Guest post by Professor Robert G. Brown of Duke University.
Not all scientific research is equal, in terms of its probable impact on humanity. If one is studying poison dart frog species in tropical rain forests, getting a number wrong or arriving at an incorrect conclusion will generally have very little impact on the life of somebody living in California, India, China, or for that matter, in the tropical rain forests in question.
On the other hand, medical research has a profound impact on us all and has a long history of abuse, both deliberate and accidental. From the egregious claims of snake-oil salesmen whose very name has come to be the universal metaphor for “science” subverted to special interest to modern cases of confirmation bias and manipulation of data in e.g. drug testing, because of the potential for profit from medical science and technology it has proven to be necessary to defend the public against bad science. All medical research at this point is strongly regulated at or before the point where the rubber meets the road and actual patients might be adversely affected or killed by bad science or self-serving deliberately manipulated science.
Some of the key standards of this regulation of research include transparency and reproducibility, as well as the near-universal use of double-blind experiments to prevent the pernicious advent of confirmation bias, backed up by the threat of liability if the research process is deliberately subverted because of any sort of vested interest (including the simple desire to “be famous”, or “win tenure”, or “keep one’s grant funding”).
Engineering is a second place where doing science (in this case applied science) badly is dangerous to the public weal. If a bridge, a car, a space shuttle is designed poorly or carelessly, society ultimately pays a significant cost. In this case the needs of engineering firms and private individuals for protections of intellectual property are carefully balanced against the need to protect society. Consequently, the building of bridges, cars, and space shuttles — with or without proprietary components — is subject to oversight, inspection, and again, legal liability.
Climate research has long since passed from the realm of being a tiny discipline with a handful of researchers whose mistakes had almost no impact on humanity to being an enormous, publicly funded research machine that has a huge impact on the public weal. Whether or not you agree or disagree with the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) hypothesis, there is no denying that it has a huge impact on people all over the world. Quite literally every human on earth is currently at risk either way relative to the conclusions of what is still a relatively small community of scientists with a remarkably homogeneous point of view.
Whether or not these scientists are honest — do or do not sincerely believe their own conclusions is not an issue (any more than it often is in the case of medical research or large scale engineering projects); what is important to the general public is that the scientists at this point have a clear interest that potentially conflicts with their own. At risk (to the scientists) is: loss of (enormous) funding; loss of prestige; loss of political power and influence. Many of them have staked their entire reputation and career on stating conclusions as near-certain scientific fact that have a multi-trillion dollar price tag to society associated with their conclusions — however objective and well-intended — turning out to be correct or incorrect.
This dwarfs the potential damage that could be done even by unscrupulous drug companies, by medical researchers seeking to make a name for themselves, by incompetent physicians and all of the other scientific activities in the general field of medicine that are so tightly regulated. It dwarfs the damage that can be done by a faulty braking system in an automobile, by whole cities of buildings that cannot (as it turns out) withstand earthquakes, by faulty O-rings in space shuttles. It dwarfs even the damage that can be done by unregulated banking systems leading to global financial collapse that lower the standard of living “suddenly” on a worldwide scale. It is larger than the combined probable damages from all of these activities put together over any reasonable time scale.
I must emphasize that from the public point of view, this risk is in some sense symmetrical. Taking global steps such as creation of an entire cap and trade financial instrumentation in order to combat CAGW is without any doubt enormously expensive and the loss in this case is certain and immediate. However, as proponents of CAGW theories are quick to point out, society is required to make some kind of wager regardless because the cost of doing nothing if their hypothesis is true may also be extreme.
However, it must be carefully noted that one is balancing a multi-trillion dollar and immediate certain cost against a future possible cost that is by no means certain. It is simply a matter of responsible governance that the cost-benefit of this risk be soberly and, above all, openly assessed. Furthermore, both regulation and liability are absolutely necessary — indeed, long overdue — in any scientific endeavor that has long since left the ivory tower of pure research and become the basis for such far-reaching policy decisions.
Unfortunately, climate research that not only has impacted, but has led the way in the public debate and scrutiny that should correctly attend the collective expenditure of vast amounts of wealth that could otherwise be put to better use has not, thus far, been conducted in an open way. Critical data and methodology have been hidden and treated as if they were proprietary by the scientific researchers involved, in spite of the fact that the data itself has rather often come from governmental organizations or is the direct product of research funded entirely by public research grants, as in most cases is the published work itself. That this has occurred, and continues to occur, is not at issue here — the evidence that this has occurred and continues to occur is conclusive and indeed, ongoing. The simple fact of the matter is that whatever the truth of the hypothesis, the methodology and data used to support it are largely hidden, hidden well enough that it is routinely true that they cannot easily be merely reproduced by a third party, let alone the conclusions be intelligently and critically challenged.
In the ivory tower it is not unreasonable or uncommon for this sort of practice to exist, at least for a time. Scientists’ only “commodity” of value at a research University or government organization is their ideas and their research work, and theft of both is far from unknown. It is perfectly reasonable for individuals to initially hide their research goals and methods from everyone but perhaps a small set of trusted collaborators until they are proven to the satisfaction of the researcher, lest some key discovery or idea be co-opted or pre-empted by a competitor.
Even in the ivory tower, such obfuscation is supposed to — and typically does — come to an end when a work is published. Publication is the final goal of the research process in the ivory tower of the University (and often in a government laboratory) and in both cases there is a careful separation between work that is done with an eye to obtaining a patent or protected intellectual property and work being done (especially work being done with public funding) for open publication with no related rights being preserved.
Once a scientist has published in the latter case, it is expected that they will make both methods and data public upon request and invite others to reproduce and either verify or criticize the methods and any results derived from them. Anything less is a corruption of the scientific process that — when it works correctly — eventually rejects error and advances the sound. This process is often imperfect — even with levelling/protecting structures such as “tenure”, there are differential rewards to scientists based on how well they keep key ideas, methods, or even data back to maintain an advantage over their competitors and it is not uncommon for only part of the story to be told in any given publication, especially early on in the development of a new idea.
