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 They can only gain credence in an atmosphere where science education has been replaced by dogmatic endorsements of the pioneers, and, increasingly, of the charlatans who have taken science over.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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Dr. Gray, you are the only person besides my buddy George I have heard that says, “…you cannot measure the average temperature of the earth’s surface… .” I have tried myself to explain this to others and their eyes glaze over. Either they do not understand or they think I’m a nutjob, because the concept that we can measure a single world temperature (by our current methods) is always assumed to be correct. And try to explain how thermometer readings that are plus or minus 0.5 or even 1.0 degree yields “average” world temperatures good to one hundredth of a degree that can then become the latest new high temperature record. Thanks for the essay.
Chad Wozniak says at May 10, 2013 at 12:57 pm
I fear that we would disagree vehemently over political philosophy (I am a Labour party supporter, British Socialist!)
But I fear even more that we would agree practically over many policies.
My concern over AGW is that it involves altering scientific methodology in order to preserve one’s own position.
This has led to a deadening of debate. Knowledge has been unchallenged and so enabled to become faith.
Faith is a basis of life; faith is an experience that you frame your life and your decisions (and your views) through.
Science is a means of evaluating doubt.
Both faith and science are of value but they are not the same.
To return to the beginning, I think you are also confounding faith (your basis for life) with science (your assurance of avoiding error).
But I hope we can still respect each other despite being on opposite sides politically.
Dear Dr Gray,
i think you have made some very salient and profound points. I have recently read “Brighter Than a Thousand Suns” by Robert Jung. The insight and substaniated thinking by Bohr, Heisenberg Schrodinger, et alia at Guttenburg in the 1920’s and Rutherford, Dirac, Thompson at Cambridgeand Fermi independnetly in Italy in the 1930’si s absoloutley outstanding.
The young questioning minds not blinded by dogma or pre-conceived ntoions. They must still exist. Why is it they they are not allowed to blossom and advance science whether is be in physics, biology or chemistry ?
As you rightly point put, why no new ideas in 50 years? Is it our education systems?
I may be upsetting people – but the rate of inventions ground to a halt as Universities started employing accountants. The departments that just existed before and did research usually without a lot of complicated/expensive apparatus were now having to fill in activity sheets and account for their time ‘not teaching’. Research departments had to ‘make money’ – i.e. research grants and funded research. The only way to make money is to have a ‘customer’ – customers by definition do not know (or want to know) the latest blue sky research – they want a marketable product. So research becomes implementation research and incremental advancement. Attempts to spend time on blue sky good ideas is stifled at the next year end when the department head is questioned about unfunded hours worked. Accountants have no sense of scientific excitement about research or new ideas – just look at the ($35,000) loss column for the department and suggest that the department head be re-employed preferably not at this university. The closest to leading edge research that a university can get nowadays is if NASA or similar agency like the Department of Energy wants to do leading edge research and provides a research grant for some kind of teaming arrangement. This is how UEA got the Hadley Centre and their reason for being terrified of upsetting the funding stream. Funding trumps science every single hour of every day.
Mea Culpa
should be Gottingen, not Guttenberg
On reflection , and some wine, the problem lies with what Universities have become. No longer the province of the the most intelligent (and before the critcism of elitism, I can run 100 m but not as fast as Usain Bolt, why is enhnaced physical ability applauded, but enhanced intelligence decried?) Universities now provide qualifcations on the basis of regurgitated informtion, not to question established ideas.To put it bluntly, most universites are now profit making meat processing plants to provide economic units to provide higher tax revenues.
I believe there have been at least two brilliant inventions of the last 50 years.
The first may be just outside the 50 years in that it was first reported in Applied Physics Letters on 1 December 1962. This was the first visible spectrum (red) light emitting diode. They, and their many descendants, are now in almost every electronic device and have spun-off an extraordinary range of applications.
The second invention falls well within the last 50 years since it was developed in 1973. This is the Global Positioning System (‘clocks in space’) which has, since it became operational in 1994, also spun-off an incredible range of applications.
Both ideas have had a revolutionary impact on modern life.
