An Inconvenient Split?

Why no mention of James Hansen? He is the poster child of the true believer, shunted aside because his extreme views make all such Paris type agreements out to be nothing but financial frauds. The movement is now in the hands of the pragmatists who are milking the movement for all its worth. It is no wonder there is a split.

Paul, I think there’s a better way to argue your point with AGW-believers. Let’s recap his thesis and then state my refinements.
So much stasis and repetition of themes, claims and counterclaims, Paul writes. “So when something does appear to change it’s worth taking note of. I have a feeling that a split may be developing on the ‘warmist’ side, between what we might call the ‘extremists’ and the ‘moderates’. ”
I’ve noticed a split too. And until now, I thought I was alone in my perceptions.
I’ve been writing up my sceptic thoughts to a Believer audience of science savvy readers in a philosophy group (“Denver philosophy” at meetup.com). And here’s my title – worth quoting because it frames my thesis – “Global warming? How the ‘climate crisis’ ends…with a whimper, not a bang.”
In contrast to Paul’s generalization of two groups, I focus on the loss of the “settled science” consensus front among leading alarmist climate scientists. “The science is settled” has been the advocate’s mantra since the Great Prophet James Hansen spoke to Congress in June of 1988. And in a presentation to Doctor’s for Disaster Preparedness in 2014 (I think), Richard Lindzen noted that ‘science fads’ often appear to run in roughly 30 year intervals – an anniversary falling to us next year for dangerous man-made global warming.
To list a few examples of science fads: the eugenics scare – which emerged from seemingly dangerous falling IQs of subnormal immigrants, discovered from mass Army testing in 1918 (ie, World War One conscripts); chemophobia sparked by dangerous pesticides like DDT by Rachel Carson in 1962; and global overpopulation – or ‘Population Bomb’ from 1968.
Last night, I added the necessity of doing a detailed timeline to better document my thesis. Therefore, instead of two groups like Paul, I wonder if it is three or even four?
Gaia theorist James Lovelock outright REVERSING his opinion, based on the evidence of a lack of dangerous measured global warming. Then there’s a growing recent group of temporizing scientists who keep up the old-time religion by moving the goalposts: people like Mann and Ben Santer, as well as James Hansen (I think).
Finally, there are people like Sir John Houghton, who, when he retired last decade, turned to religion to promote science: he invoked religious ethics to DO something to contain that Devil, man-made Carbon Dioxide. Joining him since then are NCAR’s director Kevin Trenberth in his debate at the University of Colorado at Boulder, April 2014. And now Al Gore chimes in: ” Former Vice President Al Gore told a Catholic priest that tackling man-made global warming is ‘not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual issue’ during a town hall event on CNN Tuesday night.” (http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/08/al_gore_calling_global_warming_a_spiritual_issue.html)
Last but not least – what do we do with the late Stephen Schneider? Instead of religion, he invokes not natural science but social sciences – global warming theory ought to be judged more like education policy or crime policy! In other words, falsification need not apply. Instead, we have to wait three or more decades to find out if it works. (SEE the final chapter in “The Age of Global Warming” by Rupert Darwall. Apparently, Schneider says this in lectures that may be found online.)
At any rate, three or four groups – the point is that Hansen announced a party-line front in 1988. And ever since then, despite his lie then that even human attribution was “science,” we’ve heard that “the science is settled.”
If the science is “settled,” then how come we see this breakdown in consensus justifications? How come leading “scientists” are turning away from natural science? Maybe it wasn’t scientific after all? Or has the failure and falsification become too much to deny?
In either case, regardless of one’s chosen Prophet of Doom, one either rationalizes away the prediction failures or else move on to find “better” oracles – New Prophets of Doom?
My thesis is that Believers in CGWA now face a serious dilemma – and road opening up several forks ahead offer the opportunity for serious people to re-think their “settled science” thinking.