By Robert Carter
I am standing on the helicopter deck of the famous science-drilling ship JOIDES Resolution, the snow-capped mountains of South Island, New Zealand, glistening gently along the far western horizon. It is a privilege and a pleasure to be here. The group of 50 scientists and technicians on board are drawn from the best in the world, and from the many country members of the International Drilling Program (IODP).
For a research proposal to be allocated a drilling leg on JR - which lasts 2 months and costs about US $15 million to conduct - the science involved has to survive the most rigorous international peer-review.The drilling leg in which I am participating has been fostered by a group of scientists who are vitally interested in the topic of ancient sea-level and climate changes. Faintly, for it is far away, I remember that these issues are supposed to be the focus of international discussions in Copenhagen this week.I grimace at the thought, because the study of climate change, under the aegis of "dangerous global warming caused by human carbon dioxide emissions," has long since been captured by the small group of well connected, well networked and well funded atmospheric scientists and computer modellers who advise the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and whose nearly every utterance confirms their ignorance of the true course of climate history and change on our planet - a topic that is the domain of geologists, not meteorologists and computer jockeys. However, the stately progress that the IPCC was making towards achieving international action at the COP15 climate conference against carbon dioxide, an environmentally beneficial trace gas, has been shattered by the Climategate affair.
"Climategate" refers to the recent leaking of a copious file of emails, technical papers and computer codes from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which is the research group that provides the IPCC with its iconic global temperature curve since 1860.The Climategate files have demonstrated the scientific malfeasance of an influential and internationally well networked segment of the climate research community. A small group of scientists and computer modellers - with the aid of an enormous supporting cast of environmental activists and organisations, self-interested business groups, and crusading journalists - have managed to turn the global warming issue (which in 1990 was an entirely sensible matter to have raised) into the scientific scam of the century, if not the biggest ever. Since the original leak in mid-November, which was not covered by the mainstream press, Climategate has surpassed 30 million hits on a Google searchThe IPCC is the official UN body that has presided over this fiasco. It is an organisation that was specifically set up to provide advice to national governments (including Australia's) for their use in setting climate policy.
The IPCC's incompetence is manifest in its failure to detect the corrupt science that has for so long permeated the activities of the international jetsetters of the climate science power group. The organisation should be closed down (without tears), and the Copenhagen COP-15 meeting would be a good place to start this process happening.That the global warming scare should turn out to be precisely the scam that climate rationalists have been banging on about for years is shocking enough; many future PhD theses and books will undoubtedly be written about it.
Yet it is but the tip of the iceberg so far as the public prostitution of science is concerned. Climategate being currently in full swing, the obvious question is when (not if) the parallel Reefgate, Murraygate and Fishgate scandals will erupt in Australia?All Australians should contemplate deeply the questions that are raised by the global warming scandal, including the systemic corruption of science and the dereliction of duty by media news organisations that it reveals. Key questions include the following.Why has our formerly excellent national science agency, the CSIRO, been allowed to become a consultancy arm for the government?
Why, amongst other shameless activities, has CSIRO been allowed to go around selling region-customized reports that are implied to provide climate predictions, but which in fact contain projections that are statistically no better than flipping a coin? (CSIRO's back is protected, of course, by the doubtless expensive lawyers who have insisted that the following disclaimer be inserted in all such reports: "This report relates to climate change scenarios based on computer modelling. Models involve simplifications of the real processes that are not fully understood.
Accordingly, no responsibility will be accepted by CSIRO or the QLD government for the accuracy of forecasts or predictions inferred from this report or for any person's interpretations, deductions, conclusions or actions in reliance on this report". Would you buy a used car from these people?). Why has the Australian Research Council been required to apply "national science priorities" as if any scientist, however distinguished, let alone a bureaucrat or politician, has the wisdom to discriminate between useful and "useless" research?
Behind the corrupted science of Climategate and the fall of the IPCC, then, lie two things. The first is the degradation, mainly by political interference, of research conditions and practices within modern government-funded research groups. The second is the power and financial clout of the modern, ecoevangelistic Green movement, egged on by crusading media reporters and editors. The world has probably never before seen a propaganda and political machine that is as well oiled, well funded and well organized as this modern army of apocalyptics and their media flag-wavers. But voters who respond to the siren song of the Greens imperil both our standard of living and, ironically, the state of our natural environment.
