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
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Aligner (11:10:51) :
You are either a non-scientist or have been indoctrinated. If you keep that up, in ten years time you’ll be extolling the virtues of eugenics, mass population culling, etc. arrived at by the same methodology. And others will have used you as a useful idiot
No worries on that front Aligner, I’m fully in command of myself and my perceptions, and I’m nobody’s fool. The warmists try to consolidate their position with false positivism. They claim that they can discount other explanations for climate warming, and by a process of elimination pinpoint the cause.
Who do they think they are? Sherlock bloody Holmes? Someone needs to tell them that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote fiction
The sceptic position is the correct one. We have no fully consistent explanation for the variation in climate. Natural variation is the default position. All other hypotheses, GCR’s, solar, geomagnetic are in play in the same way co2 is. None of them carries certainty about the extent of their effect.
Personally, I’m working on a planetary-solar theory, but as I said in my post, there is no access to objective truth about climate variation at this point. The sooner everyone gets their heads around that the better.
Aligner (11:10:51) :
You are either a non-scientist or have been indoctrinated. If you keep that up, in ten years time you’ll be extolling the virtues of eugenics, mass population culling, etc. arrived at by the same methodology. And others will have used you as a useful idiot
No worries on that front Aligner, I’m fully in command of myself and my perceptions, and I’m nobody’s fool. The warmists try to consolidate their position with false positivism. They claim that they can discount other explanations for climate warming, and by a process of elimination pinpoint the cause.
Who do they think they are? Sherlock bloody Holmes? Someone needs to tell them that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote fiction
The sceptic position is the correct one. We have no fully consistent explanation for the variation in climate. Natural variation is the default position. All other hypotheses, GCR’s, solar, geomagnetic are in play in the same way co2 is. None of them carries certainty about the extent of their effect.
I’m working on a planetary-solar theory, but as I said in my post, there is no access to objective truth about climate variation at this point, although there are some very bright people with some good clue. The sooner everyone gets their heads around that the better.
And if I said that twice, it’s because it bears repeating.
You all probably saw this email already, but this fellow was describing how he found a solar cycle-temp relationship:
The transform result shows a sharp spike at the 11 year point (I wonder
what is significant about 11 years?). The second part of the instructions
now acts upon this observed spike (the Cos 11 bit), to extract it’s
waveform from the rest of the noise. The result is shown as a waveform
in attachment 3, the waves having an 11-year period, with the long-term
Sydney warming easily evident.
Attachment 4 shows the original Sydney data overlaid against the 11-year
periodicity.
It would appear that the solar cycle does indeed affect temperature.
(I tried the same run on the CRU global temperature set. Even though CRU
must be highly smoothed by the time all the averages are worked out, the
11-year pulse is still there, albeit about half the size of Sydneys).
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=6
tallbloke (18:07:09) :
Apologies for grabbing the wrong end of a hockey stick. Discussion about PNS and those who seek to legitimise it in the context of AGW got the better of me. Red noise overload I’m afraid, it’s broken again 🙂
If you’ve not established urgency, reached some ethical impasse, etc. by normal science in the first place, surely you ought not to dabble about in the abstruse philosophising of PNS, period! Where is the established urgency, etc. the cart seems to be before the horse?
If you’re incapable of deep introspection and detachment from your own conditioning and prejudices, should you not place PNS off limits to yourself? Hulme uses terms like “political preferences” in his 2007 Guardian article. Whose preferences is he referring to? Is the very appearance of this disingenuous putdown in a convenient part of MSM indicative of such inward consideration, just a “chink of weakness” or the complete antithesis?
If only the billions of dollars wasted on post-normal Hansel and Gretel from the Brothers Grimm (not to mention post-venusian fortran, equally grim) had been used to ramp up fundamental research. We’d be much further down the track of solid rather than “authoritarian and exclusive” knowledge production. Nice choice of words though, very Freudian.
I guess it’ll all come out in the wash eventually. Good luck with your theory, tallbloke. No theories here, just hobby observation of Bz spikes and marked Np/Vsw movements with half an eye on Dr S’s MF/F10.7 plots. Interested only in what turns up and when during this exceptional cycle we’re all privileged to witness. Mind you, if L & P’s hypothesis continues to grow legs I may regret describing it like that 🙂
Re. Jim’s comments on Hulme:
I was impressed with Dr. Lindzen’s quotes from “Why We Disagree About Climate Change”:
“The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identities and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but what climate change can do for us.”
“Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs.”
“We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilize them in support of our projects.”
“These myths transcend the scientific categories of ‘true’ and ‘false’.”
I am struck by the last quote. It seems to me Hulme has a distorted view of science, as scientists practice it. I remember a discussion I and an Australian high school teacher were having with Dr. Alan Kay about post-modernism. Kay said:
Post-modernism is a mis-reaction of non-scientists (who still try to think) to science, and part of their confusion is that their (essentially Medieval scholastic) tradition of true-false-not logic quite misses that science is a thousand versions of “false” (some of them useful and close), but no version of “truth”. They wrongly think that not-true is “just false”, and miss how neat and important “some falses” are.
I haven’t read the book, but after seeing several quotes from it I’m getting the impression that Hulme is an affirmative post-modernist. The post-modernist belief is there is no such thing as objective truth, and therefor nothing can be defined objectively. Come to think of it, scientists would agree with that aspect. Where post-modernism and science diverge is PM says that all “truths” are just narratives, and all are equally valid. A post-modernist would therefor believe that scientists are just fooling themselves by thinking they’re finding or seeing “a better version of reality”.
There’s another version of PM called “affirmative post-modernism”. It agrees that there is no absolute truth, and that all “truths” are just competing narratives, but it espouses the idea that there are some narratives that are better than others, and which should therefor be espoused above all the other narratives. It introduces values into the mix, and the preferred values are those which “promote social justice”. What’s interesting about this is affirmative PM acknowledges that there are some people who do not understand this, but just understand “truth” (ie. what they are told is true), and that there are others (presumably elites who will tell the masses what is “true”) who understand the “truth” of competing narratives, and know how to instill the appropriate beliefs and values in the masses, and how to deploy narratives to the people that will bring about “appropriate” actions. It is inherently elitist.
Hulme is somewhat right when he says that “scientists would not be able to answer how much CO2 is too much,” because that is a value judgment. But I would expect this is something that would be handled by politicians and the democratic process. What’s needed for this process to function well is information that has come about from a well-reasoned process, which is trusted, not distortions designed to promote a preferred outcome. But then, this is where PMs would disagree.
Hulme is somewhat right when he says that “scientists would not be able to answer how much CO2 is too much,” because that is a value judgment.
I should add that scientists could talk about how much is “too much” in one sense: The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere that would be dangerous to human and animal health (ie. what would make them lethargic, impede mental function, or suffocate), which is MUCH higher than what we have now.