Although one can therefore understand the origins of this sort of reticence and inclination to hide research methods and data or share them only with carefully selected collaborative colleagues, and although one might even still respect this right up to the point of publication in climate research, in the specific field of climate research the public stakes are too high for this practice, however common it might or might not be in the study of poison dart frogs or the physics of graphene, to be tolerated.
The conclusions of modern climate research are almost exclusively based on published results such as the (now infamous) “Hockey Stick” graphs produced by Mann, et. al. and data sets such as HadCrut3. HadCrut3 itself is currently made readily available, but only as processed results obtained by some means from streams of raw data that are not. It is, in fact, essentially impossible for a third party to take the actual data used in the current HadCrut3 snapshot published by the Met Office at the Hadley Center, feed it to the actual code used to generate the processed data, and verify even the very limited fact that the data and the code do indeed produce the same result when run on different computers, let alone that the methodology used to produce the result from the data is robust and sound.
It must once again be emphasized that public policy decisions that have been made, are being made, and will be made in the future based on the raw data and methodology used will cost every living person on earth on average several thousand dollars, at least. Again this is stated without prejudice concerning whether or not the published temperatures are, or are not sound, or whether CAGW is, or is not, a well-supported scientific hypothesis. If it is true and we do nothing, it will cost thousand of dollars per living person and many lives over decades. If it is false and we spend money like water to prevent it anyway, it will cost thousands of dollars per living person and many lives over decades; in addition, it will do incalculable cost to the credibility of “the scientist” in the minds of the public that further amplifies this monetary damage by altering the profile of government funded research and the level of trust accorded to all scientists in the public eye.
I am writing this article to call for new legislation to address this issue, legislation that creates direct oversight for climate researchers whose work directly impacts the decision making process directing this enormous but unavoidable gamble. I am writing this as a citizen that is already paying for decisions based on the “certain” conclusion of CAGW — if this conclusion is certain, then it is certainly true that it can be transparently certain, with the entire process used to arrive at it right back to the original raw data open to public and scientific scrutiny not only by those that agree with it but by those that honestly disagree with it or merely have doubts that it is true and would like to verify it for themselves.
I would suggest that this legislation be soberly and conservatively drafted so that it in no way hinders climate researchers from carrying out their research but adds the following requirements that must both precede and follow any published result that impacts the decision process.
a) All numerical code, and input data (that is, the raw input data including any that is for any reason available from one’s source but not included in the computation, along with the provenance of all the raw data) used in arriving at some conclusion must be openly published in an immediately usable form and made readily available to anyone in the world as of the date of publication in any journal, public presentation at conferences or workshops, or publication or inclusion as a reference in policy document such as IPCC reports.
This legislation shall apply to publications based on proprietary data as well as data from public sources. The immense cost of the public decisions based on such publications and the risk of corruption of the results cherrypicked or data that might have been altered in hidden ways by vested interests is too great to permit data to be used or selected from any source that cannot be checked in its entirety, including the data that is left out.
Note well that this precise measure is indeed needed. The FOIA has already proven to be inadequate to compel the release of code and data used to generate datasets such as HadCrut3 or the “Hockey Stick” or “Spaghetti Graph” curves that currently support many of the conclusions of climate researchers.
Note also that this is hardly a burdensome requirement. It is sound practice already to carefully provide provenance and good organization for one’s raw data, to provide sound backup and revision control for the computer code used to process the data that permits “snapshotting” of the code actually used to produce a result, and to archive both for any given publication in case one’s methodology is ever called into question. The only additional requirement this imposes is to set up a website and put the data and code snapshot there with a short piece of documentation accompanying it that frankly will be of as much benefit to the researchers in the long run as it is to anyone seeking to download code and data to check results. Nowadays the cost of this is so low as to be “zero” and in any event is trivially within the means of any grant funded climate research program that almost certainly is already using one or more web servers to disseminate both results and data.
b) The establishment of a board of governance for the science with the specific and narrow purview of addressing abuses of the open scientific process. The need for such a board, and the need to staff it with people who are completely disconnected from climate or environmental research or any political organization or corporate organization with any possible interest in the outcome is clearly demonstrated in the occult Climategate conversations where it is revealed that certain researchers working in the field are far more concerned with “causes” and “winning the PR war” than with the science and are willing to deliberate tamper with data and methodology to hide results that confound their desired conclusions or to directly and deliberately subvert e.g. the objectivity and independence of the journal review process to suppress competing points of view right or wrong as they might be! The only place such discussions should occur is openly, in the literature itself, in the form of critical counter-articles or published comments, not in behind the scenes efforts to discredit editors or have them fired.
Note well that implementing provision a) will make tampering with data or methods far more difficult, but not (as evidence from medical research abuses reveals) impossible, and nothing (so far) seems to have worked to maintain any semblance of fair play in the public debate — on both sides of the climate issues. Even if the only sanction used by the oversight board is public censure and the probable elimination of future funding, those are probably enough in a world where one’s scientific reputation and ability to continue work are one’s greatest treasure.
c) The establishment of personal liability for any work that is published wherein it is later shown that the researcher did knowingly and deliberately manipulate data or methods so that their arguments lead towards a predetermined end (confirmation bias, cherrypicking data) without openly indicating what was done and why in the publications. Again, there is ample precedent for such liability (and the corresponding governance and oversight) in all scientific and technical endeavors that directly impact on the public weal, in particular in medical research. There should be considerable freedom under this rule to make honest mistakes or to pursue unpopular or popular conclusions — one of the major purposes of provision a) above is that it should ensure that there should never again be a good reason for sanctioning a researcher after the fact of publication by guaranteeing transparency — but just as would be (and historically, often has been) the case when it is determined that a published medical study where the researcher or corporation sponsoring the research “fudged” the data and as a result patients died or suffered losses makes the researchers and/or sponsors legally liable for the damage, there need to be at least limited liability and public sanctions in climate research to provide a strong disincentive to academic dishonesty or the protection of interests that, in the end, are not strictly the pursuit of scientific truth.
