David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman
Galileo Galilei was tried in 1633 for spreading the heretical view that the Earth orbits the sun, convicted by the Roman Catholic Inquisition, and remained under house arrest until his death. Today’s inquisitors seek their quarry’s imprisonment and financial ruin.
As the scientific case for a climate-change catastrophe wanes, proponents of big-ticket climate policies are increasingly focused on punishing dissent from an asserted “consensus” view that the only way to address global warming is to restructure society—how it harnesses and uses energy. That we might muddle through a couple degrees’ of global warming over decades or even centuries, without any major disruption, is the new heresy and must be suppressed.
The Climate Inquisition began with Michael Mann’s 2012 lawsuit against critics of his “hockey stick” research—a holy text to climate alarmists. The suggestion that Prof. Mann’s famous diagram showing rapid recent warming was an artifact of his statistical methods, rather than an accurate representation of historical reality, was too much for the Penn State climatologist and his acolytes to bear.
Among their targets (and our client in his lawsuit) was the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank prominent for its skeptical viewpoint in climate-policy debates. Mr. Mann’s lawsuit seeks to put it, along with National Review magazine, out of business. Four years on, the courts are still pondering the First Amendment values at stake. In the meantime, the lawsuit has had its intended effect, fostering legal uncertainty that chills speech challenging the “consensus” view.
Mr. Mann’s lawsuit divided climate scientists—many of whom recognized that it threatened vital scientific debate—but the climate Inquisition was only getting started. The past year has witnessed even more heavy-handed attempts to enforce alarmist doctrine and stamp out dissent.
Assuming the mantle of Grand Inquisitor is Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.). Last spring he called on the Justice Department to bring charges against those behind a “coordinated strategy” to spread heterodox views on global warming, including the energy industry, trade associations, “conservative policy institutes” and scientists. Mr. Whitehouse, a former prosecutor, identified as a legal basis for charges that the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, the federal statute enacted to take down mafia organizations and drug cartels. […]
Intimidation is the point of these efforts. Individual scientists, think tanks and private businesses are no match for the vast powers that government officials determined to stifle dissent are able to wield. An onslaught of investigations—with the risk of lawsuits, prosecution and punishment—is more than most can afford to bear. As a practical reality, defending First Amendment rights in these circumstances requires the resources to take on the government and win—no matter the cost or how long it takes.
It also requires taking on the Climate Inquisition directly. Spurious government investigations, driven by the desire to suppress a particular viewpoint, constitute illegal retaliation against protected speech and, as such, can be checked by the courts, with money damages potentially available against the federal and state perpetrators. If anyone is going to be intimidated, it should be officials who are willing to abuse their powers to target speech with which they disagree.
That is why we are establishing the Free Speech in Science Project to defend the kind of open inquiry and debate that are central to scientific advancement and understanding. The project will fund legal advice and defense to those who need it, while executing an offense to turn the tables on abusive officials. Scientists, policy organizations and others should not have to fear that they will be the next victims of the Climate Inquisition—that they may face punishment and personal ruin for engaging in research and advocating their views.
Full post at The Wall Street Journal, 23 March 2016
Democrats routinely accuse Republicans of being “anti-science” because they tend to be skeptical about claims made by climate scientists — whether it’s about how much man has contributed to global warming, how much warming has actually taken place, or scary predictions of future environmental catastrophes. There’s a scientific consensus, we’re told, and anyone who doesn’t toe the line is “denier.”
Yet even as deniers get chastised, evidence continues to emerge that pokes holes in some of the basic tenets of climate change. It is certainly possible then, that today’s climate change paradigm — and all the fear and loathing about CO2 emissions — could one day end up looking as quaint as Ptolemy’s theory of the solar system or Galen’s theory of anatomy. It’s possible. And anyone who believes in science has to admit that. –John Merline, Investor’s Business Daily, 22 March 2016
h/t to The GWPF
Note that the Free Speech in Science Project is the antidote to this sort of Mannian nonsense: http://climatesciencedefensefund.org/
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Mother Nature does not do politics. And speaks freely.
