Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I just got my printed copy of the May 7th issue of Science Magazine, and I read their Editorial. This is the issue that contained the now-infamous Letter to the Editor with the Photoshopped image of a polar bear on an ice floe. An alternate version of that Photoshopped image is below:
Figure 1. Photoshopped version of a Photoshopped image of a Photoshopped Polar bear.
So is the Editorial as one-sided as the Letter? Surprisingly, no. There are some excellent ideas and statements in it … but it contains some egregious errors of fact, and some curious assertions and exaggerations. I have emphasised in bold those interesting parts below. First, the Editorial:
Stepping Back; Moving Forward
Brooks Hanson
Brooks Hanson is Deputy Editor for physical sciences at Science.
The controversial e-mails related to climate change, plus reported errors in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, have spurred a dangerous deterioration in the rational relation between science and society. One U.S. senator has called 17 prominent climate scientists criminals, and pundits have suggested that climate scientists should commit suicide. Fourteen U.S. states have filed lawsuits opposing the federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, some asserting that “climate change science is a conspiracy.” South Dakota even resolved that there are other “astrological” forcings on climate. Scientists have been barraged by hateful e-mails. The debate has become polarized, and the distrust of scientists and their findings extends well beyond climate science. What can be done to repair society’s trust in science? A broader perspective is needed on all sides.
The main societal challenges—global energy supply, growing the food supply, and improving public health, among others—depend intimately on science, and for this reason society requires a vigorous scientific enterprise. Our expanding global economy is taxing resources and the environment in ways that cannot be sustained. Science provides a deep understanding of these impacts and, as a result, the ability to predict consequences and assess risks.
Addressing anthropogenic climate change exemplifies the challenges inherent in providing critical scientific advice to society (see the Policy Forum on p. 695 and Letter on p. 689). Climate is as global as today’s economy; we know from archaeological and historical records that an unstable climate has disrupted societies. For these reasons, scientists and governments are jointly committed to understanding the impacts of climate change. Thousands of scientists have volunteered for the IPCC or other assessments. Governments have a vested interest in the success of these assessments, and the stakes are high.
We thus must move beyond polarizing arguments in ways that strengthen this joint commitment. The scientific community must recognize that the recent attacks stem in part from its culture and scientists’ behavior. In turn, it is time to focus on the main problem: The IPCC reports have underestimated the pace of climate change while overestimating societies’ abilities to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
Scientists must meet other responsibilities. The ability to collect, model, and analyze huge data sets is one of the great recent advances in science and has made possible our understanding of global impacts. But developing the infrastructure and practices required for handling data, and a commitment to collect it systematically, have lagged. Scientists have struggled to address standardizing, storing, and sharing data, and privacy concerns. Funding must be directed not only toward basic science but toward facilitating better decisions made with the data and analyses that are produced. As a start, research grants should specify a data curation plan, and there should be a greater focus on long-term monitoring of the environment.
Because society’s major problems are complex, generating useful scientific advice requires synthesizing knowledge from diverse disciplines. As the need for synthesis grows, the avenues of communication are changing rapidly. Unfortunately, many news organizations have eviscerated their science staffs. As a result, stories derived from press releases on specific results are crowding out the thoughtful syntheses that are needed.
If the scientific community does not aggressively address these issues, including communicating its process of discovery and recognizing its modern data responsibilities, and if society does not constructively engage science, then the scientific enterprise and the whole of society are in danger of losing their crucial rational relationship. Carl Sagan’s warnings are especially apt today: “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” “This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
So, what’s wrong with the statements I highlighted in bold? Well, they’re not true. Let’s look at them one by one.
One U.S. senator has called 17 prominent climate scientists criminals…
Presumably, this refers to the Senate Minority Report by Senator Inhofe. However, he did not call 17 climate scientists criminals. In fact he does not use that word at all in connection with scientists. Instead, he made a much more nuanced series of statements:
In our view, the CRU documents and emails reveal, among other things, unethical and potentially illegal behavior by some of the world’s preeminent climate scientists.
and:
The released CRU emails and documents display unethical, and possibly illegal, behavior. The scientists appear to discuss manipulating data to get their preferred results. On several occasions they appear to discuss subverting the scientific peer review process to ensure that skeptical papers had no access to publication. Moreover, there are emails discussing unjustified changes to data by federal employees and federal grantees.
