Peer-to-Peer Review: How ‘Climategate’ Marks the Maturing of a New Science Movement, Part I

Stefan (04:15:22) :
Yes, I too am glad there’s someone else here who is looking at things with an awareness of SD, and welcome your amplification of the container/content principle. As you indicate, you may look at the container and label it as one thing, but the underlying content may belong to some other meme, quite possibly the mean side of it. I’m sure that there are Blues and Oranges masquerading as Greens (perhaps fooling themselves no less than others), not to mention Greens masquerading as Blues or Oranges because they’re focused on ends rather than means (and in this case, is there sometimes rather more conscious deception involved?).
George Monbiot really intrigues me. Like him, I have an upper second-class honours degree in zoology, and yet we see the world so differently. He has the integrity to discern the dishonesty of the CRU people, and the intellectual ability/scientific training to understand the science at least as much as I do.
And yet, he doesn’t seem to take a step further to try to identify his own internal motivational dynamics. I think he wants to see in place the positive Green world of egalitarianism and spiritually-orientated human action (although he might not use the word “spirituality” per se). Maybe he’s conflicted: on the one hand, he has some scientific training and awareness, but on the other, deep-seated utopian yearnings, and is immensely disappointed and frustrated that others don’t seem to want to fall in line.
But why is that? Is it because they’re foolish, “deniers”? Or is it because at least some of them are a little bit more integrated, which means that they may be a little bit more pragmatic? The most impressive Greens by far are the pragmatic ones, the ones who are often out there in some African village, for example, wanting to balance the aims of biodiversity with the very real needs of the inhabitants to create for themselves a decent standard of living. If you ever want to see some of these people, I recommend the last episode in the BBC TV nature series “Planet Earth”. Yes, there’s a bit of over-the-top AGW proselytism in that episode, but also some impressive examples of the constructive Green Meme in action.
In our personal development, we all have to go through the different stages. As “terrible two-year-olds”, we are about as Red as red can be, and before puberty may be true Blues going on Orange. Then we may become idealistic Greens. But as we go along, we don’t lose the capacity to act from prior motivations. Mean Green may be as much about the “pure” Green meme being contaminated with memes that appeared earlier in individual/societal development as anything else.
People like some of the scientists in the CRU emails seem to me to be concerned with their Orange credentials, but somewhere along the line, Red pokes its head out. It’s about “me” and my ego, not about dispassionate and objective science. Looking back on my life, I’ve been there and done it myself, but luckily for me, the fate of the world has never rested on what I’ve thought and said.
Had it done so, what would have been my reaction? Would I have dug my heels in lest my ego be demolished in front of literally all of humanity, or had the good grace to admit to more uncertainty than I had formerly evinced? The more important and influential the issue, the more face has to be saved, and in their position, any of us could act the same way. There but for the grace of God, and ask not for whom the bell tolls…
The AGW issue seems to be potentially something that could lead to a breakthrough: a turning point in human affairs that future historians might identify as being as important as the Reformation, Enlightenment or Industrial Revolution. The current zeitgeist has a somewhat surreal quality about it that I definitely haven’t experienced in my lifetime before; it’s been gnawing at the edges of my awareness for some time now.
There may be something more than just the AGW debate going on, something that seems to be touching on many different human concerns, some of them possibly yet to be articulated. At an unconscious level, this may be why groups like WUWT have sprung up and attracted so many people. They may be like nuclei around which some “cloud” or other is forming, something which, to extend the metaphor, is going to alter the weather (or maybe even the climate! :-)).

Michael Larkin: “And yet, he doesn’t seem to take a step further to try to identify his own internal motivational dynamics.”
I once did an exercise to try to identify my internal motivational dynamics. Never again. What I encountered was pure mean-red, utterly evil.
I have no explanation for this, although I notice that my blues and greens seem to spend a lot of time in the attic rather than where I think they belong, in the basement, so that might account for it.
My other concern is that the oranges are forever getting underfoot, impeding my spiritual progress.
This is all quite distressing, and my feeling is that if I can just get my colours into their rightful place, the resulting clarity will help to bring this global warming issue into proper focus.

