Warmism for politicians

If Sarah Palin is so amazingly dumb, how come she gets everything right on a complex issue, and explains it in language that the average voter can understand?

Sarah Palin explains climate change, covering every issue, except for the documents directory of the climategate files, in clear, easy to understand language.

She makes one minor error,  describing “hide the decline” as hiding the decline of temperature, when in fact they were hiding the decline of a proxy for temperature, but this oversimplification does not affect the point, the point being that they were tricking you by hiding an inconvenient fact that would suggest that there is nothing unusual about recent changes in climate.  Since she compressed all the Climategate emails into a single wonderfully stinging paragraph, a harmless oversimplification was difficult to avoid.

The e-mails reveal that leading climate “experts” deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What’s more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even within the CRU crowd.

After concisely summing up the more easily understood part of Climategate  (the emails), she then goes on to argue that costs and benefits of climate change proposals must be realistically evaluated:

But while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can’t say with assurance that man’s activities cause weather changes. We can say, however, that any potential benefits of proposed emissions reduction policies are far outweighed by their economic costs. And those costs are real.

“Natural cyclical” and “economic costs” summarizes the entire Hockey Stick versus Medieval Climatic Optimum argument in a nutshell.  She has repackaged the complex scientific debate of the blogs into something for voters and politicians.

She then, in a classic politician’s move, points to Australia as foreshadowing the climate change bandwagon hitting the rocks of Climategate.  Since every politician wants to get on the winning side, this is a compelling argument for her fellow politicians.

I predict that she will once again demonstrate the power to turn the debate around and shape political outcomes, as she did with health care.  While Obama looks powerless, she looks powerful.  Obama bows before kings, though in protocol kings and presidents should treat each other as equals, and gets snubbed by our major creditor, the equivalent of a banker not giving you an appointment, while Sarah changes the world from her facebook page.

The ability to make a complex and difficult topic as simple as it can be is the mark of a truly brilliant scientist.  The ability to make a complex and difficult topic a little bit simpler than it can be is the mark of a truly brilliant politician.