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Virginia High Court Rejects Case Against Climatologist Michael Mann
ananyo writes "The Virgina Supreme Court on Friday tossed out an investigation by the state's conservative attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, into Michael Mann, the former University of Virginia climatologist whose work on the now-famous hockey-stick graph has become a lightning rod for climate skeptics. 'In a dense and conflicted 26-page ruling (PDF) covering a century and a half of case law — including references to kings as well as modern "functional incongruities" that divided the judges themselves — Virginia’s high court ruled that the university is not a "person" and thus is not subject to Cuccinelli’s demands under the state’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act.' The 'climategate' scientist has been cleared of wrongdoing by a number of investigations."
Well if you're a scientist you're getting the facts wrong or presenting them wrong. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 is not "~9%", it's distortions like yours that make this a difficult conversation to have. In fact the CO2 concentration of the Earth's Atmosphere is 393 parts per million!!!! That's 0.0393% not ~9%.
"The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth's atmosphere is approximately 392 ppm (parts per million) by volume as of 2011[1] and rose by 2.0 ppm/yr during 2000–2009. [1][2] The concentration with respect to pre-industrial concentration of 280 ppm has increased roughly exponentially with a growth rate of 2.2% per year in the last decades[2] Carbon dioxide is essential to photosynthesis in plants and other photoautotrophs, and is also a prominent greenhouse gas."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere
January 2012 it was 0.393% as reported here: ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_mm_mlo.txt.
The rise in CO2 since the 1950's has not increased temperature as shown by the Girma Analysis (posted in other comments on this thread). CO2 does not do what is claimed by alarmists in the real actual atmosphere, no where close as the failed and now falsified IPCC climate models verses actual temperatures proves conclusively.
The problem with environmentalism isn't the actual facts.
The problem is that once people try to use these facts to justify policies that will harm other people, the victims of those new policies will try to dispute the facts in order to discredit the policies that are harming them.
We don't live in a free society anymore, but a technocracy. If the "experts" say X is good, government takes your money to promote it. If they say Y is bad, the government taxes, regulates, or bans it. The very premise here, "if X is good, they should promote it; if Y is bad, they should ban it," is never actually questioned.
Liberty in your lifetime
And if you think that eugenics (the science) has in any way been proven false, then you are completely mistaken.
But it's an excellent lesson in why we need to separate scientific findings from policy debates, which necessarily need to include much more considerations and a great many more factors must be weighed as trade-offs.
Just as eugenics was used to justify mass sterilizations, ultimately climate change is being used to justify eliminating about 80% of the global human population.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia