Mind change on climate change?
This is interesting.
And here’s something related. It’s from a year ago, when a number of previously convinced scientists were having doubts about the proof that global warming is generated by human activity. That number seems to have increased since—and in my opinion a scientist who once believed and now does not is of even more significance that one who was always a doubter.
One recanter, Dr. David Evans of Australia, said:
“As Lord Keynes famously said, ”˜When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’”
This is right up my alley, being a specialist of sorts in what it takes to change a person’s mind in the face of a strongly entrenched belief system. Answer: a great many facts, forming a pattern strong enough to mount a powerful challenge. And even then, only some minds will change.
More fascinating stuff from Dr. Evans:
Evans noted how he benefited from climate fears as a scientist. “And the political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990’s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too. I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn’t believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; and there were international conferences full of such people. And we had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet! But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence outlined above fell away or reversed,” Evans wrote.
This is another example of how difficult it is, and how much courage it takes, to dissent or even to withhold final judgment on this highly politicized scientific issue. As a layperson, I have followed the arguments for quite some time now, and I believe the jury is still out.
As I have mentioned before, I used to work at Oak Ridge National Labs and had the pleasure of working in the same building many of the climatologist worked (and, being research staff in the High Performance Computing Division had a semi-close relationship with them as they ran models on some of our testbeds).
To a “T” each and everyone of them that was willing to learn and heed advice on usage of the cluster found AGW to be inconclusive, again to a “T” each and every one that knew their software was perfect and we had screwed up were the heavy AGW proponents. That has always and will always color my opinion of it.
Further, having spent a number of years working through NSF and DOE grants I no longer have anything but a jaded view of science in general. A great majority of it is more political than actual science and has been that way since well before Bush (whom the lefties accuse of doing it), in fact at least in computer science it was *better* under Bush.
Lastly, I iwll also point out that like many other disciplines science has been in a general state of decline recently. As many “scientists” are coming through the ranks that treat it more as a religion than a method to gain knowledge we have seen the near total drop of the use of the scientific method. Putting your idea in that form has slowly become a ritual that gives something meaning, yet without the thought that the method allows it is nothing more than a ritual. Stating your hypothesis, collecting data, conclusions, and the other steps are now slots to filled in to give your program legitimacy instead of a form to assist in critical thinking – in some circles it is slowly becoming the secular version of “allahu akbar”. Indeed, it is not hard to find apostates that are totally shunned.
Of them climatology is one of the worst – I do not need to be a climatologist to call it “inconclusive”, I only need to be trained as a classical researcher. As such there are VERY few papers that are decent research, a mere 30-40 years it would have received a failing grade in any science class regardless of how complex the math is. If you do not follow proper scientific principles you get “inconclusive” on the output – who knows if it is right or wrong, Garbage in Garbage out. Sadly, if AGW is true then its proponents are doing more to cause us to ignore it than anything its opponents have ever done.
Here’s the RealClimate analysis.
A business psychologist once said ” a paycheck makes cowards of us all, and the bigger the paycheck, the bigger the coward”. People will do what you incentivize them to do 90% of the time. The “rainmakers” in government throw money into research to justify their protectionist role, and they get the the results that they pay for. Few of us should be surprised that environmental (and military) threats gain disproportionate momentum often with highly questionable evidence.
Unfortunately, bad science though it may be, the political momentum overcomes reverse momentum in the scientific community. Oobonga is about to install a hard cap and trade or carbon tax regime that is going to knock the stuffing out of our economy, so that the recovery will be weak. It’s going to amount to one of the biggest wealth transfers in human history.
We are about to be raped. And it will accomplish nothing in the way of “climate change” or alleviating Third World poverty. It will only strengthen the hand of the U.N. and the Non-Aligned Nations against us. It will make our nation weaker and our people will see their living standards fall.
It’s going way beyond an arcane academic battle.
Hyman linked to an opinion that has this near the beginning, “The fact that the fonts and layout are identical to the real IPCC report is another indication that this isn’t quite on the level”
oh my ! The fonts and layout give ammunition to question their motives !!! That’s sooooo scientific of a rebuttal !
To be clear – there is a RealClimate Wiki site linked in the link and therefore some ‘meat’ to their argument.
There are fundamental flaws in the way leftists see the “solutions” to any climate change problem.
1) The science is not “conclusive” or “decided”.
2) The solutions that leftists put forward take resources away from shelter, food, health and Bjorn Lomborg makes that point so well yet he is villified with hatred by leftists.
3) Steve McIntyre has been able to show flaws in the data and leftists are slow to correct their ‘information’ or ‘recognize’ the absolute flaws.
