Stepping away from the 'Climate War'

Dr. Caleb Rossiter – The Debate is finally over on “Global Warming” – Because Nobody will Debate

I am deserting from the Climate War.  I will never write another climate article or give another climate talk, and I’ll bite my tongue and say oooooooooooom when I hear or see the sort of exaggerations and certainties about the dangers of heat-trapping gasses that tend to make my blood boil at their absurdity.  For a decade I’ve been a busy soldier for the scientific method, and hence a “skeptic” to climate alarmism.  I’ve said all I think and know about this repetitive, unresolveable topic.  I’ll save hundreds of hours a year for other pursuits!

This is not like my pledge to my wife after a marathon that “I’ll never do another one.”  This is real.  There is simply too little room for true debate, because the policy space is dominated by people who approach this issue not like scholars weighing evidence, but like lawyers inflaming a jury with suspect data and illogical and emotional arguments.

The believers in human–induced catastrophic climate change, strongly represented among the liberal and radical left of American and international politics, have won the mainstream media and government battle for the conventional wisdom, but lost the war for policy change.  None of the governmental and few of the institutional and individual actors who claim to fear climate change will take real steps to reduce their use of energy, choosing instead to put on phony shows of “green-ness” and carbon-trading shell games.  So it’s over, on both fronts.

I guess I should be happy, since in the other two areas, and blogs, in which I expend professional and personal blood, sweat, and tears (the American empire, and school “reform”) I am usually in agreement with the radical left, and never win.  I nod my head happily when reading the Nation magazine and listening to Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, yet am sadly on the losing end of the policy fights in my areas that they describe.  Politicians and well-paid reformers continue to double down on the disaster of nearly 30 years of the blame-the-teacher, mistest-the-student regime, and U.S. arms and training for dictators have reached new heights under every president from Carter to Obama.

Finally, I’m a winner, but for all the wrong reasons.  The leaders of the big governments who control global policy aren’t avoiding change because they disagree with the conventional wisdom.  They’re avoiding change because it would be politically uncomfortable for them.  Thank goodness, because the change they’re mouthing would be more than uncomfortable for developing countries.  It would be a disaster, de-industrializing them and taking decades off their citizens’ life expectancy.

* * *

 Climate Claims and Fears Can Drive You Crazy

I never expected to be in the Climate War.  I have enough wars to fight as an anti-imperialist and an activist supporting development and democracy in Africa against a U.S. policy of backing dictators and American corporations.  Only by chance did I get drafted for climate duty.  About 10 years ago, when a graduate student in my class on international research statistics wrote a required analysis of any peer-reviewed study in the field, she chose a journal article on some aspect of climate science.  Her paper reported data and conclusions about human-induced global warming that were so weak and illogical in their own terms that I gave her a poor grade, noting: “You can’t have read this study carefully.”  She protested, and brought me the article, and indeed I saw that one of the most respected names in climate science and climate policy was writing flights of fancy and getting them published in refereed journals.  I raised her grade, of course, but not all the way to an A, because she had been so smitten with the credibility of the author and the journal that she forgot to check his logic.

Read the entire essay from Caleb Rossiter here. http://www.calebrossiter.com/Last%20Climate.html

h/t to WUWT reader “David” in Tips and Notes

Caleb Rossiter got fired because of his globalwarming opinons, which we covered here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/12/professors-fellowship-terminated-for-speaking-out-on-global-warming-in-the-wall-street-journal/

Another essay from him was also carried on WUWT:

Caleb Rossiter – opening eyes to the uncertainty of global warming claims