Another case of “The ends justify the means”
Submitted by Eric Worrall
Rod Lamberts, director of the Australian National Centre for Public Awareness of Science at the Australian National University, claims facts won’t win the climate debate.
Source: https://theconversation.com/facts-wont-beat-the-climate-deniers-using-their-tactics-will-24074
Rod Lamberts starts by criticising Tim Flannery, former chief of the now abolished Australian Climate Commission, for recently suggesting
“An opinion is useless, what we need are more facts.”.
(Link from Rod Lambert’s article)
https://www.facebook.com/climatecouncil/posts/10151956752276603?stream_ref=10
Rod Lamberts then works his way up to the following passage:
“What we need now is to become comfortable with the idea that the ends will justify the means. We actually need more opinions, appearing more often and expressed more noisily than ever before.”
Tim Flannery once famously gave an opinion, on air, that Australian dams and river systems would never fill again. In the wake of severe flooding on the Australian East Coast, Flannery claimed he had been misquoted – a claim which Andrew Bolt refutes.
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Damian says:
March 15, 2014 at 7:55 pm
Isn’t that what has been happening for years? Computer models spewing out opinions.
>>>
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” – H. L. Mencken
Facts? We ain’t got no Facts, I don’t have to show you no stinking facts!!! ;-))
The Nazi Party of Germany headed by Adolf Hitler won the debate January 30 1933 and then until Hitler committed suicide April 30 1945. Good riddance. This is the “blue print” the “life cycle” for AGW. Neither Gore, nor Hansen, nor Schmidt, nor Schindell, nor Jones nor Mann will ascend to the Holy Throne held by Hitler. Sig.
I am not surprised by this, since science taught in Australian schools is mixed with BS cultural values
“Warren Mundine: indigenous culture in maths nonsense”
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/policy/warren-mundine-indigenous-culture-in-maths-nonsense/story-fn9hm1pm-1226853056250
There are one and a half significant errors of fact set out in several of the above posts.
The first is that the Abbott Government is not committed to delivering a 5% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2020. It is. And it is allocating several billion dollars of taxpayer funds over the next two and a half years to achieving its objective. However, it would be reasonable to say that this Government, and its representatives, have said various totally conflicting things about climate science and about climate policy and programs. It has also behaved in a conflicting fashion, variously cutting some climate programs and boosting others.
For those interested in the language of science, I understand that scientists from our premier scientific organisation, CSIRO, have been instructed NOT to use the term ‘climate change’ but to use the term ‘climate variation’.
In any case, despite the confident observations noted above, there is no clear way, using just the facts, to work out what the Abbott Government really stands for and what it really intends to do. This may be in part because the Environment Minister is known to be personally extremely concerned about ocean acidification and the Prime Minister is known to be completely indifferent to it.
The half ‘fact’ rests on the outcome of the South Australian election. The election has been held but the outcome is uncertain. It looks as if two independents will hold the balance of power. If there is a conservative outcome in South Australia then conservative governments will rule coast to coast and federally in Australia for the first time ever.
Wall-to-wall blue will certainly reduce the rate of renewables uptake, increase fishing in marine parks, increase recreational shooting in national parks, increase felling of timber from former world heritage areas, increase clearing of native forests, decrease allocation of water to environmental stream flows and increase numbers of cattle in national parks. I imagine that these outcomes would be well-regarded by most WUWT posters.
I note that someone upstring mentioned a fish kill somewhere. For those interested in the pattern of fish population responses to changes in fresh water or salt water chemistry, precipitation and temperatures, there is a voluminous literature. There are some very large changes occurring. Some of these are beneficial, leading to an increase in fish resources. Others are not so good. All the changes are, of course, just the beginning. Picking just a single fish kill is picking just a single fish kill. I have just returned from studying a large fish kill caused by deoxygenation following a prolonged and unusual dry/hot spell in relation to a particular lake.