Stefan: “I mean, they may even be consuming more capitalist goodies than I do, and yet they call everyone else greedy? “
This is true. The green meme tends to be suffused with hypocrisy when it’s not being smugly superior about living off the grid and growing its own yoghurt. Clearly, there’s a lot of shadow work needed there, especially where, in my view, the purple meme can often be confused with shadow requirements.
However, I have personally found shadow work far from plain sailing. I am currently dealing with a young person who is frankly more “shady” than shadowy, which is causing me some angst.
When I quiz her on this, she insists that “the shadow always knows”. I suspect she is gaming the system, and am considering introducing a counter-meme in the form of something like “spotlight”, in order to eliminate the shadows.
But I wonder whether that sort of action would just introduce a whole new meme of “underground” or some such, where such behaviour would be completely out of my control.

CLIMATEGATE
THE TRACK RECORD OVER FOUR DECADES
a.n.ditchfield
My environmental awareness was aroused in mid 1971, when I was invited to a meeting of the Club of Rome in Rio de Janeiro. It first struck me as a constructive publicity move of FIAT, the sponsor. At intervals of a few months the Club of Rome invited noted scientists and intellectuals to meetings at tourist attractions like Rio de Janeiro, with all expenses paid. They were asked to meditate about the predicament of mankind and to listen to progress reports of a team of young MIT engineers who were using a computer model to project the impact on the planet of expanding economic activity. The results of the study were stated in the 1972 book, Limits to Growth, of which some 12 million copies were printed. The launching of the book was a masterpiece by editorial standards and its contents still remain central to such thought, including that of John Holdren, science adviser of Obama.
One of the new tools used in the study was the feed-back algorithm developed by Prof. Jay Forrester, of MIT, to portray the unfolding of complex systems over long timelines. All relevant factors are displayed in elaborate flowcharts and their interplay shown in a succession of stages like snapshots, in which the end of one stage is the beginning of the next. The idea is much like that of cinema, in which the rapid display of successive photos creates the optical illusion of movement. Forrester used his feedback innovation to the study of location problems of industry (Industrial Dynamics) and to explain the decay of metropolitan cities in America (Urban Dynamics). The new effort applied Forrester’s technique to demonstrate the Club of Rome proposition that a finite planet cannot support growth of population and economic activity at the pace seen for two decades after World War II. The conclusion was ready; it needed rationalization with a computer model to give a scientific look to what was the belief of the sponsors, FIAT chairman Aurelio Peccei and the renowned scientist Alexander King.
Limits to Growth had a large number of gloomy forecasts, speculative thought as such, but not science, and time rejected their validity. The earliest of the kind, the Malthus Essay on the Principle of Population published in 1798, foretold a grim 19th century. The population of Britain, stable at 5 million until the middle of the 18th century, had grown to 8 million and was expanding at a geometrical rate, while the supply of food expanded at a lower arithmetical rate. As Malthus saw it, population was bound to collapse to a sustainable level through famine, disease and war. But during the 19th century the population of Britain became four times larger and the economy sixteen times greater, an expansion supported by the Industrial Revolution. Most Britons entered the 20th century well fed, clothed and healthy, housed in cities with good sanitation. Gone were the days of the “dark satanic mills” of the early 19th century. The technology that had expanded industrial output also provided the means to end squalor.
Malthusian thought was discredited but remained dormant until the 1968, when resurrected by Paul Erlich with his equally grim Population Bomb. This time world population was bound to collapse on a planet that was running out of arable land to feed it; he reckoned that over the next two decades hundreds of millions would die of famine. The reasoning was crude and was superseded by the more sophisticated approach of the Club of Rome that put in motion the PAT idea, a formula that summarizes the impact of human activity on the environment I = P×A×T. In words: Human Impact (I) on the environment equals the product of population (P), affluence (A): consumption per capita; and technology (T): environmental impact per unit of consumption. Population was still at the root of coming doomsday, and its impact on the planet is multiplied by growing demand for non-renewable resources (fuel and minerals) to sustain better living standards. Food scarcity was only one factor among many driving mankind to destruction.