The detailed account of Galileo’s interaction with the Pope, the Jesuits and the Catholic Church, in John Gribben’s “Science – a history” is excellent. There is fault on both sides. The pope himself was actually sympathetic to Galileo’s position and reached out to him but was rebuffed rather offensively by a boorish Galileo. The pope was left with no choice but to give the Jesuits what they wanted.
This is about as historically important as was the crusades; maybe even less so, given today’s news items. Shouldn’t we be discussing the scientific contributions of Timor the Lame. His experiments into medicine, such as brain surgery have given rise to uncountable thousands of practicioners of his methods, that have infiltrated the entire free world, including the USA.
G
Back last October, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/26/climate-rationalization-beliefs-and-denialism/#comment-2056577
I suggested an organization, perhaps a Foundation that would
Perhaps this ‘Free Speech in Science Project’ could see a way to encompass this goal as well.
/Mr Lynn
This still an excellent idea.
So, where is reference to Mark Steyn, who is also being sued by the Mann-child? Mark has put up more fight than any of his so-called co-defendants. He isn’t just trying to get it thrown out, he is attacking the mullahs that aim to silence any dissention. Sad that you chose to not include him in your story.
It’s not just climate science. The fact is this anti scientific nonsense has been going across the board and all you have to do to witness that is review the number of ecologists that have signed in from wherever their field of specialty is. Nutrition, health, pathogens name it the infection is wide spread.
I’m afraid so and they seem to be getting more efficient at refining the over reach template every day.
Ysterday [24th March 2016] one TV Channel [spread its network all over the globe] to get my view point on the current heatwave condition in Hyderabad and in the state. I explained him the scenario and also told him earlier the highest in Hyderabad in March is 42.2 oC and now it is less than 41.0 oC only. The reason for the heatwave condition is superposing on the natural seasonal change is associated with Western disturbance. When the heatwave was obstructed by low pressure system in the eastern parts, the heatwave moves to the south. This is the reality but the TV channel telecasted as usual the CD on global warming.
This is the type of media, we have in India.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Consensus.
There are those who know the story
some were complicit in the crime
There are those whose pride
could not survive
any change of tribal mind.
She didn’t do it for glory
she did it because it was time
to smash ancient stained-glass windows
and tear aside culture’s barbed-wire.
When she broke through old tradition
when she cut through culture’s wire
she saved a thousand souls from hopelessness
and placed her life upon the line.
Then she danced with freedom’s partners
she danced around the fire
There deep in darkened forest night
the flames leapt higher and higher
And a thousand souls would gather there
to quietly admire
And they would wonder
what was the spark
that set their hopes on fire.
But power and envy watched from the dark
as she danced the burning coals
And they stood aghast as the flames would part
to never leave a mark.
And from the shadows they came for her
to tie her arms with wire
and bind her to the village stake
where they practiced the Inquisitor’s art.
Surrounded by the thousand souls
who could never make the break
the wire would hold her amidst the fire
and the flames they would not part.
So she danced
She danced amidst the fire
Clasped by her flaming partner
she danced in the burning pyre
all because she had made them see
through the encircling wire
And while she danced in agony
the thousand souls that she had set free
watched…
then turned away…
and walked back behind the wire.
In modern philosophical terms, Galileo was wrong and the church was right.
The church was trying to make the point that while the model of a heliocentric solar system worked, and made the maths much easier, to consider the model was Reality was a grave error, as only God had that privilege.
Galileo was really the first person to adopt what would become an atheistic perspective on Reality, that it was in the end, what the model said it was.
That wheel has turned full circle, and it is indeed the (intellectual) descendants of Galileo who are now claiming that Reality is what the model says it is, and not what it actually is.
The only way in which this resembles the Inquisition, is that in both cases there is no reference to physical; evidence.
What I mean is this. Galileo was wrong to claim his model was Reality, rather than it represented Reality. Climate change alarmists are the same, except their model – unlike Galileo’s – doesn’t even work to predict worth a damn.
The medieval Church didn’t mind science playing with models, even ones that worked and allowed prediction: What they objected to was having these models presented as Reality. Reality, was firmly in the hands of God, and the Church, and no counter-propaganda was allowed.
