Last night, Cerise arranged to meet me for dinner at La Taberna del Alabardero, which she recently discovered, and wanted me to try. It proves, she insisted, that world class dining doesn’t have to cost as much as I usually pay. I’m always up for new experiences, and well aware that there are some great values for your money here in Washington if you’re willing to seek them out, and I wasn’t disappointed. But this isn’t a restaurant review – this blog entry is about what happened before, when I stopped by the Round Robin Bar after work for a couple of pre-dinner drinks. What I saw when I walked in was quite a shock, really. There were Professor Martin Fromage Bacon of the Federal Climate Advisory Committee and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, engaged in a heated argument with Dr. Peter Pickles Canard of the Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute and noted climate policy adviser to Americans for Prosperity. There they stood, cocktails in hand, bellowing at each other like soused frat boys, totally oblivious to the other patrons, who gazed at them completely aghast.
“It’s eight hundred and forty pages of alarmist horse hockey,” Dr. Canard roared, “that’s what your vaunted 2014 National Climate Assessment is!”
“You’re just jealous,” Professor Bacon sneered, “because there isn’t a peer-reviewed journal this side of the Bob Jones University Press that will publish your so-called ‘research,’ not to mention the half-baked, illogical conclusions you draw from it!”
“And you’re just spouting the party line for a bunch of tree-hugging socialists!” Dr. Canard shot back indignantly. “Wasting the American taxpayer’s money on unsubstantiated propaganda derived from mindless group-think that you and your incompetent colleagues try to convince everybody is some kind of ‘scientific consensus,’ when it fact, it’s nothing but a paranoid fantasy!”
“The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet,” Professor Bacon heatedly pointed out, “is falling into the ocean! You call that ‘fantasy,’ you shameless shill for the Koch Brothers?”
“You fellows engaging in a… scholarly debate?” I inquired as I approached.
“Tom,” Dr. Canard protested, “there’s nothing particularly scholarly about faking data!”
“Faking what data?” I asked.
“You know what I’m talking about,” he insisted, “this guy Bacon and his… accomplices willingly falsified climatological data. You remember that, don’t you? They called it ‘Climategate!’ Emails from computers at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia…”
“Which were illegally stolen!” Professor Bacon angrily interjected. “Five years ago, in 2009! And which, in any case, proved nothing!”
“On the contrary,” Dr. Canard rebutted, “they conclusively demonstrated the existence of a conspiracy among the government-funded climate scientists to systematically lie about the myth of global warming!”
“Are you saying the planet’s not getting warmer?” Professor Bacon yelled. “That’s preposterous!”
“What’s preposterous,” Dr. Canard asserted, “is people like you, who fly around on jet aircraft all the time and have the biggest carbon footprints on the planet, lecturing ordinary folks about how they should be riding bicycles to work, that’s what’s preposterous, Professor!”
“There you go again,” Bacon huffed. “You’re just jealous because nobody invites you to attend any international climate conferences because your theories are nothing but troglodyte Looney Tunes!”
“The last ten years,” Dr. Canard barked at me, “have been cooler than the entire decade of the 1930s! And that, Tom, is well before over ninety percent of the increase of carbon dioxide concentration in the earth’s atmosphere ever occurred! How do Professor Bacon and his cronies explain that? They don’t, that’s what! They lie, they prevaricate, they fabricate evidence to support their own theories, that’s what they do! That’s what the CRU at East Anglia University did – that’s what the emails proved, and you know what this is? This is Climategate II, the Sequel, that’s what the Professor’s precious 2014 National Climate Assessment is!”
“That’s a classic climate change skeptic tactic, Tom,” Professor Bacon fumed. “He’s cherry-picking his facts and relying on the principle that people who aren’t expert climatologists won’t realize what he’s doing! On the other hand, the real facts are incontrovertible! Because of global warming, there are going to be much more severe storms, and many more of them, too, which…”
“But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,” Dr. Canard broke in, “says that there is no discernible trend toward more severe tornadoes over the last fifty-five years! And in 2013, the National Hurricane Center said that hurricane activity was the lowest since 1982! So who’s cherry-picking their facts now, huh?”
“Both of those statements are taken completely out of context!” Professor Bacon objected. “Global warming will mean widespread droughts, increased precipitation…”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Dr. Canard interrupted, turning to me while pointing at Professor Bacon. “Is he saying that it’s going to rain more and it’s going to rain less? Now tell me, how could that make the least scintilla of sense to a reasonable person?”
