Whom can you trust?

Rush goes off on the BP spill and global warming in an excerpt of his text that I provide below.

I think I've blogged about this before, but I'll blog about it now.

Who can we, the common people, trust? We can't trust our government to tell us the truth (could we ever? Even when Republicans were in power?), and we can't trust the scientific establishment - they get their grants from the goverment and don't want to lose them.

Who can we trust? Rush believes that we have nothing to do with global warming and can't stop it. Is that true? What are the experts he's relying on to tell him that? I'd really like to know.

Which is not to say that what he says below doesn't make a lot of sense:

RUSH: The BP oil spill hysteria about a lie, ladies and gentlemen, was child play compared to the hoax that's global warming, child play. This hoax was nothing. It only lasted a couple of months. The global warming hoax has been ongoing for 25 years. It has determined the curricula at every level of education in the country. It's a lie, it is a hoax. And the people who are the deniers are said to be the nutcases, the fruit loops, and the idiots. Here are some of the examples. "The scale of misinformation involved, the most widely reported narratives about the spill have turned out to be dubious," and in some cases a lie. "East Coast beaches are threatened." Do you remember the folly? We had people in the Keys, we had people in Miami, we had people on our side of the state of Florida actually going out to beaches and looking for oil from the Gulf of Mexico. They would find tarballs and they would stop everything and do investigations. "Is this from the Deepwater Horizon?" And it never was. There was never a chance that oil was gonna get to the East Coast of Florida. It was going to get to the Gulf Stream; it was going to get to Great Britain; it was going to change the climate forever, it was an out-and-out panic.

And a lone voice said, "This is silly." We had a bunch of stupid experts talking about things they have no clue about, and all they're doing is alarming people. "East Coast beaches threatened. Everyone got the wrong idea about the magnitude of the spill from the very beginning. Simply put, while terrible, it was never going to be as big as most thought it would be. The spreading of this East Coast-beach meme was a joint operation of NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the media. In June, NCAR produced a slick computer-modeled animated video that showed a gigantic part of the spill making its way around the southern tip of Florida and up the East Coast. Oil covered everything from the Gulf to the Grand Banks. 'BP oil slick could hit East Coast in weeks: government scientists,' dutifully reported the New York Daily News. CBS News, MSNBC, and many other media outlets chimed in in the same vein. The video was wildly popular on YouTube.

"In fact, according to Chuck Watson of Watson Technical Consulting -- a Savannah, Ga., firm specializing in computer modeling of the effects of hurricanes, seismic events, geophysical hazards, and weapons of mass destruction -- the simulation was bogus from the very beginning, because it ignored important conditions in the Gulf. Furthermore, says Watson, the media never took account of how diluted the oil would be once it hit the Atlantic." But who was it? It was I, El Rushbo, who told you on day two this is light crude, it will evaporate, it will be eaten alive by the ocean. And once again I, El Rushbo, portrayed as a Neanderthal, knee-jerk reactionary. "The bulk of the theoretically massive spill the video shows amounts to roughly a quart of oil per square mile." That's how much was gonna end up on the East Coast, a quart of oil per square mile. "Watson claims flat-out that NOAA was 'gold digging; for grants; there’s probably more federal research money floating around the Gulf than there is oil. 'There is a feeding frenzy with people trying to get funding for their specialty,'" and I can confirm this. Maybe I ought not.

If you get a satellite picture, take a look at the number of ships, take a look at the boat traffic on the Gulf of Mexico. You will be stunned at all the boat traffic. There is no slick. There is no oil. There is no oil drilling going on. So what's going on? There's a feeding frenzy. People are trying to get funding. They're looking for damage. They're looking for the slightest evidence of any damage that will get them funding to continue research when there isn't any. It's what happens when the government starts giving away money.