Guest Post by Michael Kile,
It was an important moment in the Climategate saga. Yet few remember Jerome Ravetz’s damning critique of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) posted on WUWT in early 2010.
Ravetz is an eminent American philosopher of science and an Associate Fellow at Oxford University’s James Martin Institute for Science and Civilisation. (Personal web page here; Oxford pages here and here.) For much of his career he has been challenging claims of scientific objectivity and developing a concept of “post-normal science” (PNS).
We can understand the root cause of Climategate as a case of scientists constrained to attempt to do normal science in a post-normal situation. But climate change had never been a really ‘normal’ science, because the policy implications were always present and strong, even overwhelming. Indeed, if we look at the definition of ‘post-normal science’, we see how well it fits: facts uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high, and decisions urgent. In needing to treat Planet Earth like a textbook exercise, the climate scientists were forced to break the rules of scientific etiquette and ethics, and to play scientific power-politics in a way that inevitably became corrupt. The combination of non-critical ‘normal science’ with anti-critical ‘evangelical science’ was lethal. (J Ravetz, WUWT, 9 February, 2010)
Some environmentalists had been using Ravetz’s PNS concept to drive a looser – more subjective – approach to decision-making under uncertainty, urging greater use of the so-called “precautionary principle”, a “principle” of pseudoscience, not genuine science.
The late Stephen Schneider (1945-2010), then Stanford University professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies and editor of the journal Climatic Change, was one of them. He was also an IPCC lead author. Schneider advised other lead authors how to deal with uncertainty in a climate context in the IPCC’s Third and Fourth Assessment Reports.
The management of uncertainties is not just an academic issue but an urgent task for climate change policy formulation and action…Various vested interests may inhibit, delay, or distort public debate with the result that “procrastination is as real a policy option as any other, and indeed one that is traditionally favoured in bureaucracies; and inadequate information is the best excuse for delay (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1990)”. (AR4 WG III section 10.1.5: Robust decision-making)
When The Royal Society published a commemorative volume of essays in 2010, Seeing Further – The Story of Science and The Royal Society, it included one by Schneider: “Confidence, Consensus and the Uncertainty Cops: Tackling Risk Management in Climate Change.” At the time, he was struggling (as the IPCC still is) to deal with what he described as the “significant uncertainties” that “bedevil components of the science”, “plague projections of climate change and its consequences”, and challenge the traditional scientific method of directly testing hypotheses (‘normal’ science). His solution was ambitious: to change ‘the culture of science’ by developing a language that would convey the gravity of the situation “properly” to policy makers.
As climate uncertainty was (and is) so intractable — and incomprehensible to the public — Schneider introduced the rhetoric of risk management – “framing a judgement about acceptable and unacceptable risks” – and pseudo-probability. While he claimed he was “uncomfortable” with this “value judgement” approach – he was even “more uncomfortable ignoring the problems altogether because they don’t fit neatly into our paradigm of ‘objective’ falsifiable research based on already known empirical data.”
Schneider proposed a new subjective paradigm of “surprises’ in global climate scenarios, one with “perhaps extreme outcomes or tipping points which lead to unusually rapid changes of state”; while admitting that, “by definition, very little in climate science is more uncertain than the possibility of ‘surprises’.”
This was a pivotal moment. Schneider had smuggled a contrived “language for risk” into the IPCC; one derived from his personal (and the IPCC’s) “value frame” and that was adopted in subsequent reports. They now had, he wrote triumphantly, “licence to pursue risk assessment of uncertain probability but high consequence possibilities in more depth; but how should we go about it?” How, indeed?
Schneider’s 2010 Royal Society essay concluded: “Despite the large uncertainties in many parts of the climate science and policy assessments to date, uncertainty is no longer a responsible justification for delay.” Yet how can one seriously argue the more uncertain a phenomenon, the greater is the risk to humankind?
