“What Will Persuade Conservatives To Fight Climate Change?” The same things that would persuade us to fight plate tectonics, entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics!

What will it take to get climate obsessed True Believers to question their assumptions? Time and time again the predictions of the climate Fanatics are proven to be false. Time and time again the claims of data are shown to be dubious at best. Time and time again the alleged cures that the climate obsessed demand are proven to the financial catastrophes and to not change anything about the climate. it is long past time for the climate Believers to have to defend the assumptions they make. Instead, they refuse to debate they refuse to discuss, and they refuse to disclose data.

Not being able to speak for generic conservatives I will speak for a singular conservative.

To start with, the folks trying to convince me will have to stop peeing on my head and assuring me that it is raining. I will confine myself to two specific examples. I could add tomes.

Back in 2015 (right before the Paris Climate Summit, conveniently) the world was greeted with this headline from NOAA: “July 2015 was the warmest month ever recorded for the globe.” https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/summary-info/global/201507 The story provided details, such as: “The July average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.46°F (0.81°C) above the 20th century average. As July is climatologically the warmest month for the year, this was also the all-time highest monthly temperature in the 1880–2015 record, at 61.86°F (16.61°C), surpassing the previous record set in 1998 by 0.14°F (0.08°C).”

The announcement was headline news in every-literally-major newspaper in the country and around the world.

For this headline, from the US Government agency responsible for monitoring the climate and providing climate guidance to the ‘policymakers’, to be true several OTHER things have to be true:

There MUST be a definition of ‘Monthly Temperature of the Globe’, and how it is calculated. Is there?
There MUST be a temperature data base somewhere, dating from 1880, that contains temperature records for the entire globe that the temperature record for July 2015 can be compared against. Is there?
The planetary temperature data acquisition system dating from 1880 MUST have been deployed such that the data it produces can reasonably be compared with contemporary data. Was it?
The accuracy and precision of the instrumentation dating from 1880 MUST have been comparable to the accuracy and precision of contemporary instruments. Was it? Hint: Sea surface temperatures were, until relatively recently, collected by dropping a bucket over the side of a ship, bringing up a bucketful, sticking a thermometer in it, and recording the resulting ‘temperature’. The whole process was conducted by an untrained, low ranking sailor who didn’t want to do it in the first place. Also, because of the procedure, it is unlikely that there are any two samples in the history of sea surface temperature measurement that were collected in different years at the same date, time, and location. Does this strike anyone as a procedure that would allow measurements collected over a 136 year time span to be compared with 0.1 F precision with enough confidence to justify worldwide headlines announcing a 0.1degree anomaly?

I could go on, but you see the problem. The people trying to convince me REPEATEDLY come up with outlandish claims that are patent BS and which are advertised as settled, scientific FACTS which can and SHOULD be cited as justification for legislation with impacts in the trillions of dollars.

Here is another quote from a newspaper article in 1999, referring to the global temperature in 1998: “The NASA scientists, using NOAA and other data, calculated an average worldwide temperature of about 58.496 degrees F., topping the record, set in 1995 of 58.154”. Using the word ‘about’ followed by a global temperature with millidegree precision? Really? If that was ‘about’ wonder how they would have done if they had gone for precision?

What am I supposed to make of scientists who, examining temperature data over a century plus time frame, collected for the most part by untrained personnel using instruments whose precision when used by trained personnel under ideal conditions would have done well to justify +/- 1.0 F, are producing press releases advertising the ‘Annual Temperature of the Globe’ with millidegree precision. And expecting me, knowing that the fullness of the rice bowls of the scientists depends entirely on their producing a steady succession of headlines demonstrating catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming, to be convinced? When I can’t remember a SINGLE press release, of thousands, from the climateriat over the last 20+ years that suggested ANY possible benefit from a mild increase in temperature SHOULD I be convinced? When individuals, many of whom are PhD level scientists whose careers have been spent in climate related fields, suggest that there may POSSIBLY be some benefit to increasing CO2 finds their careers in the toilet, their jobs terminated, and themselves threatened with prosecution for ‘crimes against humanity’, should I find THAT to be a convincing argument for ‘Fighting Climate Change’?

As in all things I am WILLING to be convinced. It is just that on this subject every bit of data that I have actually accumulated over the past quarter century plus has convinced me that as a group the recognized, peer reviewed climate experts at the pointy end of the climate science pyramid are the LAST folks I should consult on any matter more complex than whether to add another quarter to the parking meter.