ABOVE: Jules Crittenden
If I were to tell you that the latest arrow in the wingnut global cooling quiver is The Old Farmer’s Almanac, you would probably suggest that the stress of my lurking about the wingnut-o-sphere searching for blogging material had finally taken its toll on me and that I was imagining things. You’d tell me to rent a cabin somewhere in the mountains and take the dog with me for a long vacation from the Internet.
But that would only prove that you hadn’t visited Jules Crittenden’s blog lately. Crittenden is, among other things, a “science” columnist for the esteemed Boston Herald, the Boston tabloid best known for having once printed a satirical Andy Borowitz column about a proposed gunfight between Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton as an actual news article.
So, Al Gore, cower in fear as Jules Crittenden uses The Old Farmer’s Almanac to take you and your silly ideas about global warming to school:
Old Farmer’s Almanac predicts a cold winter kicking off early for Thanksgiving. A couple of warm spring months, and we’re back into a cold summer and fall up this way. … If I didn’t know better, I’d say it almost sounds like that Little Ice Age might be kicking in.
Crittenden is obviously employing a little known axiom of the scientific method that says that if the researcher sees something happen once, and the researcher likes what he sees, then the researcher can scientifically predict that it will occur over and over again as often as the researcher would like. One cold winter? Well, that’s proof positive of a hundred cold winters to come. Send the folks at NOAA home, those idiots. We’re on our way to another Little Ice Age! Call Sarah Palin and make an appointment to go mastodon hunting.
This well-respected and completely scientific argument permitting a general conclusion from one instance is further backed up by the crack team of researchers and climate scientists at the Old Farmer’s Almanac, who also see us headed into another Little Ice Age.
Hang on. via Boston Herald, OFA thinks we’re headed into a decades-long cooling trend.
Based on the same time-honored, complex calculations it uses to predict weather, the almanac hits the newsstands today saying a study of solar activity and corresponding records on ocean temperatures and climate point to a cooler, not warmer, climate, for perhaps the next half century.
…
It remains to be seen, said Editor in Chief Jud Hale, whether the human impact on global temperatures will cancel out or override any cooling trend.
“We say that if human beings were not contributing to global warming, it would become real cold in the next 50 years,” Hale said.
…
So, if you don’t want to freeze to death, you’d better sell your hybrid car and replace it with a Hummer.
Another part of the scientific method relied on by the Almanac is a well known, but little used, exception to the peer-review rule. That exception to peer-review can be invoked when a scientist employs a technique that is really, really secret and can’t be disclosed to anyone, particularly to peer-reviewers who will steal the idea for their own nefarious purposes.
OFA relies on a formula more than 200 years old that incorporates the study of sunspots and other factors they don’t reveal.
Not only did Crittenden fall for this Farmer’s Almanac piffle, but Elizabeth Scalia, the wingnut who pretends to be a nun over at The Anchoress, swallowed it hook, crucifix and rosary as well. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised any more at folks using The Old Farmer’s Almanac as an authority on climate change, because these same folks believe that the Book of Genesis trumps all scientific inquiry on the origin of man.
UPDATE: Oh, sweet merciful Lord. Life imitates comments. Crittenden is now worried that the Large Hardon, er, Hadron Collider will cause the end of the world.