These and other issues raise questions about the lawful use of federal funds and potential ethical misconduct.
and
Minority Staff has identified a preliminary sampling of CRU emails and documents which seriously compromise the IPCC-backed “consensus” and its central conclusion that anthropogenic emissions are inexorably leading to environmental catastrophes, and which represent unethical and possibly illegal conduct by top IPCC scientists, among others.
So Brooks Hanson starts out with a false and misleading statement. Inhofe did not “call 17 prominent climate scientists criminals”, that’s simply not true. He said that some of their actions appeared to be possibly illegal … and me, I’d have to agree with the Senator.
On the other side of the pond, whether some of them were criminals was addressed by the UK Parliament Committee, who said:
There is prima facie evidence that CRU has breached the Freedom of Information Act 2000. It would, however, be premature, without a thorough investigation affording each party the opportunity to make representations, to conclude that UEA was in breach of the Act. In our view, it is unsatisfactory to leave the matter unresolved simply because of the operation of the six- month time limit on the initiation of prosecutions.
So it was only because the Statute of Limitations on any criminal offenses had expired that there were no criminal investigations of the acts … sounds like a validation of Senator Inhofe’s claim of “possibly illegal” to me …
… pundits have suggested that climate scientists should commit suicide.
Presumably, this refers to Glen Beck’s statement that:
There’s not enough knives. If this, if the IPCC had been done by Japanese scientists, there’s not enough knives on planet Earth for hara-kiri that should have occurred. I mean, these guys have so dishonored themselves, so dishonored scientists.
I find no other “pundits” who have “suggested that climate scientists should commit suicide”. Nor did Beck. He said that if the IPCC scientists who made the errors and misrepresentations were Japanese, they would have committed suicide from the shame. Now that may or may not be true, but is not a call for American scientists to act Japanese, even Beck knows that’s not possible.
Fourteen U.S. states have filed lawsuits opposing the federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, some asserting that “climate change science is a conspiracy.”
I find no State (or any other) lawsuits making this claim against climate scientists, although I might have missed them. Curiously, there was a case (Ned Comer, et al. v. Murphy Oil USA) where the claim was made the other way around, that there was a “civil conspiracy” among the oil companies to deny climate change. But I find nothing the other way.
I suspect that Brooks Hanson is referring (incorrectly) to the Resolution passed in Utah that states:
WHEREAS, emails and other communications between climate researchers around the globe, referred to as “Climategate,” indicate a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome;
Of course, this was a resolution, not a lawsuit. I don’t know if that claim is true or not, although the CRU emails show that there certainly was a “well organized and ongoing effort” to conceal the data regarding global temperature, and to affect the IPCC reports in an unethical and possibly illegal fashion.
South Dakota even resolved that there are other “astrological” forcings on climate.
Here’s the actual text of the South Dakota Bill:
That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative.
I suspect that this was a simple error, and that what was meant was “astronomical” rather than “astrological”. This is supported by their use of “thermological” for “thermal”, as “thermology” is the science of using detailed thermal images of the human body to diagnose disease … I doubt they meant that. It is also supported by their use of “effect” rather than “affect”. I’d say very poor English skills, yes … astrology, no.
Scientists have been barraged by hateful e-mails.
Barraged by mails? Hey, it’s worse than emails, it’s public calls for action:
James Hansen of NASA wanted trials for climate skeptics, accusing them of high crimes against humanity.
Robert Kennedy Jr. called climate skeptics traitors .
Yvo de Boer of the UN called climate skepticism criminally irresponsible .
David Suzuki called for politicians who ignore climate science to be jailed.
DeSmogBlog’s James Hoggan wants skeptics treated as war criminals (video).
Grist called for Nuremberg trials for skeptics.
