Even in a world with internet-speed attention deficit disorder we presume some people remember Saddam Hussein’s hapless Minister of Information during the 2003 Gulf War, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf aka “Baghdad Bob”, who became notorious for his “colorful and blatantly inaccurate media pronouncements” contradicted by what was visible behind him on camera. Which brings us to Scientific Alarmism hollering “Earth’s permafrost could soon release hidden ‘deep carbon,’ supercharging warming/ Melting permafrost is releasing carbon into the atmosphere, but scientists may have underestimated just how bad the situation may be, a new analysis finds”. As usual our first response is “unless it doesn’t/unless they didn’t”. But our second is that one of the fishy unexamined premises of climate alarmism is that all feedback mechanisms are positive. Especially in a system as complicated as climate, common sense rises up in opposition to such a dogma and says surely at least some must tend to diminish, rather than reinforce, any particular cause of warming. Otherwise, if there are only positive feedbacks, why didn’t the warming in the last interglacial, or the one before that, or the one before that, or the one before that, all warmer than this one, unleash such a process in ways that prevented the next glaciation? One of the great weaknesses of climate alarmism, curiously, is its doctrinal certainty that simply doesn’t admit there are contrary viewpoints or awkward facts, so they don’t manage to think about or address them.

It may seem a little off-topic, but the New York Times, or at least David Gelles in their “Climate Forward” newsletter, insists that just because even Democrats are backing off from climate alarmism doesn’t mean it’s a political loser. As he puts it, in an awkward attempt to seem folksy:

“Most voters are more concerned with kitchen-table topics like affordability, the thinking goes. Under this logic, environmentally focused Americans are already going to vote for climate-friendly candidates. And climate deniers can’t be won over by a little campaign messaging.”

But he begs to differ:

“But a wave of recent polling suggests that the politics of climate change are more nuanced than that. Global warming is, in fact, a serious concern for many American voters, the polling suggests, and with framing that emphasizes solutions instead of sacrifice, it can be a powerful motivator for real policy change. Take, for example, April research from Gallup, which found that 44 percent of U.S. adults ‘worry a great deal about global warming or climate change.’ That’s among the highest percentages since 1989, and just short of the all-time high of 46 percent registered in 2020. Another 22 percent of Americans worry ‘a fair amount’ about climate change, meaning it’s an issue that is solidly on the radar for two-thirds of U.S. adults.”

The difficulty being in part that saying things to pollsters is free whereas voting for people whose policies will increase your energy bills and decrease your “affordability” is not. Thus polls routinely show a level of support for climate action that polling booths do not.

The other part of the difficulty, the bigger part and one that brings us back to Baghdad Bob, is again this odd if common mindset where everything is always breaking your way whether it seems to be or not. Just as there are no negative feedbacks in climate, there are none in climate policy. It just seems that way to rubes.

Then they treat everyone who doesn’t agree with them as a basket of deplorables, and wonder why they don’t win every argument and every election.

Thus another Scientific American thing: They announce, in keeping with their old-tyme and proper mission, that:

“New research has identified more than 150 different species that live on glaciers, with nearly half of these animals having only ever been reported at glacial sites. And these are true animals, not single-celled microbes.”

Which is cool. But while they admit that we don’t even know what animals live on glaciers, should climate heave into view, they will immediately declare that we know everything about them and they’re melting and they’re all going to die even though they know that glaciers have retreated before, during natural warmings like the Roman Warm Period, even further than they have as yet done in the modern warming.

The irony is that, as with tyrannical regimes that cannot process bad news and punish the messenger, alarmists who never hear that the science is not settled, that the “green energy transition” isn’t a money-saver, or that the political winds aren’t blowing your way are unable to adjust even their messaging, let alone their thinking, in ways that accommodate that pesky reality thing.