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.
Merry Christmas everyone.
Peace and goodwill to all. No exceptions.
Morality is at the core of the problem. The replacement of the love of ones fellow man with the concept that the collective, the hive, is more important than the individual. Even worst is the emergence of a hatred for ones own species, in a lower species of course such thinkers would not last long. The dog that attacks its own pack is dooming itself to extinction, natural selection at work. Ironically, it’s christian morals that gives these misanthropic views oxygen in the first place, a tolerance exploited for gain by the misanthropists.
Frankly I find it odd that it is the so-called progressives that want us to regress back to the stone age, and it is the so-called conservatives that want to progress our science and technology for the betterment of all. I will forthwith be calling “progessives” regressives. The hive (collectivist) mentality is so caustic, so deleterious because it aims for a collective mediocrity, a race to the lowest common denominator. Only individualism, individual responsibility individual excellence and competition results in real progress. Consensus by its very nature exposes the collectivist mediocrity of “The team” and produced by decree “right answers”
Collectivism, and the mediocrity of the lowest common denominator is why Communism fails, even China has had to embrace capitalism, and individualism in order to challenge the west.
PS, the mediocrity of the group pervades our thinking, as anyone who has ever been subjected to 360 degree aseessment in business can attest. The aim of 360 degree evaluation is not to promote excellece… it can’t, its aim is to minimise divergence, to herd a group to a mediocratic centroid. I refuse to do 360 degree assessments on this basis. Excellence loves disagreement and argument and arms length dealings, Mediocrity loves agreement, consensus, and group hugs.
Merry Christmas, Lord M, Anthony and blog readers. May 2014 bring good things to each and every one of you.
Bob
Sadly Lord Monckton morality is not the property of religious belief. Others, without religious belief, can come to a morality essentially that of the major religions simply on rational grounds. Quite simply an educated rational person can accept that the ten commandments, or most of them anyway, should form the basis of the way we behave to others.
Perhaps Mann and his ilk need to be paid a visit from the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, in order for them to fully comprehend the horrors they are creating for science, and for mankind.
In the words of Tiny Tim “God bless us, every one!”
Lord Monckton makes a point with which I disagree, although the general thrust of the article towards truth in science and so on is entirely apposite in these times when ‘spin’ and the product of spin (bullshit?) is almost universal.
He says: “For science, in searching for the truth, is pursuing what is – or very much ought to be – a profoundly moral quest.”
But the pursuit of true knowledge is the whole and sole quest of science. So, whilst science can be wrong, it is neither moral nor immoral; it is amoral.
Of course, the morality or otherwise of an individual scientist’s actions in dealing with science is most certainly a proper subject for examination. If s/he ‘cooks the books’ or knowingly promulgates false theories or carries out experiments upon subjects which would be unethical or makes false accusations against other scientists or seeks to mislead a gullible public with false information or …… oh wait. Yes, with the exception of carrying out experiments which are unethical because they affect the subject in a harmful manner, that appears to be precisely what some have done isn’t it!
However, I think that it is not the pursuit of science per se which is moral or immoral, rather it is the manner in which it is dealt with by the scientist or observer which is the proper subject of ethical enquiries.
In that regard it seems that there are many who might be well and truly found guilty of pursuing an immoral quest.
This makes the boys on Wall Street blush they never came up with so beautiful a scam. The wolves of “science” have the best of all possible scams – stupid people. You can’t lose and the money keeps flowing – what’s not to like if you’re in on the scam? Can anyone think of a more perfect money making scheme? The models don’t have to make sense, and this is where stupid journalists get their cut pushing the scheme, just add stupid people and there you have it, the perfect scam. Add governments who get to blame everything on global warming – they’re not responsible for anything, throw in the UN and it automatically turns into a self perpetuating money making machine.
Dear Lord Monckton,
What a masterful essay in scope and span.
For a while now I have been thinking of writing something vaguely similar on the lines of the practices of the medieval church .Its groupthink on matters like transubstantiation ,the sale of indulgences, purgatory….and what Luther and the reformation achieved in the face of the establishment of the time.
In Kent where I live ,and all over England and parts of Scotland there were Marian persecutions with numerous martyrs burnt at the stake until the truth asserted itself during the Enlightenment. This to the advantage of religion generally.
I am sure there are other historical precedents that may be even more powerful; perhaps the idiocy of the Easter Island establishment in sculpting their amazing but useless stone heads. The wind turbines of their day?
You have given me much food for thought !
With all good wishes for Christmas and the New Year -please keep up your excellent posts.
Kirk c says at December 24, 2013 at 12:41 pm
Not the point. That leads to a far too restrictive definition of knowledge.
Many things that are observable once or twice only, or vaguely by inference from direct observation, or even just by deviating from the purely theoretical expectation (Bayesian statistics) – are reasonable to accept as true.
