Saturday, September 12, 2009

Cheers and Jeers for the Post   [Chris Horner]

Three cheers for meteorologist Matt Rogers for getting "a skeptical take" published in the Washington Post. Skeptics everywhere are chattering already. Great. Placing it there cannot have been easy, not solely due to the Post's intense bias on the issue of global warming that, a tracking of the paper's editorializing and reporting over the years has shown, was largely a proxy for its feelings about George W. Bush and his administration. But also because this exposes Post writers who have assumed the posture of the advocate — such as Juliet Eilperin and Andrew Freedman, and of course the unhinged cartoonist Tom Toles.

Still, one thing stands out in Rogers's noteworthy achievement, and that is the posture of apologetic dhimmitude that one must accept to participate in establishment alarmist society. Each utterance or paper exposing the deep fallacy of the warming theory — demoted to a hypothesis by observations, I would suggest — carries the ritual "now, I'm no skeptic but" before exposing how the writer or speaker cannot possibly hold the expressed beliefs without being a skeptic.

So it is, in a way, with Rogers' piece. You can almost see his shoulders rounding in anticipation of the blows to come as he opens with "This Capital Weather Gang blog entry is written with considerable trepidation given the politically-charged atmosphere surrounding human-induced global warming." Let's parse this, shall we? In the regular stream of alarmism spouted from newspapers — Toles, Eilperin, Freedman, WaPo editors, as well as broadcast news, politicians, academics — is there a "politically charged" blowback? No. What Rogers buries here is that there is tremendous vitriol programmed into the system to spew forth upon anyone daring to espouse only one position, not both as he implies, and that position is heresy from that which has been decided by the right people.

That the writer should feel that the above statement is necessary — and, who knows, during the editing process may have been learned of that such a statement was necessary — is just sad.

Rogers closes with "I believe that predictions of human-caused climate change will continue to be overdone, and we'll discover that natural factors are equally and sometimes even more important." It is beyond difficult to reconcile his take-down of alarmism with this conclusion that, who knows, nature might actually turn out to be equal to or more dominant than man. He instead makes quite plain how and why man is not the dominant climate driver the Post works so hard to claim.

This doesn't fit. It does seem of a part, however, with the nauseatingly shuffling disclaimer that follows, apologizing for the fact that "the viewpoints expressed" might shame his alarmist colleague at the Capital Weather Gang to whom he bows for having . . . gulp . . . disagreed.

Was saying such things a condition of getting published? If so, the shuffle is repellent.

I do not pass judgment here on those who play this kind of game in order to have their views heard, even if in slightly contradictory or even suppressed form. We all make our choices about how to be most effective. And succumbing to the demands of dhimmitude in the alarmist mainstream is far superior to the approach of a Stephen Schneider — who asserted that all alarmists confront the choice between being as effective as possible and being honest.

That our team gets so excited by the odd appearance of such measured statements as Rogers's is equally unsettling. On climate alarmism, the media and academia have sold out in the most wholehearted fashion one can imagine in a free society, and there should be no gratitude but instead continued exposure of their folly and shame.

09/12 01:20 PMShare