Unintentional Humor

If find it funny that Prog economist Paul Krugman comes out with this:

Republicans against Science, Paul Krugman, New York Times.

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

On the same day CERN comes out with this:

Science Getting Settled, Lawrence Soloman, Financial Post.

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

I'm not going to go out on a limb and suggest to you that the Republicans were somehow "right" about the whole climate change deal. Many of them have been denying that there was any significant change all along. On the other hand, it's the Prog's who seem to be in danger of becoming the party of pseudo-science, happily believing unproven theories left and right because they are told to by their political heroes who stand to gain Billions of dollars based on a series of politically influenced financial bets.

Neither am I going to say the issue of climate change is dead. There are still open questions as to whether or not ground level pollution is a partial driver, or whether the chemicals needed to drive climate change are mostly natural in origin. In short, the Sun drives MOST of our climate's change, but there still is a benefit from not polluting etc. not only from a climate perspective but from a general health and natural beauty perspective as well. These study results are not carte balanche to pollute, but they should spell the end of the "stop climate change by shutting down the economy" nonsense that we've seen for a while.

The simple fact is that the Earth's climate has always been changing. The idea that human beings had the ability to stop or alter that change is arrogant. It's high time we started finding ways to deal with climate change now that we're seeing its effects, and stop wasting Trillions of dollars trying to stop something we have no control over in the first place.

What should terrify us is not the GOP's refusal to believe man is altering the climate, but that the Prog's are willing to destroy our global economy in a vain attempt to become King Canute.


RELATED: CERN Press release on CLOUD