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.
Richard, racook1978, and others: the odds of harmful climate change you cite are much lower than projected by the IPCC. If we were faced with 1 % probability, or 20%, this forum wouldn’t exist, nor would the IPCC. In the assessment of the IPCC, it’s far higher..more than 2 thirds I think..in any case much more than the 5% risk most of us have of a house fire for which we all buy homeowners insurance. The IPCC has estimated the GDP impact at 1% point each year for mitigation. I don’t know what they say the economic costs would be without mitigation. But the discussion I’ve been having is mainly about the validity of the science. Arguments about what to do, or the economic costs, have no bearing on the validity of the science,, one way or the other. Put another way, the atmosphere and it’s physics are not affected by our human worries about standard of living.
Well, I, for one, would prefer NOT to mix science with religion in any way – because, to my mind, religion – that is: ANY religion – is the complete opposite of truth. (Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno would most certainly agree…)
Anyway: FELIZ NAVIDAD!
Monkton:
They have gotten religion, but they have not gotten the point of religion, which, like the point of science, is objective truth.
the Catholic presentation to which I inadequately subscribe – is also built upon that fundamental principle of the oneness of all truth.
___________________________________
Sorry, Monk, I have had enough of your spiritual pontification on a science blog. How on earth can any rational and educated being believe that the Catholic Church cares one jot about the truth? How can anyone compare the lies of the Catholic Church to the truth of the scientific method?
This Catholic ‘truth’ would be the same ‘truth’ that jailed Galileo, burned Bruno to death, slow-roasted Jaques de Molay to death, killed all the Templars, and massacred each and every Cathar in the Albigensian crusade. Sorry, Monk, where is the ‘truth’ in the Catholic Church denying real science and murdering 300,000 deeply spiritual people, who were no threat to anyone. What ‘truth’ demanded that the priests and bishops of Montsegur be burned to death in communal funerary pyres? Where was the ‘truth’ in Bishop Arnaud Amaury declaring of the people of Beziers: “Kill them all, God will know His own”. Which ‘truth’ would that be, Monk?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Montségur
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_at_Béziers
The real truth of the Catholic Church, is that it always has been a ruthless power-base that took control of Europe as de-facto Emperors of Rome after the Western Roman Empire collapsed, and have ruled with an iron fist ever since.
May I remind you that the Spanish Invasion of England was not King Phillip II of Spain vs Queen Elizabeth I of England – it was a crusade by Pope Sixtus vs a small heretic nation who demanded real truth instead of Catholic propaganda. Do you wish the Spanish Amara succeeded, Monk? Is that your view?
Likewise, the Reformation of the 17th century was a bold stand by Holland and northern Europe against the power, greed, corruption and lies of the Catholic Church. And this was a bitter struggle that saw all the Huguenots massacred and exiled and 1/3 of the population of Germany exterminated, all in the pursuit of real truth rather than the political propaganda that masquerades as ‘truth’ within the Catholic Church. That is why every British monarch has to give an oath that they are not Catholic, to prevent the tyrants in Rome from ever taking power again.
Oh, and a Merry Xmas to you, Monk.
Ralph
Mike Jonas says:
December 24, 2013 at 12:38 pm
“we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have” – Stephen Schneider
“The only thing that is necessary for evil to triumph is for men of good will to do nothing.”
– Edmund Burke
“Give me money that’s what I want” – The Beatles (and of course Al Gore)
Wonderful writing from Christopher, though not particularly religious myself, it is clear to me, that without morality, there can be no real civilisation.
The essence of science is intellectual honesty.
I you don’t have honesty, either because the concept doesn’t exists in your vocabulary or because it has been watered down by reasons of expediency, then you can forget science.
You are correct, dear Monckton. But climate bigotry is just one form of bigotry (note that I’m using here the dictionary definition of bigotry, that is, intolerance of differing opinions). The behavior is exhibited by sufferers of many other social maladies, from race or gender to obesity or tobacco. It is not that there is a lack of relevance or importance to any of these topics, it is that their ideation is one of utter (colloquial) imbecility. The climate “concern” is a bit more out there (who would have thought this would eventually matter 30 years ago) but no different in its realization than any other of the mainstream concerns. In short, our by-numbers collective intellect amounts to little. Climate talk simply makes our shortcomings more evident. Twenty years from now, the concern might be about quanta and whoever does not believe that “an unprecedented quantum shift is about to happen” will be the new pariah.
Oh, and if anyone is wondering why we use the term ‘Xmas’, it is because the term ‘Christ’ in Christ-mas is very non-specific.
