Guest essay by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Politicians pay for science, but scientists should not be politicians. Consensus is a political concept. Unwisely deployed, it can be damagingly anti-scientific. A reply to Naomi Oreskes (Nature, 4 September 2013).
Subject terms: Philosophy of science, consensus, climate change
The celebrated mathematician, astronomer and philosopher of science Abu Ali Ibn al-Haytham, or Alhazen, is justly celebrated as the founder of the scientific method. His image appears on Iraqi banknotes and on the postage stamps of half a dozen nations of the ummah wahida.
Al-Haytham on a 10,000-dinar Iraqi banknote. Image source: banknotes.com.
Al-Haytham, unlike Naomi Oreskes,[1] did not consider that consensus had any role in science. He wrote that “the seeker after truth” does not put his trust in any mere consensus, however venerable: instead, he submits what he has learned from it to reason and demonstration. Science is not a fashion statement, a political party or a belief system.
The objective of science, as of religion, is truth. Religion attains to the truth by accepting the Words of Messiahs or of Prophets and pondering these things in its heart[2]. Science attains to the truth by accepting no word as revealed and no hypothesis as tenable until it has been subjected to falsification by observation, measurement and the application of previously-established theory to the results.
The Royal Society’s dog-Latin motto, Nullius in verba, roughly translates as “We take no one’s word for it”. The Society says, “It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.”[3] No room for consensus there.
The Royal Society’s achievement of arms and dog-Latin motto. Image source: The Royal Society
T.H. Huxley, FRS, who defeated Bishop Wilberforce in the debate over evolution at the Oxford Museum of Natural History in 1860, put it this way: “The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties: blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”[4] Richard Feynman agreed: “Science,” he said, “is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”[5]
Karl Popper[6] formalized the scientific method as an iterative algorithm starting with a general problem. To address it, a scientist proposes a falsifiable hypothesis. During the error-elimination phase that follows, others demonstrate it, disprove it or, more often do neither, whereupon it gains some credibility not because a consensus of experts endorses it but because it has survived falsification. Head-counts, however expert the heads, play no part in science.
Left to right: T.H. Huxley (cartoon by Spy), Karl Popper (ivanjeronimo.com.br), and Richard Feynman (swfan444.deviantart.com).
The post-modernist notion that science proceeds by the barnacle-like accretion of expert consensus on the hulk of a hypothesis is a conflation of two of the dozen sophistical fallacies excoriated by Aristotle[7] 2350 years ago as the commonest in human discourse. The medieval schoolmen later labelled them the fallacies of argument ad populum (consensus) and ad verecundiam (appeal to reputation).
Science has become a monopsony. Only one paying customer – the State – calls the tune, and expects its suppliers to sing from the same hymn-sheet. Governments, by definition and temperament interventionist, are disinclined to pay for inconvenient truths. They want results justifying further intervention, so they buy consensus.
The Hamelin problem is compounded by a little-regarded consequence of nearly all academics’ dependency upon the public treasury. Those whom the State feeds and houses will tend to support the interventionist faction, and may thus give a spurious legitimacy to a political consensus by parading it as scientific when it is not.
Too often what is really a political consensus will be loosely defined with care, allowing its adherents to pretend that widespread scientific endorsement of an uncontentious version implies support for a stronger but unsupported version.
Consider climate change. The uncontentious version of the climate consensus is that greenhouse gases cause warming. Oft-replicated experiment establishes that the quantum resonance that interaction with near-infrared radiation induces in a greenhouse-gas molecule, such as carbon dioxide, emits heat directly, as though a tiny radiator had been turned on. Thus, adding greenhouse gases to the air will cause some warming. Where – as here – the experimental result is undisputed because it is indisputable, there is no need to plead consensus.
The standard version of climate consensus, however, is stronger. It is that at least half the global warming since 1950 was anthropogenic.[8],[9] Supporters of the uncontentions version need not necessarily support this stronger version.
Though IPCC (2013) has arbitrarily elevated its level of confidence in the stronger version of consensus from 90% to 95%, Cook et al. (2013),[10] analyzing the abstracts of 11,944 papers on global climate change published between 1991 and 2012, marked only 64 abstracts as having explicitly endorsed it. Further examination[11] shows just 43 abstracts, or 0.3% of the sample, endorsing it.