Needless to say, no researcher can afford to pay the true liability cost of a mistake in a ten-trillion dollar public policy decision driven by their work, but actual overt dishonesty and work performed with hidden/vested interests cannot be allowed to proceed unpunished, either. This has proven to be absolutely true in countless other, far less costly, realms of scientific, economic and sociopolitical endeavor — wherever an unregulated marginal advantage exists to be exploited by an unscrupulous individual, sooner or later such an individual shows up to exploit it. There is far too much at stake here not to protect the public good.
To conclude, much of what happens on this and other blogs, e.g. Climate Audit, is ultimately fruitless. Much energy and time is expended discussing this abuse or that abuse of good scientific methodology without any real hope of putting it right or on e.g. FOIA requests and other straightforward (but openly obstructed) attempts to simply understand how various numbers that purport to show anomalous warming were generated. The place progress has been made is primarily in a very few, but extremely significant cases (e.g. the deconstruction of the infamous “hockey stick” graph that at this point is completely discredited in spite of having dominated public discourse and public policy decisioning for over a decade) when access has been obtained to raw data and actual computational code. Mistakes that may well have misdirected hundreds of billions of dollars of public money could easily have been averted by legislation like that suggested above mandating a completely open and above-board process.
Those who advocate the CAGW hypothesis should welcome such legislature — if they have nothing to hide and their results can indeed convince “97% of scientists” as claimed, then they should make it easy for those scientists to not just read their published results (working from hidden data) but to be able to verify how their work advances from the hiddent. They, and their “cause”, can only benefit from a completely data-transparent process if their conclusion is correct.
Advocates are mistaken in treating the CAGW hypothesis as a public relations problem to be solved or a cause to be fought for in the first place (terms bandied about in a most disturbing way in the Climategate communications however they were intended), often discussed as alternatives to the far simpler option of publishing papers that address and attempt to refute competing claims, ideally acknowledging points where they might have a point. Scientific discourse has no room whatsoever for either of these as the popularity of an idea is irrelevant to its probable truth, and “causes” smack of either political or religious thinking, both of them ultimately irrational in different ways. An idea is held to be correct when it is well-supported by a mix of good fundamental science, reliable data, and openly reproducible, openly critically examined methods, and any good scientist will always bear in mind the fact that however much they “like” their own conclusions, they could be wrong.
There is little that is certain in science, and good science is honest about the uncertainties even when — perhaps especially when — there is a lot at stake.
Yes, this is a high standard of truth, one that will take time to achieve, especially in a field as complex as climatology, where many results are obtained by means of rather complex computational or statistical methods that rightly should be closely scrutinized as it is all too easy to either “lie” with or be honestly misled by an incorrect model (again this happens so often that we have a whole terminology such as “garbage in, garbage out” to describe it) or incorrect statistical analysis — the latter especially is a bete noire in sciences (and medical research) with far less impact on the public purse than climate research.
Nowhere are the stakes higher; nowhere is the oversight lower and the methodology ultimately more deliberately hidden than it currently is in climate research. And why? If CAGW is indeed true, a truly open process of research and decision making should be openly and even enthusiastically embraced by supporters of CAGW, because it will equally well compel skeptics of CAGW to provide full access to their methods and data and reveal possible vested interests. How often have we all heard the litany “anyone who criticizes CAGW is supported by the oil industry” (and seen scurrilous allegations to that effect in the ongoing discussion revealed by Climategate). Well, here is an opportunity to provide objective oversight and liability in the unlikely event that this is true — but in both directions.
I would therefore strongly suggest that a sympathetic advocate be found who would sponsor the a-b-c rules above as actual legislation to govern all climate research, publicly funded or not, that is actually used to influence large scale public policy decisions. Indeed, I would call on all climate researchers and journal editors to enforce “voluntarily” compliance with rule a) whether or not such legislation is ever written! Climategate 1 and 2 documents have clearly, and shamefully, revealed that many climate researchers currently knowingly and deliberately refuse to make either data or code/methods publicly available even when proper FOIA requests have been made. Journals such as Nature or Science have a deep responsibility to ensure transparency in any papers they choose to publish that have such a huge real cost and impact on public affairs either way their hypotheses are ultimately resolved. Papers published in climate science that specifically address the issue of global warming, including papers published in the past, should be given a reasonable opportunity to provide provenance and access to raw data and methods and, if that provenance is not forthcoming for any reason, the papers should be publicly repudiated by the journal and withdrawn.
Perhaps we could call it “Mcintyre’s Law”, since few people have fought this battle more frequently, and more fruitlessly in far too many cases, than Steve Mcintyre.
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“…much of what happens on this and other blogs, e.g. Climate Audit, is ultimately fruitless.”
This is the only thing I disagree with in spades. I credit the fact that there were watchdog blogs out there with the leaking of the emails. Without the blogs, there would be no one to leak them to as there was little place for them in the media, the universities, governments and the pliable general public, nearly all of which pooh-poohed, rationalized or ignored the most egregious acts and behaviours of the CAGW teamsters that were revealed . I believe the angst felt by the team at threats of discovery of their dark works arose from the existence of the few, undaunted, unfunded, defenders of truth (including the UAE insider who leaked the emails at extreme personal risk) that seem to be fully countable on the fingers of so few hands of the entire human race. This whole amazing exercise shows us that there are precious few who stand against the crushing of freedom and destruction of civilization. It is why history recognizes rather few individuals who stand out in the journey towards free societies and why the journey is still along way from completion. Watts, McIntyre, McKittrick, Jo Nova, and maybe no more than a dozen others took on a monster that was closer to succeeding in destroying and subjicating the world than the bloody tyrants of history that we are familiar with. Will we sing their praises one day? Probably not.