Kings Saul, David and Solomon were all called the messiah in the Tanakh, as was Cyrus the Great of Persia. And ‘messiah’ is translated in the Vulgate Bible as ‘christ’, because both ‘messiah’ and ‘christ’ simply means ‘king’ or even ‘priest-king’ (the anointed priest-king of Judaea) in the Aramaic and Greek respectively.
Thus Christmas actually means Kingmas, and does not clearly define which king is intended. Perhaps the Catholic Church is actually honoring Cyrus the Great, who knows. Thus the X in Xmas underlines the fact that we don’t know who on earth this 1st century priest-king really was, because he does not appear in any historical record.
(By the way, the Testimonium Flavium is a fake interpolation inserted by the ever-deceitful Church chronicler Eusebius, who was greatly peeved at not being able to find Jesus anywhere in Josephus Flavius’ long and detailed history of 1st century Judaea. This is just one in a long chronicle of deceits by the Catholic Church, designed to prop up their crumbling empire of deceit.)
Ralph
Firstly, I was very remiss in missing Christmas wishes to the Mods
@ur momisugly Warren,
You have arrived on a science site, WUWT is not really an opinion site. The people here generally have good scientific reason for believing CO2 warming is overstated. I think maybe a grounding in why people interested in science are sceptical of Climate Change is in order. So here’s why I don’t agree. I can’t speak for anyone else because we are free thinkers here.
Firstly there is scale, the warming is supposed to be caused by a radiative imbalance of 0.6 +/- 17 Watts (Hansen)- let’s ignore for the moment that the error margin is two orders of magnitude greater than the value – Meaning that this value is accurate to zero significant digits. The average incoming radiation at midday each day at the equator is about a killowatt, about 1700 tines the imbalance. On average it’s something like 600 times the imbalance averaged over a 24 hour period. As a reference 0.6W is about the energy emitted by an incandescent christmas light, you know like an icicle light. This 0.6W added warming acts in the lower atmosphere from the surface to the troposphere, a height of lets say 3 Km (base of the lower level cloud) probably more like 10 km on a clear day. So you have a Christmas light in a column of air of say 3000 Cubic Meters (1x1x3000) that has 600 times that energy of that christmas light flowing through it every day, modulated up to 30% or more by cloud, or season or dust. or leaves blowing across it that is free to convect, radiate, conduct and otherwise transform that energy, and you are anticipating that this christmas light will consistently and measurably warm the atmosphere in this column by 4 degrees by the end of the century. It a christmas light per square meter ! It’s very very small compared to the natural sources of energy dissipated every day, some 0.06% of the peak energy flow
2. Science tells us that the all cause warming due to the atmosphere retarding heat transfer, and the gas law PV=nRT, warms the earth through all causes by 33 Degrees. Now Let’s just suppose we say that all 33 degrees warming is caused by CO2, we know it isn’t but let’s suppose. Energy absorbtion in the CO2 band is 85% (The atmosphere is 85% opaque at these frequencies) so let’s compute what would happen if we let this get to 100% opaque (IE Earth had a CO2 Atmosphere like Venus but limited to 1 atm). Weel use a relationship that will overestimate this (let’s be conservative), let’s presume that the increase in temperature is linear (It’s not, both CO2 and most forms of feedback are logarithmic, but assuming linearity will give us a temperature above the limits of what could happen). The increase possible is 15% against 85% or about 17%. 17% of 33 degrees is 5.61 Degrees, so if earth was venus and we had a CO2 atmosphere at 1 atmosphere pressure the rise would be only 5.6 degrees and earth would still be habitable temperature wise though you would find breathing difficult ;-). (Venus is hot because it has an atmosphere of almost 100 earth atmospheres – 100 times as dense as ours). This includes all feedbacks, since the 33 degrees we extrapolated from incorporates feedbacks, and we know that most of the warming across the atmosphere is due to the lapse rate (dependent on gravity). Actual warming for a 100 percent CO2 atmosphere is strictly less than this (a lot less). The IPCC projection for this scenario is anything up to 78 degrees C ( Unrealistic, earth’s history has never seen this sort of scenario for any CO2 density in the past) and it does not tally with the magnitude of the greenhouse effect to date (EG 33 degrees as 85% absorbtion). The IPCC would only be consistent with the all cause atmospheric warming so far for sensitivities below about 0.5 degrees per doubling
3. Lets look at that amplification, the IPCC says the direct warming of CO2 is multiplied by a factor of 3 to reach a final value of about 3.3 degrees per doubling (Central estimate). But lets look what has actually happened, lets use a convenient point for warming from the end of the little ice age Scientists say the CO2 level then was about 270PPM, Now its about 400. The effect of CO2 on temperature follows a log law. You can write this as
Delta T = C x ln( CO2/co2) we know some numbers from our scenario.
