[Vision2020] Climate & Science

[Ted Moffett]

Thanks for posting the article on climate and science.

I have written a long comment on "Experts and Global Warming"
that I will not post till I rewrite and edit, assuming I get around to it...

But the statement "I'm just not comfortable following the orders of our
Global Climate Science Overlords blindly, because I've learned not to trust
them." is so incredible, I hope that it was meant in jest, or as a parody,
or as bait for discussion.

The level of paranoid extreme conspiracy implied by this statement is so
over the top all I can do is laugh, except when I realize there are a scary
number of people who actually literally in all seriousness think in this
manner...

Then I stop laughing!

Do you really, really believe the numerous competent and professional
scientists involved with numerous scientific organizations in many nations,
who have been researching and publishing on climate science for over 100
years, represent some sort of global conspiracy as "Global Climate Science
Overlords?"

An in-depth study of the history of climate science reveals that by 1980,
the general outlines of the science indicating that human sourced CO2
emissions, if continued unabated, were likely to substantially alter
climate, was already established, long before this issue became a political,
ideological and economic battleground.  These scientists were for the most
part humbly pursuing their discipline in obscurity, trying to do competent
science and pursue their careers.  To imply they were a part of an order of
"Global Overlords" is hilarious and incredible!  Since 1980, the scientific
evidence, after extensive and rigorous skepticism and re-examination, has
only for the most part further confirmed the work of those earlier climate
scientists.

The field of climate science is perhaps the most vigorously vetted
and critically examined scientific field, in part because of the intense
political and ideological attacks against its integrity.  There is
substantial evidence that the primary scientific fraud or hoax involved in
climate science in the media and Internet, is the well funded and
politically supported junk science agenda to discredit the work of the
aforementioned climate scientists, who had no agenda except competent
science (http://www.mark-bowen.com/book_cs.html :  Censoring Science: Inside
the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming ).

I could expand on this theme for a thousand pages, but I'll simply once
again offer an essay on the history of the scientific study of the CO2
greenhouse effect, going back over 100 years, from the American Institute of
Physics... And then for those inclined to paranoid conspiracy theories about
climate science "Global Overlords", I'll once again reference one of the
best satires on this paranoia, "The Knights Carbonic," from George Monbiot:

The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm
------------------------------------------------------
 The Knights Carbonic November 23, 2009
http://www.monbiot.com/2009/11/23/the-knights-carbonic/

Yes, the hacked climate emails are damaging. But here’s the one you’d need
to see if you wanted to show that manmade global warming is a scam.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian, 23rd November 2009

It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by
a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia
could scarcely be more damaging(1 <http://www.anelegantchaos.org/>). I am
now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by
them.

Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in
emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments
have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no
spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to
prevent scientific data from being
released(2<http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=914&filename=1219239172.txt>
,3<http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=490&filename=1107454306.txt>),
and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information
request(4<http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=891&filename=1212063122.txt>
).

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication
of work by climate
sceptics(5<http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=307&filename=1051190249.txt>
,6<http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=484&filename=1106322460.txt>),
or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change(7<http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=419&filename=1089318616.txt>).
I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of
the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.

But do these revelations justify the sceptics’ claims that this is “the
final nail in the coffin” of global warming
theory?(8<http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/>
,9 <http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=116882>) Not at all.
They damage the credibility of three or four scientists. They raise
questions about the integrity of one or perhaps two out of several hundred
lines of evidence. To bury manmade climate change, a far wider conspiracy
would have to be revealed. Luckily for the sceptics, and to my intense
disappointment, I have now been passed the damning email which confirms that
the entire science of global warming is indeed a scam. Had I known that it
was this easy to rig the evidence, I wouldn’t have wasted years of my life
promoting a bogus discipline. In the interests of open discourse, I feel
obliged to reproduce it here.