Gail Combs says:
December 3, 2011 at 3:44 pm
(a bunch of stuff, much of which I agree with).
However, the federalist issue was lost some 200 years ago, and history again has so very, very many case studies in where, and why, it is a very good thing that Jeffersonian completely delocalized government didn’t win out. Indeed, our history is very little BUT the history of examples of that very thing. I’m certain all of the black people who would no doubt be slaves today agree with this, as would all of the people in a world that is as free as it is because centralized, strong, free governments were able to oppose tyrannies that didn’t and don’t give a damn about beautiful myths like “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness”. Don’t get me wrong — they are beautiful myths, myths worthy of basing a civilization upon, but Mr. Hobbes had the right of it.
Of course, you might be referring to a mythical world where everybody is peaceful and where nobody does things like put a woman in prison for the crime of being raped, sentence her to death, think twice about it, and then finally release her but only under the condition that she marry the very brother-in-law that raped her. Or a world where Adolph Hitler never existed. Or a mythical world where governments at all levels but especially local ones haven’t been a lot more concerned about things like whether or not black men could marry white women, whether or not blaspheming the name of Christ is a crime, whether or not two people of the same gender having sex is a crime, whether or not Billy Bob, the governor’s cousin, has the right to drive drunk where everybody else in the state does not…
Our current mix of federal and state and local power is not perfect. Perfect isn’t the point. It is functional, mostly, amazingly so given the complexity of human civilization. It is easy to claim that all we need is a far jump to some completely structure and all of our troubles would be over; it is very, very difficult to provide a substantive argument that doesn’t completely ignore any amount of actual history to support such a claim.
If nothing else, wisdom dictates that we take small steps from where we are to different places, try moderate rebalancing of costs and benefits, who has what power, and avoid tearing down the house we live in upon our own heads in the name of an ideological mythology. I’m pretty free. I’m pretty well off. I’m pretty happy. Even with CAGW and climategate, the waste isn’t bringing an end to civilization as we know it. There are plenty of more important issues — religion, war, global poverty, global economics outside of “carbon”…
Perhaps it would be good to separate the two discussions — all the people who want to tear down the federal government entirely can start a thread devoted to THAT modest proposal (and the best of luck to you), while those who think that perhaps there is something we can do within the context and framework of the federal government we’ve got to improve the specific issue of reliable climate research can remain?
rgb
“Climate science does not own the “sold their soul for 30 pieces of silver” category. So it is not just one area of science that needs to be cleaned up but ALL.”
Well, all of the ones with enormous costs and risks borne by the public that paid for them, anyway. Usually science is decent at policing itself, but when science and corporate america mix, it is not, actually, a recipe for truth and enlightenment is it?
I’d like see the Mcintyre principle equally well applied to medical research, for sure.
rgb
The key to exposing the malfeasance of climate science has been the internet. Without sites like WUWT few would be able to find the information to judge the AGW claims, let alone form an opinion from the mumbo-jumbo in the MSM. The internet is also the best way that scientists could let others judge their work, provided they are totally transparent once they have made a claim or drawn a conclusion. Anyone should be able to view all “published” scientific papers and all data supporting and related to them, on the internet, without having to face the shenanigans of scientists responding to FOI requests.
However danger lurks in the form of internet regulations and censorship, which are being considered in the EU and the US under the guise of online piracy. There’s much discussion in the US, which US readers will be aware of, about the Online Piracy Act. One article in HuffPost Tech by Alexander Howard sums up the concerns:
“SOPA is “really a Trojan horse that might be better named the Social Media Surveillance Act,” said Leslie Harris, CEO of CDT, in a press conference today. “Expect it to have a devastating effect on social media content and expression.
“That the proposed bill has advanced with significant bipartisan support, along with PROTECT IP Act in the Senate, shows that online innovation and freedom of expression still need strong defenders against 20th century institutions whose quest for copyright protection would leave collateral damage in the form of human right defenders and entrepreneurs. “Any kind of online communication tool that allows users to post and share material” online are included under this bill, said David Sohn, senior counsel at CDT. “The definitions are so broad that any general purpose platform can be declared ‘dedicated to theft.'”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/internet-companies-and-la_b_1095477.html
Senator Ron Wyden states in support of internet freedom:
“In other words, the wrong approach to combating infringement could fundamentally change the Internet as we know it, moving us towards a world where transactions are less secure, ideas are less accessible and starting a website wouldn’t be an option for anyone who couldn’t afford a lawyer.
“The Internet has become an integral part of our everyday lives precisely BECAUSE it has been an open-to-all land of opportunity where entrepreneurs, thinkers and innovators are free to try and fail. The Internet has changed the way we communicate with each other, learn about the world and conduct business, BECAUSE instead of picking winners and losers, we created a world where all ideas have an opportunity to be heard regardless of where they originate.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sen-ron-wyden/we-cant-take-the-internet_b_1097305.html
Long may the freedom and diversity of the internet continue to be able to expose what some would wish to be concealed.
For those who see a huge task in regulating scientific ethics, I would direct you to look at what is done for engineers in Canada (and of course elsewhere). Each province has an engineering act that creates a body that oversees matters of qualifications and proficiency, standards and ethical conduct. It is administered by the profession and has powers to conduct disciplinary hearings and impose sanctions, fines, suspensions and expulsions from the profession. It hasn’t in any way shackeled imagination and creativity and perhaps one could say that in this environment it has even promoted it. Its hard to argue against the engineering marvels that surround us everywhere. Even scientists tend to try to appropriate the work of engineers – for example the misnomer “rocket science” – there is no such thing it is pure engineering. I would say that computer science is also a misnomer but I would likely get a bit of argument out of this as it is too grand a prize. Anyway, it is time, especially in an age of the most apalling decline in morality, for science to appropriate this one more thing from engineers – a watchdog organization.