Joe Romm said that skeptics would be strangled in their beds.
A blogger at TPM pondered when it would be acceptable to execute climate deniers .
Heidi Cullen of The Weather Channel called for skeptical forecasters to be decertified.
Bernie Sanders compared climate skeptics to Nazi appeasers..
And Greenpeace threatened unspecified reprisals against unbelievers, saying:
If you’re one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this:
We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.
And we be many, but you be few.
And Brooks Hanson is worried about emails, and falsely accuses Senator Inhofe of calling climate scientists criminals? What’s wrong with this picture?
The IPCC reports have underestimated the pace of climate change …
Say what? I’d have to ask for citations on this one. There has been no statistically significant warming in the last 15 years, Arctic sea ice is recovering, climate changes are within natural variation … and he claims the pace has been “underestimated” by the IPCC? Sorry, I don’t buy that one in the slightest.
As a start, research grants should specify a data curation plan …
Lack of plans is not the problem. The main grantor of climate science funds in the US, the National Science Foundation, has very clear regulations about the archiving of climate data … but they simply ignore them. And to make it worse, they continue funding scofflaw scientists who ignore them. Science Magazine and Nature Magazine have very clear policies about data archiving … but they don’t ask authors to follow them whenever they feel like it. The problem is not a lack of “data curation plans” as Hanson claims. It is that the people in charge of those plans have been looking the other way, even when people like myself and many others have asked them to enforce their policies and plans and rules. Those kinds of actions simply reinforce the public idea that all of climate science is a scam and a conspiracy. I don’t think it is either one … but man, some of the AGW supporters in positions of scientific power are sure doing their best to make it look that way …
Now, given all of that, what in the editorial did I like? There were several statements that I felt were very important:
We thus must move beyond polarizing arguments in ways that strengthen this joint commitment. The scientific community must recognize that the recent attacks stem in part from its culture and scientists’ behavior.
I could not agree more. The problems are not the result of some mythical Big-Oil funded climate skeptics public relations machine. They are the result of scientific malfeasance on a large scale by far too many of the top climate scientists. People are enraged by this, as there are few things that raise peoples’ ire more than knowing that they have been duped and misled. And the climate science community is the only one that can fix that.
If the scientific community does not aggressively address these issues, including communicating its process of discovery and recognizing its modern data responsibilities, and if society does not constructively engage science, then the scientific enterprise and the whole of society are in danger of losing their crucial rational relationship.
Well put. The problem is not that Inhofe has said some actions by top climate scientists are unethical and possibly illegal. The problem is that some top scientists acted in unethical and possibly illegal ways. The problem is not that people are sending hateful emails to scientists. It is that climate scientists have poisoned the well by publicly calling for the trial of people with whom they disagree, and then want to complain that people are being mean to them. The problem is not that states are taking to the law to fight bad science, it is that the bad science is so entrenched, and the peer review system has become so much of an old-boys club, that the only way to fight it is in the courts.
This is the crux of the matter for climate scientists who wish to restore the lost trust: do honest, transparent, ethical science, and let the results fall where they may. Stop larding “scientific” papers with pounds of “might” and “could” and “may” and “possibly” and “conceivably”, we don’t care about your speculations, we want your science. Stop underestimating the errors and overestimating the certainty. Stop making up the “scary scenarios” advocated by Stephen Schneider. Stop calling for trials for people who don’t follow the party line.
And most of all, climate scientists need to learn to say those “three little words”.
You know how women are always hoping that guys will say those three little words, “I love you”? It’s like the old joke, “You know how to get rid of cockroaches? … Ask them for a commitment.” Those are the three little words that men find hard to say.
In climate science, the three little words that climate scientists find hard to say, the three little words they need to practice over and over are “We don’t know”.
We don’t know what the climate will be like in a hundred years. We don’t know what the climate sensitivity is, or even if the concept of a linear climate sensitivity relating temperature and forcing is a valid concept. We don’t know if the earth will start to warm or start to cool after the end of this current 15-year period of neither warming nor cooling. We don’t know if a rise in temperature will be a net gain or a net loss for the planet. There are heaps of things we don’t know about the climate, and the general public knows that we don’t know them.
