http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/08/your-guide-to-climate-paranoia.php

Huxley is right, the basic physics of the added CO2 is about an extra 0.4 deg C, which is significant but nothing to get bent out of shape over. These projections of multiple degrees of warming require much more CO2 and knock-on or feedback effects that no one really understands. It is also possible that feedback effects could reduce the actual warming to 0.3 or 0.2 C.

Currently I’m reading a biography of Freeman Dyson, the last of the old school giants of modern physics. After he came to the US from the UK he became close friends with legendary physicist, Richard Feynman. Later J. Robert Oppenheimer awarded Dyson a lifetime appointment to the ultra-prestigious Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies because Dyson had “prov[en] [Oppenheimer] wrong.”

Those are a few of Dyson’s bona fides. I mention him here because he was also one of the first major scientists to study global warming. Dyson was a math prodigy and he knows all the partial differential equations at the bottom of climate models. He accepts anthropogenic warming but argues that it’s complex and today’s models aren’t working.

Consequently he has been dismissed in the MSM and the scientific community as a doddering old fool meddling outside his expertise.

Ignore Freeman Dyson at your peril!

Gore’s mouth tightened. A Southern Baptist, he, too, had declared himself born again, but he clearly had disdain for Bush’s public kind of faith. “It’s a particular kind of religiosity,” he said. “It’s the American version of the same fundamentalist impulse that we see in Saudi Arabia, in Kashmir, in religions around the world: Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Muslim. They all have certain features in common. In a world of disconcerting change, when large and complex forces threaten familiar and comfortable guideposts, the natural impulse is to grab hold of the tree trunk that seems to have the deepest roots and hold on for dear life and never question the possibility that it’s not going to be the source of your salvation. And the deepest roots are in philosophical and religious traditions that go way back. You don’t hear very much from them about the Sermon on the Mount, you don’t hear very much about the teachings of Jesus on giving to the poor, or the beatitudes. It’s the vengeance, the brimstone.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same. As it appears that the only STEM course Al Gore took in college was Physics for Poets, I get amused at his apocalyptic utterances on the environment. Elmer Gantry redux.

How true, and how sad. It is almost impossible for a public figure to tell a joke anymore because some will deliberately take it literally and collapse into high dudgeon.

I think the most famous example is the 57 state thing with Obama. When I heard it I immediately interpreted it as a joke. Obama’s mistake was that he didn’t realize that Messiahs don’t tell jokes.