SO Hyman, where does this leave us?
It leaves us in a situation where:
1) We don’t agree on the ’cause’ of ‘climate change’.
2) We don’t agree on the ‘severity’ of ‘climate change’
3) We don’t agree on the ‘solutions’ for ‘climate change’.
And when the Bush Administration is BASHED so viciously by the left when his administration has spent more on ‘climate change’ than any other administration and by leaps and bounds (I challenge you to look up the raw numbers – it’d require you to find it from alternative sources of information that you are used to)…..
… it drives me to disbelieve anything that leftists say when they can’t even get simple black and white budget statistic facts correct.
A) Get facts right.
B) Come up with solutions that are market oriented.
neo, on a previous thread I made essentially the same points that Evans and strcpy make, namely, that scientific research is highly political (not necessarily in the party political sense, but rather the interpersonal one), and that anyone criticizing the latest fad (and yes, Virginia, and the appropriately named BM, science does have fads – lots of them) will be extremely unpopular for attempting to bring the gravy train to a screeching halt. That’s not paranoia, that’s reality.
To reiterate yet again:
1) scientific issues are not decided by consensus, but by dispositive data, and
2) the burden of proof lies on the party making the assertion, and
3) the more extraordinary the assertion, the heavier that burden of proof.
“Global warming” fails on all counts.
I have been dealing with this issue both in the classes I teach and around my campus. Most of the students and faculty consider me a “denier”(Me, and about 30,000 ohter signers of the recent petition). Yet, when presented with the data some actually begin to have doubts. I’m saddened by what I see happeing within the APS and AGU where the climate issue is treated as gospel, and this within professional organizations.
My one hope is that, as always, Nature will win out. Current trrends in both temp data, the Pacific Decade Oscillation, and thye very quiet Sun, point to an reality most will not be able to ignore.
A great sight with reasonable discussion for other “deniers” :
http://www.wattsupwiththat.com
The current political/media trends in this area will continue as-is for awhile, until the buildup of contrary evidence reaches a tipping point. At that point, you’ll see some highly respected, mainstream or left-of-mainstream journalist/pundit/politician who will come out with a statement that “the consensus” isn’t one any more … and it will have an impact much like the Cronkite-on-Vietnam story. I can’t predict when this will happen, but it seems a likely scenario.
physicsguy,
The problem is that the hard cap and trade or carbon tax program is going to go forward, from what I hear from my sources watching the Obama camp. Minds have already been made up. It’s going to have very deleterious effects on our economy and the global economy. People’s livelihoods are at stake. It really is going to perhaps shave one to two percentage points off of our potential GDP coming out of a recession. And that means instead of a 3 to 5 percent recovery we’ll get a 1 to 3 percent recovery, which will not be nearly enough to absorb and overcome the job losses from this recession.
It will be that bad.
A good proxy for what the hard cap and trade/carbon tax system will mean for us is Europe. They attempted it, and are giving it up because it had such a depressing effect on their economies. Granted, they have higher taxes, regulations, and interest rates than we have had, but the modeling I’ve seen in our “in-house” research here suggests the outcome I’ve explained above.
I think lefties are hoping that man has changed the climate because it would validate their worldview that man is the center of the universe.
I consider our relationship to the earth to be rather like that of bacteria on the surface of a billiard ball, i.e., inconsequential to it.
I could make arguments regarding the relative oscillator strengths of the water vapor and CO2 stretching and bending vibrations, but on balance the notion that we could change the earth’s climate seems as implausible to me as that of bacteria changing the trajectory of a billiard ball.
FredHjR:
I’m hoping that the current economic crisis will occupy more time with the upcoming administration than “green” issues. I did see just in the past week that in Britain a “green” tax was roundly defeated in light of all the other economic hardships that are abounding. So, there’s hope if such can happen in a place like the UK where AGW is truly another religion.
If the cap-and-trade stuff can be held off long enough the weight of the avalanche (pun intended) of the data should end the nonsense. The worse is that they put in the C&T before that happens, and then when the temps go down, they’ll claim THEY saved the world.
If there is a silver lining to the current economic cloud, it is that Western governments may slow down on the rush to abandon or tax fossil fuels because the consequences to the poor will be so dire. An affluent ideologue like Al Gore or Laurie David can afford to pay for indulgences and still live the high life. The laid off auto worker in Detroit may not be so ready to embrace a green lifestyle.
On a related note, the disclaimers of scientists formerly in the ranks of the true believers remind me of the ebb and flow of scientific knowledge. Better be careful before endowing theories with infallible status. They may come blowing right back in your face in the next year or two.
