Research claim: dropping CO2 caused formation of Antarctic ice cap

“Has anyone put together a coherent history/framework of how this came about and just who benefits and to what end and extent? I’d appreciate a link or other pointer. Thanks.”
Mike A UK
There are six factors that I’ve posted about here, which I’ll repeat below: Ted Turner’s grant to the UN, the payments to the undeveloped countries, the template of ozone-depleting CFGs, faddism, a modernist bias, and “knowledge cartels.”
I think there are several other factors, most importantly that official Science has finally risen to a high enough social position that it has “gotten above itself” and succumbed to pride, putting too much belief in the supposedly self-correcting nature of its procedures (the scientific method and peer review) and the integrity and objectivity of its personnel, and ignoring the social and political aspect that goes into the formation of scientific consensuses.
1. The UN’s IPCC was set up to please Ted Turner, a warmist who donated a billion $ to the UN for general purposes, and who requested it. It was then staffed by fanatical warmists. The UN’s agenda is to repay their alarmist benefactor, and possibly to induce further donations.
2. Since warmism involves payments from the West to the undeveloped countries, a majority at the UN favors the warmists’ position. This likely has an influence on the “watermelon” activists in Greenpeace, etc.
3. The discovery that Freon was responsible for the widening ozone holes at the poles may have created a “template” for Hansen and other warmists. I remember following news reports about this hypothesis at the time. My recollection is that the subtlety and indirectness of the process, via various knock-on effects, was a mind-boggler and aroused skepticism at first. It took several years for opinion leaders to come around. I suspect Hansen feels the resistance he’s encountered is just a replay of the ozone-hole resistance.
4. Extracts from:
Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads (2006)
By Joel Best (U. of California Press)
p. 4: In our society, most serious institutions—medicine, science, business, education, criminal justice, and so on—experience what we can call institutional fads.
p. 16: Consider three cases from the 1980s: [the author cites the widespread diagnosis of multiple personality disorder, quality circles, and cold fusion.]
p. 18: While the innovation is spreading, it is easy to believe, to dismiss the skeptics. … Their proponents often are respected figures in their professions, and their claims receive serious, deferential attention in the media.
p. 36: Often there are overtones of urgency—we must act now, we can’t afford to wait, because things will soon get worse and we’ll fall further behind. This is what many institutional fads offer—the promise of a sudden, wonder-working, paradigm-shifting, revolutionary, quantum-leap breakthrough.
pp. 82-83: Fads … can be fun. When people are aware that an innovation is spreading, they often feel excited. There is a widespread sense that being part of a big, important change has something thrilling, even joyful about it.
pp. 84-85: It is easy to find excitement in doing something different, if only because change breaks the boredom of routine. … There is pride in being a pioneer, one of the early adopters—the first kid on your block.
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This enthusiasm may cause a rush toward wholesale adoption. …
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People also find comfort in being part of the in crowd, in joining with other adopters. To the degree that you admire the trend-setters, you will be pleased to join them. … You’re now an insider, a status that is part of the appeal of stylishness. The feeling that you have made the right choice is not just personal (“it’s the right choice for me”) but also social (“Others will see that I’ve made the right choice”).
Pp 88-89: Adopters often also feel a sense of superiority because they have opportunities to exercise power. Once an organization’s leaders have adopted some innovation, they may require their subordinates to get with the program—to attend training workshops, adopt the new lingo, and so on.
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[Summing up,] institutional fads spread because individuals within organizations experience boredom, hope, pride, status seeking, status anxiety, and other feelings, and then decide to adopt the novelty that promises to improve things and make them feel better. As a result, members bring their organizations onto the bandwagon …. Organizations experience two sorts of bandwagon pressures, both of which have their parallels among individuals: first, the knowledge that other organizations have adopted a novelty pulls us to think we ought to do the same; second, worries that our competitors may be taking advantage of the innovation to get the jump on us pushes us to act.
pp. 90-92: In addition, they [people] may calculate that adoption [of a novelty] offers advantages to them personally. Consider the plight of Professor Alice, this chapter’s imaginary figure; she has just received her Ph.D. … [but] she will not receive tenure and promotion to associate professor unless she publishes some articles in scholarly journals.
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Scholarly journals won’t publish anything that doesn’t say something new … . But there are already bookcases full of studies of Shakespeare and Jane Austen. What’s left for Professor Alice to write about?
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Professor Alice has seen an article in a newsmagazine about physicists studying something called “chaos theory.” The name sounds promising. Professor Alice hasn’t taken physics since high school, but she already has ideas for a title—something along the lines of “Kingdoms in Chaos: The Physics of Royal Courts in Shakespeare’s Tragedies.” Professor Alice’s tenure is virtually assured.