Climate science is a new science, one of the newest. We have only been studying climate extensively for a quarter century or so, and it is an incredibly difficult field of study. The climate is a hugely complex, driven, chaotic, resonant, constructal, terawatt-scale planetary heat engine. It contains five major subsystems (atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, and cryosphere), none of which are well understood. Each of these subsystems has a host of forcings, resonances, inter-reservoir transfers, cycles, and feedbacks which operate both internally and between the subsystems. The climate has important processes which operate on spatial scales from atomic to planet-wide, and on temporal scales from nanoseconds to millions of years. Our present state of knowledge of that system contains more unknowns than knowns. Here is my own estimation of the current state of our climate knowledge, which some of you may have seen:
In this situation, the only honest thing a climate scientist can do is to do the best, clearest, and cleanest science possible; to be totally transparent and reveal all data and codes and methods; to insist that other climate scientists practice those same simple scientific principles; and to say “we don’t know” rather than “might possibly have a probabilistic chance of maybe happening” for all the rest. That is the only path to repairing the lost trust between the public and climate science.
Oh, yeah, and one more thing … apply those principles to scientific editorials as well. Don’t exaggerate, and provide some citations for scientific editorials, trying to trace these vague claims is both boring and frustrating …
Lets see. Accusations of criminal fraud for a bogus chart…. Charge made in 2007
charge made by a notable commenter.. charge SECONDED by the scientists.
Note: its a bogus chart. Criminal? idunno, but RC doesnt shy away from making these kinds of charges:
Ray Ladbury says:
14 June 2007 at 12:35 PM
My God! That is at the very least scientific fraud, if not criminal fraud. If you are trying to demonstrate periodicity, any break in the graph invalidates the graph–unless you are excluding an interim period where the effect of interest is not extang, and then you would break the curve as well.
One of the questions I always have when I confront a denialist argument is whether they know what they are doing is invalid. This leaves no room for doubt, just as Lindzen’s resorting to the canard about warming on other celestial bodies demonstrates his own insincerity.
The other question I have is why this particular field of inquiry generates such vehemence that denailists feel it’s OK to resort to fraud to win the point. That seems to invalidate the thing I love most about science–the fact that even if we fail or are ultimately proven wrong, the very activity of sincerely trying to find out ennobles us. It is truly the best example of the means justifying the end, whatever that end may be.
[Response: Indeed – I think one of the strongest indications that the science behind anthropogenic global warming is very solid by now, is the lack of quality and intellectual honesty of the counter-arguments and the lack of credibility of the skeptics personnel. The recent “Swindle” film illustrates that it is impossible to fundamentally question anthropogenic global warming without resorting to manipulated graphs, distortions and omissions of facts and debating tricks that exploit the lack of background knowledge of the lay audience. If there were still serious arguments and reputable scientists that challenge anthropogenic global warming, surely film-makers like Durkin would have found and presented them? stefan]
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/a-bit-of-philosophy/
interesting thread
have fun. find the earliest comment at RC where the moderators allow immoderate language.
criminal site:http://realclimate.org/
Hint: the game of who said the worst thing first is a LOSER strategy for those of us who believe in AGW.
Coming into this discussion a bit late…
From the article:
What he means is that society should just “move along, because there is nothing to see here.” and let the scientists scare the bejeesuz out of us in privacy (partly meaning no FOI requests, if you please). They do not want the public to have a say, except through their easily manipulated representatives. If the public actually sees through all that is going on, well that will not do – so let’s all go back to the pre-November status quo.
VERY LITTLE of the first two of those has much at all to do with “science” as we usually use the term. Once every decade or so a development comes along that enables the energy supply beyond where it was going anyway, but 90% of that “science” is in the engineering, not research. The same holds true for improving public health. It is not just the research that adds to society’s prosperity and well-being; it is much more that someone has taken an idea and made it work in a real-world way, and that is essentially down to engineers. Lots of people are not aware that engineering is actually a part of science; it is called “applied science,” and without it, all the research stays in the ivory towers.