How significant it is that “we” don’t agree on climate change depends on who “we” are. Nature is not a democracy. Having 30,000 people sign a petition will not affect whether the premises of global climate change are true or false. Questions of validity can be answered only by specialists in the field, and generally the answers (and even the questions) can be understood only by specialists in the field, and perhaps a little by highly educated laymen. Everyone else is blowing hot air.
Human,
You lack critical thinking skills again. People made good points and you chose to ignore them.
Hyman wrote, “Questions of validity can be answered only by specialists in the field,”
If you choose to IGNORE the specialists in the field Hyman, then what does that make you? 🙂
Is Al Gore a specialist?
I would hope to have the courage of Evans if I am ever in his shoes.
No, but Laurie David is.
A specialist at self-promotion, that is. AlGore is a rank neophyte by comparison, but he’s learning fast.
Exactly right. The truth of a proposition is independent of the number of people who believe it. That puts me in the disturbing position of agreeing with you, Hyman.
Now we’re getting somewhere in identifying the source of the warming trend… /g
Science used to be the field where reasonable people sought facts in a rational manner. What the hell happened?
Seems to me climate change is really about what to do with every damn kid in the country going to a university and expecting to be needed somewhere.
You guys must have not gotten the memo from the weenies…ooops, I mean the greenies.
The heretics must be allowed to air their voices of dissent.
(that will make it easier for the Disciples to find them later when it’s time for re-education camps…or, failing success at re-education, the stake and bonfire for the charge of heresy.)
“Science used to be the field where reasonable people sought facts in a rational manner. What the hell happened? ”
Money – and lots of it.
For instance – we wanted funding, being computer scientists we could generally fairly easily get it. The theory was that we were infrastructure and that money given to us was the same as giving it to everyone else. That is, purchase a 10 million dollar computational resource and that money is split between physics, chemistry, nuclear, biology – well everyone. Purchase a Spallation Neutron Source and only the high energy physicist care.
Even so we had to know who our funding agent was and what they wanted. This one we would push defense contracts and how this could be used for national security. This one we had to push how the climate people could use it to study global warming (none in my group, nor almost any in the climatologist, believed in AGW yet that was where the money was and we had all sorts of stuff proving things we do no believe). Another one and we were going to help cure cancer. This was NSF, DOE, or pretty much any funding agency around.
Under Clinton there were a lot of environmental concerns that we supposedly handled. Pre-9/11 Bush and it was about the best I saw – just pretty much solid science. Post 9/11 you did homeland security in the same way we did environmentalism before. I left in 2004 or so, do not know what the current angle is (when I left we were starting to see alternative energy increase – I imagine up until a few weeks ago it got MUCH bigger).
What were we doing? Well I developed scalable system administration software – namely adding users to the system, installing software, changing configurations, etc over 10,000 machines (before my contract ran out I easily scaled to 4096 nodes, 8192 if your network topology could handle another level in the communications tree). And how did we change as our project description did? Well, nothing really, other than our papers had a totally different slant to them that everyone in the field knew to read through.
We knew the game, those that ran their stuff on our machines knew the game, pretty much the only ones in the system that didn’t were the True Believers in whatever cause it was that was currently getting funding. We also knew how to read around it – after all we had spent countless hours writing the same things.
However the newer people coming in – of which I was one of – were second generation removed from good science. They do not understand anything but the funding game and mistake that for real science – universities are just as in bed with it as the national labs (indeed, I generally found them worse). You had to pretty much luck out (as I did) and have one of the groups that still maintained good science (and had a deep level of scorn for those that bought into their hype) in the background.
We are now moving into three generations (and by generations I mean academic ones – that is the current crop have to go back to their teachers, teachers, teacher to find someone who really understood the what, how, and why of the scientific method) removed from actual science and it is starting to become hard to find *real* researchers – they are considered difficult to work with and inflexible, unable to see what needs to be done. That is, the newer ones now believe in the church of Science – there have always been some but it is becoming really bad.
Strcpy, take heart. The place I see the rot setting in deepest is molecular biology. I’ve been shocked at the low intellectual standard of the molbio literature, where it appears impossible to falsify anything. They seem to look on research with childlike wonder, saying “Isn’t Nature marvelous in its complexity?” after doing untold ill-conceived and uncontrolled experiments, yielding conflicting results, and attributing every discrepancy to biological variation. It truly is a science for those lacking in research ability.
“Everyone else is blowing hot air.”
