Guest Opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
In Aesop’s story of the boy who cried wolf the consequences included him losing his sheep and his credibility, even if he later told the truth. Today, environmental and climate alarmists who cry wolf don’t lose anything. There is no accountability. In fact, they continue to have credibility, keep their jobs and receive funding as millions of others suffer in a multitude of ways. Failed climate predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) continue as the basis for regulations and policies, that profoundly affect thousands of people’s lives. What is happening confirms H.L. Mencken’s observation,
“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the greatest liars: the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”
Environmentalists, now including the Pope, accuse humans of acting unnaturally by creating a trail of destruction everywhere. However, because they decide what humans do is unnatural, doesn’t make it so. Does the Pope believe that humans and their activities are unnatural? It is as Goethe said, “The unnatural, that too is natural.” Despite that, a major technique of environmental and climate alarmists take natural events and present them as unnatural. The Popes Encyclical includes many examples. Alarmism is amplified by implying, either this has never occurred before, or it is occurring at an unprecedented rate. This works because most people don’t know what is natural and there is an endless supply of natural events.
Some events are better for alarmism than others. Animals are an ideal target because people don’t know the size of animal populations or how much they vary naturally. They also elicit emotionalism that distorts objectivity. Imagine Gore’s arctic ice alarmism without the polar bear. Skeptics provide the other side, but, as with any rejoinder to a false media story, it doesn’t get coverage or is tucked away in an obscure corner of the newspaper. It certainly doesn’t get matching headlines.
A major reason for media distortion is science degrees are rare among journalists, so political bias becomes dominant. Science degrees are also rare among most government bureaucrats, particularly senior bureaucrats, who are invariably graduates of environmental studies programs. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy is a classic example with a 1976 Bachelor of Arts in Social Anthropology and a 1981 joint Master of Science in Environmental Health Engineering and Planning and Policy.
So hundreds of stories appear, but how many of them are true? Aaron Wildavsky wrote about the gap between the media story, public understanding and the reality in Yes, But Is It True?
Working with his students at a risk analysis center, Wildavsky examined all the evidence behind the charges and countercharges in several controversial cases involving environmental health and public safety. Here he lays out these cases in terms an average citizen can understand, weighs the merits of the claims of various parties, and offers reasoned judgments on the government’s response.
The graduate students chose topics and pursued their origin and validity. The issues chosen did not withstand examination, yet they triggered laws and public policy. Rarely, are the damages done by those laws or policies, assessed. Accountability for those involved, especially if they are bureaucrats, are rarer. There are two Canadian examples of alarmism that resulted in laws and policies that did extensive social and economic damage. It is time for accountability, but it won’t happen.
Over 30 years ago Roger Pocklington, Oceanographer at the Bedford Institute in Nova Scotia, asked me about weather conditions in eastern and arctic Canada. He studied water temperatures in a transect from Newfoundland to Bermuda and noted a steady decline. At the time, it fit the concern of global cooling, so Pocklington spoke at several conferences. Temperatures in eastern arctic Canada had declined for over thirty years and resulted in a cooler Labrador Current. Colder denser water was pushing further south.
We determined this would impact the cod fisheries of the Grand Banks, but nobody would listen. Then everything changed. Global temperatures began to rise, but Roger’s water temperatures continued to fall. Now he wasn’t even invited to conferences.
Cod numbers declined, and they blamed humans. Overfishing is a small part of the problem because quotas are set with little knowledge of the natural variation in stock numbers. The best study of variations in fish populations and climate by Klyashtorin and Lyubukshin is virtually unknown outside of Russia.
If you assume populations are relatively constant then a natural decline makes fishing harmful at a certain level.
The Canadian government effectively banned cod fishing in 1992. For comparison imagine the US government banning corn production in Iowa. It is 23 years since the ban and although some very limited fishing occurred Fisheries and Oceans report,
Cod populations remain depleted, and the reasons remain disputed.
They finally acknowledged what Roger and I knew from the start.
When water temperatures in many Atlantic areas cooled in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s that was part of a wider change in the ecosystem. Cod live within a narrow range of temperatures. If their habitual waters get too warm or cold, they can migrate till they find a comfortable zone. But will they find, for example, the right levels of oxygen? And, if broad environmental changes are taking place, what’s happening to their food?
Animals migrate when the food supply changes. Fish have greater options because they move in three dimensions. The cod moved away from the waters around Newfoundland, but where did the cod go? They migrated into warmer international waters, where Europeans continued to fish them. The question was why weren’t Canadian fishermen allowed to fish in international waters? I understand a secret [pact] with Europe kept them from Canadian waters and Canadians from international waters. They also migrated to shallower warmer inshore waters where they were already off limits to Canadian fishermen because of government regulation. In 1996, I stood on the dock at Fortune Harbour in northern Newfoundland with an 84-year-old fisherman. He told me cod were more plentiful and larger than he could recall in the bay, but he was banned from catching even two to feed his family because of regulations from Ottawa. As a result of the ban, many of the historic fishing ports surrounding Newfoundland and Labrador were abandoned. I urge you to watch this documentary of how the people see what happened to them. The great irony of the story is that oil drilling at Hibernia on the Grand Banks saved the Newfoundland economy, but as the songs relate, this only masked the real damage.