Yet for every 1,000 bits of discovery along the research road, there are only a handful that ever see their way to improving or maintaining our well being. Most of the ideas are useless to our lives, with all due respect to the researchers and their dedication to their fields. It is the oil companies and their lab and field engineers (and, yes, some research scientists) who make new developments real enough to work for us, the wider society. They do that in such hard-nosed ways as to make most of our heads spin and our blood curdle – testing and searching in often terrible environments for new oil and gas deposits. And all that is done on the dime of the very industries the “best and the brightest” are trying to destroy. But where is the inclusion of the oil industry in their kudos? Or the engineers?
For an article’s author to claim credit for those engineers who make those things make a difference in our lives is just absolute mendacity. HELL, they don’t even consider engineers to be real scientists – but when it suits them, they will take credit. . . while butt-bumping the engineers and oil industry off stage so the researchers can reap all the applaud.
All of this applies to the food supply, as well. It is the big ag companies and food processors who spend billions getting improvements to the real world. And it is their “captive” lab scientists who connect the dots and make improvements real. And it is just those companies that are the butt of so much antipathy from the “real” scientists, the ivory tower dudes, whose worlds are not real at all – not without the intermediaries who pick the handful of useful and practical ideas out of the many thousands of papers every year and (with LOTS of money risked) bet on those ideas as being worthwhile.
This article strongly implies two claims which are not true: That all research is valuable and that no one else is involved with making ideas reality. In fact, the vast majority of their reseaech is pie-in-the-sky and contributes NOTHING.
Shame on the author.
Excellent synopsis, once again!
Rhoda R says:
May 22, 2010 at 1:00 pm
David Hoffer, you questioned whether science beyond climate science is being distrusted. I’ll answer you with: Probably any science that is funded by our Government is automatically questionable just based on the past history of Government funded science: Not just climate research, but also Alar, sacchrine, DDT, acid rain, DDT, etc.>>
Good examples of junk science from government research Rhoda, but not in the same order of magnitude. For every chemical wrongly banned there’s probably an example or two of one that should have been, but hundreds more that were handled correctly. First world countries have the cleanest water, healthiest food, and longest lifes spans in the world and in history, so across the board you have to give them pretty good marks. I got into a lot of trouble decades ago for crying foul over the ozone hole even though I could show on a white board in twenty minutes or so that the holes were supposed to be there in the first place and that the antarctic hole should be a lot bigger than the arctic hole. I also got thrown out of a lecture once for asking the guest speaker why the “acid killed” lakes on his map were north of the industrial centres he was blaming for the problem when the prevailing winds were from the west. This isn’t my first brush with junk science.
But it is my first brush with junk science that appears to have claimed the bulk of the active researchers in the world, and has been used to justify via a world authority a tax scheme that will transfer wealth to backward despotic regimes at the expense of devastating the world economy. I don’t know if DDT was junk science or not. I do know that the likes of Robert Mugabe didn’t have their hands out demanding payment as part of the solution.
It is good to be reminded yet again of the barely suppressed desire for violence that underpins Greenpeace
Regards
Michael
Oh, hell, I was so eager to post that last that the very next sentence I failed to include.
From the article:
Paul Ehrlich redux.
We all know how wrong Ehlrich was with his Malthusianism. According to Ehlrich, we should all be starving and huddled around fires in barrels below the Brooklyn Bridge with the other homeless and starving people. On the contrary, the US prosperity of the 1970s has spread over great parts of many, many other countries, even what then were third world countries like Viet Nam, Malaysia and China.
And that last sentence completely summarizes Ehrlich’s arguments in the 1970s – that we, the public, are ignorant and can’t understand without the high priests to interpret for us “what it all means.”
If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that predictions of doom are missing great swaths of factors that will become clear only in the years to come. Even now, steps are being taken to ameliorate the scenarios of the Malthusians. And each of those step will involve the efforts of thousands upon thousands.
