By Larry Kummer. From the Fabius Maximus website.
Summary: Why has the vast investment over 30 years produced little action in the campaign for policy action to fight climate change? Listen to climate scientists to learn one reason for this failure. Here is one day on Twitter, typical conversations in the decayed wreckage of a once great but still vital science. It’s a sad story, with no signs of getting better. But it’s not over yet.
“First, science places the burden of proof on the claimant. Second, the proof for a claim must in some sense be commensurate with the character of the claim. Thus, an extraordinary claim requires ‘extraordinary’ (meaning stronger than usual) proof.”
— Marcello Truzzi in Zetetic Scholar, August 1987 (text here).
Example #1 of climate science in action.
“Thirty Years On, How Well Do Global Warming Predictions Stand Up?“
An op-ed in the WSJ by Pat Michaels and Ryan Maue.
“James Hansen issued dire warnings in the summer of 1988. Today earth is only modestly warmer.”
This op-ed attracted a lot of attention from scientists. Such as this tweet.
We all know that Pat Michaels is beyond shame, but you'd think @RyanMaue might still be capable of being embarrassed by this WSJ editorial pic.twitter.com/v1sFG5uDjr
— Kevin Anchukaitis (@thirstygecko) June 23, 2018
An eminent climate scientists replied, as so many have replied to such unprofessional attacks.
Please debate the subject, not demean one of our colleagues. @CatoMichaels I have know Pat for decades and always respect his views, even on those occasions where I disagree. He adds significant robust substance to the climate issue.
— Roger A. Pielke Sr (@RogerAPielkeSr) June 23, 2018
Anchukaitis jumped into the discussion at a later point.
Shorter climate deniers: if you scientists would just be pushovers when we write motivated nonsense in the national press intended to mislead the public, we wouldn’t have to do our best to also prevent reasonable measures to avoid dangerous climate change. Ok 🙄 https://t.co/XLOUgcYGoY
— Kevin Anchukaitis (@thirstygecko) June 26, 2018
Anchukaitis deploys the universal defense of modern climate science against criticism: “deniers!” This is odd. I am a dogmatic supporter of the IPCC and major climate agencies. But after 30 years of massive effort with almost no policy action, I believe a change of tactics is needed. To Anchukaitis, that is “denial.” In a nutshell, that’s why 30 years of massive effort has failed to produce action.
Bio: Kevin Anchukaitis is an associate professor at the University of Arizona (see his University profile page).
A reminder from the past
“In response to a request for supporting data, Philip Jones, a prominent researcher {U of East Anglia} said ‘We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?’”
– Testimony of Stephen McIntyre before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce (the July 2006 hearings which produced the Wegman Report). Jones has not publicly denied it, so far as I see.
Example #2 of climate science in action
Another tweet about that WSJ op-ed.
That seemed an odd claim. It does not agree with the NOAA data, and short-term climate changes are almost impossible to attribute to human action. So I sent a Tweet showing NOAA’s global surface temperature.
NOAA disagrees with you. Trend of 2000 – 2014 was 0.12C/decade, statistically insignificant. The El Nino spike is fading fast, with global surface temp now back to the 2015 level. https://t.co/BHuN62Mj5D pic.twitter.com/uPoc1jDVg1
— Fabius Maximus (Ed.) (@FabiusMaximus01) June 23, 2018
Cowern blocked me – for showing NOAA data that contradicted his tweet. See the offensive graph below from NOAA’s excellent Climate At A Glance website. Note they calculate the 2000-2014 trend as 0.12°C per decade (probably statistically insignificant, and within the instrument network’s margin of error). The graph shows the El Nino spike – and its fall, perhaps returning to the 2000-2014 trendline.
Bio: Nick Cowern is a professor emeritus of atmospheric science at Newcastle University. See LinkedIn.
Another reminder from the past
“The time for debate has ended”
— Marcia McNutt (then editor-in-Chief of Science, now President of the NAS) in “The beyond-two-degree inferno“, editorial in Science, 3 July 2015.
Declaring that the debate is over: it is a favorite tactic of climate advocates (see more about this pitiful article). After thirty years, it had not worked. But they keep trying.
Example #3 of climate science in action
Anthony Purcell was acrimoniously attacking Roger Pielke Sr. about the role of CO2 in climate dynamics. Here are three of his salvos.
There is not much to be said about that tweet. It’s beyond rational rebuttal. Another one is more substantial.
