By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
To those of us who have dared to question on scientific and economic grounds the official story on global warming, it is a continuing surprise that there is so little concern about whether or not that story is objectively true among the many who have swallowed it hook, Party Line and sinker.
For the true-believers, the Party Line is socially convenient, politically expedient, and financially profitable. Above all, it is the Party Line. For those who think as herds or hives, it is safe. It is a grimy security blanket. It is the dismal safety in numbers that is the hallmark of the unreasoning mob.
But is it true? The herd and the hive do not care. Or, rather, they do care. They care very much if anyone dares to ask the question “But is it true?” They are offended, shocked, outraged. They vent their venom and their spleen and their fury on those of us who ask, however politely, “But is it true?”
Their reaction is scarcely distinguishable from the behavior of the adherents of some primitive superstitious cult on learning that someone has questioned some egregiously, self-evidently barmy aspect of the dogma that the high priests have handed down.
They have gotten religion, but they call it science. They have gotten religion, but they do not know they have gotten religion. They have gotten religion, but they have not gotten the point of religion, which, like the point of science, is objective truth.
The question arises: can science function properly or at all in the absence of true religion and of its insistence upon morality? For science, in searching for the truth, is pursuing what is – or very much ought to be – a profoundly moral quest.
Yet what if a handful of bad scientists wilfully tamper with data, fabricate results, and demand assent to assertions for which there is no real scientific justification? And what if the vast majority of their colleagues cravenly look the other way and do nothing about their bent colleagues? What you get is the global warming scare.
As every theologian knows, the simplest and usually the clearest of all tests for the presence of a moral sense is whether or not the truth is being told. The true-believers in the New Superstition are not telling the truth. On any objective test, they are lying, and are profiteering by lying, and are doing so at your expense and mine, and are bidding fair to bring down the Age of Enlightenment and Reason, flinging us back into the dumb, inspissate cheerlessness of a new Dark Age.
Nothing is done about the many lies, of course, because the many lies are the Party Line, and no one ever went to jail who safely parroted the Party Line.
“The Science Is Settled! There’s A Consensus! A 97.1% Consensus! Doubters Are As Bad As Holocaust Deniers! Global Temperature Is Rising Dangerously! It Is Warmer Now Than For 1400 Years! Well, 400 Years, Anyway! Tree-Rings Reliably Tell Us So! The Rate Of Global Warming Is Getting Ever Faster! Global Warming Caused Superstorm Sandy! And Typhoon Haiyan! And 1000 Other Disasters! Arctic Sea Ice Will All Be Gone By 2013! OK, By 2015! Or Maybe 2030! Santa Claus Will Have Nowhere To Live! Cuddly Polar Bears Are Facing Extinction! Starving Polar Bears Will Start Eating Penguins! Himalayan Glaciers Will All Melt By 2035! Er, Make That 2350! Millions Of Species Will Become Extinct! Well, Dozens, Anyway! Sea Level Is Rising Dangerously! It Will Rise 3 Feet! No, 20 Feet! No, 246 Feet! There Will Be 50 Million Climate Refugees From Rising Seas By 2010! OK, Make That 2020! The Oceans Will Acidify! Corals Will Die! Global Warming Kills! There Is A One In Ten Chance Global Warming Will End The World By 2100! We Know What We’re Talking About! We Know Best! We Are The Experts! You Can Trust Us! Our Computer Models Are Correct! The Science Is Settled! There’s A Consensus!”
And so, round and round, ad nauseam, ad ignorantiam, ad infinitum.
Every one of those exclamatory, declamatory statements about the climate is in substance untrue. Most were first uttered by scientists working for once-respected universities and government bodies. For instance, the notion that there is a 1 in 10 chance the world will end by 2100 is the fundamentally fatuous assumption in Lord Stern’s 2006 report on climate economics, written by a team at the U.K. Treasury for the then Socialist Government, which got the answer it wanted but did not get the truth, for it did not want the truth.
Previously, you could count on getting nothing but the truth from the men in white coats with leaky Biros in the front pocket. Now, particularly if the subject is global warming, you can count on getting little but profitable nonsense from your friendly local university science lab. They make the profits: you get the nonsense.
The central reason why what Professor Niklas Mörner has called “the greatest lie ever told” is damaging to civilization arises not from the staggering cost, soon to be $1 billion a day worldwide. Not from the direct threat to the West posed by the avowedly anti-democratic, anti-libertarian policies of the UN, the IPCC, and the costly alphabet-soup of unelected busybody agencies of predatory government that live off the taxpayer’s involuntary generosity. Not from the dire environmental damage caused by windmills and other equally medieval measures intended to make non-existent global warming go away.
