The Washington Post gave away some valuable ad-space today by letting the ridiculously self-serious La Palin air right-wing talking points using laughably obviously biased language (or perhaps her ghost-writer did, who can say?). The best take-down of her spiel goes to Marc Ambinder, who painstakingly went through each dubious assertion.
I've noticed that Palin is not actually what we would call a deep person. She has reduced intelligent people to wondering where she stands on evolution, for example. She first caught my attention as being quite possibly anti-science when she dissed fruit-fly research. And her embrace of the climate change denialist position does not surprise me, due to her enduring slogan, "Drill, baby, drill!" This isn't really so much a policy as a battle-cry. Basically, her attitude towards facts is as a campaign, not a study. She has an opinion and will labor for the evidence (in the Dinesh D'Souza interpretation of what "evidence" means, bearing upon an earlier post) but will not let the evidence labor to change her opinion. In other words, her approach is rather the opposite of science.
Not that this won't impress people. After all, her value as a science commentator is nil, but her value as a celebrity spokesperson is considerable. She knows how to sell the talking points--see how she does it:
(Link with reservations--I am possibly facilitating traffic to WaPo, but this is contingent on actually having any traffic of my own to speak of. I don't, and the likelihood you already know what she wrote is like, totally high. So really, they won't find out from me that she's generating eyeball contact with their content.)
The e-mails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What's more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even within the CRU crowd. Some scientists had strong doubts about the accuracy of estimates of temperatures from centuries ago, estimates used to back claims that more recent temperatures are rising at an alarming rate.
This scandal obviously calls into question the proposals being pushed in Copenhagen. I've always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics. As governor of Alaska, I took a stand against politicized science when I sued the federal government over its decision to list the polar bear as an endangered species despite the fact that the polar bear population had more than doubled. I got clobbered for my actions by radical environmentalists nationwide, but I stood by my view that adding a healthy species to the endangered list under the guise of "climate change impacts" was an abuse of the Endangered Species Act. This would have irreversibly hurt both Alaska's economy and the nation's, while also reducing opportunities for responsible development
I wanted to block-quote a bit for maximum bias-analysis--and wow. "Experts" in quotation marks--Scare quote alert! (Like, um, everyone who studies this topic actually agrees that increasing CO2 contributes to global climate change. Even if these guys are even manipulating one line on a graph, that doesn't invalidate everything they do, or the corroborating science of other labs.)
"Destroyed records" = talked about deleting e-mails, and maybe did. "Hide the decline" = already discussed on many blogs, just a way of reconciling the tree-ring data to more accurate thermometer temp readings. And oooh, wow--scientists disagree about particulars. Welcome to how science works--people have different opinions, which isn't different data, or even different hypotheses. They might argue about methods or presentation, but they aren't arguing the over-arching theory.
And mentioning polar bears is just gratuitously rubbing environmentalists noses in her crap. Some people give a damn about preserving species. We like animals. We might not like the idea of wolves being shot by hunters from helicopters just to protect a sport-hunting species like moose. (I'm sure there are people who do hunt for food. I just don't see that this is the reason for the natural-predator hunt. I could be persuaded otherwise. But I'll still have some pro-wolf sympathies.) It probably sounds awfully tree-hugging of anyone to think that the big, bad polar bear needs protection--but they are eating their babies, drowning while swimming out further for food, and also change habitat. Their ecosystem is disrupted, and they are in danger as a species--regardless of what "economically" happens. She gives it away by saying there's an economic impact.
She means someone, somewhere, might not earn money if polar bears are protected. Oh, shit. Maybe those folks could find something else to exploit?
But that is the bottom line, after all. Fossil fuel companies will be restricted in their ability to profit from any policies that seek to limit CO2 proliferation. The cry of "Drill, baby, drill" looks no further than consuming fossil fuels. There is a lot of money riding on "no change". But that's relatively short term money. It's a sucker's bet. Oil and coal aren't "forever fuels".
Long term, rolling with the mainstream data from climate scientists who do relate the upsurge in global temperatures with industrial CO2 production, there is a possibility that what man started, we can stop. And save a lot of lives, real estate, farm land, etc. that would stand to be destroyed by rising oceans along coastlines and desertification inland. Addressing the possibility of man-made global heating via excess CO2 production only makes adapting fossil fuel use to "clean" techniques more costly. Besides--pollution? Mountain-top removal coal-extraction? Arsenic in the streams? And the ever more costly search for more fuel resources? It isn't environmentally sound to assume that the fuels we currently use are the best thing ever, anyway.
I'm just saying. She's shilling for buggy whips. There's a real point in considering the alternative. And although her language is strong, her facts are weak.
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