For every dollar that is spent on a false environmental issue such as dangerous human-caused global warming is a dollar that is not available to be spent on a real environmental or social problem.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
The Futile Quest For Climate Control - Part 2
NOBLE CAUSE CORRUPTION
By Robert Carter
It is part of the traffic of discussion about global warming that some of the participants are corrupt. Routinely, climate scientists employed at even the most prestigious institutions are accused of having their alarmist views bought by a need to maintain research funding. Equally, self-righteous critics make desperate attempts to link climate sceptics with what are claimed to be the vested interests of the coal and oil and gas industries. It is also obvious that commercial interests – including alternative energy providers such as wind turbine manufacturers, big utility companies such as Enron, financiers such as Lehmann Bros., and emerging emissions and carbon indulgences traders – have strong potential to become involved in corrupt dealings in the traditional meaning of the term. To varying degrees all of these accusations are true, but probably the strongest alarmist influence of all on the climate policy debate is the rather more subtle phenomenon of noble cause corruption.
In his book Science and Public Policy, Professor Aynsley Kellow explores the problem of noble cause corruption in public life in some depth. Such corruption arises from the belief of a vested interest, or powerful person or group, in the moral righteousness of their cause. For example, a police officer may apprehend a person committing a crime and, stuck with a lack of incriminating evidence, proceed to manufacture it. For many social mores, of which “stopping global warming” and “saving the Great Barrier Reef” are two iconic Australian examples, it has become a common practice for evidence to be manipulated in dishonest ways, under the justification of helping to achieve a worthy end. After all, who wouldn’t want to help to “save the Great Barrier Reef”?
Improper science
Regrettably, not all scientists within the climate community have maintained the dispassionate, disinterested approach that is necessary for scientific research. The most widely known piece of defective climate science is the famous 1998 hockey-stick paper in Nature by Mann, Bradley and Hughes, which was used extensively in the IPCC 3rd Assessment Report but discarded from the 4th. An earlier problem of the same type surfaced during the preparation of the 2nd Assessment Report, when a reviewer of part of the draft requested that he be supplied with some of the raw data on which the work was based. The author, Dr Tom Wigley, declined to supply the data, making the following astonishing statement (as quoted in The Heat is On by Ross Gelbspan):
“First, it is entirely unnecessary to have original “raw” data in order to review a scientific document. I know of no case at all in which such data were required by or provided to a referee ….. Second, while the data in question (model output from the U.K. Hadley Centre’s climate model) were generated using taxpayer money, this was U.K. taxpayer money. U.S. scientists therefore have no a priori right to such data. Furthermore, these data belong to individual scientists who produced them, not to the IPCC, and it is up to those scientists to decide who they give their data to.”
This reply denies the supply of data to another scientist who wishes to check that the work can be replicated; denies data to a scientist on the grounds that he is from another country; and arrogates to the author the right to decide who, if anyone, would be supplied with data which was collected with public funds and which underpins an important international publication. Each one of these actions constitutes a fundamental breach of science etiquette, and were such attitudes to be promulgated widely, science as a value-free, objective, internationally agreed enterprise would collapse. Yet such attitudes are widespread within the alarmist climate science community.
Government agencies and reports
Equally regrettably, it is not just individual scientists who are involved in trying to control the climate change debate by the use of selective science. Scientists who work for major governmental science agencies in western countries are almost all under strict employer instruction as to public comments that they may make about climate change, always remembering that a substantial slice of their budget is provided for global warming research. For example, Australian science journalist Peter Pockley reported in 2004 that “CSIRO’s marine scientists have been “constrained” on the scientific advice and interpretation they can provide to the government’s conservation plans for Australia’s oceans. Likewise, climate scientists have been told not to engage in (public) debate on climate change and never to mention the Kyoto Accord on greenhouse gas emissions”. In this way, science policy advice is routinely corrupted by being tailored to suit the views of the government of the day. In turn, the government's views are often strongly influenced by noble cause corruption, whereby "saving the planet" is seen cynically as an effective way in which to garner votes quite irrespective of the lack of demonstrated, as opposed to advertised, risk. The inaccurate and alarmist advertisements that the federal government is currently running about climate change are a case in point.
