This beats all...

I'm skeptical about the science behind Global Warming, as you know. I strongly suspect there's a lot of suppressio veri, suggestio falsi going on. But I didn't expect the suppressio part to be quite so shocking as this.

It looks like UN documents that have been widely circulated and used to promote **ahem** certain policies, have been doctored to remove a major historical event, the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). This period of dramatic climate change has been magic-ed out of the record! Here's the article, scroll down to the part with the two graphs. Astonishing...

Now I may not know much about computer climate models (though I know enough to smell a rat when people get exactly the results they so obviously want) but I do know a lot of history. The medieval warm period is real, it shows up in the record over and over again, as does the cooling after 1500. The most famous example is the Norse farms in Greenland, where no one would farm today. But there are plenty of others.

As always, what interests me are the underlying questions. Why is this such an overwhelming issue to certain people? One reason is contained in the first paragraph of the article:

Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government"...

That's a lot of it, I think. But there is also the desire to distract attention away from the failures of Leftism, which are now so evident. This is an issue that people can be passionate about without actually arguing in a positive way the virtues of their own philosophy. A leftist can scream 'We've got to do something!" and just assume that momentum and habit will produce the desired results of bigger government, less freedom, and rule by "experts." (I, on the other hand, can proclaim my ideas on this topic openly, and let them be debated.)

And perhaps the most conspicuous failure that leftists want to distract attention from are the declining birthrates throughout the developed world, which track closely with the rise of leftish ideas and the decline of Christian and Jewish faith, and which have brought many European nations into irreversible demographic collapse. Leftists are pointing frenziedly at global Warming to distract us from the fact that they have been killing billions of people, by persuading people not to have children.

(thanks to Kathy Shaidle)