Humans DO have a tremendous capacity – to improve, to adapt, to apply, and to do much more than merely survive. The ivory tower dudes don’t partake enough of “society” to get their fingers on the pulse. I consider myself proud to be a member of a society that can feed well more than twice what the population was when Ehrlich wrote of the doom to come.
Heck, if no other great developments have come along, look at how much more ethnic foods we have available on our restaurants now! Every time I eat in one, I thank the heavens for letting me be alive in this time and place.
Henry Pool says:
May 22, 2010 at 4:24 am
I don’t know what to do anymore with TV and radio stations and newspapers that continuously refer to “global warming caused by carbon dioxide” and then never allow anyone to speak who considers such a statement to be factually incorrect.
I think I will initiate a complaint at the broadcast complaints commision (BCC) here if I hear once more someone saying or stating – as a matter of fact – that global warming is caused by releasing carbon dioxide – and I will maintain that the basis of my complaint is that the station/newspaper refuses to adhere to the principle of balanced reporting, i.e. hearing the other side. I think the BCC here is quite strict on that code….
_______________________________________________________
Henry, it was already done right after climategate. Do a search here at WUWT to see what happen (nothing)
@Phil Clarke
‘as if it were a Greenpeace communication,’
But it were a Greenpeace communication, even GP themselves took the blame because anyone who works for an organization and in that capacity makes an official claim for that organization essentially makes that organization liable for that claim. Pretty simple. For instance that is why BP now is liable for what ever negative-to-BP claim people working for BP has made.
Double standards doesn’t suite.
Nice post, Willis.
We know, they don’t know.
They know, what they know.
I don’t know, wish I did.
Know body knows.
Knowing, it appears, is not the same as knowing.
I know, this thread is getting serious.
—
Vuk etc provides a video clip of an episode in an aquarium, where the proprietors had been noting that certain of their selachimorphid species had been disappearing overnight. So they set up surveillance cameras, and found that an octopus in the tank had shown an unanticipated nocturnal proclivity for doing a bit of reverse-Jaws work on Peter Benchley’s “perfect eating machine.”
Well, pish and tosh. Any American of average perceptive capacity can tell you all about spineless, prehensile creatures that kill and devour everything around them.
They’re called a government.
—
Steven Mosher: re your link
“discussed ethical issues in how one should allocate global warming permits across the world”.
This kind of thinking should worry everyone. Thanks for the post.
RockyRoad says:
May 22, 2010 at 6:24 am
Ponder this tidbit when considering the planetary impact on climate: Earth is supersonic at the equator. Say what? Rotating once every 24 hours with a circumference of 24,901 miles gives a rotational velocity just over 1,000 mph. Sure, it doesnt seem like the earth is traveling anywhere near that fast when standing there (and Im bending the definition of supersonic for emphasis), but perception is quite often very different from undeniable fact.
Also consider that just a quarter of the planet away (at each pole) the earths orbital velocity is essentially zero. No wonder earths predominant fluid and gas are in motion.
There is a great deal more to this area such as centrifugal force and measurements of speed going to the core of this planet, the division of atmosheric forces at the equator.
Part of planetary mechanics.
Excellent post, Willis….as an aside….I wish people would stop mis-spelling climate scientists….it should be “scienTWITS” (except the fraudsters are laughing all the way to the bank)
Congratulations Willis! That was an outstanding rebuttal. You sorely outdid a, supposed, professional editor at his own game.
Brooks Hanson’s piece was a blatant attempt to “call off the dogs,” now that the informed world knows that Al Gore, James Hansen, the UN, the IPCC & the myriad of other alarmists, have been found out.
Hanson’s thesis seems to be “can’t we all get along!?” If Science & it’s editorial board want to really fix the current corrupt climate science atmosphere, they need to do more than just “hide the decline” in their behavior & stop suggesting we move on.
When Hanson wrote about we may have “underestimated the pace of climate change,” I thought there is no hope for these people, this will never end, they will never change!