No survey has tested endorsement of the still stronger catastrophist version that unless most CO2 emissions stop by 2050 there is a 10% probability[12],[13] that the world will end by 2100. The number of scientists endorsing this version of consensus may well be vanishingly different from zero.
The two key questions in the climate debate are how much warming we shall cause and whether mitigating it today would cost less than adapting to its net-adverse consequences the day after tomorrow. There is no consensus answer to the first. The consensus answer to the second may surprise.
Answering the “how-much-warming” question is difficult. Models overemphasize radiative transports, undervalue non-radiative transports such as evaporation and tropical afternoon convection, and largely neglect the powerfully homoeostatic effect of the great heat-sinks – ocean and space – that bound the atmosphere.
Absolute global temperatures have varied by only ±1% in 420,000 years[14]. Will thermometers be able to detect the consequences of our altering 1/3000 of the atmospheric mix by 2100?
Uncontroversially, direct radiative warming at CO2 doubling will be the product of the instantaneous or Planck parameter[15] 0.31 K W–1 m2 and the CO2 radiative forcing[16] 5.35 ln 2: i.e., ~1.2 K. Models near-triple this value by temperature feedback amplification. Yet no feedback can be measured directly or determined theoretically. Feedbacks may even be net-negative.[17],[18]
Another uncertainty is introduced by the amplification equation in the models, which was designed for electronic circuits, where it has a physical meaning. In the climate, as the singularity at a loop gain of 1 approaches, it has none. In a circuit, feedbacks driving voltage to the positive rail flick it to the negative rail as the loop gain exceeds 1. In the climate there is no such physical mechanism.
The chaoticity of the climate object is an additional, insuperable uncertainty.[19],[20] The IPCC admits this: “In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system and, therefore, that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”[21]
The atmosphere, like any object that behaves chaotically, is highly sensitive to initial conditions. The available data will always be inadequate to allow reliable prediction – especially by probability distribution in model ensembles – of the chaos-driven bifurcations that make climate climate.
Given these real uncertainties, the IPCC’s claim of 95% consensus as to the relative contributions of Man and Nature to the 0.7 K global warming since 1950 is surely hubris. Nemesis is already at hand. Empirically, the models are not doing well. The first IPCC Assessment Report predicted global warming at 0.2-0.5 Cº/decade by now. Yet the observed trend on the HadCRUt4 data[22] since 1990, at little more than 0.1 Cº/decade, is below the IPCC’s least estimate.
Taking the mean of all five global-temperature datasets, there has been no global warming for almost 13 years, even though CO2 concentration increases should have caused at least 0.2 Cº warming since December 2000.
Given the Earth’s failure to warm as predicted, and the absence of support for the IPCC’s version of the climate consensus, its 95% confidence in the anthropogenic fraction of the 0.7 Cº warming since 1950 seems aprioristic.
No global warming for 12 years 8 months. Data sources: GISS, HadCRUt4, NCDC, RSS and UAH.
So to the economic question. Posit ad argumentum that the IPCC’s central estimate of 2.8 Cº warming from 2000-2100 is true, and that Stern[23] was right to say the cost of failing to prevent 2-3 Cº warming this century is ~1.5% of GDP. Then, even at a zero inter-temporal discount rate, the cost of abating this decade’s predicted warming of 0.17 Cº[24] by CO2-mitigation schemes whose unit mitigation cost is equivalent to that of, say, Australia’s carbon tax will be 50 times the cost of later adaptation.
How so? Australia emits just 1.2%[25],[26] of global anthropogenic CO2. No more than 5% of Australia’s emissions can now be cut this decade, so no more than 0.06% of global emissions will be abated by 2020. Then CO2 concentration will fall from the now-predicted 410 μatm[27] to 409.988 μatm. In turn, predicted temperature will fall, but only by 0.00005 Cº, or 1/1000 of the minimum detectable global temperature change. This is mainstream, consensus IPCC climatology.