That is an odd tweet. That a CO2 increase was detected in the 1930s does not mean that it had a significant effect on the climate (the IPCC’s reports make no such claim). The melting of glaciers and polar ice sheets in the 1850s was a retreat from their expansion during the Little Ice Age (whose causes are still debated, but it wasn’t CO2). This other tweet is also material, asking an important question.
Pielke Sr. is too modest to give an adequate reply. Hence my two tweets answering Purcell’s question.
2/ See Roger Pielke Sr's bio at CIRES. Lifetime of work in many areas of climate science, holding distinguished posts, many awards.https://t.co/48InG3yKqY
— Fabius Maximus (Ed.) (@FabiusMaximus01) June 24, 2018
In one sentence, Purcell’s reply shows the essence of the climate science policy debate – and why most the US public still ranks climate change as a low priority vs. our other problems.
Now I’m not sure what your background is or what your technical qualifications might be – but if you are nothing more than @RogerAPielkeSr’s lick-spittle You’re not bringing a lot to the conversation
— Anthony Purcell (@Tony_Purc) June 24, 2018
Citing a climate scientist’s publications and professional record – in response to Purcell’s question – gets a schoolyard insult. And, in the fashion of climate sciences, he blocked me.
Andrew Dessler jumped into the discussion with this tweet …
A nice articulation of the “Iron Law of @RogerPielkeJr”: it’s always the climate scientists’ fault. Sounds legit. https://t.co/CxWRfk6f4z
— Andrew Dessler (@AndrewDessler) June 26, 2018
This is odd. First, Pielke’s Iron Law says “While people are often willing to pay some price for achieving environmental objectives, that willingness has its limits.” Explained in his book The Climate Fix (see below). Dessler is not even close. Second, he appears to believe that is a universal defense of climate scientists against any criticism. But he did reply.
My apologies. I thought you were making a useful contribution to discussion of this important subject.
— Fabius Maximus (Ed.) (@FabiusMaximus01) June 27, 2018
Bio: Purcell is a research fellow at the School of Earth Science at Australian National University. Bio here.
Bio: Andrew Dessler is a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A and M (his page at the university website).
The last word on these sad stories
“Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.”
— Karl Popper in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge(1963).
(Update) I could post more and even worse tweets from climate scientists in these threads, but pouring more water on a rock does not make it wetter.
This is the public face of climate science today: tribal, defensive, discussion by invective, dismissive of contrary data. More like a priesthood than a community of scientists. Having corresponded or worked with many climate scientists during the past decade, I found that most are diligent, responsive to inquiries, and open about their work. But a large fraction – including many of the field’s leaders – are not. Their responses to inquiries and responses is the opposite of what the public expects in public policy debates about the fate of the world, especially when proposing solutions requiring vast resources and perhaps restructuring of the world economy.
For thirty years this has been the nature of the climate science advocacy. Naturally, they have little to show for it. Mike Bastasch (reporter for the Daily Caller) gave the last word on this sad story.
Well, it’s hard to learn when you don’t listen
— Mike Bastasch (@MikeBastasch) June 23, 2018
In the past decade I have written 400+ posts about the climate wars, as a stalwart (or dogmatic) supporter of the IPCC and major climate agencies. So I do not agree with this statement by Brandon Shollenberger. But events have forced me to see that his is a rational response to climate scientists’ behavior during the past 30 years.
“My view regarding global warming has always been very simple: the people who claim it is a serious threat act in such a bizarre way, I don’t believe them.” {Shollenberger has written a series of books about the climate wars; the most recent is A Disgrace to Skepticism
.
.Mistakes at the start often put a project on the wrong path. But it is not too late to restart the policy debate.
Ideas! For shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.
For me, it did start all wrong. I was a teenager in the 70’s living in fear of Snowball Earth. Glad that didn’t last long. Then the powers that be came out with a “Greenhouse Theory” that to me, didn’t even make sense. Now if they had called it something closer to reality like A “Screenhouse Theory” or something similar, I might have paid more attention. Their antics since that time make me deny their theory even more. They remind me of diamonds in the rough. Not too bright and extremely dense.
1. Tweets are nearly useless for communicating ideas. For energizing pointless arguing they are invaluable.
2. Those intolerant of the viewpoints of others should be disqualified from all debate. If emotional insulting language invades your point-of-view your not worth listening to. You’re plainly too worked up to be rational. It’s a situation similar to Godwin’s Law.
