Blog Action Day

Filed Under: Al Gore, Environmental News, Green Politics on October 15, 2009

Today is Blog Action Day. As I promised when I first signed up for and added the Blog Action Day logo on the site here, I will be running skeptical climate change stories in honor of this day. Not because I want to denigrate the day or make the idea of Blog Action Day seem trivial or less important, but because I feel that too often, we see only one side of the story. Too often, it’s only Al Gore on the stage promoting his latest “hockey stick” graph with no one there to say “wait a second, that doesn’t look right.”

Purity of science requires honest debate amongst researchers and analysts who are not only experts in their field, but are as open-minded as possible. Today, much of our science is clouded by political and social influence. Like anyone, scientists have to make a buck to survive, so most scientists will go where the money is when researching. Currently, most of the largest pool of money (government grants) are in “climate change”–but only on the Al Gore side.

Skeptics are few and far between not because they are the “loonies” in the field, but because they are not funded very often. Despite what Michael Moore or Woodey Harrelsen might tell you, Big Oil doesn’t dump billions into climate research on the skeptical side of the ballgame. So most of the climate science money is government-doled.

Now we’ve seen what that largess, thanks to our tax dollars, can produce: apparently hastily-crafted reports for the IPCC which included “hockey stick” graphs of dubious origin (one coming from Wikipedia) and near-sighted ice cap reports that ignore one pole in favor of the other as well as temperature readings that, it turns out, are not being taken in very scientific ways.

So overall, the general public and the true scientists are both going to give a sidelong glance to any Global Warming propaganda and Climate Change science they see, and rightfully so I say. Of course, according to a professor in today’s first post, skeptics are all mentally deficient because the IPCC has spoken. “So it shall be written, so it shall be done.”