Big Sky Cairn

When I recently went to the library to do some research into the climate fears of past decades, I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for. Part of me was looking for historic validation of my skepticism. What I found - and poorly transcribed for you - fit the bill. I precedent. It wasn’t proof against catastrophic man-made global climate change - I don’t think such proof can exist for an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Instead, it was a comfort-zone for healthy skepticism rooted in history. If warnings of doom are not unique to this “crisis” - and past warnings of doom proved exaggerated - there is justification for doubt.

In a recent op-ed, Bozeman Senator Joe Balyeat put it much better than I did.

Those who are slow to embrace global warming doomsayers aren’t ignorant, they’re just skeptical. Consider my personal history. In the mid-1970s, in the course of a two-and-a-half-year, straight-A sprint through college, one class assignment was to write a paper and speech on Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb.” At the time, my religious, short-term, pessimistic world view fit in nicely with Ehrlich’s stark prediction of global calamity due to overpopulation. So I easily garnered an “A” for the paper, adding true-believer devotion to such Ehrlich predictions as these: England will not exist in the year 2000. Sixty-five million Americans will starve to death in the 1980s. By 1999 America’s population will drop to 22.6 million. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death, and Earth’s 5 billion population will starve back to 2 billion by 2025.

All of these predictions, of course, proved embarrassingly false, and I now live with a personal skepticism grounded in my own prior discredited beliefs.

I’ve since written two books documenting the errors of religious cult doomsday-ism. While most political liberals would applaud my efforts to expose the excesses of religious doomsayers, these same people excoriate my “stupidity” when I argue that similar healthy skepticism should also be applied to secular doomsayers; particularly when secular doomsayers can eventually perhaps add the power of intrusive government coercion to their social agenda.

If I’m skeptical even with respect to my own personal decisions, imagine how much more skeptical I am as a public official, when making decisions binding not just me, not just all my fellow Montanans, but future generations of Montanans as well. Before I subject them to massive new regulatory burdens and costly new government “solutions,” excuse me for being a little bit slow to drink the “global warming” Koolaid.

To those who’ve already imbibed the apocalyptic arguments, my question is this: What is your agenda, condescension or consensus? You can’t have both. If your goal is merely to have a partisan political hammer to pound against me, then keep pounding on the “global warming” theory. But if you truly want bipartisan cooperation to achieve a better future for us and our descendents, let me suggest an alternative message: sustainable energy use.

Some will challenge the comparisons between religion and science. Science, they will argue, operates on a different level from religion - to which I respond the frailty in either system is the human application. To them, I pose this question: what makes this crisis different from fears of an eminent ice age or Malthus-level overpopulation? Science has always given us catastrophic scenarios of doom - and to date, none have been true. What makes this one any different?

Kudos to Balyeat for having the guts to take a stand.

The Wall Street Journal nails what Pelosi and her merry band did last week, in short bowed to the far left and cut off funding to support our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Senate will in all likelihood restore this funding and get rid of the retreat timelines, but the whole thing is one more example of Democrats turning our government into a circus.

Read the rest of this entry »

Seriously, props to Jay Stevens for the national attention. It must be exhilarating to get that kind of recognition. I mean, to have Howard Dean - Mr. Montana himself - recognize the hard work of being a lefty blogger along with 49 other official state blogs (sucks to be in states 51-57 I guess) has got to be exciting. I’m sure Dean is a regular reader - you can tell from the way his statement doesn’t seem scripted at all. I wonder if it was the 49th or the 50th one he did that day.

I mean getting a shout out of national significance - from an important place like Washington, DC, the home of Senator Max Baucus, Mr. BMW himself, is a remarkable accomplishment, so well done.

Of course, to share in your celebration we’ll all forget that we know that national Democrat Leaders will say anything to dupe Montanans into supporting them.

I guess we’ll just have to settle for the insignificant opinions of actual Montanans like Congressman Denny Rehberg and Gubernatorial Candidate Roy Brown. Ooooh the sour grapes taste awful!

YEEEAAHH!!!

Over at Montana Headlines, there was the pleasure of hosting our candidate for governor — Roy Brown — in a guest editorial about the governor’s testimony in support of the “Clean Water Restoration Act.”

We of course immediately had a member of the loyal opposition show up (all of those kids working for Sen. Baucus have to have something to do) to give highlights of the governor’s testimony before Congress.

The governor’s remarks, if these excerpts are representative, seems truly to have been a tour de force of style over substance — not that this should be particularly surprising.