I made three objections to the assumptions underpinning the Club of Rome study.
• Population forecasts are uncertain. What had come about in mid 20th century was the dramatic fall of mortality while fertility remained the same. I held this to be exceptional. Nothing warranted the assumption that this imbalance would persist indefinitely as projected in the study. Indeed, UN world population forecasts now show stability to be reached in the 21st century.
• Given the vast land area of the planet the idea of an excessive population is farfetched. Overcrowding is a local problem. It is evil in Calcutta and has been successfully coped with in many metropolitan cites.
• The concept of non-renewable resources was untenable. Most of the crust of the earth remains unknown. The Club of Rome assumption was that mineral reserves stated in sources like the Minerals Yearbook of the U.S, Bureau of Mines were all that remained and, given the naïve arithmetic, most would be depleted by the end of the 20th century.
Dennis Meadows, the project team leader, conceded that simplifications were made to make the World Model fit into the humble IBM 1130 computer, but these did not invalidate the axiomatic idea that a finite planet cannot support infinite growth. I challenged the axiom too. If Meadows reasoned at limits, I had equal right. I claim that all human consumption does not subtract one ounce from the mass of a planet subject to the Law of Conservation of Mass. Theoretically, everything can be recycled. The limitation is one of energy, and fusion energy reactors will make it available in practically unlimited quantities. It may be argued that we cannot count on technology not yet developed, but we must not discount it either. That is the flaw of Malthusian thought: the assumption that technological development will cease and stagnate forever at current levels.
What amazed me was the sight of the elderly sages of the Club of Rome accepting the computer printouts and graphs as sayings of a pagan oracle. To my mind they just illustrated the truth of the adage: [garbage in] = [garage out]. I know the content of the Forrester programs in the intimacy of FORTRAN statements, so I was not awed by the mathematics or by the computer of the MIT team. As an engineer, I had a professional interest in the Forrester programs because I was then engaged in location studies for large industries.
Eight weeks after the Rio de Janeiro Club of Rome meeting I traveled to New York on a business mission, after an absence of five years, and felt that I had landed on a different planet. On the ride from airport to Manhattan I was surprised by the sight of leafless trees in full summer. The cab driver explained that a pest was killing the trees and a court order had banned the use of pesticides; New Yorkers were exchanging their trees for a collection of insects. I found fleas in the subway, cockroaches in my hotel room and flies galore everywhere. I learned that the new Environmental Protection Agency, in one of its first acts, had banned the use of DDT with no scientific evidence to back the claim that it was harmful to human health. Over the previous decade the Silent Spring book of Rachel Carson had demonized it to the American public until it became politically correct to curse all chemical products used by modern farming. The anti-scientific ban was to have consequences beyond the discomfort I was experiencing. It stopped a world wide drive to eradicate malaria, as was done with polio and smallpox. Over four decades 40 to 50 million preventable deaths can be laid at the door of the promoters of this environmental cause. One of them was Alexander King, leader of the scientific team at the time of World War II that gave the world large scale availability of DDT, and the hope of eradicating insect-transmitted diseases. In his memoirs King let slip a senile remark: “my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it greatly added to the population problem.”
I realized the strength of the grip of this new misanthropic attitude when I strolled down Lexington Avenue and stopped at a grocery that displayed boxes of worm-infested peaches on the sidewalk – sold at premium price! I entered for a word with the grocer. He claimed that he sold what the customers wanted: the presence of worms was taken as proof of legitimate “natural” fruit. To me it proved that fruit flies had sat on the peaches. I laughed. Someone with the wits to sell rotten peaches at high prices has the talent to sell anything at any price. I advised him to sell the grocery and move a few blocks west, to Madison Avenue, the hub of the advertising business, where he would earn a fortune as a gifted liar.
The mindset of America, and indeed of the Western world, was being shaken by a tectonic shift. For two centuries the Industrial Revolution had bestowed bounty on much of the world and was fast banishing the specter of dire want everywhere. Industrialization was fostered everywhere, and a national steel mill and national airline were emblematic of newly independent countries. Progress, once a universal aspiration, was now being challenged by contrarians of a new breed, not by the reactionaries of some failed Ancien Regime, of which the world still has plenty. The picturesque hippies of San Francisco who rejected progress and aspired to a life of idleness and poverty were only an echo of a wider movement that was engulfing the academic sphere and especially social studies. It was postmodern doctrine with its rejection of science, progress and of rational thought itself.