The ultimate fill factor was that a mass of pelicans drove a mass of fish into warm shallow water. The muddy sediment and rotting plants on the lake bed were roiled up, there was a warm night, and the water became too deoxygenated for the fish.
I can say that the pelicans, cormorants, herons and gulls are enjoying this fish kill, while the humans in the nearby tourist town were not enjoying the stench of mass death at all. There is a lively debate about whether the kill is a health hazard. IMHO, unless you pick up decaying fish and eat them, the answer is probably, ‘No’.
Of course, this incident, in and of intself, contributes very little to our understanding of climate change.
A little OT maybe but as the Formula 1 (F1) race is being held in Melbourne today, I was watching it on TV. A section of the coverage is talking about computer race car simulators (A bit like airplane simulators) and development, collecting data etc etc. I don’t know who the guy is, no name provided on the comentary, but here is most of what he said “…the most important thing is to gather the data so that you can correlate and validate your models…”. It’s clear why this guy is in the F1 race car development industry and not a “climate modeller”.
The “Frankfurt” School was begun by a bunch of Marxists in the 1920s. The official name was the Institute for Social Research.
They devoted themselves to understanding how political and social beliefs get formed, and get entrenched. They studied persuasion, itself.
Why?
To usher in the eventual Communist Revolution, they had to first understand society, then undermine it.
This is what they have done.
“PC” is their success.
This was not some lone-frontier enterprise.
Threatened by Hilter’s distrust of academics (in a way similar to lawyers when conducting voire dire), they relocated the Institute for Social Research to Columbia University.
So, yes, there have been and continue to be Marxists in U.S. academia, and this is no secret.
Soon after, many universities decided they needed to have similar institutes.
Now, Many have institutes to study opinions and voting patterns of the populace, as well as other related things.
Few are copy-cat names, since the original “Institute for Social Research” is known to be that school known as the “Frankfurt School,” which was obviously a heavily Marxist institute. Check Wikipedia to review this – Wikipedia may distort the AGW story, but they simply cannot hide the Marxist roots in academia. too many people know.
Many schools instead have some academic center with a similar name, such as “Institute for Social Science Research.”
Here is the game: the end game – the eventual communist revolution – is needed, and prevailing society stands in the way.
To overturn society, the foundations have to be identified and weakened.
So, they study how opinions are formed, how to persuade people on issues, how to build new oppressed/aggrieved groups, and how people develop their views of reality such as views regarding natural science.
Like a drug short-circuits the human physiology, they have no problem using the apparatus and phenomena of society to short-circuit it.
My grade-school kids come home with this Marxist propaganda about how I should eat, or about the world getting polluted, and so on.
The current crop of high school grads has had this all of their lives. It is propaganda and programming.
I have a difficult time teaching proper science and skepticism to grad students.
These Marxists, intent on ushering in their revolution, inherently know to go for the emotions, not the genuine evidence.
There is an American comedian named Bill Engvall. In 1997 he produced a record of one of his routines: “Here’s your sign.” It started: “Stupid people should have to wear signs that just say, I’m Stupid.”
Look it up. It is very funny.
Rod Lamberts should have one of these signs, with an addition.
Rod, here’s your sign:
I’m stupid.
I just make stuff up.
Climateace….weep on, the noise you and your chums make is music to our ears.
As I said it at the time, the fatal alliance between Labor and Green has rendered both of them un electable for a generation. So any actual harm done to the environment during this period is directly attributable to the elevation of a synthetic crisis; CAGW, to the top of the political agenda by your leaders. They thought the Australian people would fall for the con and hand them power…they were wrong…so every dead fish and felled majestic tree…?
Well, you’ve nobody to blame but yourselves.
climateace: I imagine that these outcomes would be well-regarded by most WUWT posters.
I wouldn’t jump to imaginary conclusions, friend.
Read through the replies at The Conversation. “Deniers” are bullies, ideologues, misinformers, and cranks.