In Australia, CSIRO is the government agency that makes most of the public running in the global warming debate, and that almost exclusively on the side of environmental alarmism. CSIRO’s GCM modelling group, which acts as a “science” provider to the IPCC, exploits its resulting near-monopoly situation in Australia by acting also as the provider of climate change consultancy reports to state and federal governments, regional authorities and planning boards and large industrial organizations. These reports are based around regional CGM modelling that produces unvalidated projections of future climate, not predictions or forecasts. The subtlety of such a distinction escapes CSIRO’s clients, who, together with CSIRO itself, make no attempt to correct or check the media’s unvarying presentation of such model results as if they were firm predictions, and their association with rampant climate alarmism.
Most recently, public discussion on climate change in Australia has centred around the release on September 30 of Professor Ross Garnaut’s government-sponsored report on carbon dioxide taxation (aka emissions trading). Garnaut’s task, as formulated in his terms of reference, was to advise the Australian public on the issue of human-caused global climate change. Obviously, a judgement was then required as to whether significant human warming is occurring at all, or likely to occur soon. This being a scientific question, to appoint an economist to adjudicate upon it puts that person in the invidious position of having to base their substantive review upon science authority provided by others.
The convenient authority at hand was, of course, the IPCC, whose politically-tainted "science" advice Garnaut swallowed whole with nary a blink, the science in his report being simply a subset of that in the IPCC 4th Assessment Report. The policy prescriptions outlined by Garnaut are thereby predicated on two assumptions. First, that global temperature is rising (implicitly, at either an unusual rate or to an unusual magnitude); and, second, that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will result in dangerous warming. Both of these assumptions are self-evidently wrong - notwithstanding that global temperature does from time to time warm (and cool), and that carbon dioxide is a mild, minor greenhouse gas.
Because Garnaut’s economic analysis is erected upon a faulty science edifice, his recommendations – like those of Professor Stern before him in the U.K. – have little relevance to the real world. The problem is exacerbated because Garnaut’s report also ignores the pressing issue of hazardous natural climate change, and the contextual fact that global temperature is now cooling, and predicted by many scientists to continue to cool. Above all else, planning for future climate hazard has to be based on a thorough, realistic risk analysis, and this the Garnaut Report has utterly failed to provide.
Science academies and learned societies
Traditionally, governments wishing for dispassionate advice on a science issue have turned to their nation's science academy. Disturbingly, against this historic context, Nature reported that in appointing one of its former Presidents "a high-profile former government adviser (Lord Robert May), the Royal Society is intensifying its moves into the public and political arena - and is taking a calculated risk. 'If you want to be more effective in engaging issues of public concern, then you really need to understand the rules of engagement", says May". The path being followed duly became evident when in 2001 Lord May helped organize a statement published in Science that there was a scientific consensus on the danger of human-caused global warming. The statement was headed "17 National Academies Endorse Kyoto", and May expressly commented that it had been "partly provoked by (President George) Bush's recent rejection of the Kyoto treaty, along with resistance to the Kyoto terms by countries such as Australia".
Against this unhappy background, it shouldn’t be surprising, but is, to discover that in 2006 the Royal Society’s Policy Communication Officer, Bob Ward, wrote an intimidatory letter to oil company Esso UK in an effort to suppress Esso’s funding for organizations that in the Royal Society’s view “misrepresented the science of climate change, by outright denial of the evidence …., or by overstating the amount and significance of uncertainty in knowledge, or by conveying a misleading impression of the potential impacts of anthropogenic climate change”. Mr. Ward’s attempt to prevent free public discussion of global warming resulted in rapid condemnation, including a comment from the U.S. Marshall Institute that “It is … unfortunate that the Royal Society is advocating censorship on a subject that calls for debate. The censorship of voices that challenge and provoke is antithetical to liberty and contrary to the traditions and values of free societies. That such a call comes from such a venerable scientific society is disturbing and should raise concerns worldwide about the intentions of those seeking to silence honest debate and discussion of our most challenging environmental issue – climate change”.
Notwithstanding widespread condemnation of the Royal Society action, copycat attempts
to intimidate other businesses soon followed. In U.S.A., Senators Rockefeller and Snowe wrote an intimidatory letter to Esso’s partner company Exxon; and in Australia, a Labor shadow minister, Kelvin Thomson, basing his views on a showing of Al Gore’s movie and the Royal Society letter, wrote in similar fashion to a number of leading Australian companies.
The Royal Society example of the corruption of scientific advice by politics is not an isolated one. Across the western world many other national science academies and major scientific societies have become similarly politicized over global warming and other contentious environmental issues. Thus governments and societies have now lost what used to be an important conduit of impartial and independent advice on technical matters of the day.
