TUCSON, Ariz., Aug. 28, 2013 — /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Climatism or global warming alarmism is the most prominent recent example of science being coopted to serve a political agenda, writes Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the in the fall 2013 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. He compares it to past examples: Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, and the eugenics movement.
Lindzen describes the Iron Triangle and the Iron Rice Bowl, in which ambiguous statements by scientists are translated into alarmist statements by media and advocacy groups, influencing politicians to feed more money to the acquiescent scientists.
In consequence, he writes, “A profound dumbing down of the discussion…interacts with the ascendancy of incompetents.” Prizes and accolades are awarded for politically correct statements, even if they defy logic. “Unfortunately, this also often induces better scientists to join the pack in order to preserve their status,” Lindzen adds.
Lindzen discusses key aspects of the global warming models, including their dependence on the “globally averaged mean temperature anomaly”—that is the average of the differences between the average temperature for the year at each weather station and the 1961-1990 average for that station. This metric is used to create an influential graph that resembles the daily chart of stock indices, but is of dubious significance. The change in the anomaly is tiny against the perspective of the temperature variations we experience daily, Lindzen demonstrates.
In normal science, models are judged by how well they agree with nature, Lindzen explains. In the climate “debate,” however, the models are given a claim to validity independent of agreement with real observations.
The highly oversimplified terms of the discussion in the policy arena “largely exclude the most interesting examples of historical climate change. The heavy intellectual price of the politicization of science is rarely addressed,” writes Lindzen.
Lindzen writes: “Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It has also been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions. How can one escape from the Iron Triangle when it produces flawed science that is immensely influential and is forcing catastrophic public policy?”
Escape from climate alarmism will be more difficult than from Lysenkoism, in Lindzen’s view, because Global Warming has become a religion. It has a global constituency and has coopted almost all institutional science. Nevertheless, he believes “the cracks in the scientific claims for catastrophic warming are…becoming much harder for the supporters to defend.”
The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons is published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a national organization representing physicians in all specialties, founded in 1943.
SOURCE Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) www.aapsonline.org
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/climate-science-exploited-for-political-agenda-according-to-journal-of-american-physicians-and-surgeons-221474241.html
…and surprisingly, published in the mostly liberal Sacramento Bee:
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/28/5687619/climate-science-exploited-for.html
h/t to Marc Marano of Climate Depot
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ATheoK says:
August 29, 2013 at 10:38 am
Yeppers! 8<) Very true!
(Oh. Wait. Were you trying to be sarcastic? ) What is your money-trough of government (er, taxpayer-extorted) money?
Here is a convenient and equally devastating before/after 1950 plot of the global average as Richard presents in this paper:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1955/to:2012/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1895/to:1950
It’s important to keep this link handy as a quick response to AGW activist posts on news and science sites that also use this plotting site to create straw man arguments that try to ridicule skepticism.
“The scientific community is clearly becoming less ambiguous in separating views on warming from totally unreasonable fears for both the planet and mankind. Environmental advocates are responding by making increasingly extreme claims.”
I’m all for that! The faster the Sierra Club, Nat. Geographic, Greenpeace, Natural Resources Defense Council etc. destroy themselves from within to be replaced by organizations that really
actually care about the environment the better off the Environment and all of Humanity will be.
‘Escape from climate alarmism will be more difficult than from Lysenkoism, in Lindzen’s view, because Global Warming has become a religion.’
I suspect the escape from the global warming elephant may end up being quite a bit different than people perceive. When Richard Nixon ended the final vestiges of the post WWII, Bretton Woods, agreement anchoring the US dollar to gold it was widely perceived that US currency no longer had a physical backing. However, it has been rumored that Nixon sent Henry Kissinger to Saudi Arabia around that time to negotiate an agreement whereby Saudi Arabia, then the world’s largest oil producer, would trade its oil in dollars. Whether or not that rumor is true the fact of the matter stands that all oil, worldwide, is traded in dollars; often referred to as ‘petrodollars’. Ultimately, oil is what backs the US currency. The US has never engaged the Middle East militarily to ensure a stream of oil for domestic use. Oil imported into the US comes primarily from Canada, and alternately, Venezuela and Mexico. So, the US engages the Middle East solely to foster world trade, and importantly, to insure the value of its own currency.
