Global Warming: Still Hoohah

Kobayashi Maru has a great post up on Byrnes, too, and a few things occur to him:

) In much of the Islamic world (to put it mildly), a 15-year-old female would not have access to the kind of intellectual cultivation, encouragement or freedom this young woman obviously has.

2) This is an interesting illustration of the value that outsiders can bring to a problem that ‘officials’ and ‘experts’ are unable or unwilling to crack. The fresh eyes of the uncredentialed, unbiased and marginalized often hold the key to new insights in science–the ultimate meritocracy. So it has been throughout history. The Internet gives legs to that dynamic. The freedoms of liberal (old meaning) Western Democracies give it staying power.
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Bottom line: we don’t, can’t and shouldn’t attempt to control the climate. We should listen more carefully to fresh voices like Kristen Byrnes who are trying to understand it and who don’t (yet) have to feed at the official scientific and academic funding troughs with the biases they inevitably introduce.

UPDATE I: I just ran across this well-informed analysis of the IPCC preliminary report from a February post over at Error Theory (lots more detail in his post).

The Report acknowledges that indirect solar effects are the only candidate for powerful natural warming effects. Evidence that some kind of powerful indirect solar effects exist is acknowledged. But indirect solar effects are then omitted from both the computer models that are discussed, and from the conclusions that are drawn based upon the computer models. The result is the classic problem of the omitted variable. Warming effects get misattributed to the greenhouse/anthropogenic effects that ARE included in the model. Thus the main conclusion of the Report is based entirely on elementary errors of logic and statistics. [emphasis added]

In other words: it’s the sun, stupid.

Queen Nan, btw, has declared decisively, global warming IS manmade and it’s not Greenland’s fault. It’s ours, of course. She offers no science behind that, btw. But she is the queen.

In other news, thus far no word on whether Al Gore – who will brook neither dissent or debate on his great religion and profit-making scheme, will talk it over with this 15 year old girl.