The influence of environmental organizations
Most readers will be aware of the activities of high profile environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace, the Worldwide Fund for Nature and the Australian Conservation Foundation. However, relatively few persons appreciate the size, scope, co-ordination and colossal financial resources that are now involved in environmental lobbying around the world. For example, at the centre of many climate policy debates is to be found the Climate Action Network - a 20-year old umbrella organization with seven regional nodes which coordinates the advocacy of more than 280 separate environmental NGOs.
Driven by their addiction to alarmism, and a false belief that the causes of climate change are understood, environmentalists worldwide urge the adoption of the precautionary principle to solve the “global warming problem”. The reality that you can’t take precautions against a future that is unknown (i.e. may encompass either warming or cooling, or both) is ignored in favour of irrational feel-goodery, the aim being to move the world to a “post-carbon” economy by drastic curtailment of the carbon dioxide emissions that are alleged to be causing warming.
Environmental campaigners for the reduction of human greenhouse emissions remain blind to inconvenient facts such as: that no amount of precaution is going stop natural climate change; that there is a 100% risk of damage from natural climate events, which happen every day; that we cannot measure, much less isolate, any presumed human climate signal globally; that extra atmospheric carbon dioxide causes mild warming at best, and overall is at least as likely to be beneficial as harmful; and that the causes of climate change are many, various and very incompletely understood.
Confusing the debate with rhetoric
When public doubts are raised about the legitimacy of a particular piece of climate alarmism - say that Tuvalu is being swamped by a rising sea-level – ensuing press discussion rarely deals with the science question at issue. Rather, rhetorical devices are used to counter the doubts or to challenge the integrity of the doubter. Irrelevant assertions that are commonly used in the media to negate sensible discussion of global warming, and especially to counter the views of climate rationalists (sceptics), include the following:
“The science is settled”; or, there is a “consensus” on the issue”. In reality, science is about facts, experiments and testing hypotheses, not consensus; and science is never “settled”.
“He is paid by the fossil fuel industry, and is merely repeating their desired story”. An idea is not responsible for those who believe in it, and neither is the validity of a scientific hypothesis determined by the character or beliefs of the person who funded the research. Science discussions are determined on their merits, by using tests against empirical or experimental data. It may be hard to believe in a post-modern world, but who paid for the data to be gathered and assessed is simply irrelevant.
“She works for a left wing/right wing think tank, so her work is tainted”. Think tanks serve an invaluable function in our society. On all sides of politics they are the source of much excellent policy analysis. They provide extended discussion and commentary on matters of public interest, and have made many fine contributions towards balancing the public debate on climate change. That all think tanks receive funding from industry sources is an indication that those that survive are delivering value for money, and does not impugn their integrity.
“He is just a climate sceptic, a contrarian, a denialist”. These terms are used routinely as denigratory badges. The first two are amusingly silly. First, because most people termed climate “sceptics” are in fact climate “agnostics”, and have no particular axe to grind regarding human influence on climate. Second, because all good scientists are sceptics: that is their professional job. To not be a sceptic of the hypothesis that you are testing is the rudest of scientific errors, for it means that you are committed to a particular outcome: that’s faith, not science. Introduction of the term “denialist” into the public climate debate, with its deliberate connotations with holocaust denial, serves only to cheapen those who practice the custom.
“6 Nobel Prize winners, and 7 members of the National Academy say …”. Argument from authority is the antithesis of the scientific method. That the Royal Society of London tried to restrict the public debate on climate change through intimidation of Esso U.K., for example, was a complete betrayal of all that the Society, and the scientific method, stands for.
“The “precautionary principle” says that we should limit human carbon dioxide emissions because of the risk that the emissions will cause dangerous warming”. The precautionary principle is oftentimes a moral precept masquerading under a scientific cloak. Adhering to moral principle through thick and thin is certainly a part of the precautionary principle as practiced by many environmentalists; it is a principle of the wrong type to be used for the formulation of effective public environmental policy, which needs rather to be rooted in evidence-based science. Scientific principles acknowledge the supremacy of experiment and observation, and do not bow to untestable moral propositions.