And bear in mind, that it is indeed the Christian religious world-view, that separated Spirit (soul) from matter and the body, that allowed the perspective of the ‘detached observer’ that gazed out on the material world and was able to thereby intuit things about it and construct models concerning its behaviour. Western Science is the child of Christianity, like it or not.
William of Ockham (Occam) was of course a friar…the Church was in those times the repository of all philosophical and scientific knowledge and very active in developing both.
.
Galileo always gets represented as some kind of hero, as standing up for Reason against Superstition. In reality he seems to have been a self righteous arrogant prick, who like many before and since, confused his, (or someone else’s) ideas, with reality itself.
Today’s example might well be Dawkins.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am no anti-science zealot, but in matters of the philosophy of science, we must make a clear distinction between what really IS, and what appears to be, and what constructions we place on what appears to be.
In the case of the first, we do not know and cannot know what really is, not in the normal sense of ‘knowing’.
In the case of the second, we can, armed with some kind of world-view, assemble a world of objects and events in space and time (phenomena) and call that the ‘perceived world’ (or what we commonly call the physical world) and insofar was we can agree on its constituents, we can call that a sort of reality, without realising that in fact it is already an anthropocentric model of the world, where we select certain features and ignore others, in order to simplify what is going on, and filter it into that which we are concerned with, and that which we are not. My point here is that even the ‘facts’ that appear at this level of experience, are actually the results of a considerable amount of anthropic interpretation. However we can’t escape that, so we must work with what we have, namely the shared assumption that the physical world we construct as a sort of group project from ‘whatever it really is’ is the starting point for our science.
So in the case of the third, we introduce yet another level of abstraction onto the model we build. Not content with having structured experience into events in space time (phenomena) we must needs relate them into ‘chains of events’ connected by ‘causality’ So that what has gone before determines what is yet to come.
In order to map causality onto the phenomenal world, we construct an abstract world full of noumenous (spiritual?) entities, be they Gods, Spirits, Daemons or Natural Laws, whose mediation and direction causes time to unfold the way it does.
And that is where Science comes in, as a class of explanations and models, it introduces two important elements, firstly that there are fixed eternal natural (and completely a-moral and inhuman) laws, and secondly that they operate with a mathematical exactitude. So that not only should a model constructed to posit the existence of a set of laws exactly map onto the past, it should exactly map the future.
The problem with alarmist climate science, is that it does neither. At which point it is no longer science as such, but religion.
If we define religion as stuff which is introduced for no reason and is not self-evident.
“For nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident (literally, known through itself) or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture.”
(The actual form of Occam’s Razor).
Galileo is important, but not for the reasons given. He marks the start of a long path of what in essence is atheism, a denial of (the ultimate authority of) religion, that ends in the likes of Marx and Dawkins, whose atheism is as untenable as the religious perspective it sought to replace.
The reality is we simply do not know and cannot know, and therefore all matters of religion – or indeed atheism – are matters of Faith, not Reason.
The onlyreasonable position is Agnosticism. And acceptance that it might or might not be so, and that therefore when discussing matters rationally, we should not extend into territory that lies beyond what reason itself is competent to assess. Namely the physical world, as it appears to us to be.
And it is here that we can use not Galileo, but Occam, to determine that first principles of science and what it is, that you do not introduce a model without it being either perfectly self evident that it fits the experience, or that it has a good reason (in terms of fore and hind-casting the phenomena accurately) or that it is an act of religious faith handed down by an Authority Beyond the Wit of Man to question 🙂
And that in the end is what AGW is seen to be. It’s not perfectly self evident, its not justified in terms of matching experience, because patently it doesn’t, and so it must belong in the third category. Divine Authority.
And then in a small sense, Galileo becomes the example, of Divine Authority smacking down competing ideas.
My point is however, that whilst in Galileo’s case, they had a reasonable point. In terms of AGW they dont. The situation is exactly reversed. Then the Authority challenged a model that worked because it wasn’t Reality: Today they enforce a model that doesn’t work, because they claim it IS Reality.
