Perhaps we won’t be lemmings and destroy the world’s economy in the name of stopping global warming, after all. India has rejected some of the “science”—read computer program projections—of global warming and is refusing to thwart its own prosperity tilting at the windmill. From the story:
India rejected key scientific findings on global warming, while the European Union called for more action by developing states on greenhouse gas emissions.Jairam Ramesh, the Indian environment minister, accused the developed world of needlessly raising alarm over melting Himalayan glaciers. He dismissed scientists’ predictions that Himalayan glaciers might disappear within 40 years as a result of global warming. “We have to get out of the preconceived notion, which is based on western media, and invest our scientific research and other capacities to study Himalayan atmosphere,” he said.
“Science has its limitation. You cannot substitute the knowledge that has been gained by the people living in cold deserts through everyday experience.”...Mr Ramesh said the rate of retreat of glaciers in the Himalayas varied from a “couple of centimeters a year to a couple of metres”, but that this was a natural process that had taken place occurred over the centuries. Some were, in fact, growing, he said
Meanwhile, some in the media may also be breaking ranks with the Al—the debate is over—Gore and questioning by finally questioning the enforced conformity that has been imposed on the field. For example, in a New York Times blog, science reporter Nicholas Wade (!!!) discusses this infection (my term) on the body of science. From the story:
The strength of this urge to conform can silence even those who have good reason to think the majority is wrong. You’re an expert because all your peers recognize you as such. But if you start to get too far out of line with what your peers believe, they will look at you askance and start to withdraw the informal title of “expert” they have implicitly bestowed on you. Then you’ll bear the less comfortable label of “maverick,” which is only a few stops short of “scapegoat” or “pariah.”
That is precisely what has happened in global warming, where very esteemed meteoroligist dissenters have been essentially written out of the profession. Wade continues:
If the brightest minds on Wall Street [referring to an expert afraid to blow the whistle on the housing bubble] got suckered by group-think into believing house prices would never fall, what other policies founded on consensus wisdom could be waiting to come unraveled? Global warming, you say? You mean it might be harder to model climate change 20 years ahead than house prices 5 years ahead? Surely not – how could so many climatologists be wrong? What’s wrong with consensuses is not the establishment of a majority view, which is necessary and legitimate, but the silencing of skeptics.
Perhaps that sound you hear isn’t the glaciers calving, but the media, scientists, and even nations bursting free from the straight jacket of global warming ideology. That is a development earnestly to be wished.