By Robert Carter
It is part of the traffic of discussion about global warming that some of the participants are corrupt. Routinely, climate scientists employed at even the most prestigious institutions are accused of having their alarmist views bought by a need to maintain research funding. Equally, self-righteous critics make desperate attempts to link climate sceptics with what are claimed to be the vested interests of the coal and oil and gas industries. It is also obvious that commercial interests – including alternative energy providers such as wind turbine manufacturers, big utility companies such as Enron, financiers such as Lehmann Bros., and emerging emissions and carbon indulgences traders – have strong potential to become involved in corrupt dealings in the traditional meaning of the term. To varying degrees all of these accusations are true, but probably the strongest alarmist influence of all on the climate policy debate is the rather more subtle phenomenon of noble cause corruption.
In his book Science and Public Policy, Professor Aynsley Kellow explores the problem of noble cause corruption in public life in some depth. Such corruption arises from the belief of a vested interest, or powerful person or group, in the moral righteousness of their cause. For example, a police officer may apprehend a person committing a crime and, stuck with a lack of incriminating evidence, proceed to manufacture it. For many social mores, of which “stopping global warming” and “saving the Great Barrier Reef” are two iconic Australian examples, it has become a common practice for evidence to be manipulated in dishonest ways, under the justification of helping to achieve a worthy end. After all, who wouldn’t want to help to “save the Great Barrier Reef”?
Improper science
Regrettably, not all scientists within the climate community have maintained the dispassionate, disinterested approach that is necessary for scientific research. The most widely known piece of defective climate science is the famous 1998 hockey-stick paper in Nature by Mann, Bradley and Hughes, which was used extensively in the IPCC 3rd Assessment Report but discarded from the 4th. An earlier problem of the same type surfaced during the preparation of the 2nd Assessment Report, when a reviewer of part of the draft requested that he be supplied with some of the raw data on which the work was based. The author, Dr Tom Wigley, declined to supply the data, making the following astonishing statement (as quoted in The Heat is On by Ross Gelbspan):
“First, it is entirely unnecessary to have original “raw” data in order to review a scientific document. I know of no case at all in which such data were required by or provided to a referee ….. Second, while the data in question (model output from the U.K. Hadley Centre’s climate model) were generated using taxpayer money, this was U.K. taxpayer money. U.S. scientists therefore have no a priori right to such data. Furthermore, these data belong to individual scientists who produced them, not to the IPCC, and it is up to those scientists to decide who they give their data to.”
This reply denies the supply of data to another scientist who wishes to check that the work can be replicated; denies data to a scientist on the grounds that he is from another country; and arrogates to the author the right to decide who, if anyone, would be supplied with data which was collected with public funds and which underpins an important international publication. Each one of these actions constitutes a fundamental breach of science etiquette, and were such attitudes to be promulgated widely, science as a value-free, objective, internationally agreed enterprise would collapse. Yet such attitudes are widespread within the alarmist climate science community.
Government agencies and reports
Equally regrettably, it is not just individual scientists who are involved in trying to control the climate change debate by the use of selective science. Scientists who work for major governmental science agencies in western countries are almost all under strict employer instruction as to public comments that they may make about climate change, always remembering that a substantial slice of their budget is provided for global warming research. For example, Australian science journalist Peter Pockley reported in 2004 that “CSIRO’s marine scientists have been “constrained” on the scientific advice and interpretation they can provide to the government’s conservation plans for Australia’s oceans. Likewise, climate scientists have been told not to engage in (public) debate on climate change and never to mention the Kyoto Accord on greenhouse gas emissions”. In this way, science policy advice is routinely corrupted by being tailored to suit the views of the government of the day. In turn, the government's views are often strongly influenced by noble cause corruption, whereby "saving the planet" is seen cynically as an effective way in which to garner votes quite irrespective of the lack of demonstrated, as opposed to advertised, risk. The inaccurate and alarmist advertisements that the federal government is currently running about climate change are a case in point.
In Australia, CSIRO is the government agency that makes most of the public running in the global warming debate, and that almost exclusively on the side of environmental alarmism. CSIRO’s GCM modelling group, which acts as a “science” provider to the IPCC, exploits its resulting near-monopoly situation in Australia by acting also as the provider of climate change consultancy reports to state and federal governments, regional authorities and planning boards and large industrial organizations. These reports are based around regional CGM modelling that produces unvalidated projections of future climate, not predictions or forecasts. The subtlety of such a distinction escapes CSIRO’s clients, who, together with CSIRO itself, make no attempt to correct or check the media’s unvarying presentation of such model results as if they were firm predictions, and their association with rampant climate alarmism.