Delta T is about 0.7 at this point
CO2 is about 400
co2 is about 270
From this you can find the constant multiplier empircally
0.7 = C x ln(400/270)
or C=delta T /ln(400/270)
= 0.7/0.39 = 1.79
So now we know the constant for this relation. Let’s look at the doubling of warming then from 270 PPM to 560 PPM
delta T (doubling) = C x ln (540/270)
delta T (doubling) = 1.79 x ln (2)
delta T (doubling) = 1.79 x 0.69
= 1.24 degrees for a doubling of CO2
Conclusion, if we attribute all warming since the little ice age to CO2 rise since the LIA we can only demostrate climate sensitivity of 1.3 Degrees per doubling at best, yet the IPCC models claim 3, 4 or more, the previous Australian Government tried to claim 6?
There is more.
For example when you look at the detail of feedback mechanisms, you encounter the fact that negative feedback reduces the impact of CO2 by a factor of 5. To produce the IPCCs nett amplification of 3 there must be positive feedbacks amounting to 15 times, five times to bring it back to equity and three times more. this requires a loop gain in the positive feedbacks of more than 0.95. Furthermore the individual mechanisms, lapse rate, radiation, convection, transformation, conduction etc, to oceans, rocks, evaporation etc are not time correlated, they have different lags, so you have a myriad non time correlated feedbacks with variable lags with a positive feedback component with a loop gain of 0.95. Such a system is highly oscillatory when perturbed, the climate is not. The Nett gain of 3 (all things considered is implausible – actually I’d say impossible).
Finally
What is (40 – 0) / 2 = (20) (Melbourne approx temperature range and average)
What is (32-22)/2 = (27) (Kalimantan approximate temperature range and average)
Which climate is hotter
Which climate is more extreme
Which climate is more habitable, by more creatures, tropical Kalimantan, or mediterranean Melboune. ( That is what 7 degrees of warming does, it lowers the max, and raises the mins)
On Earth as average temperature rises, temperature extremes fall
That’s enough for now, as you see, any which way you look at it, a climate sensitivity of more than about 1.5 is highly implausible along several lines of calculation and the mesurements themselves only support values between about 0.5 and 1.3 degrees per doubling, with a higher liklihood at the lower end, this is just math. This is why I am a sceptic, these things don’t add up, and I will not believe the models until these things can be explained that has never been done.
Other peoples opinion is not enough around here, you have to argue the real science with math and examples. If you stick around you will learn more
Warren says:
December 24, 2013 at 5:24 pm
Chad: No, my 99% refers to multiple peer reviewed counts of tens of thousands of peer reviewed journal papers that support AGW, not to a poll of scientists….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well that is very easy to achieve if the only way you can get a peer reviewed paper published is to say in the paper you agree with AGW even when your results have nothing to do with AGW. For several years I have been calling it the get out of jail free card because it is so darn obvious in so many papers. Heck even the news media practices blatant censorship at the urging of the same set of people as Los Angeles Times and Reddit and the BBC (with explanation) show.
{Note: Professor J. Scott Armstrong who wrote the first article on Los Angeles Times censorship, has written papers on peer review and communicating science.}
Here is the response of ‘Climate scientists’ (and I use that term very loosely) to a paper they do not like.
email 2683, from 12 April 2003…
This is from Climategate 2 and Corruption of Peer Review a long essay detailing the corruption of peer review in response to the claims the e-mails are are being taken out of context.
What to me is even worse is the corruption, like a cancer has spread throughout the scientific establishment to the point where papers like How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data and stories like US Scientists Significantly More Likely to Publish Fake Research, Study Finds are now being published. The first paper reports “… surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices….” I find that truly SAD, and it brings us back to exactly what Lord Monckton is talking about Honesty and Integrity are now missing in
scienceacademia.Warren says:
December 25, 2013 at 12:16 am
Davidmhoffer: you’re reading my post exactly backwards. I said the models do NOT predict regional climate trends. And you have not directed me to any specific finding in the 5th Assessment that says the models have not predicted the 20 century uptick in temperature trend. . I cite Professor Wolfson
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You charged in here shouting about how obvious the science is and how 99% of scientists agree. When challenged to discuss the science, all you could muster is a reference to a video by Wolfson. When pointed out to you what the IPCC AR reports said, you didn’t know what an AR report was. Having explained that to you, and that they don’t say what you claim 99% of the scientists say, you babbled something about you should have made your claim in regard to regional results from models. Challenged on that, you now claim that’s not what you meant. Having been presented with evidence directly from the IPCC showing that even they present evidence that a child could understand that the models predict more warming than it actually happening, you state that you cannot see it and refer again to a video by Wolfson rather than discuss the plain facts before you.