Individuals often find advantages in hooking their wagons to some rising enthusiasm. … Becoming associated with a trendy novelty suggests to others that you are with it, on top of things, in the know, progressive, forward-looking—and all of those other chichés that assign approval to pioneers of novelty. Often, there are intimations of generational rivalries: those advocating changes are young lions, willing to stand up against the old guard. Institutional fads offer a rationale for turning the reins over to a new generation that is not mired in the past, one that welcomes the future.
pp. 94-95: Professor Alice … illustrate[s] the importance of careerism—making choices that will advance one’s career—in the spread of such fads.
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Whenever an organization adopts an innovation,, there is the possibility that parts of the organization will change. Maybe new jobs, such as director of appraisal planning, will appear. … The organization will be—at least to some degree—in flux, which will almost certainly create opportunities. … And, of course, if a novelty comes endorsed by your supervisors … actively resisting the change may put your career at risk. It can be much easier to go along with the changes.
p. 113: We can think of diffusion—the enduring spread of some novelty—as taking two forms. One form involves the choices of many individuals …. The other form of diffusion involves the establishment of institutional arrangements that make it harder to drop the innovation.
p. 127: People … are much less inclined to publicize their decision to abandon a fad. There are too many embarrassing interpretations. Did they make an unwise choice? Didn’t they know what they were doing? Were they sufficiently prudent, or did they rush into something they didn’t understand?
p. 19: These fads aren’t free. Just as “fashion victims” waste their money on unattractive clothing styles, there are fad victims. … Alternative uses for these resources fall by the wayside. … Alienation and cynicism can result.
5. A modernist bias: a desire by opinion leaders to seem modern and accepting of sophisticated arguments, instead of trusting in the untutored, non-expert, common sense view that climate is always changing. A desire to be on the side of the modern science of ecology and concern for the earth.
6. Knowledge cartels:
Science in the 21st Century: Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels
By HENRY H. BAUER
Professor Emeritus of Chemistry & Science Studies
Dean Emeritus of Arts & Sciences
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 643–660, 2004
http://henryhbauer.homestead.com/21stCenturyScience.pdf
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Supposedly authoritative information about the most salient science-related matters has become dangerously misleading because of the power of bureaucracies that co-opt or control science.
Science as an Institution
Dysfunction and obsolescence begin to set in, unobtrusively but insidiously, from the very moment that an institution achieves pre-eminence. The leading illustration of this Parkinson’s Law (Parkinson, 1958) was the (British) Royal Navy. Having come to rule the seas, the Navy slowly succumbed to bureaucratic bloat. The ratio of administrators to operators rose inexorably, and the Navy’s purpose, defense of the realm, became subordinate to the bureaucracy’s aim of serving itself. The changes came so gradually that it was decades before their effect became obvious.
Science attained hegemony in Western culture toward the end of the 19th century (Barzun, 2000: 606–607; Knight, 1986). This very success immediately sowed seeds of dysfunction: it spawned scientism, the delusive belief that science and only science could find proper answers to any and all questions that human beings might ponder. Other dysfunctions arrived later: funding through bureaucracies, commercialization, conflicts of interest. But the changes came so gradually that it was the latter stages of the 20th century before it became undeniable that things had gone seriously amiss.
It remains to be appreciated that 21st-century science is a different kind of thing than the ‘‘modern science’’ of the 17th through 20th centuries; there has been a ‘‘radical, irreversible, structural’’ ‘‘world-wide transformation in the way that science is organized and performed’’ (Ziman, 1994). Around 1950, Derek Price (1963/1986) discovered that modern science had grown exponentially, and he predicted that the character of science would change during the latter part of the 20th century as further such growth became impossible. One aspect of that change is that the scientific ethos no longer corresponds to the traditional ‘‘Mertonian’’ norms of disinterested skepticism and public sharing; it has become subordinate to corporate values. Mertonian norms made science reliable; the new ones described by Ziman (1994) do not.
Symptoms
One symptom of change, identifiable perhaps only in hindsight, was science’s failure, from about the middle of the 20th century on, to satisfy public curiosity about mysterious phenomena that arouse wide interest: psychic phenomena, UFOs, Loch Ness Monsters, Bigfoot. By contrast, a century earlier, prominent scientists had not hesitated to look into such mysteries as mediumship, which had aroused great public interest.
My claim here is not that UFOs or mediumship are phenomena whose substance belongs in the corpus of science; I am merely suggesting that when the public wants to know ‘‘What’s going on when people report UFOs?’’, the public deserves an informed response. It used to be taken for granted that the purpose of science was to seek the truth about all aspects of the natural world. That traditional purpose had been served by the Mertonian norms: Science disinterestedly and with appropriate skepticism coupled with originality seeks universally valid knowledge as a public good.