Dave Springer says:
December 3, 2011 at 12:17 pm
Oh c’mon Rob. Regulation of science only works for science. Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is a religion. It’s therefore protected by the 1st amendment in the United States.
==================================
Protected as allowed to exist, but not protected as allowed to become the religion of the US by acts of Congress etc., as in setting up the EPA who base their responses and interference in the lives and businesses of others to belief in this religion, and not allowed to have tax payer money used in promoting it, and so on – right?
It is obviously not science, these are obviously not scientists, proved time and again, but the problem is that the US government is actively complicit in promoting this, see the ‘major funder’ email from Jones, the US Department of Energy.
This is clearly in breach of separation of Church and State.
Robert Brown;
In the end, though, nothing does a better job than human judgement, thoughtfully applied, by people that love their work>>>
Robert, the issue isn’t about who does better work, or who does it more efficiently. The issue is how to protect the work being done from being corrupted by monetary interests, political agendas, and the like. What the current state of climate “science” shows is that the checks and balances that should have kept money and political interests out of the results not only didn’t work, it appears that they were absent in their entirety. If it were not for a whistle blower and the combined efforts of thousands of volunteers active in the blogosphere, can you imagine the state that climate “science” would be in today?
When any organization is left to “police” itself, it turns into a police state in which dissenting opinion is muzzled from within, and a concerted effort made to muzzle dissenting opinion from without. It matters not if the subject is communism, blood letting, phrenology, the motion of the planets about the sun or how much global temperature reacts to CO2. History is plain on this, and if some weather forecasting bureau produces a high quality product, it is only because they are subject to the checks and balances provided by public opinion which eveluates their work on a daily basis. No such check and balance is available for the vast bulk of scientific research.
Let the private sector do the research, let the public sector regulate and inspect and send to jail those who twist the results to serve their own purposes. What “the team” has done is beyond criminal, and the suffering they have induced world wide cannot even be quantified. If the work and the regulation of the work weere under two different roofs, there is no doubt in my mind that they, at the very least, would have no jobs at all, and would very likely be sitting in jail cells for what they have done. No such retribution for the lies and and disgusting self serving behaviour will ever happen when the “system” is its own judge and jury.
Robert Brown says:
December 4, 2011 at 10:14 am
Gail Combs says:
December 3, 2011 at 3:44 pm
(a bunch of stuff, much of which I agree with).
However, the federalist issue was lost some 200 years ago, and history again has so very, very many case studies in where, and why, it is a very good thing that Jeffersonian completely delocalized government didn’t win out. Indeed, our history is very little BUT the history of examples of that very thing. I’m certain all of the black people who would no doubt be slaves today agree with this…..
_______________________________________
First abolishing slavery in the USA had a heck of a lot more to do with the industrial revolution and cheap energy than anything else. The Civil war was not fought over slavery it was fought over economics. BTW. there are more slaves in the world today than ever before.
Second a Federal Government is fine as long as it sticks to what it is supposed to do via the Constitution. When the Federal government starts colluding with others to get rid of the sovereignty of the USA, and that is what we are seeing today, then I have a REAL problem.
Once we have governance from a bunch of far removed bureaucrats you get fiascos like the 2001 Foot and Mouth problem in the UK. I strongly recommend you read http://www.warmwell.com/footmoutheye.html It gives a real live picture of the type of problems that set me against a centralized government. The FEMA – New Orleans butt covering is another example of the problem. http://www.peterleeson.com/Hurricane_Katrina.pdf
And the handling of the Gulf Oil Disaster a third: http://www.therightscoop.com/incompetent-obama-and-bp-turned-down-dutch-help-with-gulf-oil-spill-3-days-in-now-they-finally-accept/
The fourth is the FDA/USDA/WTO/NAFTA handling of farmers and the food supply. I have more than 20 pages of links for that mess. This probably is the best over view
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/11853
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/11878
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/11910
Bureaucracies are interested in two things expanding their “Territory” and “Protecting their turf” The bigger and further away the bureaucracy the worse the problems, corruption and the more the expensive.
From what you are saying I take it you are in agreement with David Rockefeller’s the long term goal.
“The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the National auto determination practiced in past centuries” –David Rockefeller allegedly addressing a Trilateral Commission meeting (June of 1991)
Whether or not Rockefeller actually said that, from what I can see it is exactly the way we are headed and it scares the crap out of me!
A World Government answering to the global elite is my worse nightmare because I am afraid the first move will be to consolidate power by removing the “skeptics” and “Deniers” followed by the “purging ” of the intelligensia and “Useless Eaters” (Plenty of historical examples) That is also based on exchanges with the Marxists littering the landscape in Cambridge and Harvard Square.
Unfortunately most people have been brainwashed into agreeing with your point of view so we will soon see a world government and the tyranny that comes when the puppet masters throw of the sheepskin of “Socialism” and we see the wolf beneath. http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/news/archives/2006/FabianWindow.aspx
Heck the “Purges” of the Useless Eaters has already begun with the world wide Farmland grab starting in the 1990’s. World Hunger from FAO: http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/10/images/hungry_timeseries.jpg
Ling says:
December 3, 2011 at 3:16 pm
Just ask: how much of this would have happened if climate science was funded voluntarily?
Robert Brown answers:
December 4, 2011 at 9:42 am
“None of it, because there would be no climate science.”
Before people were coerced to pay for science, there were for-profit and non-profit research institutes. Major science funding by government only began after World War II. Which taxpayer -funded climate studies have been so valuable it was worth forcing people to pay for them?