Especially Hyman… Son of a gun it’s (record setting) cold today in Denver, must be that evil global warming, better turn down the thermostat before it’s too late… Here’s a fun one: http://www.thepeoplescube.com/red/viewtopic.php?t=1950
Islam,the EU, European Anti-Semitism and Anti-Americanism,Dotcom bubble,Real estate bubble,Contemporary Art bubble,Global warming,Obama-mania,Bush derangement syndrome, MSM bias-what have they all in common?They are all the result of groupthink-of people accepting things because those around them do.
Note however that where there is a market where people have to put their money where their mouth is reality obtrudes and cannot be denied.The bubble breaks.
For those marketless bubbles you will have people who will die believing what most eventually recognise as nonsense; indeed some of these ideas may continue to cause enormous damage.
Neo:
There is no reason to believe a single word that the alarmists say. Even though neither you nor I have the chops to analyze the raw data, you CAN look at the behavior of the scientists involved, and if you pick up the stench of rat, if the red flags block the sunlight, if one side or the other does not play it straight, then you know whom to disbelieve.
This is why I do not believe the alarmists:
1. If you have scientific truth on your side, you have no need to…:
a. …lie or misdirect to make your case. Yet Inconvenient Truth is riddled with lies. The infamous cherry-picker scene shows a chart that actually shows exactly the opposite of what Gore says it does. I read the original article, so I can verify this myself.
b. …conceal your data and methodologies. And yet James Hanson, Michael Mann, and others either fail entirely to archive their data or they refuse to let others analyze it.
c. …stubbornly refuse to correct your mistakes. Michael Mann has been warned by the NSA to stop using certain data sets (strip-bark bristlecones, for example), and yet he continues to use them. McIntyre has also found egregious and yet easily correctable errors in his work, and yet Mann keeps propagating these errors in study after study.
d. …refuse to engage in open debate with skeptics. James Hanson famously said that he would not “joust with jesters” when asked whether he would debate his detractors.
2. If you are more interested in the truth than in politics, you will…:
a. …adjust your theories when new data comes in without resorting to magical thinking. One of Mann’s favorite bristlecone series (Graybill) had not been updated since the mid-80s, so the intrepid Steve McIntyre went and cored the trees himself. (Some of the tags were still there from when Graybill cored them.) He took his samples to a dendro lab and then tried to correlate the ring widths with local temps. They didn’t correlate in any useful fashion. So Mann went ahead and changed his theory – that his bristlecones did not respond to local conditions but rather were tuned into global climate via “teleconnections.”
(That right there should get him laughed out of the field, but it doesn’t. Like the Chicago politicians who didn’t rat out Blago because he was only a little worse than they, the scientists who let Mann et al. get away with this kind of nonsense also demonstrate the degraded state of scientific inquiry.)
b. …insist on rigorous data integrity standards. Which James Hanson doesn’t even begin to have. Even though he’s head of NASA GISS, his predictions, charts, and graphs were derived from land-based temperature stations. And as Anthony Watts has vividly shown, the stations are in dire need of evaluation and repositioning. Furthermore, when McIntyre finally got hold of Hanson’s data (it took an FOIA to pry it lose) and managed to decipher the Byzantine code, he found that Hanson was awfully selective about which stations he sampled: just the ones that showed the warmest temps.
c. …not reduce a complex system like planetary climate to easy-to-digest soundbites. The argument is this: Combustion creates CO2, CO2 levels are rising, CO2 is a greenhouse gas, ergo, the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more the air heats up, and the more it heats up, the more CO2 outgasses from the oceans. Until we reach a tipping point wherein a positive-feedback loop kicks in, and holy cow, we’re just like Venus.
Compelling though that narrative is, it doesn’t take into account that there is a limit to how much of the sun’s heat CO2 can trap (7-8%), that after awhile, adding more CO2 doesn’t increase its heat-holding properties. (It increases it’s heat-trapping on a logarithmic scale that eventually flattens to near 0.) Nor does it indicate that positive-feedback loops are extremely rare in nature, and that our climate would have to be pretty unstable to be sent over the edge by something as insignificant as an increase in CO2.
d. …be just as eager to find other explanations for the phenomenon. Sunspot cycles and the El Nié±o Southern Oscillation track almost exactly with the planet’s temperature fluctuations. There’s no evidence that CO2 tracks with temperature as a causal factor. That aforementioned study in Gore’s cherry-picker scene shows CO2 levels trailing temp increases by 800-1200 years.
e. …not keep moving the goalposts when your predictions don’t turn out as expected. Because the alarmist position posits a steady increase in temperatures to correspond with the increases in CO2 (which really is still increasing), the decline in temps since the freakish peak of 1998 SHOULD NOT HAPPEN. Last year, it snowed in Baghdad, Bogoté¡, and Jerusalem. Just last week it snowed on New Orleans. That cannot happen according to the alarmist position. Furthermore, AGW posits that the oceans will warm, but the recent Argos submersible robots found no increase in ocean temps in the last five years. Other predictions about warming in certain zones of the atmosphere have also not materialized. But instead of admitting that AGW has just been falsified, it’s now “climate change” and “these things happen when the globe is warming.”
