Guest essay by Dr. Vincent Gray, Wellington, NZ
For over 30 years the world has been saturated with the environmental fallacy.
It has taken over the media; newspapers, radio, TV; the education system;, the schools, the universities.
It has led to a retreat from experimental and theoretical science.
My professional career began during the war when science made a substantial contribution to its outcome. We had vigorous scientific discussions both in public and in the media. We published them in the journals. We enjoyed prestige, attractive salaries and public confidence.
It declined immediately the war ended. R V Jones, in his “Most Secret War” recounts that as soon as the war ended the military were no longer interested in measures to improve conditions of survival of pilots.
I endured a steady decline of science. In industrial research the role of the scientist was to justify the decisions of the sales department, and now it is increasingly to justify the policies of the Government even in the universities.
We have benefited from technical progress, based on scientific discoveries of the past. Chemistry, X-Ray diffraction have enabled molecules to be visualized. Combined with the genetic code it has led to modern medicine and our longer lives. Computers and solid state physics have changed our communications completely. The environmentalists accept these grudgingly, but they reject nuclear power, chemical pesticides, genetically engineered crops, and even (current National Geographic article) nitrogen based fertilizers. They have rubbished Darwin’s theories of evolution and replaced them by The Environment and Sustainability
There have not been any truly revolutionary scientific discoveries for 50 years
Scientists now live on short term contracts, interspersed with press announcements which either scare the public or claims to have made world shattering discoveries, all in the aid of receiving the next grant.
The climate models that have been foisted on the public would have been rejected by all the journals I knew in 1940. They can only gain credence in an atmosphere where science education has been replaced by dogmatic endorsements of the pioneers, and, increasingly, of the charlatans who have taken science over.
I have recently been revising my old NZClimate Truth Newsletters where I said it all years ago. There are no new publications worth answering. The latest IPCC Report merely repeats previous shibboleths.
They have confessed that they are frauds in the Climategate letters, and even, as I point out, in such items as Jim Hansen’s item on “The Elusive Surface Temperature”.
But, who cares? They still routinely promote the views of environmental activists on every excuse, Prince Charles and Al Gore keep up their worrying.
So, at last, to get to the point of this Newsletter, are we returning slowly to reality?
There are currently a number of indications that the worm is beginning to turn.
Fracking
This is a method developed in 1947 for improving oil production which has been the deliverer of the United States economy where they now export oil, instead of importing. It has had the effect of making coal so cheap that it has boosted cosl-fired powers stations and made up the energy shortfall in Japan that followed their unwise abandonment of nuclear energy. European environmentalists and anti-nuclear Japanese must now face the fact that gas prices in the USA are now $3.32 per million BTU in USA, $11.77 in Europe and $I6.66 in Japan
The New Zealand Government seems at last to be encouraging oil exploration. Discouraging damaging protest and even approving the ming of gold in its traditional region, Waihi.
Temperature
I have spent much effort pointing out that you cannot measure the average temperature of the earth’s surface and that the “Mean Global Surface Temperature Anomaly Record” is a very poor substitute. It is not a temperature record at all, but consists of a series of multiple averages each of which is based on a different mixture of measurements from unrepresentative weather stations. It is also, like all of the ”data” favoured by the IPCC, subtly biased to enable it to support the greenhouse theory. What is amazing is that they did not do a better job, and that the world could be made to cringe at the thought of an increased temperature of less than one degree in 100 years.
Yet it has now got stuck. It has stayed much the same for 17 years and Dr Pachauri is so worried that he thinks it might last another 15 years before his desired warming actually happens.