One guy says, “We’ve been ignoring “the deniers” for 50 years ourselves, along with many others including this current crop of hysterics.” Global warming has been preached about since 1964? I thought it was pretty much proven at this site that there was an ice age scare in the 70’s.
Another says, “Let’s not forget that opponents of AGW trot out their own set of “facts” ad nauseam, so why are they apparently winning the battle? Media assistance, ignorance, apathy, distortion and ideology all help directly and indirectly to confuse the debate.” Media assistance?! Where?? Not in the US. Are the media in Australia skeptics? All of that, except the apathy, sounds like what we have with the warmists in the US.
Another guy says, “Of course abandoning the current growth-obsessed economy DOESN’T mean moving back to the caves – very far from it – but it certainly does mean fewer silly toys and indulgences. (He posted this from a computer or some electronic indulgence over the Internet, another indulgence, ha.) I think the key first step is to come to terms with the fact that we are in a situation that is basically a war in which direct violence has not – yet – been applied on any serious scale. But the fight is every bit as serious and brutal.”
Direct violence has not – yet – been applied. Yet? Nice.
Rod Lamberts asks for more opinion and he gets it. From the comments under his call to combat:
Heh. Lamberts must be depressed about some of the comrades.
And then he gets a fact instead of an opinion:
“climateace says:
March 15, 2014 at 9:12 pm
The half ‘fact’ rests on the outcome of the South Australian election. The election has been held but the outcome is uncertain. It looks as if two independents will hold the balance of power. If there is a conservative outcome in South Australia then conservative governments will rule coast to coast and federally in Australia for the first time ever.”
I think you will find the ACT govn’t is Labor and will remain so regardless of the outcome in SA. Abbott sold federal voters some policies, axing the price on carbon for one, and the voters liked what they were sold. Voters in Tasmania were sold policies and they voted in favour of the LNP. You do seem to have a problem with democracy. Look forward to more positive policies once the Senate is changed in July.
I don’t know how Rod Lambert got his credentials in science, but in science neither opinions nor facts nor opinion and facts mean much without a theory. We can accept a tree is a tree without much in the way of opinion or theory. We can talk about trees. But if we mean by “forest” something more than “many trees” we need a theory, a legal theory of the bounds of the forest, an ecological theory of the connectedness of organisms of the forest, a light spectrum theory for defining the forest in a set of satellite image bands. Otherwise, we have only “many trees”, not a “forest”.
How you interpret your facts about many trees won’t give you the forest within the framework of legal, biological or physical theories. The theories are what give the facts their relevance. Wrong theory, wrong everything that follows.
When Vladimir Koppen and Rudolf Geiger developed the Koppen-Geiger climate classification system, they had to have a definition of climate which they determined experimentally as did the later Trewartha scheme. Koppen’s son-in-law was famous for his theory of mobile continents, but he was a climatologist and published a study of paleo-climate used later to support the Mllankovitch theory of multi-millennium climate change as the cause of the ice ages.
His paleoclimatology was better accepted than his theory of moving continents, because he had no theory, only the fact of symmetry across the gaps left by spreading of the Earth’s crust. The geophysicists rejected the facts because they had no theory, except the erroneous age of the Earth computed by Kelvin.
Until at least 1960 climate cycles shorter than the Milankovitch cycles were matters of opinion without much theory and few facts. Goerge Kulka was one of the few who had used data that was potentially capable of revealing short-term climate variations. He studied layers of dust deposited in central Europe as loess. But George Kulka and Stephen Schneider were both wrong in their theories about the imminent onset of a major cold period. Schneider later claimed that his calculations were wrong because the data was not adequate.
In hindsight, we can see that the facts gave the wrong answer because they were interpreted within the framework of theories that were inadequate: Kelvin used Newton’s theories about the rate of cooling of the Earth, Kukla invoked Milankovitch cycles to explain short-term cooling.
Schneider invoked aerosols, claiming they were overwhelming the warming effect of greenhouse gases and indeed. He believed his aerosol data was more adequate than it was. In The Dance of Air and Sea, Arnold H. Taylor claims that Schneider was correct because several medium-size volcanoes had pumped aerosols into the atmosphere.