3. And most of all, if you really believe that CO2 emissions are going to spell our fate, you absolutely and positively DO NOT jet around the world in a private plane to sell your story (instead of using the Internet you invented). Back in 1999, the Y2K alarmists were stockpiling canned soup and taking all their stuff offline.
4. I haven’t even touched the “follow the money argument” – from “doomsday sells” when applying for a grant to the green NBC logo, whose parent company, GE, maker of fluorescent bulbs and windmills, has the largest lobbying budget in Washington, to Al Gore’s private “green” investment company, to the cynical marketing of “green” products.
In short, Neo, I would be interested to find a single piece of indisputable evidence that threatens to override even one of the points I’ve made above. So far, all I can see is an information cascade, bandwagoneering, Gaia worship, neo-Ludditism, and the temptation for power-grabs that come with all crises, manufactured or otherwise.
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“The place I see the rot setting in deepest is molecular biology.”
Haha, my experience was exactly the opposite – almost none of them had a place on the “notme” board (those that broke the whole system and yet claimed it was everyone else fault but their own) – it is one word because of the speed at which “notme” is uttered when calling to say the cluster is broke.
But then our molecular biologist were not of the classic variety either, they were a specialized subset of them dealing with genetic (both inherited and nonhereditary) diseases.
The worst were the climatologist, the best were the human genome people – then again I can think of one of the climatologist that was superb (and one I base much of my thoughts on AGW on). The genome people broke the cluster all the time but were willing and able to learn to not do it again. Even when they couldn’t follow the problem (things like race conditions are hard even for classically trained CS people) they were more than willing to listen and do what we said.
Never really dealt directly with the nuke people – their stuff was classified and all our machines were non-sensitive unclassified. From eating lunch with them I suspect they would have been the best of the bunch as their complaints were remarkably similar to ours.
Here’s an article that deals specifically with how people change their minds in favour of global warming
http://cli.gs/globalwarming2
Dicentra,
The sort of argument you went through above is why I became an early global warming doubter. I am not a climate scientist and wouldn’t, as you say, know how to analyze the raw data, but I do have scientific training and when I looked at how the advocates of global warming were acting and what they were claiming I found their arguments didn’t pass the smell test.
One strike for me was “the debate is over” canard. When they trotted that one out, I knew something was seriously wrong. And this was years ago, not just recently. There is no freaking way that a debate about something as complex as the climate is over.
A second strike was the inherent one-way catastrophism of their claims. In just about any situation in the world, you would expect a climate change to have positive as well as negative effects. For instance, in a given location, winters might be worse but summers better. Or there might be more precipitation in the summer but less in the winter. Or there might be milder weather in one part of the globe but more troublesome weather patterns somewhere else. Or there might be more hurricanes but less drought, or some such thing. Or even the much more obvious, people in far northern latitudes might benefit from a little warming when perhaps people at the equator might not. But if you listened to the claims of the global warming crowd there was no balance or talk of trade-offs. All you heard was “everything is going to get much worse everywhere for everyone and there will be more and bigger hurricanes, deeper and longer droughts, more rain, more this and more that”, ad nauseum. It just wasn’t credible as a description of the real world.
Strike three is that I’ve always seen this hysteria as a form of medical student disease. All this panic set in after we determined that Venus was the way it was, and vastly different than Earth, because it was caught in a runaway greenhouse effect. Suddenly, we no longer had to worry about global cooling but instead we were just this side of being fried to death by global warming and a runaway greenhouse effect. Scientists are human like everyone else, including medical school students, and are subject to psychology as much as the next person.
Strike four, is the politicization of the whole enterprise, especially since it was grabbed by the UN. Whatever the IPCC is, it is not a bastion of free scientific inquiry. Threats of criminal prosecution for global warming skeptics (not “deniers” as they would like to have you believe), denials of funding, calls to deprive skeptics of media exposure while giving actors and others totally unqualified to comment copious airtime, etc. are signs that something is not kosher.