Apart from the infected Met Services, like the UK where they still keep predicting forthcoming warm winters and our own service which failed to predict the drought. Most ordinary meteorologists carry on with genuine science which does not depend on greenhouse gas concentrations
Windmills
The companies are going bust and the US is trying protectionism for its own dying manufacturers
Brian Leyland at
http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=5&Itemid=31
shows that windmills actually increase emissions of carbon dioxide because they have ti be backed up witgh inefficient powere stations that can be frequently turned on and off
Emissions
Only 15% of greenhouse gas emissions currently come from countries that signed the Kyoto Treaty. The New Zealand Minister, Tim Groser, recommends it should be ditched at
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10851772
Carbon Price is “Inching close to zero”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/feb/07/european-carbon-price-zero
Sir Peter Gluckman
The Government’s Chief scientific advisor has announced new funding for the National Science Challenges at
It is more interesting in what it does not say that in what it says.
§ Aging well – harnessing science to sustain health and wellbeing into the later years of life
§ A better start – improving the potential of young New Zealanders to have a healthy and successful life
§ Healthier lives – research to reduce the burden of major New Zealand health problems
§ High value nutrition – developing high value foods with validated health benefits
§ New Zealand’s biological heritage – protecting and managing our biodiversity, improving our biosecurity, and enhancing our resilience to harmful organisms
It is all very laudable, but there is no mention of any new ideas that might push any of these objects further.
For the first time there is no mention of the environment, global warming, climate change endangered species, or sustainability. It is actually getting real, at last.
Conclusion
These are, as yet, only straws in the wind. There is still much to do before science and common sense can once again prevail.
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Very well said. What “climate science” has done to real science and to valid environmental concerns should make all scientific and worthwhile environmental organizations cringe.
Marxists have done their work very well, as Hayek predicted they would.
Nail on the head, just a slight slip: endangered species are covered (under biodiversity, indeed another unfounded hype). I agree that things are slowly turning, also here in Europe. The economic reality will do the shake up. It is a pity that a justified increased environmental consciousness has been so dramatically overplayed that this may fire back. Wich would be a pity but understandable.
I have considered New Zealand to be the “thin edge of the wedge” on “environmental issues”, followed by Australia on “political issues”, and then visa versa. In the end the void is great enough to split a Kaori (NZ) tree. Neither are great performers IMO.
It is interesting that you date this decline from just post WW11. I would have thought it more observable from the late 60’s or early 70’s. It is possible that these are both correct, in that what you perceived in the 40’s had been translated into academia and other structural functions to the degree that it became increasingly dominant from the later time, where previously it might have been sporadic or particular in nature.
It must also be the case that in any transition, there are a number of participants who reflect a previous culture, and until they are rendered effectively uninfluential, a mix of influence survives, which personally I see as having survived to a diminishing degree until the end of the 1980’s.
Although I don’t doubt for a minute your basic proposition, it is also possible that what you perceived after the war had been present prior to it, and that your awareness was to some degree based on a reversion and your increasing maturity and experience.
As to the present and future, plainly AGW along with a whole host of other manifestations of this, not just in science, are all teetering and will collapse in the near future under the weight of their inherent inadequacy. Reality can only be abused for so long.
What happens after that is problematic. How is the mind of a 20 yo constituted after, to a large degree, never having been exposed to anything as uncompromising as a hard fact? If everything has been provisional for them, depending on convenience and based on an edifice of defiance of reality, what can be built from this?
My own experience in science from the ’70s onward is in agreement with Dr. Gray’s experience. Scientists are people who are expected to curry favor with MBAs and lawyers. Getting money is the goal, not the means.
“Fracking
This is a method developed in 1947 for improving oil production which has been the deliverer of the United States economy where they now export oil, instead of importing.”
I think he means to say natural gas here not oil. I surely wish the US was a net exporter of oil.
“There have not been any truly revolutionary scientific discoveries for 50 years”…
I’ve been saying this for years… And people think I’m crazy…
Humm Man out of Earth orbit? the fastest Jet…on and on…
The one exception is the electronic tech, being the only place some great stuff is coming from..
The paragraph on the temperature record is just perfect..
We still import a whole lot of oil. We export gas, though….