Phil Clarke says:
May 22, 2010 at 4:39 am
“…….Looks like he was right there. I am not sure that representing a disowned and deleted blog post as an official Greenpeace statement advances the argument very far. Speaking of advancing the argument in a cool rational way, here is Viscount Monckton, keynote speaker at the recent ICCC conference, and the Republican choice for witness at the recent congressional hearings, writing about Mann et al.
These evil pseudo-scientists, through the falsity of their statistical
manipulations, have already killed far more people through starvation than “global warming” will ever kill. They should now be indicted and should stand trial alongside Radovan Karadzic for nothing less than high crimes against humanity: for, in their callous disregard for the fatal consequences of their corrupt falsification of science, they are no less guilty of genocide than he.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/monckton/monckton_what_hockey_stick.pdf
Nice.”
_________________________________________________________________________
Unfortunately Viscount Monckton is correct. WHY do I say that??? In one word – FOOD. This CAGW fraud is ALREADY killing people! Modern farming is completely dependent on oil for fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, mechanized farming equipment and transport of food to market. Worse thanks to NAFTA and WTO peasant farmers in third world countries have been driven bankrupt by cheep subsidized US and EU grain coupled with WTO free market and no tariffs. 75% of the farmers in Mexico have left the land. Farmers in India are committing suicide at the rate of one every 8 hours. National “food sovereignty” has been removed from many countries thanks to WTO and the World Bank/IMF SAPs (see below)
Now governments are converting food into fuel and want to tax the heck out of oil. The 1996 US farm act did away with the US government grain reserve program. By 2008 the “cupboard was bare” according to the USDA .
“Using United Nations global poverty statistics as a base, it is now clear that United States and European Union biofuel policies will significantly contribute to the early, avoidable deaths of between 10 and 20 million people in the year 2008 alone.”
The Great Biofuel Famine
Stolen harvest: the hijacking of the global food supply
Food Security, Farming, CAFTA and the WTO
Structural Adjustment Policies
History, HACCP and the Food Safety Con Job
Now tell me again why you think Viscount Monckton is incorrect.
Thanks again Willis… I am not sure where you find the time. Hmm perhaps if I wasn’t computer gaming >.>
I thought the Greenpeace manifesto was best summarised by their lead PR person, Agent Smith:
Smith does need to work on his people skills somewhat IMHO.
—
davidmhoffer (one of the wittiest and most perceptive posters and bloggers to have come to my attention in the glorious six months since Climategate broke) writes of “junk science.”
That term first came to my attention back in the ’80s, and I rely for most of my appreciation of the subject on Peter Huber’s Galileo’s Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom (1991).
(It should be noted that Mr. Huber was earlier the author of Liability:The Legal Revolution & Its Consequences [1988], a treatise that belongs on the bookshelf of every physician in America, and should be used vigorously and repeatedly to pound the rostral knob of every judge and attorney malpracticing in these United States. Pertinent to the readers on this forum, he is also the co-author of The Bottomless Well: The Twilight Of Fuel, The Virtue Of Waste, And Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy [2005]. I recommend his pre-Climategate article “The Carbon Con Game” [15 October 2009] and his post-Climategate piece “Science on the Potomac” [31 December 2009], both published in Forbes.)
The definitions of junk science, however, seem to me to be overly broad. Mr. Huber himself – in his 1991 book – conceived “real science” to be (in the words of one reviewer) that which had been “…published in scientific journals, scrutinized by peers, reproduced by rivals, agreed to by consensus. The kind of science that may not ultimately be right, but is the best that human minds can do at the time.”
Well, we’ve all seen – courtesy of the confirmations found in the Climategate infodump – what happens when charlatans get control of the scientific journals, and make sure that the scrutiny of peers is subverted. They get to control “the consensus,” with the result that we get “real science” that correlates with factual reality to precisely the same extent as phrenology, astrology, and Dianetics.
I suggest instead that we look at the anthropogenic global warming fraud as Cargo Cult Science, which was decried by Richard Feynman (1974) “…because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential.”
What is that essential?
Does this or does this not sound like something that ought to be engraved in pica on a piece of sheet steel, folded until it’s all corners, and then shoved briskly up Dr. Michael Mann’s alimentary tract?
