Louis Hissink's weekly science roundup is out again so I am going to refer people there today rather than put much up myself. Louis does a bit of a demolition of an article on global warming in "The Age", Australia's most Leftist newspaper. The article is of course biased but it is quite long and does overall give quite an extensive coverage of Australia's global warming skeptics so an open-minded reader who was unaware that global warming had been ridiculed by many scientists would probably find much to provoke doubt there. So the article was in my view actually quite good publicity for the skeptical case.

And the fact that, in the usual Leftist way, the article relied mainly on personal attacks for its criticisms of the skeptics gave the article a shrill tone that should have alerted readers to the wobbliness of the case it was making. One example of the rhetoric used was a reference to the skeptics as "hired guns" -- the usual Leftists strategem of claiming that a scientist cannot be believed because he benefits from commercial funding in some way (but funding from a Green-oriented organization leads to perfect objectivity, of course). Yet as the article did also point out, most of the global-warming skeptics are in fact retired academics. It has to be that way. Ever since Galileo, scientists have found it risky to question the orthodoxy and a scientist who needed funding for any work in climate science would usually be very unwise to criticize global warming. It would be like killing the goose that laid the golden egg and his colleagues would jump on him to ensure the continuing health of the goose. So it is only retired scientists who are really free to speak out. So the global-warming skeptics, far from being hired guns are in fact mostly retired guns.

Louis also points to holes in the usual argument that it was mankind who drove to extinction many of the original large animals of North America. The section of mankind so accused is of course the North American Indians -- whom Leftists otherwise claim to have been "in harmony with nature"! Another Leftist self-contradiction, it seems. Anyway, just to support the skeptical case that Louis puts forward, there is an article here which reports on the near extinction of the North American bison that occurred on a number of occasions. It seems that recent studies of Bison DNA let early hunters off the hook: "Prehistoric big-game hunters may be off the hook in the latest twist of a whodunit that tries to explain why bison populations sharply crashed thousands of years ago. Proponents of the overkill theory blamed the first Americans to cross an ice-free corridor -- connecting what is now Alaska and Siberia -- for hunting bison within a whisper of disappearance. ... A team of 27 scientists used ancient DNA to track the hulking herbivore's boom-and-bust population patterns, adding to growing evidence that climate change was to blame. " Note: Climate change in prehistoric times! It must have been all the factories and cars and power stations they had back then!

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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