You understand neither the science nor what the scientists have said. You think yourself an expert because you saw one video. When presented with contrary evidence, you splutter about the video. You are just a poser.
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, sir, that excellent essay covered a lot of bases. To provoke thought by the readers would be an understatement. Thank you.
Trustworthiness is the foundation of all virtue. It’s closest relative is truthfulness which is the trustworthy spoken word.
Atheism is not the ‘religion of irreligion’ it once was, having, like true religion, suffered from the dead hand of priestcraft. There is little agreement in what it is in which atheists do not believe. It has become an argument between several shadows about which light they reject.
Coming as this essay does on about the day of the passing from this this ball of dust, this mortal phase, of Mr Kalashnikov, the unrepentant, nay, proud inventor of the most accessible, the most deadly, the cheapest weapon ever created enabling man to kill, main, terrorize and debase all human virtue with the least input of skill or muscle, it is certainly time, is it not, to reconsider what science becomes when decoupled from the very purpose of Creation.
There is only one Creation therefore there is only one Creator. Knowledge of Him permeates the densest of jungles with each of us having access enough to one or another of the principles of at least one stage of Revelation to know the difference between right and wrong, truth and untruth.
Whether or not one accepts the decisions of men at the Council of Nicea or “all things done at Chalcedon” (where the second 4th General Council took place) we should, given our intelligence and independent capacity for thought, have the presence of mind not to blame the Founders for the behaviour of their followers.
Bearing that admonition in mind, consider the moral challenge of the hideous and expensive lie that is the CAGW movement. As recently as last week and not for the first time, I was counselled not to fully reveal my knowledge of a scientific matter lest funding for its alleviation diminish. The challenge, the moral challenge, is deciding how to deal with the world as we find it. Shall we all navigate the shark infested waters of life rudderless and drifting with the tide? Shall our cant and destination be dictated by the whim of the wind? Does it matter not which path we take as long as the journey is an easy descent?
Consider the choices of the inventor of the ‘shaped charge’ (an artillery shell). He was expounding on the efficiency of this weapon to Sir Abbas Effendi, the holy man from Palestine, who asked if it was a worthy endeavour to seek efficiency in the killing of men. The inventor responded with a comment to the effect that “more people died in preventable accidents in the home” than because of warfare. His reply? “War is the most preventable accident.”
The outrages against science and morality that are the fatuous, alarmist and devious claims of the “CO2 is going to kill us all” movement constitute one of the most “preventable accidents” of our generation. Political and economic groupings seek advantage at every turn of the AGW worm hoping its castings will fertilise the murk in their hearts if not wallets. Feel good; pay now.
“In the soil of thy heart plant naught but the rose of love.”
Truth is love manifested. Make this day a celebration of that love.
My Xmas message to the warmists is:
How does it feel to have a massive inanimate rock speeding through space laugh at your intellect?
Wassail!
If falsehood had, like truth, but one face only, we should be upon better terms; for we should then take for certain the contrary to what the liar says: but the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand forms, and a field indefinite, without bound or limit. The Pythagoreans make good to be certain and finite, and evil, infinite and uncertain. There are a thousand ways to miss the white, there is only one to hit it.
Michel de Montaigne, “Of Liars”
I thought this quote would chime with Lord Monckton’s classical-rooted thoughts on the unity of truth.
Monkton’s eloquent scourging of the scientific, media and political classes’ mendacity and complicity in dishonesty is of course entertaining and reassuring to us skeptics. And it is fair and justified. Monkton skillfully walks a tight-rope here of sincere engagement of religion without crossing into the dismal territory of patronising proselytism.
But even in regard to Christian (and other) religions, something is not quite right. The quote by Christ in the gospels comes to mind: Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. and another, Judge not that you may not be judged.
The point is not the rightness of Monkton’s accusations. Another, non-biblical phrase that is pertinent here is “crapping in your own bath”. There are mature and immature human societies. Mature societies develop effective, if unofficial, methods of obtaining consensus; immature societies by contrast are locked in endless bitter polarised confrontation, each side spewing endless narrative of the rightness of their cause. In the long term there is a tendency for societies to mature as there is for imperially dominaing cultures to become subversively civilized by the cultures that they dominate (e.g. most popular dish in England now being curry).
We are self-righteously accusing practically the whole world of being in an evil conspiracy, OK, and disturbingly there may be substance to this. But think of it this way. Hypothetically, what if we won the climate argument tomorrow. The world’s political leaders and scientific and media opinion-leaders all announced in unison the utter and final falsehood of the CAGW argument. What next? Here are some options as to what might follow:
1. Climate science ends, it’s settled, nothing more to discover, everyone goes home.
2. Like good Christians we hark back to Noah’s ark and aim to wipe out all life connected with CAGW and start a new society with “breeding couples” of sound skeptics;
3. Or, maybe, life goes on. Climate science looks more widely at the mysteries of atmosphere and ocean. Some of us here might be in a position to take part in this, alongside the massed ranks of former AGW believers who just days before we were having such fun abusing and ridiculing.