Worse, they have made the really stupid mistake of first of all couching it as science, so that it could actually be refuted by the data. Which is why there is so much frenzied activity ‘reinterpreting’ the data so as to ‘save the model’. Any proper political perspective, should, like religion, be couched in irrefutable terms, like say Marxism.
Proper metaphysical propaganda should be self reinforcing BS that has a proper emotional appeal. AGW is not in the end self reinforcing. It contains the seeds of its own destruction, because it claims to provide prediction, rather than explanation.
Leo Smith,
I read every comment you write. I agree with most all of your thoughts, but in every case, you make me think. I very much appreciate that.
I have had a recurring dream for more than 30 years: I wake up; it’s night, and the room is dark. I get up and walk over to the light switch to turn on the bedroom light.
Nothing happens. The light doesn’t come on; the room stays dark. That dream is so repetitive that when dreaming it, I know what’s going to happen even before I turn on the light switch. The room stays dark.
I think I’m looking for knowledge. I don’t care if CO2 causes global warming or not. What I want are answers. I want knowledge. I don’t care about the politics, except when it diverts the search for answers.
Maybe some night, when I turn on the light switch, the lights will come on…
OBITUARY – HILARY PUTNAM
Slightly off topic.
You probably never heard of him, but Hilary Putnam was probably the most important philosopher of science in the last 50 years, and he died on March 13th.
I came across him with that sort of exited thrill you experience when you realise that something you have been struggling to understand, and no one else seems to, is totally understood by someone else, and you need no longer try to tell others where its at,. you can say ‘oh read/listen to/watch the video on you tube of’ Hilary Putnam!
I always think that what is cutting edge stuff in philosophy today, is where the mainstream of thought will be in 200 years time
The critiques of Kant and Schopenhauer, were largely ignored by the mainstream for 200 years because science proceeded happily along a set of reasonable, but false assumptions, perfectly well, until the dawn of the modern age, when quantum physics and the like shook things up a bit.
Popper, Kuhn, Quine and Putnam, have been the peole who attempted to point out to science what it was and what it was not, what it could do, and what it could not do.
Why should we care? Well in the last 20 years many things have very much became ‘in the news’ Creationism and the ‘science of intelligent design’, cannot be tackled without a clear philosophical analysis of why they do not compete on the same ground as science.
Then we have the sort of cultural Marxism, that claims also to be based on some ‘laws of social and economic facts’ That too needs to be shown to be at least not scientific.
And then there is of course AGW, and once again we have a suite of ideas – a world-view – being packaged up as ‘science’ when clearly it isn’t.
Finally, we have quantum physics. If anything disturbs us, in our complacent view that we ‘get’ what the world is, it’s that. The solid lumpy familiar world of objects is not, after all, solid and familiar at all. We have a model that works which is what science is all about, but that model appears to be utterly and completely preposterously different from the familiar world of our experience, that most scientists simply don’t even try to think of it as ‘real’ – just as a ‘model that works’ .
It is in precisely these areas that we need philosophers of science to try and work out what is valid in our thinking and what is illogical or internally inconsistent. Orwellian doublethink.
IN my opinion, Hilary Putnam was the greatest of our age.
If you feel like taking a glimpse into his thinking, the most accessible starting point is this
https://cosmolearning.org/documentaries/bryan-magee-talks-to-hilary-putnam-about-the-philosophy-of-science-864/
Its a series of TV chat show style talks, dumbed down just enough to make it to BBC2…fortunately when it was made, that wasn’t that much.
RIP Hilary.
Leo,
“Creationism and the ‘science of intelligent design’, cannot be tackled without a clear philosophical analysis of why they do not compete on the same ground as science.”
Why, one wonders, does that not say something like;
*Creationism and the ‘science of intelligent design’, cannot be tackled without a clear philosophical analysis of why they do not compete on the same ground as Evolutionism and happenstance design science.*
Just declaring one’s beliefs “science” is kinda silly, it seems to me.
There is no “happenstance design science.” Also, Evolutionary Theory is not axiomatic and therefore not an “ism.”