Most recently, public discussion on climate change in Australia has centred around the release on September 30 of Professor Ross Garnaut’s government-sponsored report on carbon dioxide taxation (aka emissions trading). Garnaut’s task, as formulated in his terms of reference, was to advise the Australian public on the issue of human-caused global climate change. Obviously, a judgement was then required as to whether significant human warming is occurring at all, or likely to occur soon. This being a scientific question, to appoint an economist to adjudicate upon it puts that person in the invidious position of having to base their substantive review upon science authority provided by others.
The convenient authority at hand was, of course, the IPCC, whose politically-tainted "science" advice Garnaut swallowed whole with nary a blink, the science in his report being simply a subset of that in the IPCC 4th Assessment Report. The policy prescriptions outlined by Garnaut are thereby predicated on two assumptions. First, that global temperature is rising (implicitly, at either an unusual rate or to an unusual magnitude); and, second, that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will result in dangerous warming. Both of these assumptions are self-evidently wrong - notwithstanding that global temperature does from time to time warm (and cool), and that carbon dioxide is a mild, minor greenhouse gas.
Because Garnaut’s economic analysis is erected upon a faulty science edifice, his recommendations – like those of Professor Stern before him in the U.K. – have little relevance to the real world. The problem is exacerbated because Garnaut’s report also ignores the pressing issue of hazardous natural climate change, and the contextual fact that global temperature is now cooling, and predicted by many scientists to continue to cool. Above all else, planning for future climate hazard has to be based on a thorough, realistic risk analysis, and this the Garnaut Report has utterly failed to provide.
Science academies and learned societies
Traditionally, governments wishing for dispassionate advice on a science issue have turned to their nation's science academy. Disturbingly, against this historic context, Nature reported that in appointing one of its former Presidents "a high-profile former government adviser (Lord Robert May), the Royal Society is intensifying its moves into the public and political arena - and is taking a calculated risk. 'If you want to be more effective in engaging issues of public concern, then you really need to understand the rules of engagement", says May". The path being followed duly became evident when in 2001 Lord May helped organize a statement published in Science that there was a scientific consensus on the danger of human-caused global warming. The statement was headed "17 National Academies Endorse Kyoto", and May expressly commented that it had been "partly provoked by (President George) Bush's recent rejection of the Kyoto treaty, along with resistance to the Kyoto terms by countries such as Australia".
Against this unhappy background, it shouldn’t be surprising, but is, to discover that in 2006 the Royal Society’s Policy Communication Officer, Bob Ward, wrote an intimidatory letter to oil company Esso UK in an effort to suppress Esso’s funding for organizations that in the Royal Society’s view “misrepresented the science of climate change, by outright denial of the evidence …., or by overstating the amount and significance of uncertainty in knowledge, or by conveying a misleading impression of the potential impacts of anthropogenic climate change”. Mr. Ward’s attempt to prevent free public discussion of global warming resulted in rapid condemnation, including a comment from the U.S. Marshall Institute that “It is … unfortunate that the Royal Society is advocating censorship on a subject that calls for debate. The censorship of voices that challenge and provoke is antithetical to liberty and contrary to the traditions and values of free societies. That such a call comes from such a venerable scientific society is disturbing and should raise concerns worldwide about the intentions of those seeking to silence honest debate and discussion of our most challenging environmental issue – climate change”.
Notwithstanding widespread condemnation of the Royal Society action, copycat attempts
to intimidate other businesses soon followed. In U.S.A., Senators Rockefeller and Snowe wrote an intimidatory letter to Esso’s partner company Exxon; and in Australia, a Labor shadow minister, Kelvin Thomson, basing his views on a showing of Al Gore’s movie and the Royal Society letter, wrote in similar fashion to a number of leading Australian companies.
The Royal Society example of the corruption of scientific advice by politics is not an isolated one. Across the western world many other national science academies and major scientific societies have become similarly politicized over global warming and other contentious environmental issues. Thus governments and societies have now lost what used to be an important conduit of impartial and independent advice on technical matters of the day.
The influence of environmental organizations
Most readers will be aware of the activities of high profile environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace, the Worldwide Fund for Nature and the Australian Conservation Foundation. However, relatively few persons appreciate the size, scope, co-ordination and colossal financial resources that are now involved in environmental lobbying around the world. For example, at the centre of many climate policy debates is to be found the Climate Action Network - a 20-year old umbrella organization with seven regional nodes which coordinates the advocacy of more than 280 separate environmental NGOs.
