The Washington Post asks: “Recently, a U.N. scientific report was found to have included a false conclusion about the melting of Himalayan glaciers. That followed the release of stolen e-mails last year, which showed climate scientists commiserating over problems with their data. Is there a broader meaning in these two incidents, and should they cause the public to be more skeptical about the underlying science of climate change?”
You can’t call them isolated incidents now that they are coming in droves.
It is clear that global warming science has been hijacked by a subset of researchers who have crossed the line into advocacy and alarmism. The cache of climategate e-mails alone reveals a number of scandals – key researchers and institutions manipulating temperature data to gin up a bigger warming trend, refusing to allow independent researchers to see the raw data, and strategizing to keep skeptical views out of the scientific literature and official reports. Climategate is just beginning to unfold.
Now, the UN’s vaunted 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report turns out to contain a whopper. The report describes as “very high” the likelihood that continued global warming will cause the glaciers in Himalayan Mountains to disappear by 2035 if not sooner. Amazingly, it turns out that the source of this claim is an unsupported statement of one researcher that appeared in a magazine article. Worse yet, the IPCC report’s editors knew full well that the assertion was based on speculation rather than peer reviewed science, and in fact it was disputed by several scientists when it appeared in early drafts. Nonetheless, it was left in for political reasons.
Similar shenanigans appear to have gone on with the IPCC’s claim that damage from hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters has worsened because of global warming. Like the Himalayan glacier melt assertion, it was based on the claim of a single researcher who had not published it in the scientific literature, and who now disassociates himself from the way it was used in the IPCC report. Indeed, when he did publish the study, he concluded that there was “insufficient evidence” of a link between warming and natural disaster damage.
There is a clear pattern with these revelations. It’s the very scariest claims — rapidly melting Himalayan glaciers threatening a billion people with flooding and then with drought, an increase in Katrina-scale disasters, and others – that are the ones on the shakiest ground. Virtually everything the public has been told about global warming that sounds terrifying is not true, and what is true falls well short of being terrifying.
There is a reason why the gloom and doom, however dubious and unscientific, keeps getting advanced by those who support an expansive global warming agenda. Without such hype, the threat of global warming does not justify the multi-trillion dollar costs and multi-million job losses of attempts to deal with it.
There is another lesson from Glaciergate — it is high time to retire the distinction between the “skeptics” and the “consensus science.” All along, several so-called skeptics have complained about the Himalayan hyperbole. As is typical, they were denigrated as outliers or even kooks for doing so. As recently as a few weeks ago, Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, derided such critiques as “voodoo science,” until he reluctantly had to admit they were true.
By now, the skeptics have proven to be right about way too much, and the putative “consensus science” wrong about way too much, for the labels to make any sense. In fact, if there are additional revelations like Glaciergate (and it looks like claims of global warming devastating the Amazon rainforest may be next), it might make more sense for the labels to be reversed.
This week National Journal Online asked their stable of health experts: Would the leading Democratic health care reform proposals result in a better or worse Medicare?
Heritage Foundation Vice President for Domestic Policy Stuart Butler responded:
On the face of it, the reform proposals would help ease the $37 trillion unfunded obligations of Medicare, making it a tad more viable for current and future seniors. But the savings on one credit card just become new liabilities on another. Moreover, if the key cuts actually went into place it would be a disaster for seniors. In the Reid bill, physician fees are to be cut more than 20 percent in 2011 and kept there indefinitely. That would cause docs to leave in droves and mean care cutbacks from those who remain. And Medicare’s chief actuary says payment rate cuts will cause up to 20 percent of Medicare hospitals to become unprofitable. Medicare Advantage, it’s true, would not cut to the bone, but there will be a significant erosion of benefits and far fewer plans available.
But the “good” news for seniors is that much of this will not actually happen. For instance, AARP and the AMA will as usual make sure those meat axe physician cuts never happen – the Senate, like the House, will simply run up the national credit card via another bill. Many other promised savings will also turn out to be phantom cuts. Congress will never let the Medicare commission, for example, chop away enough to meet the savings target.
So seniors will not encounter the big cutbacks many predict. Instead the long-term financial problem will continue and the new coverage entitlement will add to the total unfunded debt handed to our kids and grandkids. If Congress were serious about reform and fiscal prudence it would move Medicare towards a defined-contribution premium-support system. It would also make each new coverage commitments contingent on first achieving and “banking” Medicare savings. But Congress is not serious.
On Wednesday of this week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirmed Butler’s analysis, writing about Democrat claim that Obamacare strengthened Medicare:
The key point is that the savings to the HI trust fund under the PPACA would be received by the government only once, so they cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and, at the same time, pay for current spending on other parts of the legislation or on other programs…To describe the full amount of HI trust fund savings as both improving the government’s ability to pay future Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the government’s fiscal position.