Lets maybe take a hint from Nelson Mandela. Society might work better if we find ways to work with former enemies, rather than try to replace them.
Climate science does not seem very keen on answering the question about Agw that they raise,they are content with the idea that it might be happening, all the things that global warming might/might not cause IF global warming is/is not happening is regarded as evidence for global warming.In reality there is no real evidence that the earth is being catapaulted into a hot house earth by co2 ,we still have polar icecaps at both poles and it gets cold in winter and warm in the summer at higher lattitudes, untill we see changes there it is unlikely that the climate is sensitive to co2 warming it might be more sensitive to global cooling as we may find out in the next few years.
Religion is not the source of morality. We do not exist in a moral vacuum where we might or might not think certain things are bad and are totally dependent on a priest to set us straight on the matter.
Readers of the “Wicked bible” of 1631 which contained the misprint “thou shalt commit adultery” did not shrug their shoulders and say “well if that’s what God wants” and rush out to have sex with the neighbours wife.
Owners of a copy of the “wife beaters bible” of 1531 which contains the erroneous footnote “And if she be not obediente and healpeful unto hym, endevoureth to beate the fere of God into her heade, that thereby she may be compelled to learne her dutye and do it.” did not because of this believe that they had a moral duty to beat their wives. At least I hope they did not.
Readers of the “unrighteous bible” of 1651 which contains the misprint “Know ye that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God?” didn’t suddenly think it was right to be wrong and wrong to be right. Nor did those with a copy of the “Sin On” bible of 1716 which contains the instruction “Go and sin on more” rush out to do do what they were told.
More seriously I assert that one can be a very moral person and also an atheist. Indeed as an atheist I tend to distrust the morality of the excessively religious. The excessively religious have a tendency to stop considering and thinking about moral questions replacing their inherent moral responsibility with a mindless adherence to instructions from a priest or religious leader. This can and has lead to great evils being done in the name of religion.
I agree with most of Lord Monckton’s conclusions and goals, but not his premises, something which I think is possible, since this is not a strictly scientific or logical discussion.
I feel that the statement: ” .. the point of religion, which, like the point of science, is objective truth. ” is misleading and irrelevant. The aims of different philosophies and approaches is not as important as the methods by which those aims are pursued. Otherwise it is too easy to fall into the trap of noble corruption.
Religion seems to involve a certain amount of formalised self deception called faith/belief (I use the words interchangebly) which is subjective, and cannot be equated with a scientific approach where it doesn’t matter what you believe or want: testable facts should always trump beliefs and the absence of testable facts is not the validation of a theory. Obviously not lying is a prerequisite for the scientific approach and wishful thinking is not advised 🙂 At most I would classify the various religions as tentative hypotheses, awaiting further investigation.
Human beings are irrational to a greater or lesser degree, which makes the scientific search for truth particularly difficult, due to the amount of self-discipline required.Various scientific institutions recognise this and follow procedures to ensure that deception (including self-deception) is minimised.The field of climatology as a whole seems to have neglected the basic scientific procedures so badly that it starts to present itself as a religion.
I think one of the reasons that climatology has become so popular is that religions – especially Western ones – seem not be coping that well with the advent of the internet. Easily available opposing views contribute to people abandoning their faith in search of something better – hence most churches’ strong views on heretics. Since those who stray from the true faith usually still retain a desire for a system where doubt or skeptisism is not an integral part of the thought process, they are easy prey for the first pseudo-scientific organisation they encounter.
I disagree most strongly with the concept that religion is a prerequisite for morality (which seems to be an accepted synonym for “good”.) Part of the problem in the discussion is the definition of morality, which seems to arise mostly from subjective judgement and varies widely depending on the organisation and the person.
What I find the most useful is where religious and non-religious can find common ground and can discuss sensitive issues in a reasonable manner. With some exceptions, this blog seems to be one of those few places, with the credit going to the author and the moderators.
Many thanks to the numerous commenters who have been kind enough to join in our seasonal philosophical discussion. Some responses, if I may.
I’m delighted that Paul767 has referred to the philosophy of Ayn Rand, a magnificent author who ought to be compulsory reading for every Socialist.
I’m also delighted that RoHa meet Anthony Flew. I, too met him and admired him, for he was a genuine seeker after truth, and an always refreshing philosopher. His movement towards the notion that God exists was an illustration of his intellectual honesty (though scientifically one might disagree with him as to whether the Big Bang had a cause at all: that is something we shall never know).