On the west coast of Canada, the story was the same but different for the salmon fisheries. Again salmon numbers declined because of changing water temperatures and the government dramatically curtailed fishing. It is difficult to determine the numbers because the government bureaucrats used their estimates of anticipated numbers to determine fishing quotas. They were consistently wrong and grossly under-estimated the numbers, which allowed them to cut quotas dramatically. No investigation or accountability of grossly inaccurate science and policy occurred. People damaged by the policies complained, but were treated like criminals because they worked in the industry or business. They weren’t collateral damage, they were the problem. As a result, bureaucrats began to give meaningless estimates such as this one in 2010,
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) predicts a summer run of between 4.5 to 30 million sockeye salmon to the Fraser. However, the Pre-season run size forecasts for Fraser River sockeye salmon in 2010 predicts, and the run will most likely be around 11.4 million sockeyes, a forecast that is eerily similar to the 2009 forecast.
The range of 4.5 to 30 million is indicative of no understanding and wide enough to justify anything, especially if you are unaccountable. In some years the Canadian fisheries estimates were wrong by up to 70 percent. The estimate was always low to justify draconian actions. There is no question the number of salmon declined as the natural cycle developed. However, government bureaucrats overstated the severity of the decline to justify severe, unnecessary, restrictions.
Research of the oral tradition of Haida people about weather and climate patterns produced stories about changing patterns that presaged drought. This was followed by a decline in salmon populations and created periods they called the time of “full stomach”. This referred to the distended stomach of starvation, not the fullness of adequate food. The tradition also reported the changing weather pattern that marked the end of the drought conditions and return of the salmon. Apparently cyclical drought patterns correlate with changing ocean water temperatures, low river flow, and poor spawning conditions. The oral tradition indicates the natural pattern of salmon populations.
Declining salmon populations led to the designation of most salmon species as endangered species in Canada and the US. Drastic, restrictive fishing legislation seriously affected communities and lives. Now the natural pattern reasserts itself and record numbers of salmon are reported. One report in 2014 suggested the run might be too big for the Fraser river to accommodate.
These are just two examples of restrictive policies based on a failure to understand natural patterns and populations. They are fuelled by the hysteria of environmentalism, inadequate data, inaccurate knowledge of natural processes, bureaucracies stocked with environmental graduates of the 1980s and 90s, and if all else fails, application of the precautionary principle. Any specific example is problematic but not enough to generate anger and response to what is going on. It is as if every shepherd boy is crying wolf across the country, which creates the illusion the problem is real. Add that to the idea that they believe that humans behave in unnatural ways and you have a recipe for government devastation of people, their economies and their ways of life. All this while the bureuacrats and politicians continue to get paid. The boy is no longer tending the sheep, but he is on government allowance and disability for the stress he experienced when the wolf attacked.
While “chicken little” behavior certainly needs to be exposed and condemned for what it is, the need to assess statements of fact on their merits remains. The fact that someone has been proven to have advanced a false data or spurious arguments in the past, cannot be used to dismiss other positions he or she might later support.
If crying “fire” in a crowded theater when there is no indication of such is to be condemned, it is even more reprehensible to make it a crime to ever cry “fire”, and that is precisely where this forum is heading…
In my opinion, this whole discussion is missing the essential problem – that academia has been politicized so thoroughly over the past century or so, that theory and even data is mostly tailored to achieve acceptance by the hierarchy and thus promote the “scientist’s” career.
This is why intelligent, educated people resort to all sorts of “scientifically” unproven remedies to protect and recover their health, while the less intelligent and/or uneducated masses are swayed like the tides by the mass media.
Replacing lock-step adherents to one climactic position with those who adhere to another won’t solve this problem. And this is a problem that, even without the help of mother nature, can definitely destroy humanity post-haste.
The “cry wolf” analogy isn’t quite applicable.
In our case the shepherds’ “communal government employer(s)” are actively encouraging, and paying, the shepherd to continue to cry wolf when there is only a rustling of the leaves and bushes. A large number of the townspeople also think they see wolves in the bushes, and for various reasons, also want to be part of the protection program (… and after all, the shepherd is the expert … who are we to question his interpretation of the way the bushes shake and move).
It is not as simple as ignoring a self-employed contract laborer until he harms himself. It isn’t, as some think, a problem with the “science” of the shepherd. It is a primarily a problem with the politics and the organization of the communal government employer(s) that continue to encourage the shepherds’ actions.
Something along the lines of a “National Science Accountability Act” would probably end most junk science overnight. After this, I bet there aren’t too many Italian Seismologists claiming the risk of earthquakes is low when in reality they actually don’t know:
http://news.sciencemag.org/earth/2015/02/why-italian-earthquake-scientists-were-exonerated
They may have been acquitted but I imagine that a stern lesson was learned. As a graduate student, one of the first things I learned was when to say “I don’t know.” Apparently they teach the exact opposite in climastrology.
