This is a surprise. Professor Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia suggests that the “I.P.C.C. has run its course”. I agree with him. We really need to remove a wholly political organization, the United Nations, from science.
Republished from New York Times Reporter Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth:
Dot Earth: Insights from Mike Hulme at the University of East Anglia, which was the source of the disclosed files. Hulme, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia and author of “ Why We Disagree About Climate Change,” has weighed in with these thoughts about the significance of the leaked files and emails. In November 2009, Hulme was listed as “the 10th most cited author in the world in the field of climate change, between 1999 and 2009. (ScienceWatch, Nov/Dec 2009, see Table 2).
Hulme Key Excerpt:
[Upcoming UN climate conference in Copenhagen] “is about raw politics, not about the politics of science. […] It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science. It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production – just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.
Full Hulme Statement:
The key lesson to be learned is that not only must scientific knowledge about climate change be publicly owned — the I.P.C.C. does a fairly good job of this according to its own terms — but the very practices of scientific enquiry must also be publicly owned, in the sense of being open and trusted. From outside, and even to the neutral, the attitudes revealed in the emails do not look good. To those with bigger axes to grind it is just what they wanted to find.
This will blow its course soon in the conventional media without making too much difference to Copenhagen — after all, COP15 is about raw politics, not about the politics of science. But in the Internet worlds of deliberation and in the ‘mood’ of public debate about the trustworthiness of climate science, the reverberations of this episode will live on long beyond COP15. Climate scientists will have to work harder to earn the warranted trust of the public – and maybe that is no bad thing.
But this episode might signify something more in the unfolding story of climate change. This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.
It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production – just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.
h/t to Marc Morano
Sponsored IT training links:
Save your time and money with 642-832 online training. Download 70-646 Q & A with self paced EX0-101 practice exam to prepare and pass exam on first try.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Ron de Haan 15:12:22
Boy, I always seem to agree with you. Case in point–Obama is headed for Copenhagen. Oh, he must pick up his “noble prize” too! Good grief! I didn’t think it could get worse.
Some astonishing posts today on Jeff Id’s site:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/
“Why I think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC process
Eduardo Zorita, November 2009”
…and so on.
Can’t help but be reminded of Pielke, Sr.’s proposed alternative:
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/agu-natural-hazards-focus-group-website-launched/
Government tends to destroy that which it touches. Why should science be any different? Dissolve the IPPC.
Watch the markets over the coming weeks. As this snafu unravels the venture capitalists, grant money, and eventually political support for anything associated with AGW/green will evaporate. Bye bye.
Jim (13:41:10) :
“Are we going to trust Hume to lead the charge for change???
……………
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/03/mike-hulme-and-post-normal-science.html”
Post-normal science = Lysenkoism 2.0
I think this Hulme guy wants Phil Jone’s job. A bit of posturing for the selection committee. I’m so jaded.
I thought “primitive cultures’ wasn’t politically correct to say anymore? I’m pretty sure that is going to sound like the wrong metaphor for a lot of other academics.
Prof. Hulme is just now coming to the conclusion that just maybe climate science has become to tribal and political in nature?
Either these people are wholly disingenuous or they do not possess the necessary awareness and investigative ability to be research scientists. Climate science became all about politics, money and power decades ago.
It doesn’t have to remain so. Nobody forced scientists to prostitute themselves out for fame and fortune, they have been doing it willingly. All it would take to stop this is for scientists who are truly interested in their profession to stand up and refuse to continue down this road.
The fork in the road has now been presented to them. It will be interesting to see which path they choose. I remain skeptical.
Pops (14:34:21) :
Pachauri won’t mind if the IPCC is disbanded; he’ll run it again in his next life… and his next… and his next…”
Yes. All greenies know that recycling is a ~good thing~.
ScientistForTruth (15:27:06) “[…] the idea of climate change is so plastic”
This cat has more than 9 lives.
This is a strange times that we live in today. Most of the world leaders are about to gather in Copenhagen next week to agree on a plan to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide with the hope of avoiding further global warming and fight climate change . The total world expenditures will be well into the trillions of dollars through more taxation, higher energy costs and redistribution of wealth.
Yet there has been no unusual global warming for at least a decade and the small amount of warming that there was has now been accounted for by the natural planetary cycle called ENSO or El Nino. All natural cycles are pointing to a near term future of 20-30 years of cooler weather rather than unprecedented warming. The globe has been naturally warming since 1600 and periods of warming and cooling like today have existed many times before.
Recently released e-mails from the CRU climategate show the IPCC scientists saying that, “we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”. Their science has turned out to be flawed. The global temperatures have been declining while the CO2 was rising, completely opposite of what their science said.
So we have our current world that cannot find adequate money to fight world wide unemployment, poverty, disease, provide better health care and shelter for its poor, elderly and disenfranchised, yet it is willing to commit trillions of borrowed dollars to solve a problem that may not even exist as currently defined, supported by questionable science and a climate which at the very least, our best climate scientists claim they do not even understand.
Any prudent steward or national leader would say , this serious climate problem that we were told was imminent and catastrophic, no longer seems valid and the science for which is far from settled or completely understood yet, you climate scientists better go back and study this better. Meanwhile we have other global and regional priorities that need the limited funds much more at this moment. This is what Copenhagen leaders should do but time will tell if there are any real leaders among this group.
It looks like open source is coming to the sciences. The whole climate gate incident happened because of closed source software in the first place. You can’t trust a scientist that uses Microsoft because that is an indication of a way of thinking. Just like with the software, if we want high quality science we need to go open source. http://ojuul.baywords.com/2009/11/27/climate-research-hackees-lay-low/
Meh!