Roha, supported by Mr. Dewhurst, rightly points out that religion is not essential to morality. Be that as it may, morality is essential to science, for otherwise scientists might all behave like the tiny handful who have fabricated the climate scare.
Roha, supported by Martin A, takes me to task for using the past participle “gotten”. That, like “driven” and “sunken”, is one of our vigorous Germanic strong-verb usages and it is a shame it has become lost in the Old Country.
“Andud” seems wilfully to misunderstand the head posting by suggesting that I had suggested Jesus the Nazarene had created the universe 2000 years ago. No, I did not put a date on that, though He took human form (as a Nazarene) 2000 years ago. The best science at present seems to suggest that the universe winked into being 13.82 billion years ago. This is deduced from the anisotropy of the cosmic background radiation, though I cannot give a clear account of how it was done or whether the answer is right.
Then, sadly, we have the trolls.
The furtively pseudonymous “climateace” lists the nonsense on my Wikipedia bio, complaining that I have said I can cure various diseases. No, I have said I am researching a possible cure for various infectious diseases. I only said that much so that potential patients could come forward. Several of them are now better, so researches continue. Does “climateace” really wish that these cures had not taken place?
“Climateace” also parrots Wikipedia’s assertion that I said I had a Nobel Peace Prize (much as Michael Mann said he had one, until the UN told him not to). No, I have not said that. I have told the story of how Professor David Douglass of Rochester University, New York, presented me some years back with a Nobel Prize pin made from gold recovered from a physics experiment 30 years previously, after I had given a lecture on climate sensitivity to his faculty. He said I ought to be recognized because I had had a serious error in the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC corrected. This, therefore, was what is known as A Joke – a concept with which most trolls are unfamiliar.
Mosher, in characteristically unconstructive form, incorrectly accuses me of having misquoted Keats, and adds that “the truth of science is contingent”. Contingent upon what, he does not say.
Abbott talks of my “extreme prejudice”: but, by now, it should be clear that I take a scientific and not an aprioristic position. I may be right or wrong, but, unlike the trolls, I do not simply follow the Party Line because I am told there is a “consensus” about it.
Talking of which, “Warren” says 99.8% of scientific papers “support” anthropogenic global warming. Well, I support it myself. If there were more of it, the world would be a more prosperous place. It is cold that is the killer, as we discovered in a recent winter here in the UK, when there were 31,000 excess deaths in a single month because it was so cold. No headlines, of course: deaths from cold don’t fit the Party Line.
“Warren” is exactly the sort of true-believer at whom the head posting was directed. He has not the slightest regard for what is objectively true., Instead, he cites “Naomi Orestes” as having said there was a “consensus”. One supposes he means “Naomi Oreskes”. However, the most comprehensive survey of scientific papers on climate ever conducted was by Cook et al. (2013), who claimed that 97.1% of 11,944 papers published since 1991 supported the “consensus” that most of the warming since 1950 was manmade. The paper in fact demonstrated that only 0.3% of those 11,944 papers supported the “consensus” thus defined, as Legates et al. (2013) pointed out.
“Warren” says he will only take me seriously when I publish a peer-reviewed paper (though, curiously, he and others who say that do not seem to wish to hold Al Gore, for instance, to the same standard). However, if he will read Legates et al. he will find that I was one of the co-authors. It will be interesting to know whether he continues to adhere to his belief system when he realizes that he is not in the company of 99.8% of scientists publishing in the field, but only 0.3%.
Likewise “Warren’s” assertion that the IPCC’s “90% confidence” in its findings is impressive displays a fundamental ignorance of statistics on his part. There is no dataset on the basis of which any such confidence interval could have been determined. In short, it is fictitious, as was the previous report’s “65% confidence” and the latest report’s “95% confidence”.
I have had several peer-reviewed papers published. If “Warren” got his science from the reviewed literature rather than from Greenpeace, he might have come across some of them. He might, for instance, like to read my paper Is CO2 mitigation cost-effective?, published in August this year in one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, the Annual Proceedings of the World Federation of Scientists’ Erice Seminars on Planetary Emergencies, where I examine whether he would be justified in taking out precautionary insurance against future global warming. The answer, based on the IPCC’s and Stern’s own mainstream analyses, is that it is 1-2 orders of magnitude costlier to act today than to adapt the day after tomorrow. One cannot, as “Warren” and Stern claim, make global warming go away at an annual cost of 1% of GDP. Most mitigation measures cost 20-80% of GDP, while doing nothing, according to Stern, costs about 1% of GDP (or 3% at most, if the warming this century does not exceed 3 K). Since there has been no warming yet this century, and we are one-seventh of the way through it, we could see as little as 1 K warming by 2100, in which event all efforts at mitigation are infinitely more expensive than the do-nothing option.