The damage caused by the Great Lie arises from the fact that just about the entire global governing class has found it expedient or convenient or profitable to adopt the Great Lie, to peddle it, to parade it, to parrot it, to pass it on, regardless of whether anything that it says on the subject of the climate has any truth in it whatsoever.
The fundamental principle upon which Aristotle built the art and science of Logic is that every individual truth is consistent with every other individual truth. The truth is a seamless robe. Religion – or at any rate the Catholic presentation to which I inadequately subscribe (practising but not perfect) – is also built upon that fundamental principle of the oneness of all truth.
Science, too – or at any rate the classical scientific method adumbrated by Thales of Miletus and Al-Haytham and brought to fruition by Newton, Huxley, Einstein, and Popper – was also rooted in the understanding that there is only one truth, only one physical law, and that, therefore, every truth unearthed by the diligence of the curious and hard-working empiricist or theoretician must, if it be truly true, be consistent at every point and in every particular with every truth that had ever been discovered before, and with every truth yet to be discovered.
It is in the understanding of that central principle of the remarkable oneness and self-consistency of all truth that men of true religion and of true science ought to have become united. For there is an awesome beauty in the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. As Keats put it, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all.”
The beauty of the truth is sullied, the seamless robe rent in sunder, if not merely a few individual scientists but the entire classe politique not merely of a single nation but of the planet advantages itself, enriches the already rich and impoverishes the already poor by lying and lying and lying again in the name of Saving The Planet by offering costly and environmentally destructive non-solutions to what is proving to be a non-problem.
The very fabric of the Universe is distorted by so monstrous and so sullenly persistent a lie. Those scientists who have been caught out trampling the truth, and those universities in which it has become near-universally agreed that the best thing to keep the cash flowing is to say nothing about the Great Lie, are by their actions or inactions repudiating the very justification and raison-d’être of science: to seek the truth, to find it, to expound it, to expand it, and so to bring us all closer to answering the greatest of all questions: how came we and all around us to be here?
We who are not only men of science but also men of religion believe that the Answer to that question lay 2000 years ago in a manger in Bethlehem. The very human face of the very Divine was “perfectly God and perfectly Man”, as the Council of Chalcedon beautifully put it.
We cannot prove that a Nazarene made the Universe, or that any Divine agency takes the slightest interest in whether we tell the truth. But, for as long as there is no evidence to the contrary, we are free to believe it. And it is in our freedom to believe that which has not been proven false that the value of true religion to true science may yet come to be discerned. For our religion teaches us that truthfulness is right and wilful falsehood wrong. We cannot prove that that is so, but we believe it nonetheless.
Science, though, is not a matter of belief (unless you belong to Greenpeace or some other Marxist front organization masquerading as an environmental group). It is a matter of disciplined observation, careful theoretical deduction, and cautious expression of results. The true scientist does not say, “I believe”: but he ought, if there is any curiosity and awe in his soul, to say “I wonder …”. Those two words are the foundation of all genuine scientific enquiry.
Yet the global warming scare has shown how very dangerous is science without morality. The scientist, who takes no one’s word for anything (nullius in verba), does not accept a priori that there is any objectively valuable moral code. He does not necessarily consider himself under any moral obligation either to seek the truth or, once he has found it, to speak it.
Science, therefore, in too carelessly or callously rejecting any value in religion and in the great code of morality in which men of religion believe and which at least they try however stumblingly to follow, contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
Yea, truth faileth (Isaiah, 59:15). The Great Lie persists precisely because too many of the scientists who utter it no longer live in accordance with the moral yardstick that Christianity once provided, or any moral yardstick, so that they do not consider they have any moral obligation to tell the truth.
That being so, we should no longer consider ourselves as laboring under any obligation, moral or other, to pay any particular heed to scientists seeking to meddle in politics unless and until they have shown themselves once more willing to be what al-Haytham said they should be: seekers after truth.
Two hundred and forty-six feet of sea-level rise, Dr. Hansen? Oh, come off it!
A merry Christmas an’ a roarin’ Hogmanay to one and all.
Warren you quote “Over the ocean, the observed surface specific humidity increases at 5.7% per 1°C warming, which is consistent with a constant relative humidity”
But RH% is and has decreased http://i48.tinypic.com/2qlfnzn.jpg
Warren says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/24/monckton-of-meteorology-and-morality/#comment-1513610
“the extra heat went into the oceans” argument
Henry says
Sorry Warren, this is not apparent from the hadsst2 global sea surface temps, which is going down from 2001
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2001/to:2014/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2001/to:2014
ralfellis says:
December 26, 2013 at 1:28 am
We may also pour in the water first, and then, stopping the vent, pour wine upon it, so as to pour out wine for some, wine and water for others, and mere water for those whom we wish to jest with.