At root, the governor’s folksy rhetoric is irrelevant.  What is relevant is what the bill actually will do to erode the ability of individual states to control their own water, and that the governor supported this erosion of Montana’s sovereignty.

Check out what Sen. Brown wrote, follow whatever discussion ensues, and decide for yourself who is more likely to put Montana’s interests first.

Roy Brown wrote an Op-Ed over at Montana Headlines.

Unfortunately, Governor Brian Schweitzer is among those who support this federal power-grab, despite all the problems it creates in Montana. He’s taken the side of extreme environmental groups who contend that the federal government should apply the standards of the Clean Water Act to all waters in Montana, from our major rivers on down to stock ponds and irrigation ditches.

Go read it.

Jack had a good find today.

This story could have been this, or this

But this is what we have;

The March event sponsored by L-3 executives raised $12,750 for Sen. Baucus’ re-election effort. The funds came from 14 top employees of L-3, according to federal election records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Most contributions were for $1,000, including from Ralph D’Ambrosio, chief financial officer, Charles J. Schafer, president of the company’s products group, and Curtis Brunson, senior vice president.

According to the reports, L-3 is involved in some offshore tax haven deals, which is an issue pending before Senate Finance since at least last spring. Max’s vigilance on the issue apparently did not extend to checking into who was hosting his fundraiser on March 17.

While he had no problem taking money from these folks less than two months ago, apparently something caused a change of heart. What changed? My guess is that a reporter finally did some homework and gave him a call, who knows maybe the Montana press will learn a thing or two.

Jeff grants me a lot of ground when he agrees that global warming can never be proven and he’s right that scientific method does not seek to provide absolute proof.

Of course, Cody is right that these models can’t be proved true. That Cody thinks this is a relevant point reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of science. The scientific method doesn’t prove things. It provides evidence (it can disprove hypotheses, of course). There’s always uncertainty.

In fact, I would take this a step further and say that absolute proof is counter-scientific because a central tenant of a legitimate scientific theory is falsifiability. This is the crux of my argument, which Jeff misses: my point isn’t that catastrophic global warming can’t be proven it’s that it cannot be disproven.

If a theory can explain all possible data - even mutually exclusive data like more and fewer hurricanes - that theory is scientifically meaningless.

I think I understand why Jeff misunderstood me though - the two axioms that he discussed are an enthymeme with a missing point. The payload of the science point is falsifability. The payload of the faith point is provability. If belief in faith and belief in science were mutually exclusive, Jeff would have correctly identified a weakness in my arguments. However, there is an unstated axiom: That because science cannot prove anything beyond all doubt, it also requires faith - faith in the scientific method itself to produce accurate information about our world.

Faith is omnipresent in questions of science. A scientific matter is also a matter of faith. But that because the theory of global warming cannot be falsified, it is removed from the realm of science and rests solely within the scope of faith.

That is where my assertion - that the belief in catastrophic man-made climate change - relies on faith because it is not based on science. Here, Jeff has an interesting definition of faith - probably shaded by his feeling toward the normal application of faith: religion.

[Faith] means belief regardless of evidence.

Here again, I have to disagree. Faith should be defined as believe without evidence. Faith regardless of evidence is willful ignorance. Too often, intellectuals arrogantly think that they can disprove matters of faith - scientifically disprove the existence of God, or establish the beginning of life. Here, they are putting their faith - yes faith - into scientific positivism.

Faith is an important part of the human experience. It allows us to act in a world that we cannot completely comprehend. That faith, for some, is a sign of weakness is an unfortunate byproduct of judging the object of faith by the worst of the people who have it.

An honest question to those worried that proving citizenship and/or identity is too high a hurdle for voting.  What is the threshold for asking too much?  Is it acceptable to ask for proof of residence in the voting district?  What about asking someone for proof of their name?

If these are okay, what makes them different from asking for difficult-to-forge photo identification?  What’s the bright-line for the amount of effort we can require to vote?

If they’re not acceptable, are you okay with people voting multiple times at as many voting locations as they can drive themselves to in the course of an election day?

It seems to me, there are competing interests both in reducing burdens at the polls and ensuring that polls aren’t being abused.  Pressure from the first interest moves toward eliminating any requirement for voting while pressure from the second moves toward instituting stringent requirements.  Somewhere, there’s a balance between those interests and it’s probably safe to assume that where you think that convergence if interests lies is influenced by your political ideology.  I understand my perspective - but I’m wondering how far toward accessibility the Left wants to take us.

Maybe if we had more maps America could learn about all 57 states Obama has visited, excluding Alaska and Hawaii of course.