Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant: If the Light of Day Scares You, You May Be a Germ

The Climate Change Mafia is threatening to go to the mattresses over EPA director Scott Pruitt’s plans to hold a “red team/blue team” exercise to evaluate climate science. Given the billions the US lavishes on this research, such a review is a salutary thing: but perhaps because it threatens said billions, the Mafia is going nuts:

The idea has been derided by activists and scientists who say it’s “dangerous” to elevate dissenting voices who disagree with them on global warming.

“Such calls for special teams of investigators are not about honest scientific debate,” wrote climate scientist Ben Santer and Kerry Emanuel and historian and activist Naomi Oreskes.

“They are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science,” the three wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed.

Defenders of the “consensus” argue the existing peer-review process works well and a red-blue team dynamic is not needed. They further argue scientific bodies, like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, provide a forum for scientific debates.

“Developing science, far from being ignored, is confronted directly and openly in such assessments,” Santer, Emanuel and Oreskes wrote.

This is very, very revealing. What Pruitt is planning threatens the role of people like Santer and Emanuel as gatekeepers–although “trolls under the bridge” is probably a better metaphor. They dominate peer review, through a variety of mechanisms. They are the editors of the journals. They are the go-to referees. Look back at some of the references to peer review in the Climategate emails if you doubt this. No Little Skeptical Billy Goat or Medium Size Skeptical Billy Goat is going to make it over their bridge of peer review. But the sight of Pruitt and Trump playing the role of The Big Billy Goat Gruff has them quaking in fear.*

As for “scientific bodies, like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” providing a “forum for scientific debates”–don’t make me laugh. There was more open debate at Soviet Party Congresses in the 1930s. Again–these people dominate these forums, and like any guild or clerisy, they cannot tolerate the rise of competing forums where contrary voices may be heard.

This is all very revealing. Truly confident scientists would welcome the opportunity to prove in a very public way that they are right. They would welcome the opportunity to vanquish publicly–and if they are so right, to humiliate–their adversaries.

This lot is very fond of pointing out what transpired during the Scopes Monkey Trial. Well, here’s their opportunity to make their supposedly anti-science opposition a public laughingstock, just like Clarence Darrow did (unfairly, truth be told) in 1925. Yet they recoil at the prospect.

Telling, no?

Also telling is the refusal of many states to provide public records relating to voter registration and voting to the Trump administration’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The media and the governing establishment heap scorn on anyone who dares suggest that there might be voting irregularities in the US. Well then–turn over the records so that it can be proved! If US elections in every jurisdiction in the United States are as pure as the driven snow (I snort writing that, being a Chicago native), you’d think these states would be falling over themselves to prove what a great job they are doing in achieving such an outcome, right?

They say that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Those–like the Climate Change Mafia and state election officials and pols–who shriek at the suggestion that sunlight be cast on their activities just might be germs.

* Looking back on my old Climategate posts, I stumbled across something I’d forgotten: that the Climate Mafia was truly ahead of its time in blaming its discomfiture on Russian hackers.  Just like Hillary and her minions and the media (but I repeat myself), they attempted to distract attention from the damning substance by attacking how the embarrassing emails came to light. I had a very Trumpian response, years before Trump was a political phenomenon–I praised the FSB. Hilarious.