Dr Gray, I think you will find Peter Gluckman has snuck one science challenge in the list called:
“The Deep South: research to understand the role of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean in
determining our future environment”
Page 30 of this document spells it out, lots of AGW waffle:
http://www.pmcsa.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/Report-of-National-Science-Challenges.pdf
I read something on http://www.stuff.co.nz also but can’t seem to find it now. He’s still holding on, you can be assured. I think from memory only 4 mill over 10 years specifically assigned for then deep south challenge. That is a pittance which is good to see not much emphasis being put on it.
Some won’t find this relevant, some may even mistakenly find this racist. That’s you prerogative. I’ll also mention the topics are in no way interrelated from to the best of my knowledge. I just think it shows the man’s character. Peter Gluckman is the NZ spokesman for B’nai Brith. They are Israeli expansionist organisation that make no apology for settlements and land grabs, lets just call them what they are “Zionists”. Basically Gluckman thinks of himself as one of the anointed ones in more ways than you could ever imagine .Put it this way, they don’t believe in two states or peace. It’s my way or the highway. They seem to want the land of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Iraqi also according to the original planned maps from the international Zionist federation in the late 1800’s, oh and Ben Gurion said it also many times.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%27nai_B%27rith
This is what they claim:
“B’nai B’rith International (English pronunciation: /bəˌneɪ ˈbrɪθ/; Hebrew: בני ברית, “Sons of the Covenant”),[1] the oldest Jewish service organization in the world, is committed to the security and continuity of the Jewish people and the State of Israel and combating antisemitism and bigotry. Its mission is to unite persons of the Jewish faith and to enhance Jewish identity through strengthening Jewish family life; broad-based services for the benefit of senior citizens; and advocacy and action on behalf of Jews throughout the world.”
So you will see it says “sons of the covenant”, they are all male and are similar to the Anglo-freemasonic orders. So you can see Gluckman lives in a misogynistic fantasy world of initiations and fairy tales. Where in reality they do things like attack film festivals, they want to shut down the Palestinian voice or any opposition. Sound familiar? http://electronicintifada.net/content/bnai-brith-attacks-canada-palestine-film-festivalagain/5758
Peter Gluckman also attends IPS conferences with the likes of Mr. Elliott Abrams from the CFR and PNAC Neocon/Iraqi war planner. The one who mentioned the “New Pearl Harbour” to be taken advantage of. People of that ilk. They try to shape the way the world sees Israeli foreign policy, a little bit like how he’s trying to shape the NZ climate policy.
http://www.herzliyaconference.org/eng/?CategoryID=486
http://www.herzliyaconference.org/eng/?CategoryID=425
I have not seen so much good sense in one article for a very, very long time. Congratulations!
Billy Liar says:
May 10, 2013 at 2:36 pm
I believe there have been at least two brilliant inventions of the last 50 years.
The first may be just outside the 50 years in that it was first reported in Applied Physics Letters on 1 December 1962. This was the first visible spectrum (red) light emitting diode. They, and their many descendants, are now in almost every electronic device and have spun-off an extraordinary range of applications.
The second invention falls well within the last 50 years since it was developed in 1973. This is the Global Positioning System (‘clocks in space’) which has, since it became operational in 1994, also spun-off an incredible range of applications.
Both ideas have had a revolutionary impact on modern life.
LEDs or electroluminescence was discovered in 1907 and implementation extended over the decades with “the first practical visible-spectrum (red) LED was developed in 1962”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode
To be picky – the only thing that is ‘novel’ about GPS is that it is satellite based, Otherwise it is ‘just another’ Distance Measuring Equipment (DME) system. It is another implementation of an old idea. In the same way that satellite phones like Iridium have merely moved the base stations onto a satellite so they orbit past the phone rather than the phone passing the base stations. However, both have found widespread spin off’s. Similarly, LORAN and eLORAN are just other implementations of wartime GEE.
It is extremely difficult to find new ‘inventions’. Many of the ‘new’ patents are taking old inventions that were feasible but not practical and using advances in technology to implement them. This is extremely important work and there have been huge advances but it is not the original idea.
The only one area I can think of is nano technology and buckminster fullerine type materials the work in that area was not even feasible until the 90’s
I might be accused of a big case of nostalgia…but…
The end of true applied research for me came when Bell Telephone Laboratories was divided up among the “Baby Bells” and became Bellcore for them and Bell Labs for ATT at divestiture.