Strike five is the behavior of Al Gore and other climate alarmists. They’re talking the talk but they aren’t walking the walk. Bringing 16,000 people to Bali by jet airliner for a conference on global warming is simply a joke. Living in a home that uses 20 times the normal amount of electricity when you’re a leading green campaigner is a joke. Recycling a few pounds of cardboard and glass a year and then jetting off on an Asian tour because you’ve earned it through your good works is a joke. And too many of them have a direct financial stake in promoting the alarmist viewpoint. They make the claim that skeptics are in a position to financially benefit (through evil big business) from their point of view but completely ignore the fact that there is plenty of “green” to be had for those on the alarmist side, including multi-million dollar government grants, etc.
Strike six, I am also highly suspicious of the timing of this whole movement. It’s no coincidence in my mind that its rise corresponded exactly with collapse of the Soviet Union. There is a certain subset of people in the world whose life mission is to control your life and those of everyone around you, i.e. world-class busybodies. When the whole socialist dream collapsed, they frantically began looking around for something else to fill that deep aching need inside them to control their fellow man, especially if it would at the same time give them a self-satisfying sense of superiority. The global warming “climate crisis” was a godsend and arrived just in time. The very same people want the very same thing they always have, total control over your life, but now they have a much more palatable fig leaf to cover their base desires with. Who could be against the environment? It’s a perfect cover for someone whose fondest desire is to tell you how to live every minute of your life, and what’s even better, it’s truly global. It covers every aspect of the life of every person everywhere on the planet. You get to have your say in all of it, especially if you’re one of the ones who worms your way to the top of this dung heap. No purely political movement ever had that kind of power.
Strike seven is the chutzpah of pretending you know what the climate is going to be like with any certainty a hundred years from now, especially when it’s based on a very incomplete smattering of data less than a hundred years in extent that’s fed into very problematic computer models, based on highly complex and unproven climate theories. I call it overdriving the headlights. If you’re going down a dark highway in your car at 75 miles and hour and your headlights only illuminate the highway x feet in front of you and your stopping distance is 2x feet at that speed then you’re in serious trouble. You could easily come upon an object in the road (say a fallen tree) that you would hit before you could safely bring the car to a stop. You just don’t know what’s in the area outside your headlights. As far as I can see, the track record for making predictions about the climate 100 years in the future is zero. There is not one documented case of an accurate prediction on that time scale. It’s not like we’re 9 for 10 in making that sort of prediction, or even 1 for 2. We’re 0 for 0. There is simply no history for that sort of prediction at all. We’re overdriving the headlights because we simply can’t see that far down the road with any known or documented level of accuracy. I think too many in the scientific community (in many different fields) lack the humility to acknowledge the limitations of our knowledge. They’re so focused on what we do know, or think we know, and the great strides we’ve made that they fail to give adequate deference to how much we really don’t know.
Well, of course this got way longer than I intended. It’s sort of a summary of thoughts and ideas that have been percolating in my brain for awhile. Nothing I’ve said disproves the case for global warming, obviously, but it does give me reason to be skeptical of the “we’re all doomed, we’ve only got 10 years, we’ve got to change everything about everything right this instant” crowd. Whatever scientific truth lies at the heart of this climate crisis hysteria (and I’m absolutely sure the debate is not over on the fundamental scientific principles involved) the issue has been hijacked by non-scientific actors to such an extent that we’ve now got way too much heat and not enough light on the topic.
If it were possible to shift the world over to wind and solar, it would be a good thing. If we could slow down on the burning of finite fossil fuels without bringing about poverty and starvation, it would be very good.
Thats the only possible plus I see in the global warming debate. Good things may be done even if for the wrong reasons.
Kudos to dicentra and kcom for superb and detailed expositions.
Rick
We will not be shifting the world to wind and sun power. To see why go to Professor Haydens website at http://www.energyadvocate.com/ .
Rick,
Intentions are sweet.
We ALL have good intentions.
These are the questions that become relevant:
1) Do the poor have to forgo heat/cooling, refrigeration, transportation – or will the government have to take from the top 50% of income earners (who pay 97% of the income taxes) to subsidize the poor with these needs. Remember energy is a significant cost and market forces are important.
2) Does the inflated price take away resources for shelter, food, medicine and does that shift in priorities HURT the poor as the government with finite resources already prioritizes resources towards shelter, food and medicine for the poor.
3) The federal government under Bush (the last time I checked a year ago) spent 3 billion per year for “climate change” which is a significantly higher dollar amount for that subject than previous administration’s by far – WHEN will the left stop demonizing and questioning Bush’s or the republican’s motives and intentions?
