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.
Wrong. Reason requires consideration of the facts.
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Exactly, much peer review (and dissertations) is crap, so no wonder even Nobel winning scientists, for medicine no less, are calling for boycotts of elite science journals.
http://phys.org/news/2013-12-nobel-scientist-boycott-science-journals.html
until we (or more accurately, our grandchildren) reach the point ( or temperature) of deep regret.
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Predictions solely based on models – all of which are indisputably wrong, so your fallacious arguments based solely on appeals to authority and/or emotion are laughable………..
We are greatly indebted for the wisdom of the great Lord’s annual Christmas message.
Yet I feel that others will be even more indebted and will use it to question the judgment, not only of the great Lord Monckton, but all those associated with him in the sceptic movement. They will ignore the fact that many on the other side are also believers and especially the vast majority of politicians for whom it is a prerequisite to believe in God and also in the Greater Global Warming.
It should surely be an anathema for any one arguing from logic and documented facts to be at the same time accepting a superstitious doctrinal dogma formulated from between 4000 and 1400 years ago because of man’s inadequacies to understand powerful natural processes and to have an overriding need to exalt a super deity fashioned in his own image and with his own moral code to enable him to comprehend the infinity of space and time and creation.
I find it difficult to understand that in all things secular, we can make logical valued judgments, but in the matter of religion, we are happy to accept at face value the consensus view of the intellectual elite who produced this model of man, life and the universe all those years ago with less evidence even than the modern religion of Climate Change. Surely a person who is capable of arguing on the minutia of climate sensitivity, (but who may even be almost as far from actuality in this respect as the warmist hierarchy), should be able to argue the nonsensicality of for example, religious food rules of Judo-Christian-Islamic religions formulated before the advent of the modern refrigerator, or the need for the same religions to have mechanisms to flagellate, or otherwise abuse themselves and go on guilt trips and abstentions, all in the name of worshipping this great mystical ethereal deity.
These days, I would rather not make such arguments, preferring instead to let people live in blissful ignorance if it makes them happier. But there can be no place for religion in the Global Warming debate, especially from such a prominent ambassador as Lord Monckton.
Yes yes we know. Youse guys only do that good peer reviewed science. I challenge you to explain the glacier melt by 2035 scare in the spm. Lets hear it.
Steve Mosher of the MOSTEMP reproduction of Hansen’s GISTEMP would prefer to debate Keats this week, as Steve Goddard and crew have dug up more *deleted* NASA data and plotted the Orwellian data disfigurement, cumulatively, over time:
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/12/24/killing-off-the-dust-bowl/
Hey Steve Mosher, why aren’t you over there, defending this radical reversal of trends in the US temperature record, or don’t you debate matters of faith subjected to reason?
Davidmhoffer: in reg Nelson’s post at 5:38 pm today, he said (I paraphrase, because I’m on an ipad and can’t cut and paste). “And guess what, every one of those tens of thousands of peer reviewed papers was wrong, as Monckton pointed out in his essay”.
Also, your request for me to provide my scientific reasoning for AGW is welcome, but there’s not time or space on a web forum for anyone to do it justice. There are many excellent science books, but if you want a top notch explanation, I recommend a series of 12 half hour lectures by Physics Professor Wolfson of Middlebury College, published on DVD by the Teaching Company. For $20 you get clear explanations, many good charts, and a small book with recommended reading and references, and summary points.
My last point is that AGW is not one question, it’s several. 1st, is the Earth warming? On this point, the data is so irrefutable, that a prominent skeptical scientist, named mueller in believe, publically recanted his skepticism after participating in a Berkeley study funded by the Koch Brothers and Bill Gates. 2nd, is man the cause? The lab data on the properties of co2 is well documented and quantified. So is the amount of carbon that man has put in the atmosphere during the Industrial Age, and stll climbing. So the physics supports the co2 temperature correlation. And 3rd, how much will the earth warm as more co2 is added. This is the prediction of modelling…2- 4.5 C by 2100, depending on the economic and fossil fuel mixes assumed. And about double that over polar regions, and northern land masses., or as much as 16 degrees Fahrenheit. And 4th, So What? That’s when the complexities of predicting the effects come in. Sea level increases, extreme weather events, species migration, precipitation effects, drought, are all in the mix.
There’s not space here for more, so I recommend the many science publications for details. Meanwhile, for those of us who are not Climate Scientists, I urge us to pay attention to mr Abbot’s challenge as to whom to believe.