That is that the evidence is plausible but not necessarily verifiable by everyone.
The virtue of this article is that it discusses the various forms of truth and why we should use them… trust them.
Could debasement of the scientific method, such as clinging to failed AGW models after the “pause” of 15 years, have occurred without the loss of a fixed, shared morality?
In my opinion: No.
Although Lord Monckton’s implied association of socialism with immorality is questionable to say the least.
Merry Christmas Christopher!
My christmas present to all. An amazing map of the ever growing antarctica. I call ths art.
http://i.imgur.com/3q97srO.jpg
Merry whatever 🙂
I guess normal posting rules re religion have been suspended for the day. You lost me with the bit about Jesus creating the Universe about 2000 years ago.
I disagree with the premise of your arguments. I agree Science is about objective truth. It is a scaffold built from interlocking chains of demonstrable evidence, and whenever a link in the chain is broken everything after that link becomes addled and has to be reconsidered. So to tamper with the evidence, or method by which that evidence is being assembled, is bordering on an act of evil. Science is a good thing for humanity, it is important that we treat it with reverence.
But not all truth is built on objective truth. Science knows what a bird is, it is a provable fact worked out through the study of genealogical evidence. A bird is a scientific fact that is backed up with objective truth through a chain of fossil records and DNA analysis. But the word bird existed before science. Before the age of science and Darwin a bird was not an objective thing, it was a concept. It was a plastic concept made up by a brain that interpreted the world for the benefit of survival of living things. The bodies of nature were not built like aeroplanes, they were not assembled by a God that drew up plans, they were assembled through the workings of a different sort of truth. Our bodies and brains are the product of extreme plasticity of design for adaption to ever-varying and changing circumstances.
Aeroplanes are built for a specific function – to fly. Birds fly, but they fly with adapted limbs that once were fins, sometimes birds transform their wings into becoming flippers for swimming when evolution demands. So when a scientist builds a wing for an aeroplane it is a fixed idea, for a fixed purpose, but this sort of fixation, which is assembled from notions of objective truth does not apply to nature. Because Nature’s truth is always plastic. A wing is a flipper when nature wants it to be a flipper.
When the monks looked at bees they said they were the smallest of birds. For scientists this is a lie, because it goes against objective truth of what a bird is in the language of science, but for the monks it was truth. An an Ostrich was not a bird because it did not have wings and did not fly, a bee was a bird because it did fly. If the monk woke up another day in another frame of mind he would have said a bee is not a bird because it has six legs, and an ostrich is a bird because it has a beak. The monk was not being untruthful.
I am not making a silly point. I am putting it to you that objective truth is very useful way of looking at the world, and an excellent way to make machines, but it is not the only way. Sometimes using plastic truth provides us with another way of thinking that is rewarding and life enhancing and vital to our survival. Plasticity truth produced life, it produced consciousness and all the things we value most.
I think we have to separate these two concepts of plastic and objective truth. They mix badly, and the way the AGW crowd have tortured objective truth for political ends and personal gain is to my mind a crime against humanity, in that thought I agree.
People who wholeheartedly embrace religion can be moral, but they can also be profoundly immoral.
Immoral people of faith who are immoral find excuses for their immorality, they perform great acts of piety, they start religious wars, to convince themselves that all the “good” they are doing somehow balances all the evil they know in their hearts they have committed. Many of the most brutal tyrants had committed their brutality in the name of religion.
So to suggest that the values of Religion can make somebody behave in a moral way is not supported by the evidence.
The evidence instead supports the idea that a good person will behave in a moral manner regardless of their religions views. And that a bad person, even if they truly believe in God, and have strong religious convictions, will perform mental limbo, will find ways to twist their faith into paths which allow full expression of their immorality.
I agree with one or two others that continued references to a mythical being of your choice don’t have too much place in a science blog. Many of us atheists manage to make a good attempt at respecting our fellow human beings, and all the behaviour which that entails, while at the same time appreciating the truths which come from science. There are plenty of examples from many centuries back until the present day of despicable behaviour in the name of religion – and, of course, plenty of examples which have nothing to do with religion. People can behave in a civilised way, or not, regardless of which religion they follow.
Gotten? Gotten? Aaaaaarrrrggghhhh!
Monckton: “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.”
If I read him correctly, what Monckton is saying is that, since the quest for Truth is the sole aim and raison d’etre of Science, any deviation from that quest perpetrates a falsehood, which is inherently immoral. Now whence the standard of Morality? Clearly it is a priori, which cannot be proved or disproved, but if accepted must be taken as axiomatic. The Warmists by sullying and perverting the scientific quest for Truth have either violated the moral foundation of Science, or abandoned any moral standard altogether.
For Monckton the source of the moral standard is the Christian religion. For others it may be a different tradition, or an innate faculty like Conscience. For some, perhaps too many these days, there is no such standard. That may account for the ease with which they will depart from the hard quest for Truth in favor of venal and self-serving pursuits and misguided causes, too often in the name of ‘saving’ Mankind or the Planet.