As King (Rodney) said, “Can’t we all get along?” 🙂
I would love the caring and well intentioned left to offer that the right has valid points and good hearts and ADDRESS the points we are making instead of addressing us with vitriol.
Normally, in science, people who the data doesn’t fit your hypotheses are colleagues. In the AGW universe they’re called heretics, deniers, and shills for big business.
But what really, really, tipped me to the fact that the whole thing was fishy was that the IPCC published a summary of its report before the report was written.
Good things may be done even if for the wrong reasons.
Truth matters, Rick. Doing the right things for the wrong reasons is like an episode of House, where they administer what they’re sure is the right medicine and it ends up shutting down the patient’s kidneys and liver because their diagnosis was just plain wrong.
And like Kcom said, there are those whose primary mission is to take control of the world, thus to stop all the bad things from happening. That was the promise of the Fascists and the Bolshevicks and the Maoists, and all those “good things” they did were instead a holy horror.
Truth matters. It’s the only thing that matters.
newton defeated the philosophers as kings that define reality by using empiricism.
the philosphers have now countered with relativism, deflating empiracism and diffusing the bomb.
now, through ideology, they will take control again, and philosophers will define reality.
remember the last time they did this, how long did the dark age last?
people arent realizeing the bigger picture. if they succeed they get totalitarian control of the world, through controlling a bottle neck. energy.
if they lose, they succeed in destroying the empirical opponent and they will win in the next round as science will have been completely discredited by its flight down a false road coupled with the ignorance of the masses to the process (They are now all cargo cult image only posers)
But if it does turn out that human induced global warming was all a false theory, it would represent the greatest scientific embarrassment in history. The confidence and conformity with which the institutional scientific community has pronounced on the issue will be seen as a shockingly black mark against the professionalism an integrity of a generation of scientists.
it was the church who first opposed the philosophers…
a glorified name for witch doctor till more formalized later. otherwise a philosopher was an adviser, doctor, and religious expert. the elite person, as shumpeter pointed out, had center stage and was all important and his self agrandizement was assured. they had not to lear real facts as to the world, just master their disciplines esoterica. they were all cargo cult analysing image to pretend to find subsdtance.
then religion came along… that threatened one of their major powers… religion then had the realization that everything was made by god, and if we understand how everything is made, then we understand the maker, god. a simple thing that no one else thought of. then the church funded empirical science.
and that created the stake that killed the philosophers from their thrown of self aggrandizing and politicizing, and manipulation of others not as clever as they are.
religion took over the spiritual, since religion was a defininite, and philosophers were abstractors.
medicine took impiricism, and created modern medicine.. the philosophers couldnt make up herbals, an blood letting and declare humors no more, things had to work and progress had to be seen and proven.
then capernicous knocks them off of their trustted place by proving that we are not the center of the universe as the self absorbed and aggrandized philosophers put us.
then newton knocks them completely off the thrown by proving that reality is better known thorugh empirical argument.
of course there were many otehr termites. the rule of the abstract talker was divested in favor of the meritocritous the able, the measurable production.
socialism and such are all philosophical system seeking to oveturn empirical capitlaism. the power people see it as a way to power, to control, without having to work at having the ability to actually be competent
its a power movement which seeks power by other means than war, because war socialism didnt work… and revolution didnt work… now they are trying subversion.. and they are winning this one in ways that they never did before. the lie and the indiret attack using others as your pawns and stepping sones is the way to go.
its already too late…
we have passed the event horizon, and no force can pull us back other than a nuclear bomb, or a huge attack. the reason we havent had one, is for this reason, not because of security. you cant convince me that they can smuggle in a few tons of cocaine in one shot, and not include 10 hand grenades that can be tossed into a subway car as the doors close (tie a string to release the spoon after its gone down the tunnel). they can build roadside things from scraps, and you can buy things here… but they arent smart enough to just do something? they are. its jsut that it didnt make us cower, it made us reverse 20 years of progress towards totalitarianism and subversion in one month.
sigh.
Schumpeter traces the history of the intellectual from the monastery, where he was born, to the rise of capitalism, which “let him loose and presented him with the printing press.” Similarly, the patron slowly gave way in the last quarter of the eighteenth century to that “collective patron, the bourgeois public.” Although the intellectual conceived his role to épater the public, he found, much to his delight, that flabbergasting sells; the public would pay for his “nuisance value.”
this is the difference between a scientist, and a person using science for a poltiical end (reason is unimportant).
from the pagan culture where they taught the wealthy, told stories, invented medicines, etc…
they are a biological type!!! so some went to monestaries… but so did empiricists, and moralists. they are intellectuals, not smart.
