, in fact: click the thumb­nail above.

This mad pol­icy has demo­c­ra­tic cre­den­tials, but not much intel­lec­tual cre­dence because its strongest sup­port (in Aus­tralia, Ross Garnaut’s inves­ti­ga­tion) depends on an argu­ment from author­ity to jus­tify a refusal care­fully to (re)evaluate the evidence.

A sort of mil­lenar­ian mad­ness has gripped gov­ern­ments that should be seek­ing ways to pro­mote knowl­edge and growth, not to sti­fle both with a fog of so-called ‘set­tled sci­ence’ (a silly claim that bor­ders on being a lie) and pub­lic dread.