Reed Coray says:
May 10, 2013 at 9:10 am
Very well said. What “climate science” has done to real science and to valid environmental concerns should make all scientific and worthwhile environmental organizations cringe.
The most important point the author makes is not about “climate” science, but instead about science in general. By the end of the ’60s there was a very strong trend to require company researchers to provide support to marketing. There is no appreciation of fact or truth in marketing and the pervasive demand for “support” from scientists tends to drive out original and critical thinkers from all fields that simply demand “support.” This is not limited to corporations and instead is endemic in any system dominated by political behaviour. In such a climate of thought, ad hominem becomes in the bminds of many synonymous with critical thought. Various other institutions including the current patent and copyright systems tend to lend support to this pathetic pattern, encouraging “inventors” to patent or copyright outright trivial, self-evident drivel as original contributions. Focusing on the problems of any single science encourages the reader to ignore a far greater, systemic problem with science in general.
“bminds” -> minds
@upcountrywater says:
May 10, 2013 at 10:03 am
“There have not been any truly revolutionary scientific discoveries for 50 years”…
I’ve been saying this for years… And people think I’m crazy…
——————————————————————————————————
Yes. Pretty well everything that has developed has its base decades ago, and anything that has made progress into significance or public usage has just been evolutionary or developmental.
You quote electronic technology as an exception. That has been following along Moores Law in a dutiful fashion for decades. An iPhone might be Wow! Amazing! as a consumer item, but it is otherwise trivial.
Sensation ahead of substance. Novelty ahead of real discovery.
Thanks Dr. Gary
Larry Bell documents more “inconvenient truth”: Global Warming Alarm: Continued Cooling May Jeopardize Climate Science And Green Energy Funding! He quotes Paul Elrich (2010 Nature) observing (how a barrage of challenges countering the notion of a looming global warming catastrophe):
If WUWT is truly the most visited climate website, then we know the times, they are a changin’.
Truth may be obscured for awhile (to us, 50 years is a long time, but it really is, in view of eternity, only a blink), but it will, in the end, prevail.
While the seemingly rock hard state of the minds of “dah yute” of today may be dismaying, there is, even now, a remnant. Not all the young minds of the world have been brainwashed. There are THOUSANDS of eager, intelligent, accurately educated, girls and boys (and 20-somethings, too) ready to fight the ongoing battle for truth.
The signs of science’s rebirth may appear tentative to us, a crocus or two here, some tiny buds there, but the power of those small green shoots pushing up through the earth into the light is mighty and irresistible. A cold snap or two may slow them down, but NOTHING will stop spring from bursting forth in all its glory. And it is well on its way. Take heart! The long, cold, winter is over. Spring has begun!
When money realizes, as it clearly has, that CO2 conjecture is a bad investment, you can know that the CO2 scam is over. It’s only a matter of time. I know, I know, time is what some now have very little of and you wanted so very much to see another science summer. Moses wanted very badly to go into Canaan with his people, but God only allowed him to see the promised land from a distance before God took him home. But, the Israelites did make it. And that was all that really mattered.
THANK YOU, Dr. Gray. Thank you for all your persevering, heroically valiant, efforts in the battle for truth.
Forever grateful,
Janice
The problem for too many scientists today, especially climate scientists’, is grant addiction.
In ‘climate science’, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that grants are rarely available unless the conclusion of the research, for which you are seeking funds, is clearly stated first.
To be awarded a research grant, the conclusions have to be scary, albeit peppered with the cop out wording of: “may”, “could”, “the models show….”
And that’s how you get a grant, but I sense grants are beginning to decline in number and amount – something which is long overdue.
If you look into industrial sales pitches you will discover “hockey sticks” To wit: If you buy xyz your yield of produce, ect will rise exponentially All Mickey Mann did was use this technique to promote global warming.
