From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“The multi-decade distraction of ‘the climate crisis’ is now being cut down to size. The Climategate emails revealed the professional rot 15 years ago, and more and more money spent on climate alarm has been wasted since. It is time to stop throwing good money after bad to, alas, quieten the issue.”

The mid-course correction of U.S. policy to reign-in the out-of-control Climate Science Complex is front-page news at home and abroad. Such reform is long overdue. The bloated 25,000 registrations for the last American Geophysical Society meeting indicate how big a government-subsidized sub-industry has become. Maybe next year’s climate confab will be half as much, or less.

More Tax Dollars, Please

Is more taxpayer money needed to understand global climate change since, alas, less is known than thought? Such a plea came from climatologists Gavin Schmidt and Zeke Hausfather in the New York Times, We Study Climate Change. We Can’t Explain What We’re Seeing” (November 13, 2024). They admitted that recent events were not predicted by greenhouse physics or climate models. Global warming, global weirding.

“[T]he unusual jump in global temperatures starting in mid-2023 appears to be higher than our models predicted,” the article began.

While there have been many partial hypotheses — new low-sulfur fuel standards for marine shipping, a volcanic eruption in 2022, lower Chinese aerosol emissions and El Niño perhaps behaving differently than in the recent past — we remain far from a consensus explanation even more than a year after we first noticed the anomalies. And that makes us uneasy.

Some humility perhaps? Nope, just a call for more money by the two.

… we do not have systems in place to explore the significance of shorter-term phenomena in the climate in anything approaching real time. But we need them badly. It’s now time for government science agencies to provide more timely updates in response to the rapid changes in the climate.

The article continues with all the problems of incomplete and delayed data that funding bumps for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Department of Energy, as well as the European climate service provider Copernicus, need “sustained funding instead of one-off research grants.”

Schmidt and Hausfather end on a predictable alarmist note: “Some of the unease that people feel about climate change comes from a sense that things are out of our control — that the climate is changing faster than we can adapt.” Tipping points of doom are suggested. But SuperScience stands ready.

The good news is that climate science could easily become more agile in understanding the rapid changes we are seeing in the real world, incorporating them into our projections of the future and, hopefully, reducing that uncertainty.

Enter AAAS Pleading

Consider the above op-ed a lobbying piece for the government-dependent American Association of the Advancement of Science. AAAS CEO Sudip Parikh recently testified before a U.S. House Committee. While avoiding the term “climate change,” he warned about “existential threats to our health; food supply and water security; environmental resilience; energy production, utilization, and storage; and our overall wellbeing.”

SuperScience to the rescue? Not given the recent budget cuts of DOGE. “The announcement of an abrupt spending freeze on science and technology funding broke trust and hurt the S&T enterprise, he argued.

Many scientists, particularly those early in their careers, live paycheck-to-paycheck. I was most saddened to hear from these scientists who began questioning whether they should even continue their scientific pursuits or switch careers.

Is that good news? A market signal to spare taxpayers and go into the private sector for more productivity and social benefits? he for-profit sector. Parikh’s claim that we are going to “lose some of the next generation of science and technology talent and hurt America’s competitiveness” is fallacious. Maybe he should shut down AAAS’s lobby machine and go into the private sector himself.

Alarmism: Out of Time, Out of Money

The multi-decade distraction of “the climate crisis” is now being cut down to size. The Climategate emails revealed the professional rot 15 years ago, and more and more money spent on climate alarm has been wasted since. It is time to stop throwing good money after bad to, alas, quieten the issue.