Common Folk Using Common Sense

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Bullwinkle Blog, Woman Honor Thyself, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, and The World According to Carl, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

From the Daily Times (Salisbury, MD):

Gov. Ruth Ann Minner, a Democrat, has directed Delaware’s state climatologist to stop using his title in public statements on climate change, citing a clash of views on global warming and confusion over the position’s ties to the administration.

Minner, who made the directive in a letter, described the move as a way to “clarify” the role of David R. Legates, a prominent skeptic of views that human activities are warming the planet and triggering climate shifts.

David R. Legates, Ph.D., C.C.M., is Associate Professor in Climatology in the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware. In addition to teaching at Louisiana State University, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Virginia, Dr. Legates has served as chief research scientist in a variety of commercial venues, including the Southern Regional Climate Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the Center for Computational Geosciences in Norman, Oklahoma. He is the recipient of numerous professional and scientific awards and has authored or co-authored over two hundred articles, monographs, book chapters, proceedings papers and encyclopedia entries as well as computer programs and datasets for climate modeling.

He is also a skeptic of the current hysteria over global warming caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

But the problem is that he is also the State Climatologist of Delaware. Ruth Ann Minner is the Governor of Delaware, and she buys into the global warming hysteria. Therefore she has discovered that she can either debate Mr. Legates over the validity of man-made global warming … or she can simply silence him.

“Your views on climate change, as I understand them, are not aligned with those of my administration,” Minner wrote. “In light of my position and due to the confusion surrounding your role with the state, I am directing you to offer any future statements on this or other public policy matters only on behalf of yourself or the University of Delaware and not as state climatologist.”

Wow. That’s what I like about the Moonbat Left - they herald Diversity as long as your views are identical with theirs.

I wonder what Mr. Legates has said that has the Governor’s panties in a bunch:

While most of official Washington was captivated with the fight on the Senate floor to pass an energy bill before Congress left town for its August vacation, a vicious campaign was under way behind the scenes to smear two leading scientists for pointing out serious flaws in the science behind the theory of human-caused climate change.

The targets were Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, both astrophysicists at Harvard, who were characterized as fringe scientists whose work should be ignored. What did they do to attract such characterizations? They had the audacity to pull back the curtain on the wizard of global warming.

Global warming alarmists would have governments impose significant regulations with tremendous economic implications. The Bush administration is under attack simply for stating that the science is uncertain whether human-induced global warming is occurring. At the same time, scientists that add credence to that assertion are being silenced.

Yet if recent global warming is largely a result of natural climate variability, policies to reduce global warming would be unnecessary, costly and ineffective. Before we are asked to incur the pain, we should better understand whether there would be any gain.

• The fact that parts of the Arctic Ocean are ice-free in the summer is said to be evidence that sea ice and the pack ice along the Arctic coast are disappearing; but changing wind patterns pushing the ice around, not rising temperatures, are responsible for navigable Arctic waters.
• In Alaska, home to many glaciers, several decades of increasingly colder temperatures in the middle of the 20th century preceded a more recent return to the average temperatures of the early 20th century.
• Temperatures at the peak of the Greenland Ice Sheet show it is actually growing colder.
• Sea levels have been rising — in fact, they have been rising since the end of the last ice age 20,000 years ago — but there is no evidence of an accelerating trend.

The complexity of the climate and the limitations of data and computer models mean projections of future climate change are unreliable at best. In sum, the science does not support claims of drastic increases in global temperatures over the 21st century, nor does it support claims of human influence on weather events and other secondary effects of climate change - no matter what that fraud Al Gore - the Goracle - tries to make you believe.

The United Nations established its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. Since then, the IPCC has issued First, Second and Third Assessment Reports (1990, 1996 and 2001, respectively) as well as a number of special reports. Additionally, there have been regional studies, including the United States National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change (USNA or National Assessment). These reports profess to represent the state of climate science. But claims that these reports represent a scientific consensus that human activities are causing or will soon cause significant and generally harmful global warming ignore uncertainties noted in the reports themselves, internal inconsistencies in the supporting data, inconsistencies among the various climate models, and many studies that have reached contrary conclusions.

Global warming began long before industrial development led to increases in greenhouse gases. The Earth’s climate has been warming since the mid-1800s.

Critical portions of the “science” surrounding global warming are misleading, inaccurate, unreliable, or simply wrong. This is not necessarily an indictment of the individuals involved, but is rather more symptomatic of the nature of science when funded by a government or championed by politicians with hidden agendas.

Ruth Ann Minner, Democrat, Delaware, global warming, David R. Legates, climate, Goracle

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