“Shut up!” the climate scientist theorized.
has a Ring of familiarity…lol
I am not sure the Title is correct; for the campaign has been remarkably successful in planting the CO2 Meme right across the range of scientific, political and general public perceptions. The result being a series of disastrous policy decisions which will have a damaging affect on millions of people across the world.
It is only recently that I have observed the turning of the tide; but it will take many years and a great deal of acrimonious heat before the damage will be rectified.
What separates astronomy from astrology? They both use data and make predictions. They track the stars and astral bodies. But what is the real difference? The difference is falsifiability. Like science, pseudoscience bases ideas on observation, but, unlike science, they advance propositions that are not open to the possibility of disproof. A real scientific theory asserts things that have a danger of being contradicted by as yet undiscovered facts. Indeed, science is entirely based on, and advanced by, the discovery of precisely such uncomfortable facts. Really good science clearly and completely spells out exactly what experiment or fact would disprove the theory.
A pseudoscience, by contrast, is never in danger of this embarrassment. Its propositions are designed to have the patina of science, but be immune to all contradictory evidence, because every imaginable state of affairs can somehow be reconciled with them.
So if current climate science is to be considered “science” at all, what experiment can prove or disprove it? What data collected might not be explained away? What measurement can we take that doesn’t require smoothing and adjustment to fit the theory?
THAT is their real problem. Climate science is no more real than ghosts, aliens, the superego, astrology, or any other pseudoscience.
They are asking us to spend billions of $ on the results of a Ouija board. They want us to invent billions in Ghostbusters because they believe in ghosts. They want us to construct an alien defense base on the moon to fight the lizard people. I might be happy to kick them a few bucks, just to shut their pie holes. But they want it all, all the money, all the power.
Nope.
Feynman refutes Climate Change Methodology in 1 minute:
Agree. It’s a constant shifting of evidence. If it starts to cool, it’ll be … global warming. If it starts to warm, it’ll be global warming. If it stays the same, global warming. Anything that happens is due to global warming.
There are many similarities to the Medieval period’s assigning of weather patterns to weather-making witches.
Geo, we are in heated agreement.
I have been trying to find an epigraphic way of saying what you said. Here is my try:
Science is process of discovering true empirical facts about the world. It’s first axiom must be that: “Science is true, but scientists are wrong.”
It is the seeming contradiction between science and scientists that has powered the enterprise for the past 400 years.
As the Royal Society once said: “Nullius In Verba” Nothing by authority.
When sogenannten“climate scientists” assert that their statements are true, they are, to use an old Polish expression, pissing in the soup.
I would disagree ever so slightly.
Science is simply the process by which we eliminate bad ideas. We don’t discover true facts, we simply cataloguing things which we have, as yet, been unable to disprove.
The distinction is important because 1) science is not a thing, it is a process. 2) the process never ends. If you stop doing the process (“the science is settled”) then you are no longer doing science at all, not even a little bit. By definition the topic is no longer science at all.
Why after decades, do we have the theory of evolution, or the theory of gravity? Are these things not yet proven? Sorta. They represent our best guess as to the true nature of the world, but we dare not call them facts, lest we stop doing science. Contrast that to the statements on climate science – they are more sure about that then we are about evolution for Pete’s sake.
+100
But I would say that science is also the process of constructing ideas so that we can find out if they are good or bad.
Popper entitled his book not ‘refutations’, but ‘conjectures and refutations’.
So science includes the construction as well as the testing of hypotheses.
Er, no. I think you should read Karl Popper.
Science is not a process of discovering true empirical facts. Quite the opposite. It is a process of constructing hypotheses to take what are commonly held to be true empirical facts in order to produce a model that is a shorthand description of the generalised behaviour of the world.
And the only criterion of quality of the hypothesis is that it continues to predict approximately correct outcomes for the model when it is applied to future situations.
e.g. if we take and note down planetary positions relative to the stars, we find that a model based on putting the sun at the centre with the planets, of which earth is one, going round it in more ore less elliptical orbits allows us to make phenomenally accurate predictions about the alignment of the planets in future times. Predictions that come true.
Does this mean that the sun IS at the centre of the universe and that real planets are in fact orbiting it in elliptical orbits?
Nope. It just means the model produces results that match the observations., For all we know we are living in the Matrix and the whole appearance and sensation of living on this planet is nothing more than ‘appearance and sensation’. No absolute truth has been established. Only a mental picture that fits our experience has been constructed.