Arnold Taylor gives us the key to the issue raised by Rod Lambert. Why are the facts not important?
Well as we have seen, the facts have to be interpreted within the context of a theory. And as we see from Arnold Taylor’s statement, facts can always be found to support a theory. Freudian psychology and Marxian economics worked because the theory was capable of surviving whatever the fact situation. Until Mendelian genetics was rediscovered. Darwin had chosen Lamarck’s theory of genome change. Right facts, wrong theory.
Catastrophic global warming as a religion will lose its political force if we have another ten years of pause or even a little cooling. However, the science of AGW will remain with us until the theory (read “models”) points shows that benefits of CO2 in the atmosphere outweigh the costs of AGW or that the feedback in the climate system balance the warming effect, or that the warming itself is not catastrophic.
The facts do not have to change. What has to change is the context within which the facts are interpreted. Possibly Rod Lambert intended the word “opinion” to stand in for “theory”. If so, he was being coy, and coyness is no crime except when you couple that with the statement that the “end justifies the means” and the end was to avoid underlining the fact that catastrophic anthropocentric global warming is a theory, and for some a religion.
I really don’t think that what Tim Flannery has given us can be categorised as facts. An awful lot of dud, crap, just-plain-wrong predictions maybe but really, truly, useful, dispassionate scientific data on which to form a properly considered opinion???? Go on-pull the other leg. He and his mate, Robin Williams of “our” ABC are truly a waste of space.
[charles nelson says:
March 15, 2014 at 9:55 pm
Climateace….weep on, the noise you and your chums make is music to our ears.
As I said it at the time, the fatal alliance between Labor and Green has rendered both of them un electable for a generation. So any actual harm done to the environment during this period is directly attributable to the elevation of a synthetic crisis; CAGW, to the top of the political agenda by your leaders. They thought the Australian people would fall for the con and hand them power…they were wrong…so every dead fish and felled majestic tree…?
Well, you’ve nobody to blame but yourselves.]
I don’t weep. I observe. I am particularly interested in observing biosphere responses to climate ‘variations’ as the CSIRO scientists have been instructed to call ‘climate changes’. I used to think that biosphere responses to AGW would occur several generations down the track and that I would miss out on seeing it begin. I was wrong. The changes are globally evident now across thousands of species.
It does rather concern me that everyone is looking around for catastrophes already. It is far too soon, really. The best food is cooked slowly.
IMHO, those Australians who prefer that no effective action be taken on CO2 emissions have won hands down. Congratulations to people such as yourself, Anthony, Willis, Lord Moncton et al. 400ppm and rising, rising, rising. It is just as well you guys are right, Right?
In terms of the political issues you raise with the Greens and Labor, I think we would be in general agreement.
My view is that the Trotskyites have infiltrated the Greens with a view to using them as a front organisation, and that the Greens will therefore go the way of all extreme left parties in Australian history, that is to say, they will disappear as an effective political force. The Australian electorate, rightly so in my view, is just not interested. I agree with you that Labor is mad to have anything to do with the Greens at all. But that, IMHO, is the least of Labor’s worries. As a Party it seems to lack any drive towards a core or coherent set of values and policies. IMHO, these will not appear by magic and I see very little evidence of Party reform.
This leaves us with…
Australia, by way of the Abbott Government and a melange of conservative state governments, is about to engage in a pure neoliberal policy and program political, social and environmental experiment.
Neoliberalism is based, inter alia, on two assumptions: that the environment is an infinite source and that the environment is an infinite sump.
Good luck with that, I say.
Neoliberalism is also based on the assumption that, in a functioning democracy, there will be more winners than losers in a pure neoliberal economy. This equation is very simple. If there are more winners then the neoliberals will continue to be re-elected. OTOH, if there are more losers than winners then the neoliberals will lose elections.
Will there be more winners than losers?