The cockroaches always come out into the open to die.
To be honest, it doesn’t have choice. It’s funded by the tax-payer, which means it’s funded by the government.
@ScientistForTruth (15:27:06)
Thanks for that bit about post-normal science, your second such comment today. In conjunction with other comments on tribalism, this makes the approved, peer-reviewed approach of climate science appear to be nothing but superstitious primitive mysticism with a shiny, seductive, modern veneer of respectability (and a very thin one at that).
It’s a symbiotic relationship between politician and scientist, better discussed in Ayn Rand’s essay, “For the New Intellectual.” (Title essay from the book of the same name.) Her description is more telling — Attila and the Witch Doctor. While it’s a metaphorical term and might have once been thought of as describing the relationship between king and priest, it’s also frighteningly descriptive of the relationship that has devolved over more than half a century between politicians and scientists.
And if you want a really disquieting image, associate names such as Mann, Hansen, Hulme, et al with witch doctor. The classic scientist is a dying breed.
Off topic (again) but interesting explanation of the way in which public opinion has been manipulated by Climate Change evangelists….
http://www.devilskitchen.me.uk/2009/11/crudgate-why-this-cant-be-swept-under.html
I think the majority of folk posting above have misunderstood Hulme, just as they misunderstood Monbiot calling for Dr Phil Jones’s resignation.
This pair are not contrite. They do not regret the conspiracy. They are “moving on” to the next stage of the consolidation of the now almost world-wide acceptance of this mad ideology of “climate change”.
They are distinguishing the science from the politics because the science does not matter any more one way or the other. It has been superceded. FAITH has surpassed questionning and objectivity. They are on a mission to save us from ourselves.
VERY dangerous people!
I am surprised so many on this thread think Hulme is “on their side”. That is very far from the truth, I’m afraid.
Climatology is a classificatory discipline akin to botany: Not an empirical science, because by definition there cannot be any experiments. What Warmsters do is formulate preconceived hypotheses that accord with their atavistic, regressive Statist ideology, then justify their propaganda by fabricating data, corrupting methodology, posing spurious assumptions, all the while colluding to suppress dissent by any and all means. Characterizing this as “tribalism” posits such behavior as an inevitable facet of fallible human nature. But no: Since 1988, a mutual-admiration society of barely thirty tenured academic radicals has consciously, knowingly conspired to undermine public-interest research projects at the root, politicizing every aspect of their franchise with a view to personal aggrandizement and enrichment at credulous society’s expense.
When practitioners of any objective, rational endeavor withhold base data, conceal analytical methods, hold themselves immune to ethical and even legal constraints by restricting their sacred “peer review” to co-conspirators, no-one need accept any of their hypotheses whatever because disinterested third-party replication is impossible. Science is not thereby impugned but reinforced: Properly conducted in face of obstacles worthy of Galileo, honest inquiry well-meant becomes heroic.
For whatever reason, since the mid-1960s a socio-cultural gangrene has festered in body politics worldwide. Cultism of the Al Gore variety –feckless, nasty, prima facie idiotic to the nth degree– has nonetheless infected peculating elites at every level, fostering a global kakistocracy of nihilistic sociopaths bent on blasting post-Enlightenment industrial civilization at the root. Courts no more concern themselves with decent principles aka the Rule of Law than executive or legislative bodies do with matters marginal to insiders’ self-aggrandizement.
Now facing demographic demolition, beset by a looming Maunder Minimum presaging an overdue end to our median 12,250-year Holocene Interglacial Epoch, free-market peace-and-prosperity burgeoning since the 1950s is falling victim to a wrecking crew of trans-generational saboteurs. Odds seem 70:30 that, by default, they will succeed in tipping global populations into a viciously repressive, neo-feudal New Medieval Age. If so, benighted national polities will have only themselves to blame.
If you want an example of the politicization of these scientists (the term used loosely)…you may be interested to read something I wrote back in early November…before Climategate broke:
http://rightfans.blogspot.com/2009/11/pardon-interruption-real-character-of.html
It’s an off-topic blog, so I apologize if that’s not considered an OK linking practice hear…but I think the comments of the keynote speaker I reference are pretty appalling and representative of what these elitists really think.
The scientist in question, BTW, is Alan Robock – Rutgers University
Jim, Lubos goes on to reference this excellent piece by Melanie Phillips, who find the money quote:
That’s breathtaking. This guy is dangerous.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6115644.stm
Chaotic world of climate truth
VIEWPOINT
By Mike Hulme, 4 November 2006
Director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research
“But over the last few years a new environmental phenomenon has been constructed in this country – the phenomenon of “catastrophic” climate change.
It seems that mere “climate change” was not going to be bad enough, and so now it must be “catastrophic” to be worthy of attention.
The increasing use of this pejorative term – and its bedfellow qualifiers “chaotic”, “irreversible”, “rapid” – has altered the public discourse around climate change.
This discourse is now characterised by phrases such as “climate change is worse than we thought”, that we are approaching “irreversible tipping in the Earth’s climate”, and that we are “at the point of no return”.
It seems that we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the (catastrophe) sceptics
I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric.
It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the (catastrophe) sceptics. How the wheel turns.”
What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy; it is whether we have sufficient foresight, supported by wisdom, to allow our perspective about the future, and our responsibility for it, to be altered. All of us alive today have a stake in the future, and so we should all play a role in generating sufficient, inclusive and imposing knowledge about the future. Climate change is too important to be left to scientists – least of all the normal ones.
quoted from Hume, Guardian 2007
Calvin, your link is broken/wrong.
The US “Thanksgiving” holiday is perhaps aptly named, as it seems that the HMS Globaloney’s rats are queueing up at the scuppers.