The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Link: Telegraph | News | Climate chaos? Don’t believe it .

In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: “With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: ‘We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.’ “

The Medieval Warm Period is the main reason that “climate change science” is bunk. If temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now then carbon emissions were certainly not responsible.

Again this weekend, the creepy David Milliband was on television (on a weirdly hysterical edition of Andrew Marr’s “Sunday AM”) saying that there is a clear scientific consensus. Whether or not that is true, science is not democratic. There have been many times in scientific history when one man was right and the rest of the scientific world was wrong. Our problem today is that most scientists are directly or indirectly State-funded, and “the fundamental equation of state-subsidized science is that “No Problem equals No Funding.”

There are lots of scientists who would be out of work without the global hysteria of global warming. It amazes me that there are so many people with so little knowledge of history that they can be so easily – and so disastrously – scammed.

It is an essential element of the scientific method that “All hypotheses and theories are in principle subject to disproof.” The duty of scientists is to try to disprove current hypotheses and theories. As new information arises, new hypotheses will be developed, which are then themselves subject to disproof. Science is a series of working theories. Despite what idiots like Milliband would have us believe, there is no ultimate scientific knowledge. We certainly can’t determine the “truth” by taking a vote among scientists. Even if we could, eliminating every scientist from that vote who was being funded by governments or oil companies, on the grounds of conflict of interest, might produce a result of which Milliband would disapprove.

Climate change is an ideological construct masquerading as science. It is a construct designed to justify the political end of an ever more powerful State, with ever more reasons to interfere in citizens’ lives. Whatever the merits of the science behind it, it is the most dangerous political idea since Marxism.