===================
We like to think ourselves much more advanced than those that lived thousands of years ago, yet much of what they knew we have forgotten.
A most excellent device. Simple in design, elegant in application. Who hasn’t wished for a magical wine bottle at a party, that would pour water instead of wine to those guests in need of no more. Only to discover 2000 years ago they had already solved the problem.
Bobl and Osborne: I entered this website with the belief that most skeptics of the science were science based thinkers, still asking some good questions of the consensus view. Unfortunately, that was not to be. We see mostly comments demonizing those who agree with the IPCC or any peer reviewed papers supporting AGW, junk science such as the recent post making the ludicrous claim that global warming is either not happening on Venus, or is due to pressure rather than the infrared absorbing characteristics of CO2, and the claim which is ultimately the final refuge of scoundrels..’you can’t believe peer reviewed papers because the peer reviewing scientists are all corrupt’ (or similar). This type of thinking, found often on the site, is more typical of those that believe the earth is 9000 years old, Evolution is a Fraud, or that Aliens from a distant planet populated the earth.
You can prove to me you’re not among those I’ve described by posting your 1000 peer reviewed anti-AGW papers…..as far as I know, no one has ever counted more than 24 out of the 14,000 pro AGW papers published since 1991.
Monckton of Brenchley says: December 25, 2013 at 2:04 pm
Hi Christopher,
I tremendously admire your seemlingly tireless efforts to combat the party line of CAGW, and agree very much with your characterising of the latter as a kind of religion. But I don’t agree that religions are a search for truth, any more than the culture of CAGW is, no matter how many adherents to either genuinely think that this is what they are engaged upon.
I don’t believe that there is any phenomenon that can’t (eventually) be understood in objective terms that require no reference to politics or philosophies, and to best address major downsides of a phenomenon such as the culture of CAGW, requires first an understanding of how it works. Religions can be understood as social memeplexes, and the similar characteristics of CAGW that many other than yourself have remarked upon, arise I believe because the culture of CAGW is a secular memeplex. These entities evolve to a ‘party line’ orthodoxy via differential selection. The enterprise of science properly followed constrains memetic evolution to only the direction that reflects (an increasing understanding of) reality, but even memeplexes originally spawned by speculative science can quickly leave the proper enterprise behind, and indeed suppress or corrupt real science, hence then being able to evolve arbitrarily.
I agree also that Dawkins’ challenges to Christianity are misconceived; given he supports CAGW this is effectively saying “I believe in my memetic bias, but not yours”. We are all immersed in some memeplex or other, perhaps several. Hence belief in religion is not a delusion by definition (unless everyone on the planet is deluded), and by the same token belief in a secular memeplex like CAGW is not a delusion either. We have co-evolved with these entities for a very long time, nothing within the social phenomenon of CAGW is new, quite the contrary; the key to managing the downsides of such phenomena is to understand how they work. Just for clarity to all here, I add that actual climate events or science practised properly fall outside of arbitrarily memetic evolution, but as many have observed, CAGW has long since become disconnected from both of these.
Find more details on all this at http://wearenarrative.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/the-cagw-memeplex-a-cultural-creature/ which was guest-posted on Climate Etc and here on WUWT at the begining of November.
Last month, water vapour levels were 1.0% above the long-long-term average.
One can cherry-pick a starting point and an end-point and come up with any trend one wants to get. But it is changing much, much less than the climate models have built in.
So we can put a big X on the most important positive feedback so far. Will climate science start investigating why it has been wrong about this so far. No, they just keep trying to cherry-pick and rewrite the data.
And more importantly, why doesn’t Warren know this is the case?
Bill: because one data point doesn’t make a trend. Discussions about ‘climate’ are about long term trends. Single data points are ‘Weather’
Warren says:
December 26, 2013 at 6:29 am
I tell you what is ludicrous you making this statement.
‘ junk science such as the recent post making the ludicrous claim that global warming is either not happening on Venus, or is due to pressure rather than the infrared absorbing characteristics of CO2, and the claim which is ultimately the final refuge of scoundrels..’
The reason for the temperature on has been explained to you in many posts, these are the facts , the data, the science of why Venus so hot. But as I said to you and others because this you cant compare the Earth and Venus. But then you didn’t come here to debate , you came as a paid troll.