It’s a bit like that great sage David Suzuki when asked, after extolling the virtues of accepting Global Warming, was asked a question about the pause, as evidenced by NOOA, NASA, HADcrut etc. He answered (my paraphrase) “wtf are they?”
Governors Wind Energy Coalition, July 11, 2015
‘Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown, U.S. mayors to travel to Vatican for Climate meeting with Pope Francis’
Article has more information on who will be attending this climate meeting July 21.
http://www.governorswindenergycoalition.org/?p=13728
Seafood is good for you.
Fishermen have brought us a wonderful diet in which iodine deficiencies are mostly a memory (iodized salt also helps). Refrigeration, flash freezing, canning, and probably nitrates and nitrites have stopped the waste of the bounty of the sea once it is caught.
Neurotransmitters have precursors synthesized in the human body. “Serotonin, a neurotransmitter found only in the hypothalamus and midbrain, relieves depression, reduces sensitiviey to pain, and induces sleep. Its chemical precursor is tryptophan, which is found in the protein in meat, fowl, and fish.”
Clams are a good source of copper.
http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/minerals/copper
If more people who claim so many horrible effects of trace chemicals used to grow food would just look up the terrible effects of micronutrient, protein, fat, and carbohydrate deficiencies (both childhood and adult), they might be more thankful for the rich and varied diet we have here in the free West. So many deficiencies from food fads and phobias can cause mental side effects and nerve damage. Some of these effects are permanent.
So have that tuna melt, fish and chips, or clam chowder when it sounds good.
I just did today. And don’t forget that while Omega-3 (ratio vs Omega-6) fatty acids are good for you, eat that piece of cheese. Saturated fats are not so bad for you either. Just avoid the trans-fats, which tend to be in highly processed foods anyway. And are decreasing in the food supply as we speak.
This *IS* a bit off-topic. But go ahead and mix up that tuna with some miracle-whip, and a little bit of pickle relish, and diced or sliced tomato, and a bit of lettuce. Or grill it before adding the greens. And add that slice of cheese.
@RWturner
July 13, 2015 at 1:34 pm
“Something along the lines of a “National Science Accountability Act” would probably end most junk science overnight.”
In fact, the opposite position is already entrenched, at least with regard to the potentially most devastating man-made toxin – nuclear waste and fallout. There is no nuclear power generation in the entire world that is privately insured except in a token fashion. This situation exists because all the governments of such countries exempt the nuclear power industry from anything even approaching adequate liability insurance. And apparently the entire world community, as represented by the United Nations, also accepts this uninsured risk, since nuclear fallout and contamination does not respect national boundaries.
In the wake of Fukushima, it was reported that Japan actually has in place the most stringent liability insurance requirements for nuclear power plant operators. And it quickly became clear that even this relatively minor nuclear breakdown overtaxes the compensation funds in place.
I find it remarkable that the boosters of nuclear power in this forum persistently turn a blind eye to this situation, and are never taken to task for it. What is their explanation for the global insurance community’s reluctance to profit by the admirable “safety record” of nuclear power? Surely the insurers should be crying out to insure this risk, and governments should be overjoyed to take this contingency cost off their books?
There’s a huge difference between suffering ailments from environmental threats and nutritional inadequacies humanity has endured for millenia and those that have been introduced in the last few decades, are impossible to detect and identify except with high-tech equipment and procedures in the hands of specialists, and whose long-term effects have yet to be exhaustively determined.
A single high powered CME could conceivably turn our world of six or seven billion people back to “horse and buggy” technology, only without the horse or buggy, but with nuclear plants throughout the world in meltdown, hundreds of millions starving within days or weeks, if not freezing to death even sooner, and dying of disease spread by lack of clean drinking water, should they survive longer.
None of the technological advances of the last hundred years can offset that threat. But we could use those advances to mitigate the effects – IF we openly recognize the dangers of “globalization” (ie. “just in time” production and distribution of the essentials of life) and begin to make reasonable arrangements to offset them.
The great climate debate is a deadly distraction in this situation. By focusing all attention on this apparently slow-moving threat, a false sense of elbow room is created. If a large solar event destroys our electrical grid tomorrow or next week, it won’t much matter whether it’s the ice age or global warming that’s on the horizon. Unprepared as we are, humanity and its technical advances of the last thousand years will be toast.
i belong to a climate debate blog on facebook. i have repeatedly made the challenge that any alarmists must put up the deed to there house and the title to there car to be held in lieu just encase there dire predictions dont prevail . in 5 years or 10 years they must forfeit all in an effort to pay back all the money wasted. guess how many takers i have ? you guessed it . big zero .
Eric M. Sounds like a strange offer although I agree with your position generally. But not getting any takers…could it be because you do not have credibility. What are you offering to pay them if they are right.