These norms imply that science is done by independent, self-motivated individuals. However, from about the middle of the 20th century and in certain situations, some mainstream organizations of science were behaving not as voluntary associations of independent individuals but as bureaucracies. Popular dissatisfaction with some of the consequences stimulated ‘‘New Age’’ movements. ….
A more widely noticed symptom was the marked increase in fraud and cheating by scientists. In 1981, the U. S. Congress held hearings prompted by public disclosure of scientific misconduct at 4 prominent research institutions. Then, science journalists Broad and Wade (1982) published their sweeping indictment, Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science. It has become almost routine to read in the NIH Guide of researchers who admitted to fraud and were then barred from certain activities for some specified number of years. In 1989, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) established an Office of Scientific Integrity. So prevalent was dishonesty that the new academic specialty of ‘‘research ethics’’ came into being. Professional scientific organizations drafted or revised codes of ethics. Various groups, including government agencies, attempted to make prescriptive for researchers what had traditionally been taken for granted, namely, something like the Mertonian norms.
This epidemic of cheating in the latter part of the 20th century meant, clearly enough, that an increasing number of scientists were seeking to serve their personal interests instead of the public good of universal knowledge.
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Throughout the history of modern science, the chief safeguard of reliability was communal critiquing (Ziman, 2000). Science begins as hunches. Those that work out become pieces of frontier science. If competent peers think it worthy of attention, an item gets published in the primary research literature. If other researchers find it useful and accurate, eventually the knowledge gets into review articles and monographs and finally into textbooks. The history of science demonstrates that, sooner or later, most frontier science turns out to need modifying or to have been misleading or even entirely wrong. Science employs a knowledge filter that slowly separates the wheat from the chaff (Bauer, 1992: chapter 3; see Figure 1).
This filter works in proportion to the honesty and disinterestedness of peer reviewers and researchers. In the early days of modern science, before knowledge became highly specialized and compartmentalized, knowledge-seekers could effectively critique one another’s claims across the board. Later and for a time, there were enough people working independently on a given topic that competent, disinterested critiques could often be obtained. Since about the middle of the 20th century, however, the costs of research and the need for teams of cooperating specialists have made it increasingly difficult to find reviewers who are both directly knowledgeable and also disinterested; truly informed people are effectively either colleagues or competitors. Correspondingly, reports from the big science bureaucracies do not have the benefit of independent review before being issued.
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Causes
Price (1963/1986) saw the exploding costs of research after WWII as a likely mechanism for bringing to an end the era of exponentially growing science. The mentioned symptoms may indeed be traced to the escalating costs of research and the continuing expansion of the number of would-be researchers without a proportionate increase in available funds. The stakes became very high. Researchers had to compete more and more vigorously, which tended to mean more unscrupulously. The temptation became greater to accept and solicit funds and patrons while ignoring tangible or moral attached strings.
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Unrealistic expectations coupled with misunderstanding of how science works led to the unstated presumption that good science could be expanded and accelerated by recruiting more scientists. Instead, of course, the massive infusion of government funds since WWII had inevitably deleterious consequences. More researchers translate into less excellence and more mediocrity. Journeymen peer-reviewers tend to stifle rather than encourage creativity and genuine innovation. Centralized funding and centralized decision-making make science more bureaucratic and less an activity of independent, self-motivated truth-seekers. Science attracts careerists instead of curiosity-driven idealists. Universities and individuals are encouraged to view scientific research as a cash cow to bring in money as ‘‘indirect costs’’ for all sorts of purposes, instead of seeking needed funds for doing good science. The measure of scientific achievement becomes the amount of ‘‘research support’’ brought in, not the production of useful knowledge.
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Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels
Skepticism toward research claims is absolutely necessary to safeguard reliability. In corporate settings, where results are expected to meet corporate goals, criticism may be brushed off as disloyalty, and skepticism is thereby suppressed. As Ziman (1994) pointed out, the Mertonian norms of ‘‘academic’’ science have been replaced by norms suited to a proprietary, patent- and profit-seeking environment in which researchers feel answerable not to a universally valid standard of trustworthy knowledge but to local managers. A similar effect, the suppression of skepticism, results from the funding of science and the dissemination of results by or through non-profit bureaucracies such as the NIH or agencies of the United Nations.
While the changes in the circumstances of scientific activity were quite gradual for 2 or 3 centuries, they have now cumulated into a change in kind. Corporate science, Big Science, is a different kind of thing than academic science, and society needs to deal with it differently. Large institutional bureaucracies now dominate the public face of science. Long-standing patrons—private foundations like Rockefeller and Ford, charitable organizations like the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society—have been joined and dwarfed by government bureaucracies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the NIH, and the National Science Foundation, which, in turn, are being overshadowed by international bodies like the World Bank and various agencies of the United Nations—the World Health Organization, the Food and Agricultural Organization, UNAIDS, and more. Statements, press releases, and formal reports from these bodies often purport to convey scientific information, but in reality these releases are best viewed as propaganda designed to serve the corporate interests of the bureaucracies that issue them.