The cost of this minuscule abatement over ten years will be $162 billion[28], equivalent to $3.2 quadrillion/Cº. Abating just the worldwide mean warming of 0.17 Cº predicted for this decade would cost $540 trillion, or $77,000/head worldwide, or 80% of ten years’ global GDP[29]. No surprise, then, that in the economic literature the near-unanimous consensus is that mitigation will cost more than adaptation[30],[31]. The premium vastly exceeds the cost of the risk insured. The cost of immediate mitigation typically exceeds by 1-2 orders of magnitude that of eventual adaptation.[32]
Accordingly, Oreskes’ statement that “Political leaders who deny the human role in climate change should be compared with the hierarchy of the Catholic church, who dismissed Galileo’s arguments for heliocentrism for fear of their social implications” is not only scientifically inappropriate but historically inapt: for no political leaders “deny the human role in climate change”, though some may legitimately doubt its magnitude or significance; and none impose any such opinion upon their citizens.
It is the true-believers in the New Religion of Thermageddon who have demanded that their opponents be put on trial for “treason” (Robert Kennedy), and for “high crimes against humanity” (James Hansen, NASA)[33]. The penalties for treason and for crimes against humanity are not the house arrest to which Galilei was sentenced, but death. Insistence upon consensus has often bred the most brutal kind of intolerance.
Galileo Galilei. Image source: content.answcdn.com.
The true lesson of l’affaire Galilei, then, is that the governing class, then the high priests of Rome, now the acquiescent archdruids of academe and their paymaster the State, should not intolerantly abuse their power, then of theology, now of monopsony reinforcing peer-pressure rebranded as consensus, by interfering in scientists’ freedom to be what al-Haytham had beautifully called them: seekers after truth.
References
[1] Oreskes, N, 2013, Nature 501, 27–29 (05 September 2013), doi:10.1038/501027a.
[2] Luke II, 19: King James Bible.
[3] http://royalsociety.org/about-us/history/
[4] Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95), Aphorisms and Reflections, selected by Henrietta A. Huxley, Macmillan, London, 1907.
[5] Feynman, R., What is Science?, 15th annual mtg. National Science Teachers’ Assn., New York (1966), in The Physics Teacher 7:6 (1969).
[6] Popper, K., Logik der Forschung, (Julius Springer Verlag, Vienna, 1935).
[7] Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 52 pp. (2012).
[8] IPCC, 2001. Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis: Contribution of Working Group I to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Houghton, J.T., Y. Ding, D.J. Griggs, M. Noguer, P.J. van der Linden, X. Dai, K. Maskell and C.A. Johnson (eds.)], (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
[9] IPCC, 2007. Climate Change 2007: the Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007 [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Avery, M. Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)], (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
[10] J. Cook, D. Nuccitelli, S.A. Green, M. Richardson, B. Winkler, R. Painting, R. Way, P. Jacobs, and A. Skuce, Environ. Res. Lett. 9 (2013), doi:0.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024.
[11] Legates, D.R., W.W.-H. Soon, W.M. Briggs, and C.W. Monckton of Brenchley, Sci. Educ. 22 (2013), doi: 10.1007/s11191-013-9647-9.
[12] Stern, N., The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review. Cambridge University Press (2006).
[13] Dietz, S., C. Hope, N. Stern, and D. Zenghelis, World Economics 8:1, 121-168 (2007).
[14] Petit, J.R., Jouzel, J., Raynaud, D., Barkov, N.I., Barnola, J.-M., Basile, I., Bender, M., Chappellaz, J., Davis, M., Delaygue, G., Delmotte, M., Kotlyakov, V.M., Legrand, M., Lipenkov, V.Y., Lorius, C., Pepin, L., Ritz, C., Saltzman, E., and Stievenard, M., Nature 399: 429-436 (1999).
[15] IPCC (2007), p. 631 fn., where the value is given as a reciprocal in W m–2 K–1.
[16] Myhre et al., GRL 25:14, 2715–2718 (1998), doi:10.1029/98GL01908.
[17] Lindzen, R.S., and Y.-S. Choi, Asia-Pacific J. Atmos. Sci., 47:4, 377-390 (2011), doi:10.1007/s13143-011-0023-x.
[18] Spencer, R.W., and W.D. Braswell, Remote Sensing 3, 1603-1613 (2011), doi:10.3390/rs3081603.
[19] Lorenz, E.N., J. Atmos. Sci. 20, 130-141 (1963).