“It’s going to rain more in places where it’s not needed,” Professor Bacon sighed with an exaggerated roll of his eyes, “and less in places where it is.”
“And now,” Dr. Canard snarked, “we see that Professor Bacon and his buddies know where rain will be needed and where it will not! That, unfortunately, is typical of the quality of the thought and reason behind everything the socialist government lackeys of climate science do!”
“You can’t make this stuff up, Tom,” Professor Bacon chuckled, pointing at Dr. Canard. “Criticism like that coming from a sycophant of the plutocracy like him!”
“The United States of America,” Dr. Canard blustered self-righteously as he gestured at Professor Bacon, “is not a plutocracy! And I’d say it makes perfect sense that some left-wing sympathizer like him would try to drag class warfare politics into it!”
“You dragged politics into it when you called me a socialist!” Professor Bacon accused, getting about an inch from Dr. Canard’s nose. “Suppressing the truth about climate change is all about politics for you and your gang!”
“My associates and I,” Dr. Canard bristled, “are not a gang!”
“And my associates and I,” Professor Bacon loudly responded, “are not socialists!”
“Well,” I observed, “certainly not all of them, anyway.”
“The legitimate climatological research community contains as many conservatives as you’d find in any random sample…” Professor Bacon began.
“Of university professors!” Dr. Canard japed. “Which is to say, not very many! And my work is just as legitimate as anything in which you or your… co-conspirators engage!”
“The UN IPCC,” Professor Bacon emphatically maintained, “is not a conspiracy! And neither, for that matter, is the FCAC!”
“What successful conspiracy,” Dr. Canard needled, “would ever say anything different? And there are plenty of political motivations behind the 2014 Climate Assessment! It’s all about justifying Big Government overreach and interference with individual freedom and private property rights! Besides, you don’t see the Chinese buying into this Kyoto Accord crap, do you? And if they don’t curb their carbon emissions, cutting the growth in atmospheric carbon dioxide enough to offset it will bankrupt the United States, Europe and the rest of Asia – and for what? We don’t even know if doing that would make the least bit of difference in the earth’s climate!”
“Now you’ve gone from attacking the veracity of my research and my integrity as a scientist,” Professor Bacon whined, “to claiming that even if I am right, my results aren’t worth knowing! Have you no shame, sir? Have you no sense of decency?”
“Don’t use that kind of language with me!” Dr. Canard snarled. “I know where it comes from, and it’s you and your kind who are the vanguard of a new McCarthy Era! You’re conducting a witch hunt for scientists of genuine integrity with enough guts to question your flawed findings and you’re conducting systematic campaign to destroy them!”
“How dare you,” Professor Bacon demanded, grabbing the lapels of Dr. Canard’s five thousand dollar bespoke Armani suit jacket, “make such a crass, baseless… ad hominem remark?”
Dr. Canard slammed his cocktail on the bar an gathered his hands into fists. “Take your hands off me, you charlatan!”
“Hi Tom!” Cerise chirped. “Having a chat with your friends?”
The enraged climatologists froze, blushing in deep embarrassment.
“I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” Cerise continued, as if nothing unusual had happened.
“Ah, yes,” I replied, “this is Dr. Peter Pickles Canard of the Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute and adviser to Americans for Prosperity; and this is Professor Martin Fromage Bacon of the President’s Federal Climate Advisory Committee and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”
“Why, what a privilege it is to meet such distinguished scientists,” Cerise cooed, extending her hand to Professor Bacon, thus forcing him to let go of Dr. Canard’s lapels. “And you, Dr. Canard,” she murmured seductively as she simultaneously shook his right hand and placed his cocktail back in his left. “It’s always so exciting for me to see men of intellect display such… passion for their work.”
“Uh… yes, you’re… ah… welcome,” Dr. Canard mumbled.
“Pleasure meeting you,” Professor Bacon managed as Cerise quickly took my arm. “Tom,” she declared, “if we don’t leave right away, we’ll never make the fifteen minute grace period for our restaurant reservations. Plus, I’m double parked. Goodbye, gentlemen.”
“See you later, guys,” I assured them as she led me away, which is true – they’re both regular clients.
“What in the world,” Cerise whispered to me as we exited the Round Robin Bar into the lobby of the Willard Hotel, “was all that about?”
“Let’s just say,” I replied, “it was a clear demonstration that, in addition to sex, drugs and religion, one should never discuss the theory of global warming due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions in polite company.”