Therefore I suggest that “junk science” be abandoned as an expression. The AGW cabal, through their chokehold upon scientific publishing and their perversion of peer review, did their concerted and deliberate best to make challenges to their hoakum look like “junk science,” didn’t they?
Better we maintain specificity. For this purpose, Feynman’s superb concept – Cargo Cult Science – stands the test, and should be employed henceforth.
Besides, as I’ve made use of it over the past six months, it drives the warmists right to hellangone up the wall.
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Phil Clarke says:
May 22, 2010 at 7:27 am
Monckton called for Mann to be prosecuted for fraud, not for voicing is opinions.
He stated Mann et al are guilty of genocide. If you have hard evidence of fraud you should present it to Penn State U. [or just post it here]. His scientific conduct has, of course, been investigated and no evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever has been found.
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You forgot, Mann is STILL under investigation and very interesting stuff is coming to light too. Also “Britain’s top statistician recently blasted Mann for exaggerating the size of global warming. “
jcrabb says:
May 22, 2010 at 7:28 am
@pettyfog
Did you notice that Willis mentioned Arctic sea ice was returning to normal, which clearly is not the case.
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The sea Ice in the Arctic was within one standard deviation of the average this winter. To any one with an understanding of statistics there is no difference between the average and plus or minus 2 standard deviations on either side of the average, therefore Willis is technically correct.
The author of the editorial is Brooks Hanson, not Hansen.
DirkH says:
May 22, 2010 at 8:11 am
Oh, and Nick inspired me to search a little on Greenpeace’s website, our “entirely peaceful friends”, and looky here, a nice pic of the Koch brothers western-style:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/dirty-money-climate-30032010/
“Wanted for crimes against the climate: Charles and David Koch. ”
You don’t have to invent it. Greenpeace delivers all the ammo one can need themselves.
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AHHhhh, excuse me but who the heck are Charles and David Koch, and Oh yeah, where do I go to pick up my check for advancing “climate change denial” ROTFLMAO
Willis Eschenbach says:
May 22, 2010 at 10:22 am
“In this life I have found that I can accomplish almost anything, as long as I don’t care who gets credit for it”
Someone else said – Well said Willis – I will endorse the remark.
If only more people could work and live by this credo. It works for me, getting others to take the credit is a sure fire way to get traction.
Regards
H
Enneagram says:
May 22, 2010 at 8:54 am
Who were/are the original promoters/funders of the Global Warming/Climate change fraud?. Are they still pushing the same agenda?. Why?. What is it so important behind it?
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Banks and Big oil. I kid you not. In a word David Rockefeller who was behind Maurice Strong. Strong went to work for the Rockefeller’s in Saudi Arabia in 1953 as a poor chigh school dropout. Shortly there after he ended up as a big wheel in Canadian oil. Quite a jump for a young man.
The whole Global warming/environmental movement traces back to the first UN Earth Summit in 1972, when Strong paid for Greenpeace to attend along with a bunch of other young activists. He gave them a pep talk about pollution, global warming , CFC and the ozone hole and then told them to “go home and raise hell”
You can see where it comes from with Kissenger’s 1970 statement “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people; control money and you control the world.” Some consider Kissinger a Rockefeller frontman
The idea is even better expressed here:
“The common enemy of humanity is man.
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming,
water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through
changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome.
The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
– Richard Haass, Club of Rome Document
Strong and Rockefeller are of course Club of Rome members.
It is forty years later and we have:
1. Control oil and you control nations; CHECK – “CAGW”
2. Control food and you control the people; CHECK – WTO Agreement on Agriculture, 80% of the food supply controlled by ten corporations, most of them private, International Patenting of seed and animals, 75% of Mexican farmers removed from their land….
3. Control money and you control the world; CHECK Replace US and other countries gold standard currency with fiat currency, cause an economic crisis, form the Financial Stability Board with International control over the financial institutions of various countries and get Obama to agree to it….
Yeah, right I am a conspiracy nut, but I suggest you spend a week or two checking out what I said first before you form that opinion.