03 December 2009
 
Weird Science


(L-R, Top Science Advisor John Holdren, NOAA Chief Jane Lubchenco and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) )

There isn’t  a lot that passes for glory these days. Maybe we know too much about one another, and the only privacy we will ever get is in the grave.
 
That was one of the things we covered while my old Boss and I were solving world problems at the Capital City Brewery last night. We were drinking Rusty Nails in recognition of the crappy weather outside.
 
We naturally got off onto Tiger’s marital problems. We didn’t dwell on the prurient aspects of it, since that is none of our business. My Boss had a theory. I thought the legendary golfer was chased out of the garage in his Escalade by his irate wife, swinging that nine-iron, but that probably wasn’t it.
 
According to my Boss’s theory, Tiger got cold-cocked in the house in the domestic dispute and then, the billion-dollar face marred, the couple had to figure out a way to account for the damage.
 
Voila! A car wreck was just the answer, and in a way, you could say the healing process had begun with the joint planning to cover things up.
 
“Tiger’s wife is gorgeous,” I said. “She is a hammer.”
 
“More ways than one,” said my Boss.
 
I don’t know, and really don’t care about the interiors of other people’s lives. The rest of the news of the world is so depressing I guess things like this and the Balloon Boy and the gate-crashing couple at the White House state dinner are what pass for news these days. It turns out that Michaele and Tareq Salahi have a history with the Obama’s going back to Chicago, where they appear in another picture with the then-President-elect and the Black Eyed Peas.
 
There is something about a connection to Palestinian politics, too, and some whispering that maybe the Salahi’s were actually invited, but they are a connection that no one wants publicized.
 
Like Tiger’s voice mail, I imagine.
 
Certainly the salacious is more fun than reality. I mean, the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming had a chance yesterday had a chance to get to the bottom of the cooked books on warming trends, and chose not too.
 
The skeptics on the committee evidence that some important numbers were fabricated in the scientific assessments of one of only three major climate research labs were dismissed, according to what I could observe on C-Span.
 
The President's top science adviser, John Holdren, agreed that the e-mails should be thoroughly investigated, even if he is confident that there is nothing to be found. He concentrated on the more vicious ad hominem attacks contained in some of them. I was astonished to hear the performance, since I agree with the good doctor that some scientists might actually be human, just like trophy wives and golfers. The issue at hand, however, is not whether the scientists are jerks, but rather that some of them deliberately manipulated the data.
 
Doctor Holdren said if anything turned up, they would definitely take it into account, but he prejudged the investigation, saying that “the result will not call into question the bulk of our understanding of how the climate works or how humans are affecting it.”
 
Then Jane Lubchenco, a scientist who is the new chief at NOAA. She replaced another old boss of mine, Admiral Connie Lautenbacher, who was the very model of probity. Dr. Lubchenco gave a tabletop demonstration to show how increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is also making the oceans more acidic.
 
I missed that part, but in my mind I thought it might have been one of those cool experiments involving a two-liter soda bottle, water, vinegar, baking soda and a box of raisins.
 
I know the House is composed of frauds on both sides of the aisle, so this should not surprise me. I ought to relax a little, since it does not appear that cap-and-trade legislation is going to be debated seriously until the Spring, when things will naturally be warming up again. There may be time for responsible people to examine the embedded programs in the hi-jacked scientific files and see what they really mean, and how the climatic record was distorted.
 
I am prepared to believe something is going on with the earth’s climate, but I am not certain it is what people think.
 
On that score, I find myself in complete agreement with that pusillanimous Congressman Henry Waxman. Normally, I hold the man in contempt, since he embodies everything about the busy-body government-knows-best progressives I despise.
 
So, I had to smile when I ran across this the other day, a quote from the busy-body himself, in the dark days of 2008:
 
"All of us have a right to our own views about the seriousness of global warming. But we don't have a right to our own science...” He claimed the American people needed the best science possible, and damned if I don’t agree with him.
 
Of course, he said that last year, before he got to choose the science he wanted for all of us.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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