AP Stats

To perpetuate a man-made global [fill in the blank] fraud, there had to be a certain evolutionary process in the histrionics of Global Cooling/Warming/Climate Change.

The first issue arose with the timeframe of predictions. As we all learned from the noted Climatologist Ted Danson back in the 1970s, the oceans had only 10, maybe 15, possibly 20 years to go before they died. Well, here it is about 40 years into the future, with none of the draconian remedies in place that just had to be imposed to prevent this calamity, and Flipper is still alive and kicking somewhere in the Atlantic.

So, the first thing the Global Cooling/Warming/Climate Change [GCWCC] Hysterics learned was, make sure your predictions have a long enough time frame (say, 75-100 years minimum), so two things will happen:

(a) No one who is alive when the original predictions were made will still be alive when the catastrophic date is finally reached and the original predictions fail to materialize, and/or

(b) Like the old 5-year plans of the Soviet Union, there will be enough changes and corresponding new prediction in the intervening years that when the original due-date arrives, no one will be focusing on those "old" forgotten original predictions anyway.

Thus, following this template, you can predict-away with impunity, because no one will ever hold you accountable for anything you say. Instead, the goodness of your intentions is all that will be remembered. That Al Gore. He may have been wrong about some of the details or something — I mean, it was such a long time ago, and who's perfect anyway? — but he sure cared enough about the planet to take a stand!

The only caveat to this is that people will remember what you said long into the future if your last name happens to be Nostradamus, who wrote his predictions in cryptic verses that can be interpreted in many different ways, thus keeping the predictions alive. Or, you were an ancient Mayan who foretold the end of the world in 2012, but couldn't see the end of your own civilization coming 500 years ago. In the latter case, as soon as January 2013 arrives we'll forget about the Mayans and concentrate on the movie2012 instead as a valid warning of impending planet-wide doom that got it 100% right . . . except for the small detail of the actual date that Armageddon arrived, which means that it's 99.9% believable . . . which is still better than Rush Limbaugh's 99.3% accuracy rate.

The second thing GCWCC Hysterics learned was to cherry-pick the starting point of their comparative analysis. By starting their measurements in the 1880s during a particularly cold period of time, everything following it was, by definition, "warmer." Never mind that 100, 500, even 1,000 years is the blink of an eye in geological terms, and that measuring accurate world-widetemperatures was impossible before the space age. A hundred years is a long time to most people who measure the world against their own frame of reference, so the 1880s would seem to be a pretty justifiable place to start the analysis.

Besides, lay people don't really understand science, anyway. Plain, ordinary, simple-minded folks like you and me would not understand the straightforward, logical process that re-works data until it "fits" a pre-conceived theory. We'd assign all sorts of nefarious motives to this, instead of understanding that this is part of a normal fine-tuning process that all Men of Knowledge undertake when their data doesn't exactly support their assumptions and conclusions. I'm reminded at this point of the Doonsbury cartoon during the Nixon Watergate Tapes scandal when Nixon was afraid that some of his words would be taken out of context. He played a section of the tape to illustrate his point. It went something like, "So John, how's the cover-up coming along?"

In addition to cherry-picking your starting point for your analysis, the GCWCC Hysterics quickly learned to choose the politically correct check-points after the 1880s to further "validate" their conclusions. If there's a couple of year period where temperatures go up noticeably in the natural ebb and flow of the planet, carve those out for added emphasis. And, for good effect, throw in some photos of polar bears on ice flows and insinuate they are drowning, or show the shoreline of Antarctica receding while ignoring that the interior ice is actually thickening, maintaining the same overall volume in a different footprint.

As a corollary to this, if there's an embarrassing multi-year period where it's actually getting colder like, er, it is at present, then acknowledge that we can't prove something scientifically with anecdotal observations — while massaging the data with enough "tricks" to make the cooling go away, or appear less significant than it is.

From these two foundations we get into a variety of additional tricks of the trade, among them:

(a) Pick out one or two trees with the "correct" patterns while ignoring the others around them that do not reinforce your theory;

(b) Make sure all "peer reviewed findings" arbitrarily reject out of hand any competing data and analysis, even punishing those who dare to question the preferred scientific "consensus"; and

(c) Blindly accept the "scientific pronouncements" of organizations that include non-scientists and individual scientists whose research funding depends on man being the cause of global warming (as well as there being global warming in the first place). After all, if man didn't cause it, then there's no need to fund efforts for man to analyze and correct it.