Gail – the 2001 foot and mouth mass slaughtering of healthy animals further reduced Britain’s bio-diversity, which began on joining the then Economic Community which resulted in among other things, the majority orchards being grubbed up and the production of English apple varieties given to France, and a general ban on the diversity of seeds of veg and fruit which became illegal to sell, kept alive by forming clubs. The Monsanto destruction by making it illegal, for example in Iraq, of farmers saving their own seeds and being forced to buy Monsanto, is becoming better known, but this surely has been in the pipe line for a long time.
The later outbreak of foot and mouth was from animals catching it from the laboratory next door..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-mouth_outbreak
Odd how the previously unknown strain of ‘swine flu’ began two years after a patent was taken out for a vaccine against it, and next to a lab working on such ‘viruses’..
“Let the private sector do the research, let the public sector regulate and inspect and send to jail those who twist the results to serve their own purposes.”
You mean the way that works so well in medical research? I see.
rgb
“The Civil war was not fought over slavery it was fought over economics. BTW. there are more slaves in the world today than ever before.”
Oh? I suppose the civil rights war was fought over economics. I suppose we should have just left local governments and even state governments free to keep all the darkies in their place. After all, what a huge abuse of states rights, forcing little old Georgia and Alabama and places like that to actually permit black people and white people to ride the same bus, attend the same schools, get married.
And of course, you’re indirectly advocating that we stand by and do nothing about slavery and abuse overseas. Hey, its their business, right? Local governments should be left alone, even if they are horrific tyrannies. And hey, if they decide — on the basis of simple majority decisions — that the Jews are superfluous, well, tough luck Jews.
It isn’t difficult to reduce any such argument to absurdity, in other words. The United States has fought in two world wars, one world non-war, countless small wars, and, with its various cousins in the centralized, federal democracy arena, has slowly but surely pushed the boundaries of tyranny and oppression back all over the world. It has been able to do so because of its strength, because when we stand together, many become one, we are strong and can work wonders, where if every local municipality tried to manage its own affairs we’d still be living in log cabins and fighting little wars, Durham county invading Orange county across the line, precisely the way Europe was one big battlefield for almost all of the second millennium.
“Second a Federal Government is fine as long as it sticks to what it is supposed to do via the Constitution. When the Federal government starts colluding with others to get rid of the sovereignty of the USA, and that is what we are seeing today, then I have a REAL problem.”
There, we are in agreement, although I personally really do think that it is deeply, deeply absurd to equate CAGW and carbon trading with some sort of sinister plot to get rid of the sovereignty of the USA. That illustrates precisely what one of the biggest problems with this blog (and thread) is. This is an unreasonable assertion. By what standard is signing a treaty with other nations, even a stupid and ill-reasoned one, equate to “getting rid of the sovereignty the USA”? Is there a point in there where we all failed to get to vote or something, or did the USA simply elect to do something that you disagree with (and for that matter, that I disagree with). This sort of hyperbole makes it so very easy for the proponents of CAGW and Carbon trading to point to its opponents and say “look, they are batshit crazy”.
There isn’t one single aspect of the US signing the Kyoto treaty that is unconstitutional or even unreasonable if the CAGW hypothesis is true in its worst, scariest, predictions. Judging the reasonableness of the hypothesis itself is what is at issue here, not trying to adjudicate the entire process whereby presidents get elected, congresspeople are elected, and all of that. The electoral process and divisions of power and so on are imperfect, absolutely agreed, but they beat the hell out of any alternative that I can see out there in the wide world, and I would certainly rather live here than anywhere else.
Here my personal freedoms are for the most part quite broad, and there is steady pressure to broaden them further still, pressure that cannot be resisted by tiny, bigoted rural hamlets that wish everybody was Christian just like them and that think that gay people should be put to death, witches should be burned, black people shouldn’t hold public office and absolutely shouldn’t marry white people, that Jews are almost like white people but aren’t not really, and if something happens to me unexpectedly so that I cannot work and so that the cost of dealing with it exceeds all expectations and runs through my personal fortune there is at least a chance I won’t literally starve to death, homeless and cold. Here women (like yourself) have the right to speak freely and be heard and hold public office, even though there are still plenty of communities and an entire male dominated culture that oppose it. Here we have excellent roadways that make it a trivial matter to drive almost anywhere, fine airlines that permit one to fly to any point in the world, remarkably affordably, superb communications, an educational system that for all of its warts is one of the wonders of and envies of the world. We have opportunity for any human being to rise from any state of birth and social stratum to wealth and political power — opportunity that is still far from perfect because whole localities still fight it and wish to hold onto a status quo that leaves power in the hands of an elite that has always had it.
We live in a country where an idea can change the world, and has done so many times before. Kyoto and the IPCC aren’t worthy of being considered a “threat to democracy”. That is manifestly untrue even if there are those that dream of it being so. If the European Union, Australia, the United States, China, India walk out on Kyoto, what is left? What are the odds that this will happen this year? Or if not this year, soon? What are the sanctions that the U.N. can bring to bear on the USA? Would that be “none”? Would that be “we could kick the U.N.’s sorry ass out of our country” anytime they attempted to do anything at all to us? Would that be “no country or countries acting in concert have a credible change of being a military threat to the US” in part because together we are so very strong, and never stronger than when we are being reasonable and ethical, being the best that we can be?
I think that it would. The rest of the world — at least the tyrannical part of it — fears the US, because every now and then we actually reach across the ocean and use our power, and when we are done sometimes the world is a cleaner, freer place because of it. When we don’t let our power be directed by any special interests, those on the “right” or those on the “left”. When we actually apply the same moral standards to things that we ourselves would wish to live under.
Our democratic friends don’t fear us, at least I hope not. I can’t see the US invading Canada or Australia or India in any conceivable future, not without the world turning along enormously dark paths.