The US has had a relationship with Saudi Arabia extending all the way back to the mid 1930s when FDR visited there. Well, it was reported, somewhat under the radar, and only yesterday, that Saudi Arabia sent an emissary to meet with Vladimir Putin. Years ago that would’ve been inconceivable. Russia now vies with Saudi Arabia for being the world’s largest oil producer.
If oil is no longer traded in petrodollars, and China and others wish so, then all bets are off. What is the current US debt load? What is the situation if the US creditors no longer have faith in its currency? The US is the most lavish funding source for climate science. All those politically correct scientists may be in for a very rude awakening when they discover that not only did they screw us, they screwed themselves. And they lacked the wisdom to recognize that had to be the inevitable outcome.
Another article from the same issue:
From the President: Dialectic of Deceit
Juliette Madrigal-Dersch, M.D.
THIS journal is going to go on my reading list! Refreshing!
“Once people get the idea that it’s ok to say that the emperor has no clothes, then there’s only one way this will end.”
Oh no – does that mean that we all have to bear witness to Michael Mann in a sandwich board and not much else?
The sandwich board will read “Climate Whore”.
Richard needed to publish this somewhere it wouldn’t get dismissed out of hand; kudos to him for taking that important first step into dismantling the Ponzi scheme known as AGW.
“The time has come for us to see. What we are now asked to worship, what had once been dressed as God or king, is the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent. This is the new ideal, the goal to aim at, the purpose to live for, and all men are to be rewarded according to how close they approach it.” – Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged, 1957)
“It is very often by Princes rather than by their own merits that men are brought to the greatness that they desire.” – Giorgio Vasari (Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 1568)
Unfortunately, this also often induces better scientists to join the pack in order to preserve their status,”
Fair statement , the ones leading it front and centre could in no way be called ‘better’
Old global warming arguments never die. They just smell that way.
The article is like a breath of fresh air.
ATheoK says: August 29, 2013 at 10:38 am
“Well, of course Dr. Lindzen published in the ‘Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons’! Where else would he find an uncorrupted publication addressing a large customer base of science educated citizenry.”
hmmm – Lindzen has published in better journals than this one and the ‘Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons’ has published articles of an odd kind e.g. http://www.jpands.org/vol12no4/bauer.pdf and also flirted with the vaccines-cause-autism nonsense http://www.jpands.org/vol11no1/geier.pdf and has spent a lot of time trying to convince people that abortions cause breast cancer.
Anyone here understand the word “irony”? The science has been co-opted by both sides of the argument. Of course, when the message chimes with what we want to hear, it makes a louder, more mellifluous sound.
Margaret Hardman:
Your post at August 29, 2013 at 11:33 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/29/climate-science-exploited-for-political-agenda-according-to-journal-of-american-physicians-and-surgeons/#comment-1403023
Bollocks!
There is NO irony!
You are asserting that because AGW-supporters are Lysenkoist it must be that those who oppose them are Lysenkoist, too. That assertion is pure psychological projection.
Many climate realists have been fighting the pseudoscience of AGW purely BECAUSE we support science and oppose Lysenkoism. I have been engaged in this fight since the early 1980s.
And we are pleased that Lindzen has managed to publish his paper because it is a small victory in the fight to defend science against the harm caused by the Lysenkoists.
Richard
It would be helpful if more engineers and science majors, as well as the general public, had a basic grasp of the historic abuses of science in the 1900’s.
Lysenkoism’s destruction of agricultural output in both Russia and China (during the Great Leap) have clear parallels with the attacks on modern agricultural advances and water use we see right now. Science has a shameful, and very recent, history of being coopted by government in these areas, and the results before and after WWII were lethal to millions – at the hands of their own governments, through fashionable scientific manias, obsessions, and fixations regarding agriculture.