Second and third rate scientists only claim that science is about ‘discovering the truth’
First rate scientists understand that it is simply about constructing models that work.
Anyone who claims ‘scientific fact’ is just as bigoted as the most rabid climate alarmist.
Science is not about discovering facts. Science is about taking facts and using them to construct models.
That 97% of all lay scientists believe that their models are in fact, facts, does not make them so.
What exists is the sensation and appearance of apples falling. What we as ordinary humans do, is construct a physical world based on that appearance and sensation, in which ‘apples’ commonly ‘fall’.
What science does, is to take the now commonly accepted facts of ‘apples falling’ and construct a ‘theory of gravity’ to ‘explain’ it.
But this is not one, but two steps removed from ‘sensation and appearance’
Science makes models built of abstract notions like ‘gravity’ to explain the commonly understood ‘physical world’
But the ‘physical world’ itself is in fact a model that explains our experience of ‘sensation and appearance’.
‘facts’ are relative to the physical world model.
When a child laughs at an adult playing ‘peekaboo’ it is because it has grasped the absurdity of an object that is there, and then not there. It is a way to indoctrinate the physical world view that objects do not disappear really. In order to ‘save’ the theory that ‘material’ objects have persistence in time, the notion of location beyond immediate experience, has to be introduced. There are places, we learn, where things are, that we cannot see right now.
From then it’s not a huge jump to ‘places where things are, that we cannot see, ever’. Gravity is one of those ‘things’.
Our world is composed of models, all the way down. There may be something real at the bottom. We assume there is and it makes sense to do so, but even THAT is just another ‘model that works’.
Take heed however, that the key criterion is models that work
Non-science, or non-sense, is models that don’t work.
When we commonly misrepresent the case by talking about ‘scientific fact’ we really are talking about ‘models that work’
There is no right, but there is a wrong. What is wrong is models that do not work, even by the standards of the ‘facts’ on which they are based. In a world of pigs and bird, pigs do not fly. And theories about why birds fly that have the side effect of predicting that pigs will too, are patently wrong.
But theories that predict that birds will because they have magical feathers (drop a feather and see the magic work), and and pigs wont, because they lack even body hair, are not necessarily right. But they do work.
Beware of ascribing magical powers to science.
At best we can say that science is not as wrong as other things are. But that doesn’t make it right.
We can say that by and large AGW is wrong, because it makes no successful predictions.
It isn’t even useful metaphysically – i.,e, as a way of looking at things that enables new objects and facts to be created that are useful. It’s not useful. Not by its own standards of utility
i.e. if we compare it to say Christianity, which establishes a world view that includes a place and entities that are beyond direct experience, just like wot science does, and attempts to construct mechanisms to explain perhaps the emotional experience of existence in terms of these noumenous places and entities, which science does not attempt to do….at least Christianity succeeds on its own terms. Devout Christians by and large do end up feeling better about themselves and about the world.
AGW fails on its own terms. As a way of looking at things it denies the facts it purports to be based on, leads to predictions that manifestly are not accurate, and its adherents propose actions that demonstrably do not produce the results that they claim they are intended to.
Whatever the so called ‘climate science’ is about is therefore patently not about climate or about science.
I could construct a theory based on the evidence of what climate science does in fact do, and lead to…but then again. I could be wrong 🙂
Nice clarification. I will quote this.
Well said, sir.
Hey!
Don’t bring ghosts and aliens into this!
You really are going too far; Casper and the Aninaki are going to get really offended. Then you will be sorry. Do you know what an alien probe feels like?
Larry
Good summary–TKS
Bob Hoye
I keep telling you people that you are dealing with a cult. A literal cult, with cultists. You can’t persuade a cultist by presenting them logic or facts. Their brain reacts in a way that they instantly reject the non-conforming information and produces a defense against it, and that’s where the litany of logically fallacious responses come from.
Yup. Actually if this were the seventeenth century, we would call it ‘black magic’. The distortion of peoples minds for profit control power and gain, by the use of psychological techniques of what today we call ‘marketing’
AGW is a marketing campaign. Perhaps the most intensive and sophisticated marketing campaign the world has ever known, religions excepted.
And just as we used men in white lab coats to sell washing powder back in te 60s so today men in universities with pointy little beards are being used to sell windmills, higher taxes, world government, aid to poor countries and a host of other irrelevata.
The policy debate should be over! There is no warming that cannot be attributed to natural variation. There has been no warming for more than 18 years-an impossibility if the AGW theory is correct! The cure won’t work and it is worse than the disease-which doesn’t exist!
