The Official Long Hill Institute Position on Global Warming

The Long Hill Institute position on Global Warming is, we don't know and you probably don't either.

The general consensus of the American bien pensant class is that it is not merely a thing, but a huge big thing that can only be cured if vast sums of moolah are thrown at it.

The Long Hill Institute has decided that unless we are willing to send a trusted staff member to become a certified climate science, we should not opine too heavily on the subject.  We did not dispatch a staff member to study the subject in depth because no one volunteered and if they did, they would not have been trusted anyway.

As the sky is falling narrative is the preferred media explanation of most everything, we leave you with a couple of alternatives to consult for the balance we cannot provide.

Richard Lindzen is an atmospheric physicist and was the Alfred P. From 1983^[1] until his retirement in 2013, he was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at  a post-secondary school called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  We aver he may not be a wild eyed nutcase as most deniers skeptics are characterized.  You can read about his views here.  He has been called a disinformer.

As to the famous 97% consensus, economist David Friedman rebuts that claim.  Is he right?  Up on Long Hill, we were lucky to get to the end of the article as we are on full dilettante mode.  If a respected academic wants to question the statistics, well there are two sides.

Below is the article that explains our position.  It appeared in the October 2009 issue of the Sturbridge Times Magazine.

WHAT DO I KNOW?

I tried to get my wife to take all the family’s money and put it into Mega-bucks tickets. My rationale was that I had always said it would be a cold day in July before I ever won any money. Well we had a lot of cold rainy July days this year. August, however turned out sultry hot.

 Still it is a summer like none that I remember. We have had rainy spells, but little as soggy as this year. The weather occasioned a debate on talk radio. The hosts generally take the position that the low temps prove global warming a hoax. Some callers will argue the other side, a few even positing the cold spell as evidence that warming is true.

 Which side is right? Beats me. My cousin in usually waterlogged Seattle tells me they are experiencing the warmest Spring and Summer ever. Well, that settles, exactly nothing. The only thing that is certain is that true believers on either side of the argument will not be swayed by anything said by the opposition.

Why not? Well why should they? What can one know? Unfortunately, not much in the modern world. The problem was best expressed by George Orwell over 60 year ago,

“Somewhere or other—I think it is in the preface to Saint Joan—Bernard Shaw remarks that we are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the MiddleAges,and as an example of modern credulity he cites the widespread belief that the earth is round.The average man, says Shaw, can advance not a single reason for thinking that the earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth-century mentality.”

Orwell then went on to prove the point that he himself had no reason to believe the world was round even though he accepted that it was. Of course we who are living now can point to pictures from space and all that, but we have to admit that few of us have made a study of it and are taking it more or less on faith. His closing paragraph sums it up:

 “It will be seen that my reasons for thinking that the earth is round are rather precarious ones. Yet this is an exceptionally elementary piece of information. On most other questions I should have to fall back on the expert much earlier, and would be less able to test his pronouncements.And much the greater part of our knowledge is at this level.It does not rest on reasoning or on experiment, but on authority.And how can it be otherwise, when the range of knowledge is so vast that the expert himself is an ignoramous as soon as he strays away from his own speciality? Most people, if asked to prove that the earth is round, would not even bother to produce the rather weak arguments I have outlined above. They would start off by saying that ’everyone knows’ the earth to be round, and if pressed further,would become angry.In a way Shaw is right. This is a credulous age, and the burden of knowledge which we now have to carry is partly responsible.”

 In truth, with my own unaided reason, I could not have figured out the Earth is round. As a child in elementary school, I did have my primitive sense of wonder piqued when Columbus was explained. Unfortunately, they explained it wrong. Columbus did not come up with something shocking in the world is round idea. Most scholars already believed it. Chris thought the circumference of the globe smaller than it was. He had made a mistake that gave us the New World.

So how does this connect to Global Warming. At a family gathering the various members were talking about the question. I won’t say discussing. Neither side answered the others’ questions other than to state a fact. My techie son asked a relative how they would explain that Mars is heating up at the same rate as the Earth. A statement was made in reply, but no answer. How do people become so doctrinaire over something even experts disagree about?

It is time to quote true experts on human nature. No, not Nietsche or Freud, but Gilbert and Sullivan:

That every boy and every gal

That's born into the world alive

Is either a little Liberal

Or else a little Conservative!

Fal, lal, la!

Yup, we’re born that way. I accept it and am waiting for my application to the Flat Earth Society to be approved. They have my solemn undertaking to agree with their official Global Warming Policy no matter what it is.