Needless to say, it took Schneider a long time to “negotiate” agreement with climate scientists on precise “numbers and words” in the Third Assessment Report cycle. “There were some people who still felt they could not apply a quantitative scale to issues that were too speculative or ‘too subjective’ for real scientists to indulge in ‘speculating on probabilities not directly measured’. One critic said: ‘Assigning confidence by group discussion, even if informed by the available evidence, was like doing seat-of-the-pants statistics over a good beer.’”
Over the next few years – and many beers later – “confidence” in the key IPCC findings came to be expressed in a “calibrated language” all its own, one that can lull a credulous reader into believing a show-of-hands consensus- quantified with bogus precision – is superior to mere opinion. From its latest SR:
Each finding [in this Special Report] is grounded in an evaluation of underlying evidence and agreement. A level of confidence is expressed using five qualifiers: very low, low, medium, high and very high, and typeset in italics, e.g., medium confidence. The following terms have been used to indicate the assessed likelihood of an outcome or a result: virtually certain 99–100% probability, very likely 90–100%, likely 66–100%, about as likely as not 33–66%, unlikely 0–33%, very unlikely 0–10%, exceptionally unlikely 0–1%. Assessed likelihood is typeset in italics, e.g., very likely. This is consistent with AR5 and the other AR6 Special Reports.
Additional terms (extremely likely 95–100%, more likely than not >50–100%, more unlikely than likely 0–<50%, extremely unlikely 0–5%) are used when appropriate. This Report also uses the term ‘likely range’ or ‘very likely range’ to indicate that the assessed likelihood of an outcome lies within the 17-83% or 5-95% probability range. (IPCC SR Ocean and Cryosphere, 24 September, 2019, page 4)
Ravetz was quick to post a response to set the record straight.
I would like to defend myself against a charge that has been made by various critics. This is, that I personally and intentionally laid the foundations for the corrupted science of the CRU, by providing the justification for Steve Schneider’s perversion of scientific integrity. First, there is no record of the guilty scientists ever mentioning, or even being aware, of PNS during the crucial earlier years. Also, shoddy and corrupted science in other fields did not wait for me to come along to justify it. My influence is traced back to a single footnote by Steven Schneider, citing an essay by me in a large, expensive book, Sustainable Development of the Biosphere (ed. W.C. Clarke and R.E. Munn), (Cambridge, University Press, 1986). PNS first came into the climate picture with the quite recent essay by Mike Hulme in 2007. That was a stage in his own evolution from modeller to critic, and came long after the worst excesses at CRU had been committed. I should say that I do not dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand, since some of them are correct! But this one really does seem far-fetched. (J Ravetz, WUWT, 12 April 2010, Debate and post-normal science
According to Ravetz, the relationship between scientists and policy-makers has changed; the technocrat ideal of the nineteenth century is dead. We have entered what he calls a “post-normal” age, where science too has become “post-normal”. It no longer speaks “value-free” truth based on impartiality and objectivity. So-called “consensus” advice cannot be considered the objective truth. How do we prevent the self-interested exploitation of uncertainty in such an age?
For Schneider, and presumably the IPCC, it seems to have been by adding “quantitative modifiers”, or phrasing all conclusions in a way to “avoid nearly indifferent statements based on speculative knowledge.”
“We have to offer up scary scenarios,” he said, “make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have…Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” For Ravetz, this was PNS in action.
In February, 2010, Ravetz posted “Climategate: Plausibility and the blogosphere in the post-normal age” on WUWT. He later released other essays, most of which were ignored by alarmists and the MSM.
What I say may be shocking to some [readers]. I argue that the ‘global warming’ campaign can be best understood as yet another of the Wars that have characterised politics in recent years….Now the evil empire of choice is Carbon, intended to be vanquished by an infinitely corruptible system of bureaucratically defined payments for non-existent transactions. (J Ravetz, Oxford Magazine, 2010)
Ravetz kindly agreed to elaborate further on Climategate and its possible implications for science. Several extracts from his 9 February 2010 WUWT critique are followed below by his answers to my questions.