The entire scam has been created and maintained by low talent pseudo scientists, tricksters and eco-Socialists without regard for the millions to be hurt by it. Gore, Mann , Hansen, the Hockey team and many others have made careers while causing long lasting damage to the foundations of science!
Many of them should be in jail or required to pay back grant and research money obtained fraudulently.
“My view regarding global warming has always been very simple: the people who claim it is a serious threat act in such a bizarre way, I don’t believe them.”
And where did I learn to mistrust fanatics? Experience. Heuristics.
I got a headache trying to read this
disjointed, poorly formatted,
example of poor writing.
There’s no excuse for making
an article here so hard to read.
When I was a child and didn’t want to hear something I would stick my fingers in my ears and shout “La, la.la….” very loudly. I’ve grown up now and will engage in debate with anyone who can marshal an argument.
I still haven’t seen any evidence that convinces me that extra CO2 is making life on earth unlivable. From everything I HAVE seen, including the greening of Earth, the physical science of CO2 absorption bands and the robustness of the climate system to shocks, I’m inclined to believe that there is no problem at all.
And anyway, we’ll run out of fuels before we even see CO2 levels anything like the ancient past. It’s simply a non-issue. As long as we control NOx, SOx, large particulates and Hg emissions (tech we’ve already achieved), we’ll be quite alright.
I’m in my 40s now. When that fool Hansen stood up and gave his testimony, he and his ilk assured all us children that by now the climate would be unrecognizable, that it’d be too hot for this, that, and the other. Hurricanes, tornadoes and floods making America a wasteland. But sadly for him I have a fantastic memory, and the weather is the same now as it ever was, as is backed up by all the data since the 1980s. They’re dry-heaving in panic over a few tenths of a degree Celsius, barely within the detection limits of their own equipment.
It’s a sad and pathetic sight. And I’m no fool. It’s because they want money and power. Same as it ever was.
JFC! Purcell’s twitter feed explains a lot. He’s a pure ideologue. A foaming at the mouth reactionary posing as a lefty
The guy has no business being anywhere near climate science, he’s completely compromised
Ken Rice at “And Then There’s Physics” (ATTP) also took a stab at defending Hansen et al 1988, here:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2018/06/22/no-hansen-wasnt-wrong/
The defenders of that paper are trying to put lipstick on a pig. The truth is that Hansen and his seven co-authors got almost everything very wrong, from projections to even basic physics. CO2 emissions went up about 1/3 faster than in the fastest of his three scenarios, “Scenario A,” yet CO2 levels went up slower, and temperatures only went up about 1/4 as fast as he projected for that scenario (or at most 1/3, depending on whose temperature index you use).
Like the other defenders of Hansen 1988, Rice pretended that Hansen’s three “scenarios” were defined in terms of what CO2 levels would do, when they were actually emissions scenarios. So I tried posting comments, starting here:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2018/06/22/no-hansen-wasnt-wrong/#comment-125304
He let me post a few, but then started deleting them, beginning with this one:
http://sealevel.info/ATTP_deleted_comment_125320.html
(ATTP has a written “moderation policy,” but it seems to have little to do with how he actually moderates comments.)
That’s the most important reason that WUWT is vastly superior to ATTP (and almost all of the other alarmist blogs): the censorship. Anthony’s goal for WUWT is useful scientific discussion, so he welcomes reasonably-sane dissenting opinions, politely expressed. Most of the alarmists, however, view their mission as proselytizing for their point of view, and suppression of dissent through censorship is usually one of the first arrows they draw from their quivers.
i’ve seen the same behavior when some futures trader has that lotto look and is dead sure everybody else is wrong when the market moves against him
he does the HODL, doubles down per the gambler’s fallacy – then loses his butt and gets angry at everybody.
it’s never wise to take a short position on H sapiens.
This discussion reminds me of a plane flight I had about 10 years ago. I was in the back of the plane discussing biofuels and global warming with the person next to me. I said that CAGW was a farce and not supported by data. A person 8 rows in front of me stood up, turned around and started yelling at me that I was wrong. He appealed to authority (he said he knew what he was talking about because he had a Ph.D. in Physics). I said that I knew what I was saying as I had a Ph.D. in Chemistry. That just got him more upset. Boy it was fun to watch. And I am sure he won converts to his belief systems by his behavior too!
