Posted on November
30, 2015
Going “Concern”
UCS is a corruption of science
by
Daniel
Clark
If you often read news articles about “climate
change,” then you’ve surely seen a group called the Union of Concerned
Scientists cited as an expert source.
When you encounter such a reference, you might as well stop reading,
because what follows will have no scientific validity whatsoever. We know this from the fact that the very
title of UCS is a contradiction in terms.
There’s a reason why there isn’t an organization
called the Union of Objective Scientists.
A scientist is supposed to follow the evidence wherever it leads
him. It’s entirely plausible for two
good scientists, separately studying the same subject, to arrive at different
conclusions. Science does not demand
that they unite to get 
their
story straight. There’s hardly anything
more anti-scientific than a group of self-appointed representatives of science
declaring that an issue is settled, and must never be questioned again.
UCS, which was unscientifically founded by Vietnam-era
anti-military activists, is really just a political organization that promotes
policy changes based on politically corrupted science. Take, for example, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, which is defying a subpoena of its internal
communications from the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. UCS charges that committee chairman Lamar
Smith has “attempted to manufacture controversy … without any evidence or
analysis that NOAA scientists ‘altered the data’” in a study of global surface
temperatures that it released in June.
In reality, there is no disputing the fact that the
NOAA has altered its data. The
disagreement lies in the agency’s characterization of these alterations as a
routine process of revising the figures to account for statistical anomalies,
as opposed to Republican legislators’ suspicion that the changes were driven by
political motivations – or “concerns,” if you will.
Until this year, the NOAA had conceded that the rate of
increase in the earth’s temperature has slowed dramatically since 1998, a
finding that basically agreed with the Remote Sensing Systems atmospheric
satellite data, which finds no warming at all during that same period. Scaremongers have had to embarrass themselves
by explaining away this trend as a “hiatus” within a broader pattern of global
warming. The new, altered NOAA data have
revised historical temperatures downward, the effect being that recent
temperatures are higher by comparison, and therefore that there is no global
warming hiatus after all. You don’t have
to be Dale Gribble to suspect that there’s a conspiracy afoot.
Congressman Smith wants to investigate the manner in
which the NOAA produced and publicized this new report, to see if it was improperly
influenced. UCS decries this as
“harassment,” as if the workings of a federal bureau were none of the business
of the elected representatives of the people.
Lost amid the controversy is what it says about the
NOAA’s reliability in general. If its
previous surface temperature readings were as dramatically wrong as it now says
they were, then why should we trust that its revised data are so much more
accurate? If UCS were being scientific
instead of concerned, it would be as leery of the NOAA as Rep. Smith is.
Once
a scientist becomes “concerned,” he ceases to function as a scientist. Once he has dedicated himself to a political
campaign against manmade global warming, the nonexistence of such a phenomenon
is no longer an acceptable option. Any information
that fails to conform to his predetermined conclusion is therefore unwelcome.
That corruptive effect is buttressed by the fact that
the prescribed remedies for global warming read like a left-wing totalitarian’s
to-do list: from anti-industrialism to global wealth redistribution, to
population control, to vegetarianism, to nullification of property rights under
the rubric of “land use change.” Far
from being an objective geological theory, it is the galvanizing force behind
the entire leftist political agenda. After
the dissenting voices have all been squelched, the acceptance of these
initiatives will be seen as compulsory.
It will simply be what must be done in order to “save the planet.”
Even if there ever was any honest science behind the
belief in manmade global warming, it was immediately corrupted by political
ulterior motives. If the NOAA data has
been falsified to show global warming where there isn’t any, it won’t be the
first such offense on behalf of the cause, nor will it be the last.
Nor will “concerned scientists” give a flying beaker
about it. What really concerns them is
not that the earth may be getting warmer.
It is that anyone should dare question their pseudo-scientific mandate
for building their liberal utopia.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press