Prof. Alan Sokal, a physicist of New York University saw through it and concluded that there ain’t no thing called a social science. Anything goes, provided it is well written, scholarly-looking, in tune with the prejudices of the editor, and proved his point with publication of his paper, titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”. The paper would have been perceived as a hoax by an engineering student, but was published as serious in Social Text. In one statement the number PI had a value of 3.141592… because it was arbitrated by the current social context; future generations in a different context would give it another value, because all is relative. Sokal didn’t invent such postmodernist nonsense; it is supported by more than 100 references to what had been published about hard science by social “scientists”. Engineers and scientists stopped being pinup boys and were vilified as robots mindlessly herding mankind to the cliff edge. It was claimed that the higher knowledge of postmodernist government was needed to avert disaster.
During the decades dominated by Thatcher and Reagan a limit was put to the politics of envy that exploited the cynical saying that “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul”. This was laid to rest by market economy reforms that returned power to Victorian values that rewarded hard work, enterprise and ingenuity instead of political craftiness. Neither Blair nor Clinton dared tamper with reforms that worked well. The market economy was accepted all over the world because it was more efficient in meeting the needs of mankind than any alternative.
In the shadow of that time Environmentalism became a big business with a myriad of non-governmental organizations that evolved into a huge extortion racket, protected by law and supported by ample funds and publicity. With the turn of the political tide the racket is out for its own grab for power.
• Its objective is to place energy production under control of governments, and ultimately of an international body. Energy consumption would be rationed. Taxing the air you breathe will no longer be a figure of speech; it will be world wide policy to submit the acts of every human being to central control.
• Its technique is the one of the Club of Rome: rationalization with computer models to give a scientific look to what is an unproved and non provable belief: that anthropogenic global warming would end civilization (no longer attributed to overcrowding and exhausted resources). One finds the UN Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change In the old role of the Club of Rome, with vastly expanded propaganda resources.
• Its instrument is the postmodern Precautionary Principle: where there is a deadlock in understanding, bureaucratic whim trumps science.
The instrument carries the threat of being lethal to democratic institutions. Its first notable use was ushered in by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under the tenure of Carol Browner, during the Clinton years, to implement her anti-tobacco project with the justification that second hand smoke caused cancer in non-smokers. Numerous medical studies commissioned by the Agency failed to deliver the justification. The studies had been done under the stern rules of Food and Drug Administration with double-blind reviews. Big Tobacco hired lawyers to state their case and these resorted to expert testimony of scientists – exactly what the other side did. The pot called the kettle black. One cannot expect advances in science to emerge from such partisan conflict. Carol Browner circumvented the deadlock with a legal dodge of the Precautionary Principle: “if an action or policy has suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action.” This opened the gates to endless mischief. On December 7th 2009, the day that lives in infamy, Obama decreed that carbon dioxide a pollutant dangerous to health, when it is the nutrient that sustains the food chain of all that lives on the planet. EPA rulings, not acts of Congress, are now the law of the land. America was turned into a Bobama Republic ruled by decree. Carol Browner is now energy adviser to Obama, not for her knowledge of the field but for her expertise in chicanery. Her achievement in the field was banning the drilling for oil on the continental shelf of Florida.
At the Copenhagen Climate Conference Hugo Chavez blamed global warming on capitalism and got a standing ovation from delegates of 191 sovereign states. Evo Morales blames Americans for the summer floods of Bolivia. They have the support of the Castro brothers, Amhadinejad, Kim Jong-il and of Osama Bin Laden. With friends like these, does Obama really need enemies?
In November 2009, three thousand documents with FORTRAN source codes and one thousand private e-mails were placed in the public domain, revealing peer-reviewed climate science as a joke on which rests the proposed expenditure of trillions of dollars. Climategate may come to rank with the climacteric events of World War II, as an event that changed the course of world history.