Wednesday, October 19, 2011

is the damage already done?

So while Donna Laframboise applies the last rites to the credibility of the IPCC, a lingering question remains: is it too late?  Has the damage already been done?  Is the climate narrative too deeply embedded within the political and social fabric of contemporary society for sanity to prevail?

Perhaps.  Matt Ridley offers this excellent discussion on the relative merits of shale gas and windmills as newly acquired sources of energy, their peceived acceptability and media profiles:

  • To persist with a policy of pursuing subsidized renewable energy in the midst of a terrible recession, at a time when vast reserves of cheap low-carbon gas have suddenly become available is so perverse it borders on the insane. Nothing but bureaucratic inertia and vested interest can explain it.
Bureaucratic inertia. Check.
Vested interest. Check.

Ecomyths persist long after they are scientifically exposed as fraudulent precisely because they conform to the predominant dogma of the ideology that serves and justifies bureaucratic inertia and vested interests.  

Environmentalism is no longer the ideology of reform, of rebellion, of revolution: it is fully co-opted as the dominant dogma of stasist conformity and control.

the IPCC as environmental problem child

Judith Curry has posted this review of Donna Laframboise's new book on the IPCC The Delinquent Teenager.  I have been a bit slow off the mark, and have not completed my reading of the book yet and was going to promote it once that was done, but delaying further seems unnecessary.

If you are a regular reader to this site, you are probably already well aware of Donna's meticulous documentation in a series of posts exposing the fraud of the presumed moral authority of the IPCC.  Judith's excellent review clearly confers on Donna's work the very stamp of legitimacy that The Delinquent Teenager strips from the sorry shell of the IPCC edifice.

Are the politics of climate still as polarized and toxic as ever?  Or is there a new spirit of reform and cordiality?  Reactions to Donna's book will be extremely telling.