The preceding century was one of discovery, innovation and advancement in telecommunications. The Big Bang theory’s existence came from studies of bird poop in microwave antennae. The transistor came alive after a lab researcher messed up the doping process and decided to test the “ruined” result. In a more “scientific” process, Dr. Nyquist formulated the theory of digital sampling that still works, giving us talking machines that sound human…and the damned Iphone. Let’s not forget the LASER and its development. These examples are just a few of many such discoveries and happy accidents.
Of course that was when telecomm was a stodgy industry where change came slowly and costs were much much too high for the average consumer to hear the marketers talk.
Standards were the big thing – change was something long considered and picked at before seeing the light of day. Then came divestiture – and Ma Bell was never the same.
Many of the same brilliant people still worked at the split organization, but research had to produce something marketable, something whiz bang something to make money with. Not only on the ATT and Western Electric side, but all through technology the question wasn’t; “Gee, how can we use this?” It was; “How much can we sell it for and when will you have it ready?”
Companies developed competing standards and marketed them – most consumers are aware of VHS and BETA – Japanese Victor Corporation and Sony’s head-to-head conflict. However this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Scientists became dependent on sales marketers for funding. I think the slide to feeding from the government trough was easy from there.
“Publish or perish” became “produce or die”.
Thanks for letting me wallow in nostalgia for a bit, I feel much better now, Dave.
Mike (an old telecomm engineer)
Ian W,,,,Its ironic that your novel development is named after the most heinous plagiarist of all time…who even boasted of it. Fullers geodesic dome idea which propelled him to stardom was stolen from a patent application by an Austrian inventor which Fuller read in hi capacity as mail censor. He later defended this by saying that “What is often mistermed as plagiarism is more precisely ‘talent.'”
…its not certain that he had any.
Thanks, Dr. Gray.
I think that when governments grow big enough to control the universities, they start churning out useless “yes-men”, incapable of questioning the status quo, which is how we make science.
This graduates just want to reaffirm the discoveries of their teachers, not to prove them wrong in some way and maybe invent something new. Like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein did. Like we used to do in our jobs.
What was that quote from Planck again? I don’t want to be misunderstood, I wish a long life to Dr. Gray and the gentlemen writing an op in the WSJ recently.
Unfortunately there has been a rise of style overriding substance, of activists putting on the mantle of science as if a costume, all too effectively appealing to authority (for just the formal style of a paper is enough to get many to auto-believe, while computer model monuments to GIGO impress the naive, both taking advantage of a predominance of TL:DR and superficial impressions). Meanwhile, they lack the commitment to honest inquiry and increasing the material capabilities of mankind which gave more true science a justly deserved favorable reputation. On such as nuclear power and radiation, ideologues never managed much infiltration, but they finally did at environmental studies institutions.
For instance, the Doran & Zimmerman paper providing the foundation of the 97% consensus appeal to authority claim is a classic example: actually reading the short paper is enough to see its two questions were essentially if temperatures rose since the Little Ice Age and if humans have a significant (non-zero UHI et cetera) impact on temperature, but about all of countless websites reporting such (aside from skeptic sites) are dishonest enough to portray such as agreement on CAGW, making the paper serve its purpose.
Many who call themselves scientists today do not deserve the term, better called activists; just graduating from college with a degree, like millions of other people, does not intrinsically make someone really a scientist, nor does being paid to advance a cause other than more honest inquiry.
Dr Gray, while I would disagree with you on several points – important scientific advances continue to be made in apolitical areas like nano-tech – I agree that the problem is that the grant system politicizes science. This dates from the 1950/60s when politicians decided that they needed to make academic science more relevant to society, and funding was shifted from direct funding of academics to a system of targeted grants.
We see its worst excesses in climate science where many papers are little more than a pitch for the next round of grants, and full of scientifically unsupported statements that pander to the current groupthink/consensus, call it what you will.
The solution is an at least partial return to a system where some academics get long term funding, which they are free to use researching any subject they feel of interest.
@M Courtney –
Faith is not the basis of my convictions, since I am an atheist. My convictions are based solely and strictly on my own observations and those of others that I find credible and compelling. I am always suspicious of blankjet statements about anything.