He may also like to read my earlier paper for the Annual Proceedings, published in 2011, in which I demonstrated that most of the global warming from 1983-2001 was caused by a naturally-occurring reduction in cloud cover (Pinker et al., 2005). So “Warren’s” statement that most of the warming in the 20th century was manmade may not be true, as several papers in the learned literature (including mine) attest. And there is certainly no scientific basis for his assertion that physics dictates that most of the warming must have been caused by us. That is another instance of the logical fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam, arguing from ignorance. We don’t know why the warming occurred, but if Pinker is right (and Dr. Joseph Boston kindly reanalysed her data for me to make sure she was) then most of the warming was probably of natural origin.
Next, “Warren” makes the strange assertion that I had said tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers were wrong. I had made no such assertion. Far fewer papers than he may realize suggest that global warming may prove catastrophic. Of the 64 papers marked by Cook et al. as supporting the IPCC’s version of “consensus” to the effect that most of the warming since 1950 was manmade, only one said warming might prove catastrophic.
Finally, “Warren” asserts that I believe in the existence of a global “conspiracy” among scientists. No: I had explicitly stated that there is indeed a small group – we all know who most of them are – who for political and financial motives have been making up bad science and getting it published in acquiescent journals. The real problem is that, once the political class had taken up the issue, the remainder of the scientific community stood by and allowed the lies to continue to be told – again for political and financial reasons. That is not a conspiracy: it is the herd instinct of the hive mind that so much of academe has become – a hive mind of which “Warren” seems to be a part.
Let us hope “Warren” has learned from his experience here that mere assertions of religious belief in the New Superstition are not enough. He must back his claims with proper, peer-reviewed evidence. That excludes tendentious lecture series, and it excludes the documents of the IPCC, which are not peer-reviewed in the accepted sense. The morality taught by my own religion requires that science be a genuine search for truth, which is why those who have tried to assert that science is “amoral” are not quite right. The search for scientific truth is a moral process, in that it requires scrupulous intellectual honesty of the scientist. Scientists like the small and malevolent band who have made up scientific results and claimed certainty where none can exist are not intellectually honest; their work is immoral; and their conclusions, because their work is immoral, are valueless.
I normally enjoy Lord Monckton’s commentaries but this one was sad and disappointing. Was it really necessary to conflate religious “truth” with scientific inquiry? I mean, yeah I realize it’s Christmas and Christmas is obviously a religious holiday, but we get enough of the faith-based science from the AGW crowd. Faith is not the same thing as truth. It’s belief in something without evidence and that’s actually what the problem is, right? And just how big of a problem is it? Here is an excerpt from a 2011 working group study by the Pontifical Academy of Science — the official “science” wing of the faith-based Vatican:
http://www.pas.va/content/dam/accademia/pdf/glaciers.pdf
So much for the church and “truth”…
Does this mean that Lord Monckton only derives truth from the Catholic Church when it’s convenient? Someone please clarify because I must be confused.
Oh, and Happy Winter Solstice 🙂
Warren says:
December 24, 2013 at 6:31 pm
James Abbott: a little snarky at the end, but generally well put. Unfortunately the scientific near consensus is not matched by a consensus among voters, who seem unlikely to accept policy measures until we (or more accurately, our grandchildren) reach the point ( or temperature) of deep regret.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You mean the coming Ice Age?
From the Peer Reviewed Papers you believe in:
(These are the Bond events also seen during glaciation as Dansgaard-Oeschger events every 1200 to 1500 years)
A more recent paper looking at glaciers in Norway.
The authors of BOTH papers simply state that most glaciers likely didn’t exist 6,000 years ago, but the highest period of the glacial activity has been in the past 600 years. This is hardly surprising with ~9% less solar energy.
MORE:
Abstract
…..We therefore conclude that for a period in the Early Holocene, probably for a millenium or more, the Arctic Ocean was free of sea ice at least for shorter periods in the summer……
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFMPP11A0203F
Abstract
…..Arctic sea ice cover was strongly reduced during most of the early Holocene and there appear to have been periods of ice free summers in the central Arctic Ocean……
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379110003185
And finally. As reported in Nature Geosciences, “Regional atmospheric circulation shifts induced by a grand solar minimum,” Celia Martin-Puertas et al. took a meticulous look at annual sediment deposits in a German lake from 3,300 to 2,000 years ago. They analyzed the sediment layers—called varve—carefully measuring proxies for solar irradiance. This is what they found and their major conclusion:
Even NASA agrees the sun has gone quiet: “It’s the smallest maximum we’ve seen in the Space Age,” David Hathaway of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., told reporters in a teleconference. and NASA: Deep Solar Minimum and NASA: Solar Variability and Terrestrial Climate
And so does SpaceDaily: (SPX) Aug 09, 2013: Looming weak solar max may herald frosty times
It is amusing to see the story includes the usual AGW non sequitur (get out of jail free card) I laugh about:
When you look at CAGW in relation to the entire Holocene the politicized panic is really laughable. Carbon Dioxide is a plant food and if we are really really lucky it might keep us out of the next major ice age but I doubt it. The real take away from a study of ‘Climate Change’ and such is burning coal will stave off the extinction of C3 plants (our main food source) for a bit longer. SEE: Carbon starvation in glacial trees recovered from the La Brea tar pits, southern California
I enjoyed the essay, especially since I have come to the conclusion that truth is the most important thing. Human existence requires cooperation and we must have trust to cooperate fully. This requires truth.
