ANYONE NOTICING?

Posted at 9:28 a.m. ET

The amen corner has led the applause for Mr. Obama's appointments, one by one.  Each is a genius, an inspired choice, a pick for the ages, possibly the greatest public servant in history.

Maybe it's time to watch more closely.  The president-elect has chosen his science, energy and environmental chiefs, and a sense of unease begins to erupt.  It appears that Mr. Obama has consumed the global-warming Kool-Aid, and asked for seconds.  Still, the mainstream media is in applause mode.  After all, these people have letters after their names.

But John Tierney, one of the few cautious dissidents writing opinion pieces for The New York Times, blows the whistle.  The president-elect's science adviser, a Harvard professor, may be a certified crackpot:

Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science advisor? Apparently not, judging by reports from DotEarth and ScienceInsider that Barack Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science advisor on Saturday.

That wakes us up.

Dr. Holdren, now a physicist at Harvard, was one of the experts in natural resources whom Paul Ehrlich enlisted in his famous bet against the economist Julian Simon during the “energy crisis” of the 1980s.

In 1980 Dr. Holdren helped select five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — and joined Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Harte in betting $1,000 that those metals would be more expensive ten years later. They turned out to be wrong on all five metals, and had to pay up when the bet came due in 1990.

Well, a little mistake...or five little mistakes. 

Now, you could argue that anyone’s entitled to a mistake, and that mistakes can be valuable if people learn to become open to ideas that conflict with their preconceptions and ideology...

...But I haven’t seen much evidence of such open-mindedness in Dr. Holdren.

Oh.  Well, the man must be bright.  He's at Harvard.  He's...

Consider what happened when a successor to Dr. Simon, Bjorn Lomborg, published “The Skeptical Environmentalist” in 2001. Dr. Holdren joined in an an extraordinary attack on the book in Scientific American — an attack that I thought did far more harm to the magazine’s reputation than to Dr. Lomborg’s. The Economist called the critique “strong on contempt and sneering, but weak on substance”; Dr. Lomborg’s defenders said the critics made more mistakes in 11 pages than they were able to find in his 540-page book.

Hmm.  Now we see.

Dr. Holdren’s resistance to dissenting views was also on display earlier this year in an article asserting that climate skeptics are “dangerous.” (You can read about the response to that article at DotEarth.)

Tierney is spot on.  Declaring skeptics "dangerous" is not science.  It's medieval religious dogma.

Dr. Holdren is certainly entitled to his views, but what concerns me is his tendency to conflate the science of climate change with prescriptions to cut greenhouse emissions.

And...

Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado and the author of “The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics,” discussed Dr. Holdren’s conflation of science and politics in a post on the Prometheus blog:

The notion that science tells us what to do leads Holdren to appeal to authority to suggest that not only are his scientific views correct, but because his scientific views are correct, then so too are his political views.

That of course is the point.  Much of the talk about "global warming" isn't real science, it's political science, generated by people who simply want us to live different kinds of lives.

Tierney asks the basic question:

What kind of White House science advisor you think Dr. Holdren would make?

It's important that others start asking that question.  We've been sold a bill that says Mr. Obama is making "moderate" appointments to his administration.  There's nothing moderate about Holdren.  He could cost us trillions of dollars, do enormous economic damage, increase poverty and hunger...with no good result.

Oh, by the way, a very knowledgeable Urgent Agenda reader, a distinguished academic, refers us to a minority report, just issued by the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.  It's here, and asks the most serious questions about the global-warming "consensus."  It's well worth reading.

December 20, 2008.