Why the Left loves Climate Science

"Climate is what you want, weather is what you get." - Heinlein

On Watts Up With That, Dr. Don J. Easterbrook explains the long-term warming-cooling trends that should inform "climate change" policy, but aren't. First the facts he presents, then my explanation of the reason that the political establishment of America and Europe are deliberately ignoring them. Dr. Easterbrook writes,

One of the best ways to look at long-term temperatures is with isotope data from the GISP2 Greenland ice core, from which temperatures for thousands of years can be determined. The ice core isotope data were obtained by Minze Stuiver and Peter Grootes from nuclear accelerator measurements of thousands of oxygen isotope ratios (16O/18O), which are a measure of paleo-temperatures at the time snow fell that was later converted to glacial ice. The age of such temperatures can be accurately measured from annual layers of accumulation of rock debris marking each summer’s melting of ice and concentration of rock debris on the glacier.

Here is a chart of the temperatures from 1480-1980:

At least 40 periods of warming and cooling have occurred since 1480 AD, all well before CO2 emissions could have been a factor.

Next, the past 5,000 years. "Note that temperatures were significantly warmer than present from 1500 to 5000 years ago."

And here are the last 10,000 years, "virtually all of the past 10,000 years has [sic] been warmer than the present."

So where do the 1934/1998/2010 warm years rank in the long-term list of warm years? Of the past 10,500 years, 9,100 were warmer than 1934/1998/2010. Thus, regardless of which year ( 1934, 1998, or 2010) turns out to be the warmest of the past century, that year will rank number 9,099 in the long-term list.

The climate has been warming slowly since the Little Ice Age (Fig. 5), but it has quite a ways to go yet before reaching the temperature levels that persisted for nearly all of the past 10,500 years.

It’s really much to do about nothing.

Except it's not about nothing. It's about power and control.

Exhibit A: Ottmar Edenhofer

German economist Ottmar Edenhofer is co-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change. He was the lead author of the IPCC's 2007 report. He told Germany's Neue Zurcher Zeitung in November, as reported by Investors.com:

"The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War."

Edenhofer let the environmental cat out of the bag when he said "climate policy is redistributing the world's wealth" and that "it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization." ...

Edenhofer claims "developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community" and so they must have their wealth expropriated and redistributed to the victims of their alleged crimes, the postage stamp countries of the world. He admits this "has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole."

Climate science's only customer is governments, there being no commercial market for forecasts of 50-100 years. When climate scientists found that their only steady funding came from statist bureaucrats, the discipline, very fuzzy with huge margins of error to begin with, became subordinated to politicians' goals.

Climate science's only product is political because its only patrons are politicians. It's of no benefit to anyone else. Climate modeling cannot be used to do anything except what is being done with it - promote statist control over ever-expanding slices of national economies to conform to a transnationalist ideology. If climate science could be used to do anything else, it would already be happening. But have you ever heard of any report of climate science's findings not used to prop up expanding the power of the state or trans-state organs?

Read the rest at Right Network.