Sadly we are being pushed by people who believe that the cause (ideology) is more important that facts. The objective of those people is to force all others to bow down to their dogma that must never be questioned. I can only hope that in the end, science returns to testing, verifying, and still keeping an open mind to the possibility that the result may not be correct. Doubt in science is really a good thing because it causes us to be open to the possibility of another discovery.
True, true, Mr. Stendera (thanks for kind remarks on M. Mann thread — just read them). Can’t you just see Michael Mann at the county fair pushing his Super-Dooper Does-it-All STICK! (comes in wood or fiberglass). LOL, your fertilizer metaphor is MUCH better, Mr. S..
Bob Diaz, did you eat more hamburgers??? It’s a lot warmer here in the Pacific Northwest this week!!! Maybe you should cut back… LOL
Well said Dr Gray, to me it seems human nature is the one constant through out.
We are lazy and remain complacent until the crisis effects us personally.
So even scientific awakenings are cyclic.
As you and others have pointed out, the damage to scientists, conservationists and policy advisors will be deep and far reaching.
The real scientists have my deepest sympathy, it would seem the lesson here is bureaucracy is the natural enemy of discovery, wonder and individual brilliance(critical thinking?).
Climatology TM is to me the ultimate expression of group think.
While we are reviewing, past critiques of this CAGW nonsense, does any one have access to John Daley’s direct criticism of the team ? I was immensely cheered by his statements to the team, wrt their incompetence, but if I saved it, it is on a now expired laptop
Correct, we are currently in a dip in the rate of fundamental advances.
But these are not uncommon.
The question ought to be what we can do to kick-start a new wave of creativity?
-Common sense says that the internet should allow better cross-fertilisation of ideas.
-There are more of us than ever to come up with inspiration.
-We are all in such desperate straits that we must come up with something… hang on.
No we’re not. Necessity is the mother of invention and most of the brightest and best of us are given tenure at universities. What would those people need to do in order to be secure?
A: Not rock the boat, then they can’t be sacked; fear authority.
B: Promote their field so as they don’t fall back relative to other fields (the performing arts has an academy so we must. And outsiders don’t understand our field so they need the academy to tell them who is good. And so we can’t disagree with the heads of the academy if we want to get on in the academy. So Yesterday’s ideas are not to be offended against).
C: Raise the profile of their field to ensure the funding keeps flowing. The bigger the issue the better. Saving the nation; good. Saving the world; better! Cost-effectively realising this is a phantom menace and that the clones are a waste of resources…
Not a good strategy if you want to be secure.
My prediction: Science and common sense never prevail. Itll just be a different irrational fixation instead of CO2. Has there ever been a time in any culture in recorded history when affairs were governed by science and commonsense without over-riding obsessional fixations with something more important than lived reality?
The fall-off of major scientific discoveries since 1970 parallels what happened in the Soviet Union, which incidentally partly explains why the West won the Cold War – the Soviets falling behind technologically – and, I believe, is due to the same cause: the leftist politicization of science in general, with its hostility towards dissenting views and its disregard of the principle of skepticism.
Janice Moore – I share your hopes for a recovery, but not so much your optimism – this diease has become so very deeply rooted worldwide and in every dimension of society, that it will take herculean efforts to eradicate it.
I attach two emails I sent to Dr. William Happer apropos his latest Wall Street Journal op-ed, which refer to the problem ar hand.
Dear Will:
Saw your latest op-ed, and Peter Glieck’s meshuga response to it. Great job of showing him and his fellow alarmies for the fools and dunces and hypocrites and liars and sycophants and parasites that they are.
There is no question that added CO2 has only benefits and no harmful effects. Greenhouse operators (i.e., the real “greenhouse effect”) have always understood this – I remember hearing of this on a fifth-grade school field trip where my class visited a greenhouse. You don’t have to be a physicist or any kind of scientist to be able to understand that – just have an open mind.