“From: ernst.kattweizel at redcar.ac.uk
Sent: 29th October 2009
To: The Knights Carbonic

Gentlemen, the culmination of our great plan approaches fast. What the
Master called “the ordering of men’s affairs by a transcendent world state,
ordained by God and answerable to no man”, which we now know as Communist
World Government, advances towards its climax at Copenhagen. For 185 years
since the Master, known to the laity as Joseph Fourier, launched his scheme
for world domination, the entire physical science community has been working
towards this moment.

The early phases of the plan worked magnificently. First the Master’s
initial thesis – that the release of infrared radiation is delayed by the
atmosphere – had to be accepted by the scientific establishment. I will not
bother you with details of the gold paid, the threats made and the blood
spilt to achieve this end. But the result was the elimination of the
naysayers and the disgrace or incarceration of the Master’s rivals. Within
35 years the 3rd Warden of the Grand Temple of the Knights Carbonic (our
revered prophet John Tyndall) was able to “demonstrate” the Master’s thesis.
Our control of physical science was by then so tight that no major
objections were sustained.

More resistence was encountered (and swiftly despatched) when we sought to
install the 6th Warden (Svante Arrhenius) first as professor of physics at
Stockholm University, then as rector. From this position he was able to
project the Master’s second grand law – that the infrared radiation trapped
in a planet’s atmosphere increases in line with the quantity of carbon
dioxide the atmosphere contains. He and his followers (led by the Junior
Warden Max Planck) were then able to adapt the entire canon of physical and
chemical science to sustain the second law.

Then began the most hazardous task of all: our attempt to control the
instrumental record. Securing the consent of the scientific establishment
was a simple matter. But thermometers had by then become widely available,
and amateur meteorologists were making their own readings. We needed to show
a steady rise as industrialisation proceeded, but some of these unfortunates
had other ideas. The global co-option of police and coroners required
unprecedented resources, but so far we have been able to cover our tracks.

The over-enthusiasm of certain of the Knights Carbonic in 1998 was most
regrettable. The high reading in that year has proved impossibly costly to
sustain. Those of our enemies who have yet to be silenced maintain that the
lower temperatures after that date provide evidence of global cooling, even
though we have ensured that eight of the ten warmest years since 1850 have
occurred since 2001(10<http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2008/pr20081216.html>).
>From now on we will engineer a smoother progression.

Our co-option of the physical world has been just as successful. The
thinning of the Arctic ice cap was a masterstroke. The ring of secret
nuclear power stations around the Arctic Circle, attached to giant immersion
heaters, remains undetected, as do the space-based lasers dissolving the
world’s glaciers.

Altering the migratory and reproductive patterns of the world’s wildlife has
proved more challenging. Though we have now asserted control over the
world’s biologists, there is no accounting for the unauthorised observations
of farmers, gardeners, bird-watchers and other troublemakers. We have
therefore been forced to drive migrating birds, fish and insects into higher
latitudes, and to release several million tonnes of plant pheromones every
year to accelerate flowering and fruiting. None of this is cheap, and ever
more public money, secretly diverted from national accounts by compliant
governments, is required to sustain it.

The co-operation of these governments requires unflagging effort. The
capture of George W. Bush, a late convert to the cause of Communist World
Government, was made possible only by the threatened release of footage
filmed by a knight at Yale, showing the future president engaged in coitus
with a Ford Mustang. Most ostensibly-capitalist governments remain apprised
of where their real interests lie, though I note with disappointment that we
have so far failed to eliminate Vaclav Klaus. Through the offices of
compliant states, the Master’s third grand law has been accepted: world
government will be established under the guise of controlling manmade
emissions of greenhouse gases.

Keeping the scientific community in line remains a challenge. The national
academies are becoming ever more querulous and greedy, and require higher
pay-offs each year. The inexplicable events of the past month, in which the
windows of all the leading scientific institutions were broken and a horse’s
head turned up in James Hansen’s bed, appear to have staved off the
immediate crisis, but for how much longer can we maintain the consensus?

Knights Carbonic, now that the hour of our triumph is at hand, I urge you
all to redouble your efforts. In the name of the Master, go forth and
terrify.

Professor Ernst Kattweizel, University of Redcar. 21st Grand Warden of the
Temple of the Knights Carbonic.”