Driven by their addiction to alarmism, and a false belief that the causes of climate change are understood, environmentalists worldwide urge the adoption of the precautionary principle to solve the “global warming problem”. The reality that you can’t take precautions against a future that is unknown (i.e. may encompass either warming or cooling, or both) is ignored in favour of irrational feel-goodery, the aim being to move the world to a “post-carbon” economy by drastic curtailment of the carbon dioxide emissions that are alleged to be causing warming.
Environmental campaigners for the reduction of human greenhouse emissions remain blind to inconvenient facts such as: that no amount of precaution is going stop natural climate change; that there is a 100% risk of damage from natural climate events, which happen every day; that we cannot measure, much less isolate, any presumed human climate signal globally; that extra atmospheric carbon dioxide causes mild warming at best, and overall is at least as likely to be beneficial as harmful; and that the causes of climate change are many, various and very incompletely understood.
Confusing the debate with rhetoric
When public doubts are raised about the legitimacy of a particular piece of climate alarmism - say that Tuvalu is being swamped by a rising sea-level – ensuing press discussion rarely deals with the science question at issue. Rather, rhetorical devices are used to counter the doubts or to challenge the integrity of the doubter. Irrelevant assertions that are commonly used in the media to negate sensible discussion of global warming, and especially to counter the views of climate rationalists (sceptics), include the following:
“The science is settled”; or, there is a “consensus” on the issue”. In reality, science is about facts, experiments and testing hypotheses, not consensus; and science is never “settled”.
“He is paid by the fossil fuel industry, and is merely repeating their desired story”. An idea is not responsible for those who believe in it, and neither is the validity of a scientific hypothesis determined by the character or beliefs of the person who funded the research. Science discussions are determined on their merits, by using tests against empirical or experimental data. It may be hard to believe in a post-modern world, but who paid for the data to be gathered and assessed is simply irrelevant.
“She works for a left wing/right wing think tank, so her work is tainted”. Think tanks serve an invaluable function in our society. On all sides of politics they are the source of much excellent policy analysis. They provide extended discussion and commentary on matters of public interest, and have made many fine contributions towards balancing the public debate on climate change. That all think tanks receive funding from industry sources is an indication that those that survive are delivering value for money, and does not impugn their integrity.
“He is just a climate sceptic, a contrarian, a denialist”. These terms are used routinely as denigratory badges. The first two are amusingly silly. First, because most people termed climate “sceptics” are in fact climate “agnostics”, and have no particular axe to grind regarding human influence on climate. Second, because all good scientists are sceptics: that is their professional job. To not be a sceptic of the hypothesis that you are testing is the rudest of scientific errors, for it means that you are committed to a particular outcome: that’s faith, not science. Introduction of the term “denialist” into the public climate debate, with its deliberate connotations with holocaust denial, serves only to cheapen those who practice the custom.
“6 Nobel Prize winners, and 7 members of the National Academy say …”. Argument from authority is the antithesis of the scientific method. That the Royal Society of London tried to restrict the public debate on climate change through intimidation of Esso U.K., for example, was a complete betrayal of all that the Society, and the scientific method, stands for.
“The “precautionary principle” says that we should limit human carbon dioxide emissions because of the risk that the emissions will cause dangerous warming”. The precautionary principle is oftentimes a moral precept masquerading under a scientific cloak. Adhering to moral principle through thick and thin is certainly a part of the precautionary principle as practiced by many environmentalists; it is a principle of the wrong type to be used for the formulation of effective public environmental policy, which needs rather to be rooted in evidence-based science. Scientific principles acknowledge the supremacy of experiment and observation, and do not bow to untestable moral propositions.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Haiti - The Rulers Luck?
By Dr. Ken Hildebrandt 1/17/10
It'd be amusing that Obama has enlisted former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to lead the aid effort to Haiti, were it only mere fiction. These men have shown extreme contempt for human life on massive scales, yet we're all to believe we're just one big happy caring family in the face of a catastrophe.
What about the preventable catastrophes they turned their backs to, or worse yet, the ones they caused? For example, Clinton oversaw the Iraqi Embargo costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of children. Former US Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright said in response to the assertion that half a million children's lives were lost due the sanctions that:
"I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it."
We're talking about half a million children, on purpose, not hurting Saddam Hussein in the least, but rather the very people he was oppressing. And we're to believe this guy's just a smiling saxophone player who cares about others. Can anyone explain why?