I see our atheist friends are whining about the history of the Roman Catholic Church. They mention evils committed when the Church was, in effect, the government in Europe. Yet for some odd reason they fail to mention the horrors committed by governments all around the world throughout history. (is this the Jim Hansen school of argumentation?) They fail to mention that the root evil has always been the state itself.
The question of “God” does not get answered by how believers have acted when they were organized and had power over others. Gandhi is reputed to have observed he liked Christianity but did not care so much for the Christians.
The eternal question man asks is “how did all this get here”?!? How did matter come to be in the first place? The atheist says it all happened by “accident”. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary what a weak argument. The agnostic says, “don’t know”. That is much better.
Me? A Taoist. Do Taoists believe in God? I read someplace “Taoism offers the option to skip the comparison. This question is irrelevant. God could or could not exist, and either state doesn’t change the way we lead our lives. Our lives are expressions of action between ourselves and the universe. To respect our surrounding environment is a furthering of respect to ourselves. This manner of living doesn’t change regardless of the nature of God or the Tao.” … A Taoist doesn’t think the Tao is before, after or is even equal to God. The Tao is a concept to describe something that goes beyond our capability to define. Taoism leaves the Tao undefined and a Taoist happily explores the wonder that opens up as a result.
I find most atheists to be intolerant in exactly the same way that many “believers” are intolerant. Shame on both sides when they do that sort of thing. I think that studying philosophical Taoism would help many of our atheist friends get a grip on life to where they also could say …
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night
🙂
I don’t do religion myself. But a merry Christmas to you all anyway.
The Mandlebrot fractal blows my mind.
Daniel H has wilfully misunderstood the head posting. The only sense in which I have “conflated” religion and science is in pointing out that belief in catastrophic global warming, for which there is precious little scientific evidence, has the character of a quasi-religious superstition and not of science. My main point was that true religion, however inadequately and imperfectly, insists upon morality and, therefore, intellectual honesty.
As for the Pontifical Academy of Sciencies, I had lunch at the Academy with its Prefect a couple of years ago, and tried to suggest to him that it was not the place of the Church to fall into the trap of making mere fashion statements about global warming (in which he is a true-believer of the worst kind). However, neither I nor the eminent scientists present were able to make a dent in his belief system. He was unable to adduce anything resembling a scientific argument.
The Church, therefore, has gotten its science wrong yet again. Fortunately, few will recall the Pontifical Academy’s pointless and asinine pontification on this subject, for it will be submerged in the thousands of other flatulent, half-baked, me-too statements churned out by the world’s governing class. I shall add it to my collection of official idiocies on the subject. Sub specie aeternitatis, the Prefect of the Pontifical Academy will be proven wrong. Fortunately, his expatiations on this or any other subject are not de fide. We are free to ignore them, as almost everyone is ignoring his pietistic but scientifically meaningless statement on global warming.
I do not assert that everything the Church says on science (or, as here, on politics masquerading as science) is true: nor am I obliged to believe any such thing. But science without morality is mere politics. Whether morality springs from religion or simply from an appreciation of the natural law on the part of a good soul, it is essential to the proper functioning of genuine, independent, disinterested scientific enquiry. The pedlars of the global warming scare have acted immorally in dressing up politics as though it were science. The world is already beginning to laugh at them. If the scare has any useful purpose, it is in reminding the people that when the classe politique expresses the greatest certainty that a thing is so there is the greatest probability that it is not so.
‘Davidmhoffer wrote (yesterday, 8:34 pm): ‘ Every last model prediction, all 22 models, and all the predictions from all the models, have failed’.
.
In the long run perhaps all our models fail but some fail more miserably than others. If you take an exam of two-choice items, you may have about one half wrong if you don’t know anything. A miserable failure is to have all items wrong. That may sometimes happen by chance or because you misunderstood the instruction, but it almost always means that you have pertinent false knowledge in stead of just ignorance.