Global Warming Redux

James Lewis over at the American Thinker pokes yet another hole in the "science" of Global Warming. If you haven't heard, 2007 was the coldest year in a century, with a .6 degree decline in temperatures, which wipes out the entire century's temperature increase commonly attributed to human induced global warming. Naturally, all the climate modelers are beginning to react by "tweaking" their models.

"How can this super-cold winter happen? It's got all the faithful a little worried. Climate modeling teams all over the world are sweating 24/7 to deal with it. They are producing epicycles for their models, to hang on the warming story.

"Epicycles" are cycles on top of cycles. When traditional astronomy began to collapse in the years before Copernicus, True Believers reacted by adding lots of little cycles on top of the great cycles of the planetary orbits, to protect their faith. Trouble is, they had to add so many cycles on top of cycles that eventually, the whole system became a laughingstock. Ultimately you could explain anything you wanted -- after the fact."

Lewis also recounts the story if Hungarian mathemetician Ferenc M. Miskolczi, who used to work for NASA, which wouldn't publish his paper (now published in a Hungarian journal) pointing out that all the climate models treat the Earth's atmosphere as infinitely think - because it greatly simplifies the math involved while simaltaneously helpings them "prove" their assumptions. If you correct these models to the actual thickness of the atmosphere (around 65 miles) all the warming effects of greenhouse gasses disappear entirely. Ooops.

The ironic thing about all of this is that NASA administrator James Hansen has been the one complaining about the Bush administration's politicization of science, all the while the agency has been engaging in a fair piece of censorship itself, all in the name of a political agenda of its own. It would be pretty ironic if it wasn't so tragic.