George Will’s column on climate change is the best explanation of what went wrong with the science supposedly supporting climate change. Here’s a blast that’s certain to leave a mark:

The Financial Times’ peculiar response to the CRU materials is: The scientific case for alarm about global warming “is growing more rather than less compelling.” If so, then could anything make the case less compelling? A CRU e-mail says: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment” — this “moment” is in its second decade — “and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

The travesty is the intellectual arrogance of the authors of climate change models partially based on the problematic practice of reconstructing long-term prior climate changes. On such models we are supposed to wager trillions of dollars, and substantially diminished freedom.

Some climate scientists compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes. They seem to suppose themselves a small clerisy entrusted with the most urgent truth ever discovered. On it, and hence on them, the planet’s fate depends. So some of them consider it virtuous to embroider facts, exaggerate certitudes, suppress inconvenient data, and manipulate the peer review process to suppress scholarly dissent and, above all, to declare that the debate is over.

There’s no proof that these ’scientists’ go where the information takes them. For these ’scientists’, every tidbit of data is proof of global warming. Fortunately, some people appear to be taking the scientific process seriously:

The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails.

The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012.

The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world. This assessment is the basis for next week’s climate change talks in Copenhagen aimed at cutting CO2 emissions.

The next paragraph is the most telling:

The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics.

That paragraph is what fear sounds like. It’s also what a guilty conscience sounds like. Al Gore and his followers in the scientific community have told us that the debate is over, that consensus of the (supposedly) most brilliant minds on climate change had been reached and that the world would end if their recommendations were followed like they were etched in stone on Mount Sinai.

Anytime a skeptic pointed to data that ridiculed their findings, the scientific community ridicule the scientists rather than argue the merits of their findings. The Met Office sounds like they aren’t even certain that the underlying data is accurate, which casts their conclusions in doubt. Let’s prove this by illustration.

Let’s suppose, instead, that a physician is given information from diagnostic test. The physician uses that information and the relevant case histories to determine a diagnosis. If the physician suddenly learns that the information from the diagnostic test might be significantly inaccurate, it isn’t unreasonable to think that that physician might rethink things. That physician might even start over.

Let’s return to the climate change scientists. Since their public position is that everything points to global warming that’s sure to end the world unless we dramatically change our habits, no re-examination happens. Their remedies don’t change. Their remedy constantly remains the same: a massive redistribution of wealth through an oppressive cap and trade bill is THE ONLY THING that will save Planet Earth.

People are increasingly skeptical of the all-data-points-to-the-end-of-the-world worldview. The net result is that Cap and Tax is dead in the water for the next 3-5 years minimum.

I can’t do better than Will’s summation so I’ll just leave you with this:

Copenhagen is the culmination of the post-Kyoto maneuvering by people determined to fix the world’s climate by breaking the world’s, especially America’s, population to the saddle of ever-more-minute supervision by governments. But Copenhagen also is prologue for the 2010 climate change summit in Mexico City, which will be planet Earth’s last chance, until the next one.

Technorati: Science, Peer Review, Climate Change, Consensus, Copenhagen, Cap And Trade, Al+Gore, Redistribution of Wealth, Kyoto, Democrats

Cross-posted at California Conservative