“A World Government answering to the global elite is my worse nightmare because I am afraid the first move will be to consolidate power by removing the “skeptics” and “Deniers” followed by the “purging ” of the intelligensia and “Useless Eaters” (Plenty of historical examples) That is also based on exchanges with the Marxists littering the landscape in Cambridge and Harvard Square.”
Right, but at some point you have to wake up to the fact that we are nowhere near any path to a world government. You might also wake up to the fact that in a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years that’s exactly what we’ll have (assuming we haven’t fallen all the way back to barbarism and war in the meantime). Finally, you might look over the history of the tyrannies that did consolidate power to any of a number of functional elites and contrast them with our own. Personally, I’m not terribly worried that somebody is going to come knocking at my door tonight to haul me off to jail because I have dared to speak out against our ill-guided policy with respect to CAGW. Are you? Really? I think I could say things like “Obama’s mom wears army boots” and while it might be considered rude, not much of anything would happen. I could wear a tee-shirt saying “What would Jesus do? He’d be Buddhist!” or publicly state that the Pope has (in my opinion) very likely committed crimes covering up the crimes of Catholic priests and bishops and feel perfectly secure.
Now, contrast that with visiting sunny Iran and wearing a tee-shirt featuring Muhammed with a speech bubble that says “The Quran? I just made that all up…” You’d be lucky to survive the hour.
Even the debate over CAGW is a sign of a healthy democracy. WUWT is a purely democratic institution. I’m proud to post here (and the many other places I post). Yes, eternal vigilance is the price of freedom and all that but I think you greatly exaggerate the risks associated with CAGW and the IPCC. Even the science would straighten itself out — eventually — if we all did nothing at all. Global temperatures will do what they will do, quite independent of what we might think that they are likely or unlikely to do, and eventually the truth will be manifest.
rgb
Robert Brown says:
December 4, 2011 at 4:13 pm
“Let the private sector do the research, let the public sector regulate and inspect and send to jail those who twist the results to serve their own purposes.”
You mean the way that works so well in medical research? I see.>>>
For every abuse of the system that sneaks through the cracks in medical research, there are a thousand thwarted.
No system is perfect, but in any system where the researchers and the regulators are one and the same, the results bow to a political agenda. Wrong doing is whitewashed. For every crime that is thwarted, a thousand slip through the cracks. Read the history books, learn from them, or be condemned to repeat what is in them. Communism, socialism, pick an ism and you will find that self regulation for the greater good is a myth never achieved in history. Power corrupts. Hence, separate the powers. The flaws in the regulation of medical research come no from the seperation of power, but from places where the seperation of power was circumvented.
“Before people were coerced to pay for science, there were for-profit and non-profit research institutes. Major science funding by government only began after World War II. Which taxpayer -funded climate studies have been so valuable it was worth forcing people to pay for them?”
Au contraire. There has never been a time where people were not coerced to pay for science. The means of coercion simply changed over time.
People on this list really should read Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons”. They also might acknowledge that the increase in the standard of living for every human being on this planet but the ultra-rich since the end of World War II is the greatest such increase in the history of the Earth. Again, by such an enormous factor that it doesn’t brook any debate. You can try to argue that this enormous increase would have been enormouser with some other structure of funding, but any sort of even passing familiarity with the literature of science (and its support) is sufficient to make this at least a very dubious proposition.
Personally, I happen to think that building a solid, complete, total knowledge base of the real physical Universe is a part of the human race growing up and positioning itself to — maybe — earn the right to survive the inevitable disasters that will in the future be capable of terminating it. There isn’t one single piece of information that is trivial or unworthy of learning. With that, it is certainly fair to prioritize. Again, if CAGW is a correct hypothesis every penny spent on climate research is well spent! And I repeat, we do not know whether or not it is a true hypothesis, not yet. Not knowing if it is true is not the same thing as being certain that it is false. My major gripe isn’t spending money on climate research, it isn’t even spending a lot on the research — it is the begging of the question and basing major, expensive policy decisions on what looks like it is poor and corrupted science. I’m still open minded about the hypothesis itself.
Aren’t you? Or are you fallen into the same trap as the CAGW proponents — a closed mind unwilling to look at data and reasoned arguments without bias? I’d argue that we don’t even HAVE uncorrupted data and arguments at this point, not that we couldn’t and shouldn’t work to build them.
rgb
“The flaws in the regulation of medical research come no from the seperation of power, but from places where the seperation of power was circumvented.”
Well said, sir, and well reasoned. I do not agree with you, but I can appreciate your argument. I just do not think any system prevents all abuse, and misdoubt the ability of lay persons to “regulate” science. I also think you vastly underestimate the problems with modern medical research and reproducibility. But I could be wrong.
rgb
Robert Brown says:
“…we do not know whether or not it is a true hypothesis, not yet.”
Right. CAGW [and for that matter, AGW] are not hypotheses, because they are neither testable nor falsifiable. They are at the conjecture stage of the scientific method.
Don’t misunderstand, if something is a conjecture that doesn’t mean it is wrong. I personally think that added CO2 may cause a slight amount of [beneficial] warming. But I could be wrong; it may cause no warming at all. It may even cause cooling on balance. At this point, no one knows. What we do know is that past predictions of rapid global warming have been falsified by the planet itself.
Especially in science, words matter. If and when there is testable, falsifiable evidence for AGW, it will then be elevated to the status of a hypothesis. But as of right now AGW is a conjecture, because there is no testable evidence directly linking human emitted CO2 to global warming.
Robert Brown;
They also might acknowledge that the increase in the standard of living for every human being on this planet but the ultra-rich since the end of World War II is the greatest such increase in the history of the Earth.>>>
Yup. Let’s see, what are the great advances in science over the last century that have so dramatically improved the lot of human beings?
Electricity (generation and distribution), light bulbs, internal combution engines, freeze drying, food processing, refridgeration, long haul trucks (with reefers), television, CD’s, DVD’s, home stereos, home theatres, anti-biotics, anti-virals, personal computers, laser printers, central heating, central air conditioning, greenhouse produce, irrigation systems, food quality inspection systems, preservatives, vecro, yellow stickies, super glue, inter-continental aircraft…..
