An article published last year by current EPA Administrator Lisa Heinzerling reveals a startling shift in strategy by those arguing for significant policy changes based on the now discredited science of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming. In short they have come up with a duplicitous strategy that goes from viewing the theory as an insufficiently supported scientific theory to portraying it as a sacrosanct piece of pseudo-science immune to disproof by observational evidence. In Climate Change Human Health and the Post-Cautionary Principle Ms. Heinzerling advocates that we move from thinking about manmade climate change in terms of a pre-cautionary principle which counsels action even in the absence of scientific consensus about a threat.
That she feels provides too much leeway for those who based upon the data at hand might argue otherwise.
Instead she urges that it be considered a post-cautionary principle where some very bad effects of climate change are depicted as unavoidable and others are seen as avoidable only by drastic measures.
And that of course since it is all post-cautionary defines the matter as a closed case a fait accompli permitting no further discussion.
This I would remind readers comes from a woman who now has it in her power to foist such transparently shoddy thinking onto the entire scientific world.
Under the old pre-cautionary principle its adherents tried to generate a sense of urgency for immediate government action by claiming that the evidence of an impending catastrophe was strong enough to justify such action notwithstanding the fact that the jury was still out on the science behind the matter.
Give credit where credit is due: at least the old pre-cautionaryists conceded that all the evidence was not yet in.
Fast-forward to 2008.
Heinzerling deciding that she and her cohorts had not prompted sufficient governmental action with that far-too-evenhanded approach now proclaims that we probably blew past our precautionary opportunity.
Instead she posits we actually live in a post-cautionary world where we must act with a renewed sense of urgency to implement governmental policies combating the alleged ill effects of man-caused global warming despite the lack of true scientific evidence.
She then makes a rather stunning declaration about what precipitated this change.
Taking the line recently adopted and popularized by Al Gore she states that:
The scientific debate over whether climate change is happening and whether it will hurt us is over…
And just what is her support for this bold claim? It seems to rest on nothing more than an appeal for a contrived consensus from scientists at the IPCC who themselves proclaimed that global warming was indeed happening and that humans are partly responsible. They declared that the world was warming and identified a discernible human influence on the climate. But as it turns out this appeal comes from an organization whose findings are now being brought under serious suspicion in the Climategate scandal.
In order to generate and defend their contrived consensus on anthropogenic global warming the Hot Earthers at IPCC relied heavily on data from the University of East Anglias Climate Research Unit (CRU). And according to recently uncovered e-mail exchanges members of the CRU regularly modified or suppressed data that tended to disconfirm (falsify) the theory of man-caused global warming.
Now it has become abundantly clear that those discredited CRU scientists still viewed man-caused global warming as nothing more than a scientific theory capable of being proven false by observational evidence.
Else why fudge the data?
And why manufacture a counterfeit consensus where none actually exists?
In declaring the debate on anthropogenic global warming over that is exactly what Lisa Heinzerling and Al Gore have done.
In so doing they have deliberately plunged the world not only into the nebulous arena of the post-cautionary but into the nefarious era of the post-credible as well.
Victor Morawski professor at Coppin State University is a Liberty Features Syndicated writer.