/Mr Lynn
A powerfully stated, lucid, and timely description of the way things are. Well done!
And a very merry Christmas, to you, too (and to ALL of you!), Lord Monckton. Thank you (and to your wife, Juliet, also) for sharing that spectacularly beautiful image, a perfect metaphor for “truth,” of F(z) = z² + c {z ranging from 0 to ∞, but limited to 250K iterations}.
Yes, indeed, Christianity may be disbelieved in, but it has never been falsified.
With gratitude for all you have done for truth and for the Truth,
Your sister in Christ (who, like you, is not perfect, just forgiven!),
Janice
P.S. The starvation and deaths directly caused by socialism as proven in objective experiments around the world (e.g., U.S.S.R., China, Cuba, Zimbabwe, …) have proven it to be, indeed, “ev1l.” Of course, “one death is a tragedy; millions of deaths are mere statistics” — (Envirostalinism’s grand old man quoted from memory, only). Very ev1l, indeed. And all the more so due to its wolf-in-sheep’s clothing disguise that fools even some of the best of us.
Science cannot prove itself. The VERY concept of truth is that of a self-evident truth in which all Math’s and science is based on. And you need a society with a significant portion of those in research with such integrity. The Christians of Europe rejected pantheism (so no God in grass and no wind God and no Moon god). If you have a wind god then why would you study why the wind blows? You will not!!
So the combination of honesty and that the truth MATTERS resulted in science rising out of Christian Europe (we were walking on the moon when most cultures were still cooking their dinners with Camel dug).
As society heads to less morality then so does the ability of that society to have good science.
And science cannot explain itself. There is no science experiment that can prove 2 + 2 = 4.
Without a society based on codes of honesty and integrity, then you WILL not have science rise up like it did in the western cultures of Europe. And the state of science today is a HUGE mess. If the people involved don’t have honesty and believe in the truth, then how can you have any science??
Dr. Craig in this short video explains this concept that science cannot not prove science!
Watch as Dr. Craig absolute roasts and pawns Atkins
misquoting Keats and misunderstanding his romantic philosophy.
coal in your sock monktopus
John K. Sutherland says:
December 24, 2013 at 2:55 pm
Gotten? Gotten? Aaaaaarrrrggghhhh!
I assume you were not brought up in North America where this usage, once standard in England, is still in normal use.
Terrific piece, Lord Monckton. Not for the first time and I’m sure nor will it be the last.
Merry Christmas everyone.
Hey Moncko, can a Welsh atheist commoner wish you a Merry Christmas and a kiss on the lips?
Not with tongues
MERRY CRIMBO AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR.
Merry Christmas to all!
A good dissertation my lord, my only quibble is the fact that a morality based on reason is possible, not one handed down from a mythical or mystical being.
The socialists tell us that self-sacrifice (Altruism) is the moral way to live. You must sacrifice yourself for your fellow man, Since you are evil (selfish) they must force you to sacrifice yourself.
I don’t believe in human sacrifices, particularly the sacrifice of the productive to the non-productive! Are you listening M. Courtney?
Only one person in the history of the world has postulated a moral code which is based on reason and reality: Ayn Rand. I paraphrase: Human Joy is the ultimate goal of each individual. The required VALUES for attaining that goal = Reason, Purpose and Self-Esteem. The VIRTUES required to attain those values = Independence, Rationality, Integrity, Honesty, Justice, Productiveness and Pride.
The primary virtues of Rationality, Productiveness, and Pride are tied down to Reality by her PHILOSOPHY. By the nature of existence and consciousness; each one of her stated virtues, required for human life, are connected to reality.
Reason is our means of survival. Rationality is the acceptance of reason as one’s only source of knowledge and guide to action. Rationality requires a person to do his own thinking (Independence) and stay true to it in action (Integrity). It requires Honesty – the refusal to fake reality – because the unreal does not exist and can be of no value. It requires Justice – the moral evaluation of others – because rational, productive people are good for us, while irrational parasites are worthless or dangerous.
Survival requires an all-encompassing purposefulness, with all of one’s other purposes integrated to a central productive purpose. Productiveness is the application of reason to the creation of the products and services necessary for survival. To define and achieve rational purposes, a person must be certain of his competence and worth – he must achieve self-esteem. This requires the virtue of Pride – a commitment to living up to the highest rational standards. Thus Rand calls pride “moral ambitiousness.” It is, in effect, productiveness applied to character: “as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul”
Take the oath: “I swear, by my life and my love for it, that I will never be a slave to another man, nor allow another man to be a slave to me”!
Merry Christmas to all!
(I acknowledge the existence of who the holiday is for, no sweat) Peace and Joy to ALL mankind and a Happy New Year!
Paul R.