You don’t answer people questions, you jump around to different subjects. Like to some jumping rabbit with a hot poker up its arse.
Your comment at 6:29am is a big pile of manure , you are talking out of where manure comes from.
Harvey: you’ve made my point about demonization better than I could have.
Warren says:
December 26, 2013 at 6:29 am
Well, your “Aliens populated the earth is from a guy who supports your CAGW religion, and, let’s see here …
Seems like (prior to 1962) there were about two peer-reviewed papers supporting plate tectonic movement available. But the continents were still drifting. Are still drifting. Will continue to drift. The fact that no pal-reviewed literature is being accepted by editors is meaningless, if the facts show as much steady and cooling periods as warming periods as CO2 increases.
Please, cite ONE modern science theory that was correctly “predicted” by consensus science “first” …
Seems like (prior to 1952) there were NO peer-reviewed papers supporting plate tectonic movement available. But the continents were still drifting.
Seems like (prior to 1942) there were NO peer-reviewed papers supporting plate tectonic movement available. But the continents were still drifting.
Seems like (prior to 1932) there were NO peer-reviewed papers supporting plate tectonic movement available. But the continents were still drifting. Rather, consensus science violently opposed the thought, fought the methods, fought the analysis.
Seems like (prior to 1922) there were NO peer-reviewed papers supporting plate tectonic movement available. But the continents were still drifting.
Conventional wisdom – your much-vaunted incestuous relationship between self-selected CAGW-favored editors, hidden reviewers delaying contrary papers and rejecting contrary (skeptical) positions, and invisible financial reviews at the government and NSF and national board levels do – shall we say – “filter out” the spirit of anyone even trying to analyze the world accurately.
The 1.3 trillion in new taxes demanded by your CAGW religion is an attractive pile to those who fly in search of funds, in search of power, of influence, of publication, of rewards and awards and honors …. All who analyze rationally receive is condemnation and curses and lawsuits.
Harvey: re the explanations of Venetian warming you mention as all over the website: you seem to consider these as “received Truth” . the explanation I gave you is that found in any science textbook, or what any physics professor will tell you. Do you get your Science from bloggers?
Racook1978: I agree with your distaste for new taxes, and I greatly fear that socialists will use AGW to justify their command and control approach to the economy and to our lives. However, the atmosphere knows nothing about these fears…it only responds to the Natural Laws of physics and chemistry, and we must not let our fears interfere with proper assessment of the Science. We disagree on what the Science is telling us, but not on the destructive power of high taxation.
I made the comment about your post at 6.29, and I stand by it. It is a pile of [trimmed], written by a paid troll.
Your reponse at 7.05am, is also wrong when did me or anyone else here do this
“to try to make someone or a group of people seem as if they are evil: “, because that is the English definition of “demonize” .
I leave you to question that comment, in relation how you side ‘demonize’ people that question the so called science of global warming,
All we have done is point you are wrong not just about Venus.
[Watch your language. Mod]
In one way or another, everyone on the planet probably IS deluded. Just about everyone believes in something that can’t be shown to exist. The level of delusion is the issue. If you fail to seek medical attention for your child because you believe “god” will cure them, or that they’re possessed by demons, that is a serious delusion. If you believe that ancient aliens may have visited Earth and influenced or created our early civilizations, that’s also a delusion, but a much more innocuous one. I happen to believe the latter was possible, but haven’t seen any convincing evidence. I’d even go so far as to believe it’s possible there may be an omnipotent entity out there somewhere, but I simply cannot believe that it acts in the way described in any religious text. You might as well believe in the capricious “Q” form Star Trek, there isn’t much difference.
@warren
clearly you did not react to my comment here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/24/monckton-of-meteorology-and-morality/#comment-1513640
May I ask: for what reason?
Have you ever made a study of maximum and minimum temperatures?
You should perhaps do it, as you will not find it in any of your “peer reviewed” papers…..
The results should interest you because the mechanism of AGW implies increasing minima, pushing up the mean average temps.
Venice is warming?? Oh, you mean Venusian. 😉
=======================================================================
True. Even a toddler with no concept of “stealing” can learn that there is something wrong with it the first time another toddler takes their toy from them. Whether they grow up to not steal themselves depends on what else they learn as they develop their own “moral compass”.
Many here, such as Gail, who do not identify themselves as “Christian” have a compass that includes personal integrity and honesty.