The three basic neoliberal assumptions will all be tested thoroughly in Australia over the next decade or so.
The ride should be interesting.
PaulH,
Taking the piss means being sarcastic, mocking by exaggerating another’s view.
Wikipedia:
The term sometimes refers to a form of mockery in which the mocker exaggerates the other person’s characteristics; pretending to take on his or her attitudes, etc., in order to make them look funny. Or it may be used to refer to a ruse where a person is led to believe something is true that is not (usually a fairly unbelievable story) for the purpose of ridicule of the subject.
The phrase is in common usage throughout British society, employed by headline writers in broadsheet gazettes[2] and tabloids[3] as well as colloquially. It is also used in English speaking countries such as Australia.[4][5]
In colloquial usage, “taking the piss” is also used to refer to someone or something that makes a claim which is not in line with a recognized agreement e.g. an invoice that is double the quoted price with no explanation for the added charge could be said to “take the piss”, or likewise if something consistently misses a deadline.
[ Patrick says:
March 15, 2014 at 10:28 pm
“climateace says:
March 15, 2014 at 9:12 pm
The half ‘fact’ rests on the outcome of the South Australian election. The election has been held but the outcome is uncertain. It looks as if two independents will hold the balance of power. If there is a conservative outcome in South Australia then conservative governments will rule coast to coast and federally in Australia for the first time ever.”
I think you will find the ACT govn’t is Labor and will remain so regardless of the outcome in SA. Abbott sold federal voters some policies, axing the price on carbon for one, and the voters liked what they were sold. Voters in Tasmania were sold policies and they voted in favour of the LNP. You do seem to have a problem with democracy. Look forward to more positive policies once the Senate is changed in July.]
I am a passionate supporter of democracy – always have been and always will be.
I do think that the quality of our democracy is being eroded in many ways, but that is a whole other discussion.
IMHO, the voters in Australia have spoken decisively at all levels, delivering virtually wall-to-wall blue. I listed the actual and probably environmental consequences above, so will not repeat them.
The reason I did not ‘count’ the ACT Government (popn roughly 300,000) is that it is essentially a jumped-up town council masquerading as a state government. My prediction is that, with roughly a third of its budget depending on land sales, and with land sales about to plummet consequent to massive staff cuts in the public service, and already carrying a large debt, the ACT Government will disappear in a puff of smoke in the next elections. Without being partisan about it, the only reasonable constraint on this prediction is that the conservative opposition in the ACT is close to being the most pathetic opposition in Australian history. I wish they would get themselves some quality candidates. They are utterly incapable of either holding the current bunch to account or of presenting as a credible alternative government.
In my experience ‘taking the piss’ in Australia always means something very like ‘taking the Mickey’ and that any other possible meanings have died out of common usage.
Personal abuse alert, Anthony:
Ursus Augustus says:
March 15, 2014 at 5:31 pm
Chad Wozniak, you are advocating we all become engaged in the ideological war, which is behind the Warmistas. Well, certainly, many of us readers here do, but WUWT is good because it rises above that warfare and provides a factually based site.
I think we all share the cause for scientific integrity here.
This has become very much an Aussie thread. Good to you Diggers!
Tim Flannery had some time at my university (before I was there) on a dig. One of his articles about the death of megafauna put up a good reason why they might have died, using elephant deaths in Africa. It was recommended reading by us students.
The waterholes but a few dried up, and the elephants stayed around rather than moving on.
The ate themselves out. Starved and he compared this to the deaths of megafauna. Decades later he changed his tactic, blaming the Aborigines, yet no skeletal evidence found around a water hole had any weapons in the bodies, that were still whole. His theory has been dismissed now. Drought no doubt caused them to stay around a water hole, and they were dependent on trees to eat, not grass. They were browsers not grazers. And like elephants they had long gestation periods.
Frederick Colbourne
I agree. The ‘proof’ of choosing, marshalling and applying facts is, and will be, in the climate pudding.