Things haven’t change much, have they.
Bob
In politics when the rebuttal goes directly to character assassination and omits any attempt to address the content of the opposing point of view, you can be 100% sure that the assassin has no explanation for their position. When science does the same it should be a criminal offense.
Here in Australia, the climate change campaign hasn’t failed, it has won on every front. In 20 years we’ve gone from having among the cheapest energy in the world to among the most expensive, and unreliable to boot. We’re not allowed to use normal light bulbs, we have to buy the ones that cost ten times more (that’s not an exaggeration). Our current federal government is supposedly from the “conservative” side of politics, but they plan to introduce more of this. They are now planning to ban the most popular car models in order to meet the Paris targets. They’ve been defending this step by saying that consumers will be better off by paying less for petrol. It’s nice to know that there’s some place in the world where the climate change campaign has failed, but it certainly hasn’t where I sit.
Sorry, Larry, but you missed the bus.
The global warming campaign failed becuse it is not supported by science. It’s all politics.
I’m happy to declare the debate over. The CAGW alarmists have lost. They can ask themselves why as they cry into their blankies.
Classic climate wars. Facts do not matter to the CAGW religion, a subset of globalism. Why rational debate with them is a waste ot time, esp. given biased MSM. The basic generally effective globalist response is the ballot box, as UK, US, and now Italy have discovered.
Mr Purcells comments dont do him or his institution any credit. A great , if sad, example of the point being made.
As a matter of some general interest, when did Al Gore first say that “the debate is over”and “the science is settled”?
The answer is at the time of the publication of his book “Earth in the Balance”( 1992).
He claimed then that the science of global warming will never be disproved.
This was in the face of several polls at the time recording the belief of scientists that then recent global warming was largely not human induced.
Gore claimed that scientists “almost unanimously” supported his claim of dangerous man made global warming.
Well, talking about CO2 increasing, which officially it is, recently has been giving me a few negative thoughts.
First of all, to my knowledge and someone correct me if I an wrong:- the only CO2 measuring laboratory is the one at Mauna Loa. The Earth System Research Laboratory Global Monitoring Division run by NOAA It carries out “In Situ Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Measurements”.
Secondly, this single agency is sitting on top of a live volcano which is further surrounded by a number of other volcanos, one of which has been prominent in the news lately.
I also read that this neighboring volcano, known as Kilauia, has been erupting since the mid 50’s. Although it appears that much of this has not been apparent during this time, because the pauses between obvious activity has been when the mountain builds up its lava or magma chamber.
(That chamber, I read, is estimated to still contain some 100 times of the lava that has been pouring out over the last few weeks.)
Anyway, the point I am making is that volcanos produce gas, even when they are between eruptions, or so I understand, and some of that gas is CO2. I also am aware that to measure the 400 parts per billion, (this being such an infinitesimally small amount to detect, let alone measure), Mauna Loa, (who last erupted in 1984, may be producing CO2 of its own, not to mention its neighbors), and therefore seems a quite unwise place to carry out these difficult measurements.
Never known anyone to cast doubt on NOAA’s facility in any blog or literature, but perhaps we should cast a skeptical eye on it.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
Larry has got the chain of causation all wrong. Its because he starts from the premiss that there is a problem, as diagnosed by IPCC and Climate Science. So he thinks the issue is that climate science has failed to communicate and this failure is due the antics of the activist scientists.
This is completely wrong.
We start with the fact that the activists, including some scientists, failed to convince policy makers. In the US and the UK, which are the two countries where the mania has taken root in academic and some political circles. But equally important, they have failed to convince policy makers or scientists in the developing world, particularly China, India etc.
This failure has been due to the fact that they have no case. But they cannot see this, and so, because of this failure, they have become weirder and weirder in their conduct, as a reaction to their failure to persuade.
Larry seems to think the problem is, they have a decent case, but their conduct has resulted in poor communication and lack of persuasion.
Wrong. They had no case. There is no failure of communication. There has been nothing to communicate. Their idiotic behavior is not the cause of their lack of persuasion, but the result of it.
It is like any other cult, when it fails to persuade it turns in on itself in paranoia and rage and blaming the skeptics.
A big part of their failure has been their refusal to advocate doing the things which their theory demands are essential. Like, to take two examples, closing the auto industry worldwide, and having China go from 10 billion tons a year to 1, in the next five or ten years.
Anyway, this is not a communication problem. Its a problem with the theory. There is no way to persuade rational people of it.