The truth of science is contingent. The truth of religion, absolute.
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Yep, and worse belief based on faith violates the second law of thermodynamics.
I’ve been a professional writer and editor for nearly forty years without having even seen the word “inspissate.” I guess it’s my Christmas present. Thanks!
Warren. Answer the challenge. How did that make it into the summary for policy makers?
BTW enjoyed your work in ” There’s Something About Mary”
Mosher says: “The truth of science is contingent.”
It appears to have become ‘contingent’ upon the agenda of the Scientist, and the needs of Political Correctness.
If religious belief gets Fatuous Twit Humans to consider that there is something ‘out there’ more significant than themselves, it would be a good thing.
It would be hilarious(!) if some future Carbon-Hygenic, Quasi-Industrial/Agrarian/Plutocracy were to be wiped out by a well-aimed Asteroid.
“……..how came we and all around us to be here?”
Well, climate, actually!
“An examination of the fossil record indicates that the key junctures in hominin evolution reported nowadays at 2.6, 1.8 and 1 Ma coincide with 400 kyr eccentricity maxima, which suggests that periods with enhanced speciation and extinction events coincided with periods of maximum climate variability on high moisture levels.”
state Trauth et al in Quaternary Science Reviews 28 (2009) 399–411.
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/222396841_Trends_rhythms_and_events_in_Plio-Pleistocene_African_climate/file/9c96051a83a42b7ed0.pdf
As it turns out, “maximum climate variability on high moisture levels” gins up the larger braincases in the genus Homo!
I found your discussion on religion and science intriguing. As always, you have provided much food for thought and research.
I thank you for that and wish you a very Merry Christmas. It has been many a happy year to ponder your thoughts, I wish you another 🙂
William
Troe: if your asking about davidmhoffers challenge, see my recent post. Re your other comment about the movie, if you’re relying upon demonization ( or snark) to win your arguments, the rest of us have little to fear.
James Abbott says:
December 24, 2013 at 6:03 pm
“Lets see, faced with an issue of potential global significance, who do we believe:(?)”
Follow the money – it will lead you to the Con-men (and their “Thousands” of hangers-on).
Common sense is more common than you may have thought.
So no answer is the answer then. An admited fabrication made it into the gold standard of climate science and you refuse to address this fact head on. Read Monckton again Warren. He is writing about you.
“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.”
They could be gaslighting victims, they would want to pass it on for reinforcement, a contemporary leaven of the Pharisees if you like. They sure as hell don’t know what they are up to, so best to forgive them really 😉
And 3rd, how much will the earth warm as more co2 is added.
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None, apparently for the last 17 years, a fact I attribute to natural climate variability dwarfing what little effect CO2 exudes on atmospheric temperature. In fact, atmospheric CO2 concentrations should be expected to rise after increases in temperature, e.g. Henrys Law.
“James Abbott says:
Lets see, faced with an issue of potential global significance, who do we believe:”
I trust the data the most. So far, the data says that we cannot prove ANY unusual warming due to our CO2. Meanwhile, there is irrefutable evidence of higher crop yields, faster forest growth, etc.
I suspect we will get 0.4C or so of warming with a doubling of CO2. The earths ability to dissipate to the poles any extra heat from the CO2 is so efficient that the amount of warming will be a fraction of the theoretical amount.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all!
Warren says:
December 24, 2013 at 7:00 pm
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Excuses. I’m on an iPad and can’t cut and paste. Whine, whine, whine. How hard is it to type the name of the person you are responding to and the time of their comment. Look, just like I did above, without any cutting and pasting.
As for the rest of your diatribe, your tinker toy DVD really isn’t worth my time. I’ve read AR3, AR4, AR5 and many of the papers they reference as well. Have you? As for the lab experiments you reference, I’ve read quite a few. I can explain the greenhouse effect that they measure, and how they measure it. Can you? I can explain the limitations of lab experiments in terms of simulating the atmospheric air column. Can you?
As for your anecdotal story about a scientist who changed his mind, I suggest you read carefully the views he actually expressed before he claimed to have changed his mind, and I can advise you that there are many who have changed their mind in the opposite direction. Does my citing Lovelock negate your cite of Mueller?
No it doesn’t, because I don’t make up my mind based on what you tell me other people think. Stick around Warren, participate in a few threads where specific papers are being discussed. See if you can keep up.