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The upshot is that policy makers and the public generally do not realize that there is doubt about, indeed evidence against, some theories almost universally viewed as true, about issues of enormous public import: global warming; healthy diet, heart-disease risk-factors, and appropriate medication; HIV/AIDS; gene therapy; stem cells; and more.
‘‘Everyone knows’’ that promiscuous burning of fossil fuels is warming up global climates. Everyone does not know that competent experts dispute this and that official predictions are based on tentative data fed into computer models whose validity could be known only many decades hence (Crichton, 2003).
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What ‘‘everyone knows’’ about the science related to major public issues, then, often fails to reflect the actual state of scientific knowledge. In effect, there exist knowledge monopolies composed of international and national bureaucracies. Since those same organizations play a large role in the funding of research as well as in the promulgation of findings, these monopolies are at the same time research cartels. Minority views are not published in widely read periodicals, and unorthodox work is not supported by the main funding organizations. Instead of disinterested peer review, mainstream insiders insist on their point of view in order to perpetuate their prestige and privileged positions. That is the case even on so academic a matter as the Big-Bang theory of the universe’s origin.
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It is not that knowledge monopolies are able to exercise absolute censorship. Contrary views are expressed, but one must know where to look for them; so one must already have some reason to make the effort. That constitutes a vicious circle. Moreover, the contrarian view will often seem a priori unreliable or politically partisan, as already noted. Altogether, people exposed chiefly to mainstream media will likely never suspect—will have no reason to suspect—that there could exist a credible case different from the officially accepted one.
The conventional wisdom about these matters is continually reinforced by publicly broadcast snippets that underscore the official dogma. What other reason might there be to publicize, for example, the guesstimate that global warming will cause an increase in asthma attacks (Daily Telegraph, 2004)? This is just another ‘‘fact’’ to convince us that we must curb the use of coal, gas, and oil.
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Reform?
The ills of contemporary science—commercialization, fraud, untrustworthy public information—are plausibly symptoms of the crisis, foreseen by Derek Price (1963/1986), as the era of exponentially growing modern science comes to an end. Science in the 21st century will be a different animal from the so-called ‘‘modern science’’ of the 17th to 20th centuries. The question is not whether to reform the science we knew, but whether society can arrange the corporate, commercialized science of the future so that it can continue to expand the range of trustworthy knowledge. Ziman (1994: 276) points out that any research organization requires ‘‘generous measures’’ of
_ room for personal initiative and creativity;
_ time for ideas to grow to maturity;
_ openness to debate and criticism;
_ hospitality toward novelty;
_ respect for specialized expertise.
These describe a free intellectual market in which independent thinkers interact, and there may be a viable analogy with economic life. Economic free markets are supposed to be efficient and socially useful because the mutually competitive ventures of independent entrepreneurs are self-corrected by an ‘‘invisible hand’’ that regulates supply to demand; competition needs to be protected against monopolies that exploit rather than serve society. So, too, the scientific free market in which peer review acts as an invisible hand (Harnad, 2000) needs to be protected from knowledge monopolies and research cartels. Anti-trust actions are called for.
Where public funds are concerned, legislation might help. When government agencies support research or development ventures, they might be required to allocate, say, 10% of the total to competent people of past achievement who hold contrarian views.
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It should also be legislated that scientific advisory panels and grant-reviewing arrangements include representatives of views that differ from the mainstream.
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Where legislation is being considered about public policy that involves scientific issues, a Science Court might be established to arbitrate between mainstream and variant views, something discussed in the 1960s but never acted upon.
Ombudsman offices might be established by journals, consortia of journals, private foundations, and government agencies to investigate charges of misleading claims, unwarranted publication, unsound interpretation, and the like. The existence of such offices could also provide assistance and protection for whistle-blowers.
Sorely needed is vigorously investigative science journalism, so that propaganda from the knowledge bureaucracies is not automatically passed on. To make this possible, the media need to know about and have access to the whole spectrum of scientific opinion on the given issue. The suggestions made above would all provide a measure of help along that line. A constant dilemma for reporters is that they need access to sources, and if they publish material that casts doubt on the official view, they risk losing access to official sources.

Just a wild shot from an under-educated psychologist, but could the formation of the ice sheet be the cause of the reduction in atmospheric CO2 and not the other way round?

This ‘Nature’ article is just so much rubbish.
What a propaganda rag ‘Nature’ has become.
I’m cancelling my subscription forthwith.