This is the kind of conspiracy the deniers need to reveal to show that
manmade climate change is a con. The hacked emails are a hard knock, but the
science of global warming withstands much more than that.

------------------------------------------

Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 12:59 PM, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com>wrote:



>  I can't help being dismayed that someone whose  posts are praised as ones
> that "apply critical thinking to information and events in the news" would
> come down on the side of arguing *for* argument from authority.  That seems
> to me to be about as uncritical as you can get.
>
> One question to ask, in fact, one that's been lying around just begging to
> be asked is: why do experts in the field of climate science feel the need to
> argue from authority in the first place?  Shouldn't they let their
> methodology and conclusions speak for themselves?  This is science, after
> all.  Why did they deny multiple FOIA requests for their data simply because
> the person requesting them might be critical of their results?  Why did one
> of them specify in one of the Climategate emails that they would delete the
> information before they would allow themselves to be forced to give it up?
> Why did they "lose" the original unadjusted data?  Why do they feel
> obligated to get in the middle of policy-making?  Shouldn't they be
> conservatively stating their conclusions, with caveats, and letting the
> policy-makers decide their importance?
>
> Science is supposed to be egalitarian.  It shouldn't matter if an
> award-winning climate scientist submitted a paper or a fourteen-year-old
> Japanese school girl submitted it.  The paper should stand or fall on it's
> own merits.
>
> Also, "consensus among scientists" can be misleading.  In one poll I looked
> at (http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2009/2009-01-20-02.asp), scientists
> had to agree or disagree with two items: in the past 200 years, mean
> global temperatures have been rising, and that human activity is a
> "significant contributing factor" in changing mean global temperatures.  I
> would unequivocally answer "yes" to the first one, and probably answer "yes"
> to the second one.  The word "significant" has a special meaning in
> science.  The CO2 signature could be "significant" and not be very large.
> These statements also say nothing about the expected impact of global
> warming.  A person could answer "yes" to both statements and still feel that
> global warming is not a danger.  I would expect a critical thinker to
> wonder, if that's the case, why such importance is placed on such
> statements.  The right talks about "loyalty oaths", and I can sometimes see
> their point.
>
> I would also like to argue that a person doesn't have to be a complete
> "expert" in a field of study to see problems in one.  We live in a world in
> which we can educate ourselves quickly on very specific topics with a little
> motivation and a fair amount of time available.
>
> I'm just not comfortable following the orders of our Global Climate Science
> Overlords blindly, because I've learned not to trust them.
>
> Paul
>
>  ------------------------------
> *From:* Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com>
> *To:* vision2020 at moscow.com
> *Sent:* Wednesday, July 13, 2011 3:35 AM
> *Subject:* [Vision2020] Climate & Science
>
>  [image: Opinionator - A Gathering of Opinion From Around the Web]<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/>
>  July 12, 2011, 4:01 pm On Experts and Global Warming By GARY GUTTING<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/gary-gutting/>
>  The Stone <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/the-stone/> is a
> forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.
>  Tags:
> anthropogenic global warming<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/anthropogenic-global-warming/>,
> climate change <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/climate-change/>,
> Global Warming <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/global-warming/>,
> Plato <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/plato/>, science<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/science/>
>
> *The Stone is featuring occasional posts by Gary Gutting, a professor of
> philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, that apply critical thinking to
> information and events that have appeared in the news.
> *
> Experts have always posed a problem for democracies.  Plato scorned
> democracy, rating it the worst form of government short of tyranny, largely
> because it gave power to the ignorant many rather than to knowledgeable
> experts (philosophers, as he saw it).  But, if, as we insist, the people
> must ultimately decide, the question remains: How can we, non-experts, take
> account of expert opinion when it is relevant to decisions about public
> policy?
>
> One we accept the expert authority of climate science, we have no basis for
> supporting the minority position.
>
> To answer this question, we need to reflect on the logic of appeals to the
> authority of experts.  First of all, such appeals require a decision about
> who the experts on a given topic are.  Until there is agreement about this,
> expert opinion can have no persuasive role in our discussions.  Another