China still refuses to acknowledge the starvation caused by the Great Leap, attributing the deaths of millions of Chinese to natural causes. New planting techniques were enforced from the top down, and as crops completely failed, bureaucrats were eager to report the success of the government agricultural policies. As a result of the false reporting and manipulated numbers, the Chinese exported rice as the people starved and were forced off of their private farms. So it is well to require China to acknowledge and allow free discussion (on its firewalled internet) of the horrifying death toll resulting from the Great Leap scientific agricultural programs, before we accept any agricultural sustainability programs in Europe or the US. But instead, agreements have been signed with China to pursue a 5 year plan for sustainable agriculture in the EU and with the US Dept. of Agriculture.
Or to quote Eisenhower who predicted this 52 years ago:
“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
As always, Prof. Lindzen is honest & to the point! Perhaps the medical community is a bit nervous, as they have hitched their wagon to CAGW rather tightly & may be starting to reconsider that. In my field (public health), it is de rigueur to hew to the party line, i.e. more warming equals malaria in Wisconsin eventually etc. I’m surrounded by it and have to keep my yap shut.
I highly recommend everyone to watch Prof. Lindzen’s colloquium speech to the assembled scientists of Fermi National Laboratory in 2010, titled “The Peculiar Issue of Global Warming.” He really goes after the “new religion” aspects of CAGW, much to the dismay and disapproval of the assembled physicists. Since FNAL is DOE, that was to be expected. It was a great show, I was glad I attended! If the link doesn’t work, it means FNAL is having a technical issue, that happens in these sequester shortages.
http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/VMS_Site_03/Lectures/Colloquium/100210Lindzen/f.htm
I have to agree with richardscourtney in his response to Margaret Hardman.
AGW is pseudoscience. If I am wrong about that, I challenge anyone to produce verifiable, testable scientific evidence showing conclusively that human CO2 emissions affect global temperatures.
So far, I have seen no such evidence. If anyone has such evidence, post it here.
Anthony,
You write: “In normal science, models are judged by how well they agree with nature, Lindzen explains. In the climate “debate,” however, the models are given a claim to validity independent of agreement with real observations.”
Point taken. However, I think you mean “real science,” not “normal science,” which has an entirely different meaning per Thomas Kuhn (1962). The behavior of the alarmists is entirely in keeping with Kuhn’s “Normal Science,” (capital N, capital S), i.e. the defense of the paradigm even to an irrational degree and irrespective of contrary facts.
Dr. Lintzen is certainly justified in discussing the historical abuses of science through the eugenics/population control movement in the recent past. But modern eugenics/population control programs – do they exist?
The Population Control Holocaust by Robert Zubrin
The Characteristics of Population Control Programs
“First, they are top-down dictatorial, and based on foreign governments meeting quotas for funding.
Second, the programs are dishonest. It is a regular practice for government civil servants employed in population control programs to lie to their prospective targets for quota-meeting about the consequences of the operations that will be performed upon them.
Third, the programs are coercive. As a regular practice, population control programs provide “incentives” and/or “disincentives” to compel “acceptors” into accepting their “assistance.” Among the “incentives” frequently employed is the provision or denial of cash or food aid to starving people
Fourth, the programs are medically irresponsible and negligent. As a regular practice, the programs use defective, unproven, unsafe, experimental, or unapproved gear, including equipment whose use has been banned outright in the United States.
Fifth, the programs are cruel, callous, and abusive of human dignity and human rights. A frequent practice is the sterilization of women without their knowledge or consent, typically while they are weakened in the aftermath of childbirth. This is tantamount to government-organized rape. Forced ab——s are also typical.
Sixth, the programs are racist. Just as the global population control program itself represents an attempt by the (white-led) governments of the United States and the former imperial powers of Europe to cut nonwhite populations in the Third World, so, within each targeted nation, the local ruling group has typically made use of the population control program to attempt to eliminate the people they despise. In India, for example, the ruling upper-caste Hindus have focused the population control effort on getting rid of lower-caste untouchables…”
ref: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-population-control-holocaust
That is very nicely put, clear and succinct, as is everything Richard Lindzen is quoted as saying. Excellent.
