“Whenever you can’t have a debate, I often think that’s evidence that there’s a problem,” Thiel said on The Glenn Beck Program. “When people use the word ‘science,’ it’s often a tell, like in poker, that you’re bluffing. It’s like we have ‘social science’ and we have ‘political science,’ [but] we don’t call it ‘physical science’ or ‘chemical science.’ We just call them physics and chemistry because we know they’re right.”
Thiel said no one will be upset if you ask questions about the periodic table, because it is actually science. But referring to man-made climate change as “science” tells you “that people are exaggerating and they’re bluffing a little bit,” Thiel said.
“The weather has not been getting warmer for the last 15 years. The hockey stick that Al Gore predicted in the early 2000s on the climate has not happened,” he remarked. “And I think as this monolithic culture breaks down, you can have more debates.”
Yes.
Shiver: ‘Thiel said America “could be curing cancer,” but because the government has made the cost of developing medicine so high, people are dedicating their time and energy to the tech industry instead.’
The worst of it is – there’s no way to know if he’s right or not. It’s really really hard to develop a cancer cure, or a good antibiotic. But how do you tell what could have happened if more of the best people “dedicated their time and energy to it”? Another example of Bastiat’s “that which is not seen”.
By the bye, I have a friend who develops cures for thyroid cancer for the NIH. He has one which (he believes) could help upwards of ten thousand people a year. That’s not enough – you can’t pay for a billion dollar investment with that many people. So no FDA approval studies, and no medicine.
“The weather has not been getting warmer for the last 15 years. The hockey stick that Al Gore predicted in the early 2000s on the climate has not happened,” he [Theil] remarked.
Okay, whoa. The Hockey Stick was not Al Gore’s. It was Michael Mann’s. The stick did not predict warming. It was a retrospective. It purported to compare the 20th century temperature trend, (hockey stick _blade_) to the utterly stable temperatures of the prior 1000 years (the flat hockey stick _shaft_). In doing so it proffered to replace a prior understanding of the past 1000 years showing a curve ( boomerang? Scythe-handle?) of temperatures both warmer and cooler than present.
The curves of prediction — a set of three — was due to neither Gore nor Mann but James Hansen. One curve for “business as usual”, one for “let the politicians try something” and one for “hand over all power to me and my peers.” Or something of those sorts. In any case the trends of real temperatures “have not happened” [as Thiel puts it] in the direction or magnitude Hansen predicted.
So, Thiel is right on the weather but wrong on the biography, but he lays the blame at the feet of the lobbyist rather than the scientists.
The weather has not been getting warmer for the last 15 years
And yet the global average surface temperature for the last 12 months was higher than for any 12 month period since 1880. The “no warming since 1998” talking point is long overdue for retirement.
So we should scream with hysteria that temperatures are skyrocketing. We should socialize all the industries and have a carbon tax credit system run by Goldman Sachs (a democrat bastion) just because, well, Gaia.
The Earth hasn’t been getting warmer. We are in a pause, the high water mark, meaning that temperatures may be higher than some bs historical average but that temperatures are not increasing. A fifteen year pause is outside of all of the predictions. The models were wrong. The scientists were wrong. The activists were wrong. That doesn’t mean that global warming isn’t real but it does mean it isn’t what it is claimed to be. This should cause a rational person to take another look at the movement.
The thing about Science! is that the more you know the more you realize you don’t know. The deeper you dig, you discover how often science is wrong or endlessly changing positions on things. Science, and especially that of the global warming field, is not infallible. Science gets things wrong all the time and discovering these missteps is what has driven human development.
Typically when issues are found that question the validity of predictions of a complex and chaotic system that isn’t understood by any human or group of humans it is no big thing. It isn’t controversial. No one gets bent about theories on Dark Matter changing. Why? Because they are not emotionally invested in it, which is why AGW alarmists have such a hard time dealing with observations that don’t support their predictions, culling bad science from their stack of evidence, or even admitting that they are wrong on some things.
We are in a pause, the high water mark, meaning that temperatures may be higher than some bs historical average but that temperatures are not increasing
So we’re at “the high water mark” but we somehow got here without temperatures increasing? That was quite a trick.
I don’t believe you are stupid, Jim, so I have to go with dishonest. Really. Give it a rest.
Did you read what he said, or do you just twist his words to be a jerk?
I don’t care about being jerky. I can dish it and take it.
I do not understand how one can be so uncritical and accept things on blind faith when the reality is that the AGW alarmists were wrong. Accepting that doesn’t mean you have to stop believing in global warming but it is a prerequisite to actually take a rational scientific approach to the problem of pollution.
Or just round everyone up and throw them in jail like AGW activists keep screaming to do.