Unfortunately, we have a long ways to go to get this rubbish out of the body politic’s system. Obama and company and his Ministry of Propaganda (the media) will cling to AGW no matter how much evidence is presented to refute it, because it is the reason for their assault on civil liberties and their pretext to tax and regulate everything to death. They’re already saying the last 17 years’ cooling isn’t enough to disprove global warming, and of course they ignore the pattern over the longer period (80 years of net cooling since the peak temps of the 1930s, not to mention over 3,800 years since the beginning of the hittite-Minoan-Mycenean warm period).
By the way – I assume you’ve heard about the two profs at San Jose State who burned a copy of Steve Goreham’s Book, The Mad Mad Mad World of Climatism? Can you imagine that – a university, supposedly a place of open dialogue and examination of all aspects of problems and issues, engaging in book burning? Hitler and Goebbels live on campus! I should think that SJSU’s reputation will be forever besmirched by this incident.
Best regards,
Chad Wozniak
Dear Will:
Thank you for your kind response to my message. And thank you for keeping up the good fight.
One of the biggest problems we face is that many big corporations have bought into the AGW myth, because they expect to profit from various aspects of it. People like George Soros and Michael Bloomberg expect to make money on otherwise uneconomic “renewable” energy sources, like wind, when Obama succeeds, at their behest, in jacking up the price of fossil fuel energy to the point where these wasteful schemes can compete. Big Oil, far from financing skeptics, is actually in the thick of this, and one may recall that Enron was the first to tout cap-and-trade. It’s crony capitalism at its worst.
The other huge problem is the extent to which this mythology has already penetrated the K-12 educational system, as well as the universities. Elementary school teachers are being instructed, under the new official educational standards, to tell their pupils that they will die from global warming if something isn’t done about it, and to punish any pupil that denies this (which to my thinking is nothing short of child abuse). Kids are going to have an awful lot to unlearn at some point – not only the falsity of AGW, but the habit being inculcated in them of not questioning anything they are told.
It’s really sad that the people who will be hurt the most by the AGW alarmist agenda are the poor people who are the biggest supporters of the officialdom pushing that agenda. Obama speaks glibly of saving the world for our grandchildren, but there are a lot of grandchildren right now, here, today being raised by grandparents on low incomes, who stand to be very badly hurt if Obama’s energy agenda is carried out. The wealthy left-wingers who support this agenda might not feel it if gasoline goes to $10 a gallon or electricity to 40 cents a kWh, but poor and middle-class people sure will.
Here in California we have a particular example of an abusive regulatory agency: CARB (California Air Resources Board). CARB has proposed new regulations for diesel engines that will require trucking companies, farmers and other users of trucks to refit their existing equipment at huge expense – enough to drive a good many out of business altogether, and of course cost their employees their jobs. The “science” behind these new regulations was found to have been “researched” by a charlatan, an impostor without credentials, and after review by experts was found to be completely false and unfounded, and to have no beneficial effect on emissions – but CARB is going ahead with the regulations based on it anyway.
I was particularly offended when Obama traveled to Ghana and told people there not to develop their fossil fuel resources and instead rely on thei “bounteous resources of wind, sun and biomass.” Well, the vast majority of Ghanaians do rely on biomass – they burn shit (sorry to be so direct, but “dung” just doesn’t quite get the point across) to cook their food. Shit is biomass, right? And then they die by the thousands from the diseases and parasites they catch from doing that. I’ve been to Ghana and have seen how everybody there (except the tiny socialist-kleptocrat elite) lives, and if that is the vision Obama has for our country’s future, the kind of world he wants to leave to our grandchildren, we are in serious trouble
We have quite a row to hoe here, and it’s probably going to require a deep-down change of leadership in the country before these problems can be fixed – and considerable restructuring to take down rogue regulatory agencies like CARB, the EPA and the Department of Labor.
My apologies for being so prolix – it just seems there is always something to talk about on this subject.
Best regards,
Chad Wozniak