Domestically speaking, the prison population about doubled here in the US during the Clinton years, plus he lost millions of jobs by getting us involved in NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. As for Bush, the former governor signed over 150 death warrants, got us involved in two wars and gave tax cuts to his favorite one percent of the population. The invasion of Iraq drew protests in all seven continents, and has already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands, not to mention those who are maimed for life. The CIA and other intelligence organizations all said it would only increase terrorism, which it did.
What's Obama done, but carry on Bush's wars, not renegotiated NAFTA as he had promised, and ignored the fact that the US houses more people in cages than any nation on earth? He's done a lot more, like mocking those with Down's Syndrome on national television, bailing out wealthy bankers, and now he's trying to give the insurance industry a nice shot in the arm, by granting them some 30 million new customers. I could go on but what's the point? So much for, "Change we can believe in."
But this is a natural catastrophe in Haiti, most have every right to believe. Well, perhaps that's not the case. Please hear me out.
In this government link from 1997 (http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=674) former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen stated in his answer to the forth question that:
"Others are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves."
If 'others' can do this, we can only imagine what the powerhouse of the world can do, especially in the near 13 years since the above mentioned admission was made by a top ranking government official.
You've likely guessed my suspicions about recent events. I'm not saying this is what occurred, though it's sure a possibility to be considered in my view.
This could hardly have happened at a more convenient time. The president's ratings are plummeting, and his bill to subsidize the insurance industry has essentially divided the nation in two.
What better way to lead the people into believing we're one big happy family than to reunite former Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush along with Obama in a joint humanitarian effort?
To top it off, when we see rabid zionist Wolf Blitzer leading the cause for CNN, the man who rushed former Senator Mike Gravel (who read the Pentagon Papers in front of the US Senate revealing the lies of three presidential administrations leading to the end of the Vietnam War) during the Democratic Debates, as if he was someone we didn't have time to hear, I can't help but recollect the words of Adolf Hitler:
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think."
It'd be amusing that Obama has enlisted former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to lead the aid effort to Haiti, were it only mere fiction. These men have shown extreme contempt for human life on massive scales, yet we're all to believe we're just one big happy caring family in the face of a catastrophe.
What about the preventable catastrophes they turned their backs to, or worse yet, the ones they caused? For example, Clinton oversaw the Iraqi Embargo costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of children. Former US Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright said in response to the assertion that half a million children's lives were lost due the sanctions that:
"I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it."
We're talking about half a million children, on purpose, not hurting Saddam Hussein in the least, but rather the very people he was oppressing. And we're to believe this guy's just a smiling saxophone player who cares about others. Can anyone explain why?
Domestically speaking, the prison population about doubled here in the US during the Clinton years, plus he lost millions of jobs by getting us involved in NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. As for Bush, the former governor signed over 150 death warrants, got us involved in two wars and gave tax cuts to his favorite one percent of the population. The invasion of Iraq drew protests in all seven continents, and has already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands, not to mention those who are maimed for life. The CIA and other intelligence organizations all said it would only increase terrorism, which it did.
What's Obama done, but carry on Bush's wars, not renegotiated NAFTA as he had promised, and ignored the fact that the US houses more people in cages than any nation on earth? He's done a lot more, like mocking those with Down's Syndrome on national television, bailing out wealthy bankers, and now he's trying to give the insurance industry a nice shot in the arm, by granting them some 30 million new customers. I could go on but what's the point? So much for, "Change we can believe in."
But this is a natural catastrophe in Haiti, most have every right to believe. Well, perhaps that's not the case. Please hear me out.
In this government link from 1997 (http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=674) former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen stated in his answer to the forth question that:
"Others are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves."
If 'others' can do this, we can only imagine what the powerhouse of the world can do, especially in the near 13 years since the above mentioned admission was made by a top ranking government official.
You've likely guessed my suspicions about recent events. I'm not saying this is what occurred, though it's sure a possibility to be considered in my view.
This could hardly have happened at a more convenient time. The president's ratings are plummeting, and his bill to subsidize the insurance industry has essentially divided the nation in two.
What better way to lead the people into believing we're one big happy family than to reunite former Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush along with Obama in a joint humanitarian effort?
To top it off, when we see rabid zionist Wolf Blitzer leading the cause for CNN, the man who rushed former Senator Mike Gravel (who read the Pentagon Papers in front of the US Senate revealing the lies of three presidential administrations leading to the end of the Vietnam War) during the Democratic Debates, as if he was someone we didn't have time to hear, I can't help but recollect the words of Adolf Hitler:
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