> requirement is that there be a consensus among the experts about points
> relevant to our discussion.   Precisely because we are not experts, we are
> in no position to adjudicate disputes among those who are.  Finally, given a
> consensus on a claim among recognized experts, we non-experts have no basis
> for rejecting the truth of the claim.
>
> These requirements may seem trivially obvious, but they have serious
> consequences.  Consider, for example, current discussions about climate
> change, specifically about whether there is long-term global warming caused
> primarily by human activities (anthropogenic global warming or A.G.W.).  All
> creditable parties to this debate recognize a group of experts designated as
> “climate scientists,” whom they cite in either support or opposition to
> their claims about global warming.  In contrast to enterprises such as
> astrology or homeopathy, there is no serious objection to the very project
> of climate science.  The only questions are about the conclusions this
> project supports about global warming.
> There is, moreover, no denying that there is a strong consensus<http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus-intermediate.htm>among climate scientists on the existence of A.G.W. — in their view, human
> activities are warming the planet.  There are climate scientists who doubt
> or deny this claim, but even they show a clear sense of opposing a view that
> is dominant in their discipline.   Non-expert opponents of A.G.W. usually
> base their case on various criticisms that a small minority of climate
> scientists have raised against the consensus view.   But non-experts are in
> no position to argue against the consensus of expert opinion.   As long as
> they accept the expert authority of the discipline of climate science, they
> have no basis for supporting the minority position.  Critics within the
> community of climate scientists may have a cogent case against A.G.W., but,
> given the overall consensus of that community, we non-experts have no basis
> for concluding that this is so.  It does no good to say that we find the
> consensus conclusions poorly supported.  Since we are not experts on the
> subject, our judgment  has no standing.
> It follows that a non-expert who wants to reject A.G.W. can do so only by
> arguing that climate science lacks the scientific status needed be taken
> seriously in our debates about public policy.  There may well be areas of
> inquiry (e.g., various sub-disciplines of the social sciences) open to this
> sort of critique.  But there does not seem to be a promising case against
> the scientific authority of climate science.  As noted, opponents of the
> consensus on global warming themselves argue from results of the discipline,
> and there is no reason to think that they would have had any problem
> accepting a consensus of climate scientists against global warming, had this
> emerged.
> Some non-expert opponents of global warming have made much of a number of
> e-mails written and circulated among a handful of climate scientists that
> they see as evidence of bias toward global warming. But unless this group is
> willing to argue from this small (and questionable) sample to the general
> unreliability of climate science as a discipline, they have no alternative
> but to accept the consensus view of climate scientists that these e-mails
> do not undermine the core result of global warming<http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/gate-fever-breaks/#more-22259>
> .
>  Related More From The Stone<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/the-stone/>
> Read previous contributions to this series.
>
>    - Go to All Posts »<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/the-stone/>
>
> I am not arguing the absolute authority of scientific conclusions in
> democratic debates.  It is not a matter of replacing Plato’s
> philosopher-kings with scientist-kings in our *polis*. We the people still
> need to decide (perhaps through our elected representatives) which groups we
> accept as having cognitive authority in our policy deliberations. Nor am I
> denying that there may be a logical gap between established scientific
> results and specific policy decisions.  The fact that there is significant
> global warming due to human activity does not of itself imply any particular
> response to this fact.  There remain pressing questions, for example, about
> the likely long-term effects of various plans for limiting CO2 emissions,
> the more immediate economic effects of such plans, and, especially, the
> proper balance between actual present sacrifices and probable long-term
> gains.  Here we still require the input of experts, but we must also make
> fundamental value judgments, a task that, *pace* Plato, we cannot turn
> over to experts.
> The essential point, however, is that once we have accepted the authority
> of a particular scientific discipline, we cannot consistently reject its
> conclusions.  To adapt Schopenhauer’s famous remark about causality, science
> is not a taxi-cab that we can get in and out of whenever we like.  Once we
> board the train of climate science, there is no alternative to taking it
> wherever it may go.
>
>
> --
> Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
> art.deco.studios at gmail.com
>
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