Lord Monckton, thank you for following the lead of Sir Isaac Newton. He was also known for his profound understanding of both science and religion. As Sir Isaac Newton wrote “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” Lord Monckton, thank you for letting us stand on your shoulders from time to time, as the view from there is quite astounding.
Warren says:
December 24, 2013 at 7:00 pm
Davidmhoffer: in reg Nelson’s post at 5:38 pm today, he said (I paraphrase, because I’m on an ipad and can’t cut and paste). “And guess what, every one of those tens of thousands of peer reviewed papers was wrong, as Monckton pointed out in his essay”.
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Warren, I repeat,: name one prediction\projection\model by Climate Scientists that what right, or even remotely accurate over the past twenty years.
It can’t be that hard can it? Out of tens of thousands of “peer reviewed” papers, random chance says at least one of them must be correct.
Just one. I beg you.
Richard: yes, Co2 is given off by the oceans as temp rises…if you read the science, you’ll find that co2 is thus both a cause of temp rise, and a result of temp rise. This is the commonly found phenomenon of positive feedback, seen elsewhere in both engineering and science. As a result, atmospheric temperature increases due to co2 emissions from fossil fuels are larger than they would be otherwise.
Actually, the oceans have taken up a larger portion of the temp rise from co2 emissions, while the atmosphere is warming more slowly so far in the 21st century. To understand anthropogenic climate change, one has to consider time periods of at least 25 years to see trend lines within the yearly variability, and to consider that the warming includes both oceans and atmosphere.
Warren says:
“1st, is the Earth warming? On this point, the data is so irrefutable…”
Despite Warren’s false assertion, the data is irrefutable that the Earth is not warming, and has not warmed for many years.
Next, Warren asserts:
“2nd, is man the cause?”
There is no verifiable evidence that human activity is the cause of any global warming. Warren is not capable of posting any testable scientific evidence showing measurable global warming due to human activity. His conjecture is based entirely on assertion, not on any measured evidence showing that mankind causes X degree of warming, per unit of CO2 produced. The alarmist scare is all based on such assertions and conjectures — not on any verifiable, testable measurements.
Next, Warren asserts:
“3rd, how much will the earth warm as more co2 is added. This is the prediction of modelling…2- 4.5 C by 2100…”
As usual, Warren once again falsely asserts, based on vague ‘models’. But the Real World refutes Warren’s True Belief: despite the steady rise in [harmless, beneficial] CO2, global temperatures have not risen, as predicted incessantly by the alarmist crowd. Empirical scientific observations prove conclusively that Warren’s assertions are flat wrong.
Warren is free to post his own empirical observations, but he chooses not to. Instead, Warren chooses to make false assertions, based on the debunked conjecture that catastrophic AGW will result from rising “carbon”. But Planet Earth demonstrates that is not happening.
If Warren were honest, he would now admit that he and the rest of the climate alarmist crowd have been proven wrong by the ultimate Authority: our own planet. But such basic honesty seems to be scarce among the alarmist crowd.
Stick around “OP”, participate in a few threads where specific papers are being discussed. See if you can keep up.
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Good advice. This isn’t the Guardian or Huffington post,
I tripped across criticism of the policymakers summary that some of you may have seen.
Pierre Darriulat. 50 years in particle physics, nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, and astrophysics. Former Director of Research at CERN.
“The way the SPM deals with uncertainties (e.g. claiming something is 95% certain) is shocking and deeply unscientific. For a scientist, this simple fact is sufficient to throw discredit on the whole summary. The SPM gives the wrong idea that one can quantify precisely our confidence in the [climate] model predictions, which is far from being the case”. …………and …….”When writing the SPM, the authors are facing a dilemma: either they speak as scientists and…recognize that there are too many unknowns to make reliable predictions…or they try to convey what they “consensually” think…at the price of giving up scientific rigour. They deliberately chose the latter…they have distorted the scientific message into an alarmist message”
http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/WrittenEvidence.svc/EvidenceHtml/4360
Reg Nelson: any science publication or peer reviewed paper dealing with your question will illustrate the main point…that the models duplicate the rise in earths temperature seen in the 20th and 21st century (not year by year, as I explain in my last post, but trend lines) and also predict relatively flat temperature trends when the CO2 emissions from human activity are excluded. Sorry to disappoint you, but if you don’t believe that, check the Wolfson lectures I recommended earlier, or other sources.
Dbstealy: what is your source? Mine is from scientific papers. You can check any of them for this info. I’m afraid you are deeply uninformed