[20] Giorgi, F., 2005, Climatic Change 73, 239-265 (2005), doi: 10.1007/s10584-005-6857-4.
[21] IPCC (2001, §14.2.2.2).
[22] C.P. Morice, J.J. Kennedy, N.A. Rayner, and P.D. Jones, JGR 117:D8 (2012), doi: 10.1029/2011JD017187.
[23] Stern (2006 op. cit.), ix.
[24] Derived from IPCC (2007 op. cit.), 803, Table 10.26.
[25] Boden and Marland, Global CO2 Emissions from Fossil-Fuel Burning, Cement Manufacture, and Gas Flaring, 1751-2007, Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA (2010a). [26] Boden et al., Ranking of the world's countries by 2007 total CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA (2010b).
[27] Derived from IPCC (2007 op. cit.), p. 803, Table 10.26.
[28] Derived from Wong, P., Portfolio Budget Statements 2010-11: Budget-Related Paper No. 1.4. Climate Change and Energy Efficiency Portfolio, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, Australia (2010).
[29] World Bank, Gross Domestic Product 2009, in World Development Indicators 2009. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/Resources/GDP.pdf.
[30] Tol, R., J. Econ. Perspectives 23:2, 29-51 (2009a).
[31] Tol, R., An analysis of mitigation as a response to climate change, Copenhagen Consensus Center, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark (2009b).
[32] Monckton of Brenchley, C, 2013, Is CO2 mitigation cost-effective? In Proceedings of the 45th Annual International Seminar on Nuclear War and Planetary Emergencies, World Federation of Scientists [A. Zichichi and R. Ragaini, eds.], World Scientific, London, 167-185 (2013), ISBN 978 981 4531 77 1.
[33] Happer, W., Letter to the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming (2010 June 22): http://republicans.globalwarming.sensenbrenner. house.gov/Media/file/PDFs/Hearings/052010Science_Political_Arena/Response_Happer.pdf.
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Oreskes should write a book about the consensus of the failure of the climate models.
And then, as far as I can tell, Climate Science completely and fully ignores the theory and consequences of plate tectonics, all of the paleoclimate scientists do at least. I imagine this never occurred to Oreskes.
Historically in religion, as well as science, an interpreting expert class becomes utterly corrupt.
Sacred texts, like data and measurements, are not the province of a few paradigm-making experts to interpret for everyone else.
This top down approach has led to abuses and impoverishment of people in science and religion, and science in particular has a very violent and recent history of top-down abuse in the 1900’s, including Lysenkoism and eugenics/population control.
milodonharlani says:
September 7, 2013 at 11:58 am
“ATheoK says:
September 7, 2013 at 11:46 am
Oreskes got published in Nature!?
Well, that leaves the question; “Can Nature as a scientific outlet, degrade any further?”. I shudder to think how…
—————————
I too am appalled that Nature published her anti-scientific screed of CACA-phoney. ”
Nature is owned by the German publisher Holtzbrinck. Exactly how arch-green that publisher is I don’t know but probably a lot.
Professor Oxburgh, did the Royal Society compose the list of questions to be put to scientists in the Climategate “enquiry”?
Nullius in verbum !
Roughly translated means: “Don’t expect anything in writing.”
Gunga Din:
I am replying to your post addressed to me at September 7, 2013 at 11:38 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/07/a-question-for-oreskes-but-what-do-we-mean-by-consensus/#comment-1410562
Sorry, but I cannot accept that.
Science seeks the closes approximation to ‘truth’ by seeking information which refutes existing understanding.
Pseudocience decides an understanding is ‘truth’ then seeks information which supports that understanding while ignoring or rejecting information which refutes that understanding.
Politics seeks adoption of an understanding (i.e. an idea) by enforcing its adoption or by gaining widespread agreement with the idea (i.e. consensus).
Thus, consensus is a political method which negates the scientific method. And that is why politics and science are mutually exclusive activities. Science seeks ‘truth’ but politics seeks adoption of an action so they use different methods which use information differently.
When a scientist seeks consensus as a method to gain support for his science then he becomes a politician, he stops being a scientist, and he becomes a pseudoscientist. And a politician who adopted seeking after truth as his objective would fail in his political activity.
This is not to say a scientist cannot be a politician (some have been) but the two activities need to be kept completely separate.