What two things do all of those have in common?
1. Developed by private industry.
2. Without cheap energy, we’d have none of them.
Robert Brown;
I also think you vastly underestimate the problems with modern medical research and reproducibility.>>>
Have you ever taken a close look at the regulatory regime those organizations operate under? I’m shocked they ever get ANYTHING to market. Compliance law that governs those organizations, and the tracking and inspection systems that enforce it are comprehensive to the point of being the largest cost component of the R&D process itself.
Dr. Brown,
Hardin’s “How To Legislate Temperance?” section in The Tragedy of the Commons http://www.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full was a reminder to me of the danger of administrative law without corrective feedbacks. Climate Science seems to be missing the internal corrective feedbacks associated with more mature fields of science.
Wow, I never would have expected to see so much space on WUWT given to a long-winded Marxist troll, just because he might have a little scientific integrity, or disbelieves the CAGW fairy tale, or refutes the existence of Santa Claus.
There are already laws on the books covering all of the evil deeds done and yet to be done by both climalarmists and the politicians backing them. We need more laws as much as we need more politicians, or more government funded scientists, of whom Dr. Brown is one or would like to be one (can you say 100 million dollars?)…
A million times more science is conducted every day in the private sector than will ever be done in the public in a whole year.
But Wait! We can change that overnight! You will simply work for us!
All right! Government is so purposeful, so loving, so all knowing, so benevolent, I can hardly stand it! Government is the liberator of all mankind! Save us please!
What a bunch of drivel and nonsense, batshit. I’ve come to expect a lot more from the site. I will have to cancel my subscription if it continues!
It’s not just that skeptic research has a hard time getting published, as someone mentioned earlier, it has a hard time getting funded. The gov’t. is in the warmist camp, and the only potential gored-oxen who would privately fund such studies are the demonized oil companies and free market or conservative think tanks–whose results are instantly trashed in the public mind by the well-organized, well-funded alarmist machine. (One example among many I read here recently was of someone who wanted to research old ships’ logs for evidence of past weather, but couldn’t get government funding. Dr. Gray (of hurricane fame) couldn’t get funding for studying warming–his agency told him to stick to his last.)
Further, a “skeptic” has no burden on him to come up with an explanation for what’s happening. He need only point out the logical flaws in the explanations being proffered by others. E.g., the 2035 Himalayan melt-by date, or the “radiative physics” assumption about climate “drivers,” or the unlikelihood of the climate sensitivity index being as high as the IPCC says, or the unwarrantedness of the positive-feedback hypothesis, etc. The same applies to pointing out the flaws in research about glaciers–see the thread just posted today on that topic. Or see the many threads picking holes in (or at least making reasonable objections to) consensus Arctic research conclusions.
Further, the skeptic can undermine the case proffered in another way: by uncovering instances of behavior or rhetoric that impugn the trustworthiness of the advocates. And there’s lots of that.
The skeptic need only say, “Go back to the drawing board–don’t tax me until you have something that can withstand criticism.”
Well, I wish Google would fund it, the way they are funding a buyout of all the out-of-print but in-copyright books around, so they can put them online. (But Google won’t.) If Google did such a thing, and pledged to continue doing so in the future, would you still say that the program was so “wide open to abuse” that Google would be such a pitiful, helpless giant that it would be unable to notice what was happening and keep it under control? If you concede that Google wouldn’t be massively victimized, you concede that it’s not inherent in the donation that corruption will occur, but in the donor–the government. Well, I concede that there’d be some waste, some poor decisions about what to fund and not fund, but those seem minor in the big picture to the benefit of having free online access of the world’s citizens to the world’s science.
Google wouldn’t let this happen, to any great degree (there are always borderline cases). The government would probably let a lot more nonsense get funded, such as iffy alternative medicine journals, chiropractor’s journals, etc. But the amount involved would be small, and the harm produced would be 1% of the benefit of pulling down the paywalls around mainstream science.
In the meantime, in exchange for avoiding that cost, the warmist juggernaut will roll on—instead of hitting the speed bumps which citizens who had free access to the science (and thus a level playing field with climatologers) would provide. The waste-cost of the EPA’s regulations will dwarf the waste-cost the government’s paywall-replacement subsidy
You’re asking for nine-tenths of a loaf. It won’t happen. A tenth of a loaf is better than no bread.
Robert Brown says:
December 4, 2011 at 5:27 pm
my emphasis
Hahaha… why don’t you just quote directly from the horse’s
assmouth:“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment …”
You aren’t going to fit in well here, Brown. GFY.
Robert Brown says:
December 4, 2011 at 5:27 pm
Gail Combs wrote: “The Civil war was not fought over slavery it was fought over economics. BTW. there are more slaves in the world today than ever before.”
Robert Brown, with an as yet undetermined appendage responds: “Oh?”
Oh yes!
http://www.historycentral.com/CivilWar/AMERICA/Economics.html
I thought this was common knowledge amongst the more literate. I guess I was wrong about that.
Roger Knights says:
December 5, 2011 at 1:50 am
Google can do whatever it wants. Google doesn’t have the power to levy taxes. I have no doubt that subscription science journals would absolutely love the idea of an unqualified journalcaid program I certainly don’t want to pay for it. I think there should simply be a law that any research conducted in whole or in part with public funding must be placed in a freely available government archive just like the archive maintained by the United States Patent and Trademark Office and furthermore that no part of any public money may be spent in payments to private publishers.
There’s a nasty little exclusionary racket going on in the academic publishing business that is funded in part by tax dollars. Ending the racketeering is desirable from a taxpayer POV. Increasing the size of the racket by direct government payment of subscription fees does not end the scam it only makes it more lucrative.