WE WON ! - Skeptics 1 Warmists 0

Robert Manne, Professor of Politics at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, admits his team has failed, That has to be good. Real scientists everywhere are smiling! Professor Manne, Australia's "most influential public intellectual" - whose credentials must now be questioned - has thrown-in-the-towel with a lead article in this month's THE MONTHLY magazine entitled "Victory of the Denialists".  Unfortunately Manne's writing is thick on insults, but thin on reasons.

Manne's argument appears to rest entirely on his mistaken belief that "science" is What The Gods Declare It To Be. For Manne, the Gods are "official climate scientists". Apparently, only those who are anointed by Government funding have access to The Truth - their declarations must be obeyed. Manne is so completely under their spell, he is incapable of figuring out how anyone could think anything else. For Manne, planetary atmospheric dynamics are so blindingly clear that only unreasonable citizens could question it. So those who get this question wrong are not just unreasonable but quite possibly brain dead. There is an antipathy here to the questioning mind that is unbecoming in an academic. It seems to be a common sinister affliction among the leftist elite.

So, how does the arbiter of the reasonable, reason it?   Like this:
     "Thousands of climate scientists in a variety of disciplines have been exploring the issue for    decades. They reached a consensual conclusion whose existence is easily demonstrated."

He's right that the consensus is real (among government funded climate scientists and one hair-brained paleontologist). But that's not evidence about the climate, its evidence about scientific processes, monopoly science and university culture -- not the climate. The problem for Manne is that this assumes that (1) science-the-human-practice is incorruptible and (2) scientists are unaffected by human ambitions, money fame, bias or...simple error. Its obvious that more funding of one side of the debate means more papers published from that point of view. Can humans be human? We skeptics think so.

Governments have funded millions of dollars to thousands of scientists to study one sort of problem. The unwritten rules of "climate science" research is fairly clear: workers will be rewarded if they find one kind of answer, and anyone called "denier'' is defunded, sacked and basically exiled if they find any other kind of answer. Professor Manne thinks his team was beaten by big money. His synopsis is that vested interests defeated climate science, even though evidence shows the vested interests were 3500 times larger on the believer side. And that kind of thinking is why the intellectuals keep coming up with potty ideas.

As always, with "intellectuals" when they analyze their failure, it's impossible for them to have been defeated by better arguments and stronger evidence. And with further doubt came further evidence of exaggerated claims and busted predictions. And it's this process - one involving not denialism but questioning, not claims but evidence - which is handing sceptics their VICTORY. Consider this. It is the skeptic's who exposed the following warmist claims as false: 

• The Himalayan ice would completely melt by 2035.
• The Arctic ice would vanish in 2008 or 2012.
• Polar Bears are drowning and eventually will vanish.
• Temperatures rise as CO2 increases in the atmosphere.
• The Greenland ice sheet was melting and would rise the sea level and meter or more.
• The Great Barrier Reef would now bleach every second year.
• Reefs, worldwide, faced devastation from a warming climate.
• The world would warm significantly over the past decade.
• Australia's drought would be permanent and become the "new Climate".
• The "rain that falls isn't actually going to fill our dams and river systems."
• The acidification of the seas will kill the shell animals and cause fish stocks to fall.
• Deceasing ice on Mt Kilimanjaro was evidence of warming.
• Hurricanes and tornadoes would get worse and more frequent.
• Antarctic ice was declining and sea level rises are a fact of life.
• Australia's Carbon Dioxide Tax would make a difference to the climate.

The Way I See It....the powerful flaw in the man-made warming scare is the economics, the failure of renewables, the irrational need to ignore nuclear energy. Or perhaps what really bugs the Warmists is the fake nature of the so-called "free market solution" - where everything that matters is fixed by the bureaucrats rather than the market?

Manne has to admit that skeptics are not the team which has a UN coordinating panel, government funded institutions and NGO's worth hundreds of millions that are devoted to propagating their words. Nor do skeptics have a sympathetic ear in the media or multimillion dollar ad campaigns funded by taxpayers.  Dear Robert...No, you and your ilk weren't defeated by a pile of money. you LOST, despite your pile of money.