Richard
Richard said:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/07/a-question-for-oreskes-but-what-do-we-mean-by-consensus/#comment-1410593
====================================================================
I do not disagree with anything you said.
I suppose, as a layman, I was using “consensus” in a broader sense than actual science should allow.
I do know and understand that a “scientific consensus” is not proof or a substitute for continued scrutiny of what “the consensus” has accepted without question.
Thanks.
Thales of Miletus (6th Century BCE) was the founder of the scientific method, not ibn al-Haytham. It was Thales who first consciously set aside supernatural explanations, and required observables as the test-bed of hypothesis. All of ancient Greco-Roman science followed from Thales’ accomplishment. al-Haytham was brilliant, probably a genius, and obviously had a very clear idea of the scientific method. But he was trained in, and followed, the lead of Greek scientific thought then prominent in Syria.
Also, Popper did not formalize the scientific method. Popper himself mentioned in his autobiographical “Unended Quest” that he got his idea reading Einstein’s book on his then-new relativistic theory. Popper notes Einstein writing that if the cosmological red-shift due to gravitational potential didn’t exist, his theory would have to be abandoned. This immediately led Popper to his idea of falsification as the scientific method.
But, as shown by Einstein’s views, the formal method was already well established. In fact, the modern method was specifically developed by Galileo, whose insistence on observational tests of theory forever removed science from philosophy.
As for Ms. Oreskes, she follows in a long line of likewise shallow minds who think it fine to pronounce judgment on scientific debate without having the slightest grasp of the science itself. Her accusatory rhetoric recapitulates in our present the insane ravings of the past that called forth and justified the witch-burners. We can all thank our lucky stars for the tenacity of Jeffersonian liberalism in America, because a slight decrease in civic restraint and a slight increase in political superstition would see the Ms. Oreskes’ sitting on high in black robes and calling down their official judgments on us all.
David L. Hagen says:
September 7, 2013 at 9:30 am
####
Thanks for pointing out some real history.
Justthinkin says:
September 7, 2013 at 8:22 am
While others laughed,our teacher stood up and awarded her A on the spot.
===========
A great example. Today, in school, teachers give out A’s to students that give the accepted answer. Yet we know in science that today’s accepted answer is very likely only an approximation of the truth, not the whole truth.
So, this process continues into university and graduate programs, where students are graded based on how well their answers match the consensus, the mainstream opinion, without regard for the uncertainty in all scientific knowledge.
Over time, those that reach high office in the academic world are thus repeatedly conditioned thousands of times (think Pavlov) to accept authority and consensus as a substitute for truth. What works for dogs works equally well for humans, no matter how much we believe we are above other animals.
Pat Frank says: September 7, 2013 at 12:27 pm “Also, Popper did not formalize the scientific method. ”
Lord Monckton said, “Karl Popper formalized the scientific method as an iterative algorithm starting with a general problem.” If I may add, that iteration was formalized in Edwin Thomson Jaynes’ Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (2003) through Bayesian epistemology/inference/statistics.
Comparing the quality of consensus for plate tectonics to that of AGW is like comparing the consensus favoring quantum mechanics with that of phrenology.
A bit Off Topic but a strength of WUWT is that there is usually someone willing to explain things to those of us less informed or who have just not thought something through as illustrated by Richard’s reply to me here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/07/a-question-for-oreskes-but-what-do-we-mean-by-consensus/#comment-1410593
“…the barnacle-like accretion of expert consensus…”
Common sense, in prose that rings like crystal. You gotta love it.
My jaw [just] dropped when reading Christopher Monckton accepting this viewpoint without question. “as though a tiny radiator had been turned on”?? Tiny radiators of heat ??? With no energy source it implies ??? I thought Monckton knew more of infrared radiation science. This is a bunch of malarkey.
CO2 absorbs very specific lines of infrared radiation and equally radiates, never more than, exactly ½ of what it absorbs upward to the exterior hemisphere and exactly ½ downward to the interior hemisphere if using a plane-parallel model instead of a sphere. But all 99.99…% of infrared from the surface of Earth in these specific CO2 lines are already absorbed (that’s the energy source) and most close to the surface and so adding more CO2 to an already opaque, basically totally opaque, atmosphere at these frequencies does nothing (ok, tiny, tiny increase in the wings).