I believe that the record of socialism speaks for itself: at best it is stagnation, as in Britain pre-Thatcher, at worst it is Nazism (yes, National SOCIALISM), Communism and now Climatism. No belief system which emphasizes the collective over the individual can ever be truly humane, because it inevitably leads to the disregard of fundamental rights – the rights, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, to “life, liberty and the oursuit of happiness.”
With all due respect, to believe that socialism in any form has a future would seem to me to be much more of an exercise in unempirical faith than conclusions drawn from observation. It is as much an article of faith as AGW, methinks.
I don’t believe I fall into any of the conventional political categories, although I probably come closest to the classical luberal (not today’s reactionary statists) label.
Dr. Grey,
I find it intriguing that you reference Dr. R. V. Jones’ excellent book ‘Most Secret War”. This book lists in its pages all of the problems with “science” that we are heir to. Every one of Lord Monckton’s oft quoted logical fallacies are included, plus such things as political interference, self righteousness and down right pigheadedness.
I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a great read.
Great post.
You made the comment that, “So, at last, to get to the point of this Newsletter, are we returning slowly to reality?”
Maybe in New Zealand, but not here in the US.
I just recently heard an educator of secondary education (high school in the US) justify eliminating dissection (frogs, fetal pigs, and the like) out of public schools because surgeons (paraphrasing here) don’t need to know anatomy anymore given that most operations are performed using tiny incisions and amplified microscopy.”
Seriously, she said said something like that.
Of course, she missed that fact that there might be an advantage to the patient if the surgeon knew where to make the “tiny” incision in the first place, not to mention all the structures he/she might want to avoid (a knowledge of anatomy is helpful in knowing to what said structures are attached and which ones can sacrificed and which are absolutely necessary to sustain life).
Common sense tells you that the earlier you start understanding anatomy, the better, but, since the purpose of the general population understanding science is lost on the average educator, anyway, I’m not going to hold my breath waiting on some intelligent teaching idea to come out of the American educational system.
For 10K years there was a true frontier to be explored and settled. Having completed this process on Earth we were to have continued it on to other worlds. We seem stuck now, unable to truly set forth into the heavens. We’ve already backed off on manned missions even to nearby worlds. We are not doing serious planning for making a jump to new Earths. Unless we find a way to work around the enormous problem of M in E=MC^2, with its insurmountable wall as velocity increases, it appears we must develop great courage for missions lasting multiple generations or manned by a series of clones of the initial crew. But we do not seriously pursue this. We are stuck on this rock and here we shall someday perish as a species. This will not be due to poisons, global warming or any other Man made issues. It will be Nature doing what is already preordained.
“witgh inefficient powere stations that can be frequently turned on and off”
Do you mean:
“with inefficient power stations that can’t be frequently turned on and off”?
I likewise recommend R.V.Jones’ book.
Its been a couple decades or more since I read it. Even so one of the episodes in it which has stuck with me ever since is when British captured a Würzburg radar (in the Bruneval raid). They found the construction tolerances were amazingly precise, much more than was needed, so they speculated it was actually some sort of directed energy weapon. The Brits only ever built their radars just good enough that they’d work, and no more.
After WW2 they asked the radar engineers in postwar Germany ‘why did you make it with such high tolerance’. The answer: ‘we always build stuff that way’.
Seventy years later the Germans are still cleaning out the rest of Europeans at the competition tables because they have this ingrained attitude. You can learn a lot about a people by how they do things, and national habits are very hard to change.
Reblogged this on The GOLDEN RULE and commented:
There is much to learn, or to become satisfied with the support offered, from this post. I find I do not agree with all that Dr Gray says, particularly his enthusiasm for nuclear power, but I do understand his reasons.
What is important are his thoughts on how the “science” applied to AGW is unsupported by valid logical thinking and processes and yet how it manages to still shape the world’s thinking and actions.
Really impressed by his understanding of the impossibility of establishing a meaningful average global temperature, whereby it becomes a joke to make political decisions on such data (my comment).
“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.”
So simply said, and so very true.
The last truly “new” thing to be invented was the LASER in the mid 1950s. The basis of all computer science was developed long before that. By then we already had the basic knowledge to get to the moon.