When it comes to climate change..................

..............I don't consider myself a "denier."  Maybe I'm a "traditionalist."  As near as I can tell, change has been the tradition on this is wondrous spinning and revolving orb we call home for its entire four point five billion years.  Whether we want to talk about Pangaea, or asteroid strikes, rising or falling sea levels, or encroaching and receding glaciers, the one constant is that the Earth is in a state of flux.   I will confess to a fairly simplistic approach to the issue.  Our fair county has, as evidenced by it soils, twice been invaded by glaciers.  Must have been colder.  Those glaciers have retreated (twice) a long way.  Must have gotten warmer.  I prefer Licking County be glacier free thank you, so warming, on the face of it, doesn't scare me much.  The catastrophic (and man-made) warming, predicted by many, seems mostly to live in their computer models.  Maybe they will be proven correct, but so far - not so much.
      There are many who push the notion that there has been no warming in the past twenty years, yet we also hear that 2014 is the warmest year on record - and the year isn't even over yet.  How can that be?
      If questions like this interest you, do read the latest blog post from my favorite optimist.  In it, he despairs of the state of science today.  He seems to think science has become "politicalized."  Imagine that.  Read the whole thing, but here are a few key excerpts:

As somebody who has championed science all his career, carrying a lot of water for the profession against its critics on many issues, I am losing faith. Recent examples of bias and corruption in science are bad enough. What’s worse is the reluctance of scientific leaders to criticise the bad apples. Science as a philosophy is in good health; science as an institution increasingly stinks.

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics published a report last week that found evidence of scientists increasingly “employing less rigorous research methods” in response to funding pressures. A 2009 survey found that almost 2 per cent of scientists admitting that they have fabricated results; 14 per cent say that their colleagues have done so.

      
last week, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a supposedly scientific body, issued a press release stating that this is likely to be the warmest year in a century or more, based on surface temperatures. Yet this predicted record would be only one hundredth of a degree above 2010 and two hundredths of a degree above 2005 — with an error range of one tenth of a degree. True scientists would have said: this year is unlikely to be significantly warmer than 2010 or 2005 and left it at that.