In his classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), the economist Joseph A. Schumpeter sketched in a brilliant “Sociology of the Intellectual.” Things have not changed much in sixty odd years. The intellectuals he has in mind are distinguished by “active hostility to the social order.” Their job, as they see it, is “to work up and organize resentment, to nurse it, to voice it and to lead it.” Not everyone who receives a university schooling ends up an intellectual, but a university schooling is nearly universal among intellectuals. The common training provides a common cause. Or, as Schumpeter phrases it, “the fact that their minds are all similarly furnished facilitates understanding between them and constitutes a bond.”
jump over the change to empiricism.. and you end up with colleges… places of learning… and when they had no place in religion, medicine, etc.. they went to eduation… and so they went in and decided tochange the world by betraying the public trust… (listening to communists tell them that they will be on top if they help the cause).
to return to shumpeter..
The major change in the twentieth century was the expansion of the university–the emergence of Clark Kerr’s multiversity. The trend only accelerated in the years following the first edition of Schumpeter’s book. From 1930 to 1957 college enrollments in the U.S. more than doubled, and between 1960 and 1969 they doubled again, rising to over seven million. The faculty expanded along with enrollment.
The trouble is, as Schumpeter notes, the enormous expansion of the university created the conditions of what would now be called underemployment. “The man who has gone through a college or university,” he writes, “easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work.” What is such a man to do? He “drift[s] into the vocations in which standards are least definite,” like journalism, literature, or scholarship, thus “swell[ing] the host of intellectuals. . . .”
The economic conditions breed discontent–the intellectual feels underappreciated and underpaid–and discontent breeds resentment toward the social order which does not recognize the intellectual’s genius and unique value. Add to this the fact that the system of emoluments seems capricious, rewarding some who are no more talented or accomplished than those who are deprived.
to quote what i wrote to someone (who posted it today),
Hostility is the product of rationalization from personal experience.
“[T]he intellectual’s righteous indignation about the wrongs of capitalism,” Schumpeter concludes, “simply represents the logical inference from outrageous facts,” and such thinking is little different–little better–than “the theory of lovers that their feelings represent nothing but the logical inference from the virtues of the beloved.”
The analogy is exact. Love is not a rational choice, although should you ask any lover why he favors his beloved he will reply with a long list of “reasons.” If I love you because you are beautiful and brilliant, though, what becomes of my love when you lose your looks or perhaps your mind? So too with the modern university intellectual’s pose of social hostility. It does not arise from a rational analysis of the American order, but as a distortion of one’s own personal circumstances. I should make better money; I should get the social recognition of a doctor or lawyer (my education is equal to or greater than theirs). To conceal the neurosis of this resentment from myself, I generalize it, transforming it into a social ideal. Why should a businessman make more than a teacher? (If a plumber thinks he can earn $250,000, however, he’s a joke.)
i added
in the line “the persuit of happiness” is why they don’t get it. they are miserable, they are going to move people by making them miserable. They will empower the state by making people miserable. Want to know why a doctor or lawyer or even an actor makes a lot more than they? Its bcause they make people HAPPY. Making people happy is beyond the ken of people so miserable!!! The doctor makes people happier. The lawyer strives to make people happier… even the plumber makes people happier!!! A intelligentsia can do nothing but complain, grouse, belittle, ad hominem attack, and more… the reason that they don’t make much is that they make peole miserable, and if it weren’t for the course creds no one would pay much attention to them. which is why the communists use them!!! they are angry little people who wish to see the ones that don’t love them get punished. They are borderline personalities taking it out on a society that is indifferent to them
Thus personal resentment and feelings of superiority are translated into an idealized image of social concern and responsibility. The humanities or social science professor, hating society, sees himself as the better man. And only wishes to associate with those who share his ideals–that is, those with equally idealized images of themselves.
For anyone wanting to read a good book by a “denier,” may I recommend, “CLIMATE CONFUSION,” by Roy Spencer. Even a lay person can understand the science Dr. Spencer covers. He also has some great chapters describing how green solutions will cripple the economy and how conservation, wind, and solar cannot hope to provide enough energy for the future. A clear minded look at and rationally argued case against the alarmism of AGW.
“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.”
-Michael Crichton
I wonder how much longer we will have to wait for skeptics to publish some peer reviewed research.
Religion has no place in government as politics have no place in science.
You don’t have to wait. It’s all over the place. There are attempts to repress it, of course, but it’s out there. But you would know that if you had any clue about anything. Instead, you’re doing what you decry, injecting politics into science.