Some years ago I published a refutation of so-called intelligent design theory. Here’s the title and abstract:
On the assumption of design
Abstract: The assumption of design of the universe is examined from a scientific perspective. The claims of William Dembski and of Michael Behe are unscientific because they are a-theoretic. The argument from order or from utility are shown to be indeterminate, circular, to rest on psychological as opposed to factual certainty, or to be insupportable as regards humans but possibly not bacteria, respectively. The argument from the special intelligibility of the universe specifically to human science does not survive comparison with the capacities of other organisms. Finally, the argument from the unlikelihood of physical constants is vitiated by modern cosmogonic theory and recrudesces the God-of-the-gaps.
“There is no “happenstance design science.” ”
What would you like to call it? You must have noticed that living things are extremity well . . organized . . constructed . .
“Also, Evolutionary Theory is not axiomatic and therefore not an “ism.” ”
I disagree.
“Some years ago I published a refutation of so-called intelligent design theory.”
And, therefore? Couldn’t be wrong?
Siantism marches on ; )
JohnKnight, you were wrong to deny the Biblical view of the fixed Earth, and you wrongly describe the evolutionary process as happenstance. It’s not.
In my article, I show that your claim that organization is evidence of universe design is merely circular. You see order and assert design, and having accepted design then assert order.
Ironically, your argument from organization recapitulates the circular logic of the classically religious argument about scripture. The Bible is true because god wrote it, and proof of god’s existence is right there in the Bible testimony.
Round and round we go.
“In my article, I show that your claim that organization is evidence of universe design is merely circular.”
My claim? . . In your imagination?
“You see order and assert design, and having accepted design then assert order.”
Strange as this might sound, I never did any of that stuff, in reality-land. You imjagi8ned it . . What I said was about living things being extremely well organized/constructed or however you might like to put it. Even the simplest living things are comprised of billions of hyper-organized molecules (not just bubbles filled with goo). You ou8ght to ch3eck it out sometime . . when you’re not imagining things ; )
John, you claim it’s my imagination that you make a circular argument about order = design = order, and follow that up by making a circular argument about order = design = order (“Even the simplest living things are comprised … etc., etc.).
Good job.
A late comment on the Galileo controversy. He was very, very, very far less wrong than the opposition.
To put the circle vs ellipse issue in perspective, take a sheet of paper and construct a circle on it. Then, on another sheet construct an ellipse of the same area, with the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit. Show them to lots of people and note how few can tell the difference.
Seriously, you need to read what I wrote two years ago almost to the day where I’d already called this out. I even began with the same Galileo opener. “Begun” (as in this battle) started THEN. It was about the “Corrective Statements” U.S. District Judge Judy Kessler ordered the tobacco companies to make in the wake of the DOJ’s successful RICO case against the industry. You tell me if it sounds familiar:
Disagreement with Tobacco Control Now Punishable By Law
[excerpts]
No issue is taken with the prescribed statements about primary smoking. That ship has sailed. What’s at stake here are the ordered statements about secondhand smoke…
…They begin with the major tobacco companies having to state that they “deliberately deceived the public about the health effects of secondhand smoke,” followed by a “The truth is…” list of [health] effects…
…Two branches of government acting in concert have just directed that not only will they not hear of disagreement but that one must be forced to speak the government line…
…Despite the stranglehold our modern day Prohibitionists’ have on the flow of information, effectively blacking or drowning out opposing views in the news, claims of effects on health by so-called secondhand smoke remains controversial. The science is not settled. In fact, the “undeniable” has crystal clearly been denied…
…Criticism of [studies that arrive at this different conclusion] doesn’t absolve any who force a confession of sin from a defendant who can provide tangible reason for honestly believing differently…
..Let it also be clear none of this is to defend the tobacco companies that are but a red flag exhibit, but to denounce the elimination of dissent…
…Despising the tobacco industry is no refuge for what the secondhand smoke portion of those “correctives” portend for everyone’s freedom to dissent when one is refused their honest belief, based on multitudes of material, that something remains genuinely open to debate.
(Full post here: http://stopquestionfrisk.blogspot.com/2014/04/disagreement-with-tobacco-control-now.html)