My comments here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/24/monckton-of-meteorology-and-morality/#comment-1512159
and here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/24/monckton-of-meteorology-and-morality/#comment-1512182
leading to here
http://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/attention-surplus-disorder-part-two/comment-page-1/#comment-686
were not intended to imply that they cannot have an honest relationship with other people by the standards that Man would not applaud.
Some will laugh. Some will be curious. Some will accept it and maybe learn learn something.
I hope all appreciate the intend.
TYPO!
“were not intended to imply that they cannot have an honest relationship with other people by the standards that Man would not applaud.”
Should be
“were not intended to imply that they cannot have an honest relationship with other people by the standards that Man would applaud.”
Jeff: thanks. Appreciate the nice corrective.
I sorry also that it is you Warren that dosn’t read.
‘The main differences that
stand out are the “bulge” in the Earth’s stratosphere,
due to the heating of the ozone layer, a
feature which is not found on Venus, and the
downward extension on Venus to pressures
higher than 1bar, the mean surface pressure
on Earth. The gradient of temperature versus
height in the lower atmosphere in both cases
is, in agreement with expectation, close to the
adiabatic lapse rate, which simple theory (see
Taylor 2006) tells us is just the acceleration due
to gravity divided by the heat capacity of the
air. These constants are about the same on both
planets and give a value for the gradient of about
10°C per kilometre. Thus, because the surface
on Venus is about 45 km below the pressure level
found at the surface of the Earth, it cannot help
but be 450K hotter. Mystery solved’
Astronomy & Geophysics. Feb2010, Vol. 51 Issue 1, p1.26-1.31.
Ps Sorry Mod , I try and think of better word next time to describe a comment like Warrens.
Warren,
I’ve been reading WUWT for something like five years, and have commented maybe three times.
Once or twice a year someone like you strolls in and makes a boob of them self. Great communicators, like you, but the outcome is always the same…..they get barbequed for lack of knowledge.
I highly recommend for the next month or two, that you just read, and then study, the data found on this web site. Spread sheet it against the data that you have accumulated so far to convince you of your current position. Compare/analyze/verify. Then argue.
I also recommend that you wait for the next “Warren” to come along and see what happens, rather than be what happens.
I wish you the best on your education in climate science.
Ron Richey
Warren says:
December 26, 2013 at 6:29 am
Aliens from a distant planet populated the earth.
==================
quite possible, perhaps even likely. the problem is most people think of aliens as having a head, 2 arms and 2 legs. the aliens that populated earth would more likely be microbes or spores from billions of years in the past, preserved by the cold of interstellar space, and eventually deposited on a world with a suitable environment. In many respects how life on earth spreads from one area to another, carried by the elements.
In this fashion life becomes much more likely. Life need not have developed independently on earth. A self-replicating chemical reaction need only develop on a single world, then be spread over time to colonize the universe. Some will argue this to be impossible, given the vastness of space, without fully considering the vastness of time.
At 1 g acceleration, due to time dilation the furthest point in the observable universe can be reached in a single lifetime. Are we to conclude that nature cannot achieve similar wonders with billions of years to work with? And why limit ourselves to billions of years?
Nothing says the big bang occurred in empty space. There may well have been a universe in existence at the time of the big bang, which is now intermingled with the remnants of the big bang, and the seeds of life were from a much more ancient time. From long before 14 billions years ago.
Nothing says the big bang occurred in empty space.
=================
In point of fact, “dark energy” suggests that space was not empty at the time of the big bang. We only need dark energy to explain how the expansion of the universe could still be accelerating, if indeed the big bang took place in empty space. Once we allow that the universe was not empty at the time of the big bang, then the acceleration can be explained without “dark energy”.
@ferdberple
so, interestingly, since we are allowed some free religious thinking on this thread
do you believe in God: a plan
or do you believe in
homo sapiens erectus (don’t laugh)
a coincidence?
HenryP: I didn’t react to your comment because I didn’t notice it. Do you want me to locate the peer reviewed Science article on the ocean warming? As I recall, it quantified the total heat uptake by the oceans, and I recall most of the increase in heat content was measured as sub surface. Regarding temp max and minima, I have seen graphs and tables showing that the long term trend in the 20th century has been for less difference between night time lows and daytime highs ..in other words nighttime lows increasing more than daytime highs. I’ve certainly looked at the 20th century hockey stick data data, showing I believe around a 0.65C rise. There are plenty of ups and downs in the 20th century, including some multi year downtrends. Those that agree with AGW,like me, point to the long term trend. Those disagreeing will sometimes point to down periods or decade long flat spots and claim it’s evidence against AGW. I just don’t see how you can conclude anything about AGW without considering a very long time scale. 100 years seems enough to me.