This is where the implications of trying to convert small-scale lab results in tubes of CO2 to an open large-scale planetary atmosphere is so wrongly accepted without question as if it can radiate more that it absorbs. It is this reason why we see no increase in temperature but what happened on the sun in the 80′ and 90’s after removing the upward artificail adjustments to the GISS records and NOAA records and allowing for the real UHI effect imprinted on the temperature records.
Caleb wrote that Oreskes favors group-think over individualism. This is a tactic of the left in many areas. As a child and young teenager in the 1950s, I read many inspiring books about great women and men in science, exploration, politics, military, etc. I’m sure the books included hear-say, caricature, and half truths, but they were inspiring nonetheless.
However, starting in the early 1980s when I began to search in stores for children’s books for my own children, I had a difficult time finding up-to-date books on the individual accomplishments of people. It was then that I discovered I could purchase many such books for 50 cents each at a local Good Will store because those kind of books were being discarded en masse by the local schools and libraries. I am saving all of those books for my grandchildren.
Are we beginning to suffer the long term effect of “group think” in this world, where some individual may suppress his/her own novel idea in favor of a group’s consensus?
Gunga Din:
re your post at September 7, 2013 at 1:14 pm.
Thankyou for that kindness. You are generous to the degree of it being a fault.
Richard
Today a scientist is trained to become a member of the scientific community. The concept of “consensus” has become part of the education. Just the horror to have a scientist with a mind of it’s own…. Just hear about the quest of those independent minds who question the “Big Bang Theory” as they promote the theory of an electric universe:
Excuse my spell-corrector… try “just” instead of “gust”.
I sign all my books “Nullius in Verba” but I was very disturbed to see the new Royal Society’s president Dr. Paul Nurse has totally strayed from the prestigious scientific organization’s motto. Nurse was featured by the BBC in a video “Science Under Attack” with the main message “trust the climate scientists” and questioning Phil Jones interpretation of climate change is tantamount to questioning “science”. He justified Phil Jones’ refusal to be open with the data, suggesting the requests by skeptics were merely attempts to prevent them from doing their day job. He judiciously uses the word denier, and suggested the contradictory evidence is cherry picking. Isaac Newton would be rolling in his grave. If Dr. Nurse truly embraced “Nullius in Verba”, instead of promoting such BBC propaganda pieces he would promote respectful debate between skeptics and CO2 advocates. It is the active suppression of debate, that is the real attack on science.
Pat Frank says: We can all thank our lucky stars for the tenacity of Jeffersonian liberalism in America, because a slight decrease in civic restraint and a slight increase in political superstition would see the Ms. Oreskes’ sitting on high in black robes and calling down their official judgments on us all.
————————————————————————————————————————-
I’ll give it ten years and this very thing will be happening in all areas of life. We already see it happening on University Campuses and in Government Hiring.
You just have to watch presentations made by Svensmark, Kirkby, Lindzen, et al to see real scientists, they make no elaborate claims, they just describe their hypotheses succinctly. Compare that with the emotional language of many AGW believing ‘scientists’ and the difference becomes so clear. I have not heard Svensmark call Mann a ‘denier’ and his office a ‘denialist lair’ these terms have no place in science.
Wayne good call on the “tiny radiator” comment I missed that. Got distracted by the near infrared.
Can we conclude from this that people who already have their minds made up, who attack those who are skeptical of the consensus opinion, and who are blind to every observation that does not agree with their preconceived biases are not “seekers after truth”? Somebody should let them know. Oh right, you just did.
Eric Camp, exciting students with controversial scientific theorries. A must see and an absolute breath of fresh air
The reason why Warmists use the word ‘consensus’ is because they were afraid of a statistically significant temperature standstill or statistically significant temperature fall. They knew either outcome would utterly ruin their plans for man’s energy restructuring. The ruining has begun. Some climate scientists are now asking inconvenient questions as well as the media. Rational politicians have begun to weigh in. Doubts abound.
Here is an ‘impossible’ idea that turned out not to be impossible (quasicrystals). This man refused to disbelieve his own ‘lying’ eyes. An example of chance and curiosity fighting against the consensus.
How much humility will the climate modelers learn?