“Science” as a concept has never been scraping the bottom of the barrel as long as it has been recently. It is a consequence of zero self-discipline, with no consequences to those high-profile crazies that have hijacked it at every step. And they have far surpassed all the previous historical examples of un-scientific carelessness.
“…ambiguous statements by scientists are translated into alarmist statements by media and advocacy groups, influencing politicians to feed more money to the acquiescent scientists.”
The most cogent description of the AGW phenomenon as I have ever seen. Thank you Dr Lindzen.
Richard
Thank you for your measured and considered comment. It is no more than I had expected, especially from you. Have you actually read the paper? It is here http://www.jpands.org/vol18no3/lindzen.pdf
It is written in the usual style of the (now) “realists” – AGW is a religion, it is comparable with lysenkoism (are governments putting you and your skeptical mates like Lindzen and Spencer in prison to rot away and die long and painful deaths? Of course they aren’t because the comparison is unsustainable). Why didn’t the beloved George W Bush (2001-2009) end the global warming conspiracy? He didn’t because there isn’t one. Climategate as pathology – that one is dead.
The fact that it is in such a low impact journal, one with a very poor reputation says so much. The fact that it plays the same Tony’s tricks to hide the incline by having two squiggly graphs and asking the reading to spot the eight differences (clue, there is an elephant in one of the graphs) and another of using daily variation to mislead the reader into not noticing the year on year increase is typical “fake realist” fare. And you have the shallowness to call my comment bollocks when you know that both sides of the argument, for and against, use the science to their own ends.
I have no more to add. Good afternoon
Margaret
To those researching the AGW issue with a historical perspective. here is a link to a well written view on the Lysenko-istic character of the AGW story when the craze was being fueled up in 1996 by Gore and others.
http://dwightmurphey-collectedwritings.info/A67-GlbWrmg.htm
Another article can be found by Bob Carter, around 2010 I think.
Kudos to Lindzen, upon whom future historians will record as a hero.
Re: NikFromNYC
“The time has come for us to see. What we are now asked to worship, what had once been dressed as God or king, is the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent. (Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged. 1957)
From: Dialectic of Deceit: —–
“We are called “providers” instead of doctors. This single, seemingly non-threatening word instantly erases our years of top grade scores, entry exams, expensive and intensive education, highly competitive testing, and unbelievable residency hours—and lumps us in with the physician assistant or nurse practitioner who completes a part-time two-year course.
“… We must learn to identify deceptive and manipulative language, and avoid falling into arguments or discussions founded on terms designed to mislead. To allow manipulative language to remain unchallenged is to engage in a dialectic of deceit, a debate in which logic is useless and the truth can never be revealed. Adopting the language of our opponents automatically concedes the fight. Are you a “provider” or a doctor? … ”
“…. I don’t submit a claim. I send a bill. ….
“…. Submitting a claim is the same as submitting your training, your experience, your very profession, to the whims of the lowest insurance clerk. I can tell you that this doctor, that this organization, will never submit.” [end] ( – Dialectic of Deceit, Fall 2013)
-Juliette Madrigal-Dersch, M.D., Marble Falls, TX, serves as president of AAPS.
Friends, seldom do I stumble upon such a magnificent essay for the ages. 2 pages, 4 columns, 1430 words. It is worth you time to read every golden word. And reread. Savor it.
Lindzen wrote an essay in 1995 about the remarkable similarities between the global warming and eugenics hypes. It contains some of the thoughts expressed today and is a very good read:
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/180_Eugenics.pdf
Game over when Dick Lindzen goes JPANDS. That is not a mark of distinction.
(Lindzen’s CV. Compared with his intellect, you have zero distinction. Comparing yourself to a rabbit. Supremely pathetic. ~mod)