How could the illusions persist for so long until their sudden collapse? The scientists were all reputable, they published in leading peer-reviewed journals, and their case was itself highly plausible and worthy in a general way. Individual criticisms were, for the public and perhaps even for the broader scientific community, kept isolated and hence muffled and lacking in systematic significance. And who could have imagined that at its core so much of the science was unsound? The plausibility of the whole exercise was, as it were, bootstrapped. I myself was alerted to weaknesses in the case by some caveats in Sir David King’s book The Hot Topic; and I had heard of the hockey-stick affair. But even I was carried along by the bootstrapped plausibility, until the [Climategate] scandal broke. (J Ravetz, WUWT, 9 February, 2010)
MK: Is it accurate to say you were sympathetic to the alarmist case on climate change until Climategate?
JR: Yes, I saw climate change as another sort of evidence of humanity’s disruption of the ecosphere; my reaction was, “why not this too?” I was aware that the more lurid predictions of the alarmists of the 1960s (population bomb, resource depletion, etc.) had not been realised; but there is quite enough of alarming developments otherwise.
MK: Could you describe in more detail why you now consider so much of climate science “unsound”?
JR: In my latest essay, Climategate: the unravelling and its consequences, I distinguish between Climate Science, which is fully aware of complexity and uncertainty, and the ‘CAGW’ (Carbon-based anthropogenic global warming) science of the small group that fed directly into the IPCC. That is becoming increasingly exposed as unsound, thanks to the critics on the blogosphere. The ‘Nature trick’ is the most egregious case, but there are others. Some now assert that the temperature records have been systematically distorted in order to produce an apparent rise – the simple method was to progressively delete the stations from cooler places. And now Arctic ice is growing in extent; and it seems that its decrease was more due to patterns of winds than to warming air.
The deeper problem for CAGW science is to show that there has been a sudden significant unprecedented rise in temperatures, over a long enough period to count as ‘climate change’ and not just cyclical variability. Removing the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age was essential for that programme. The very varied, uncertain and scattered field data did not really add up. And the models were exposed in 2000 as giving any prediction you liked, depending on the assumptions and conventions. The propaganda has always displayed anything warmer as evidence for climate change, and anything cooler as a temporary shift in the weather. After a while that loses plausibility.
To have a political effect, the extended peers of science have traditionally needed to operate largely by means of activist pressure-groups using the media to create public alarm. In this case, since the global warmers had captured the moral high ground, criticism has remained scattered and ineffective, except on the blogosphere. The position of Green activists is especially difficult, even tragic; they have been extended peers who were co-opted into the ruling paradigm, which in retrospect can be seen as a decoy or diversion from the real, complex issues of sustainability, as shown by Mike Hulme. Now they must do some very serious re-thinking about their position and their role.” (J Ravetz, WUWT, February, 2010)
MK: Has there been any reaction from Green activists to your assessment of their position on climate change post-Climategate as “especially difficult, even tragic”?
JR: None! But I have not been in touch with Green activists for some time. You may have seen that there was a posting on the Greenpeace website (since taken down) that called for direct action against the enemies of climate change. I have personal memories of people who had committed themselves to a cause, political or religious, and then found it extremely difficult or quite impossible to admit that they had been badly mistaken. So – one might say – just as the very varied and complex cause of militant Socialism was appropriated by Stalin, so has the official Green movement been appropriated by Al Gore. And those who identified with the good cause are then trapped.
MK: Were you surprised by the conclusions of the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Report on Climategate released on 31 March 2010?
JR: Not in the slightest! What were they supposed to do? The ruling orthodoxy (as expressed by Lord Robert May) is still CAGW; so how could an official body cast doubt on it? But many will remember how the talking heads of science and medicine were assuring the public that British beef is safe, even for years after the cat ‘Mad Max’ had come down with Mad Cow disease. Their problem is that the longer they hold onto the party line, the more they lose credibility with the public.
The examples of shoddy science exposed by the Climategate convey a troubling impression. From the record, it appears that in this case, criticism and a sense of probity needed to be injected into the system by the extended peer community from the (mainly) external blogosphere.
The total assurance of the mainstream scientists in their own correctness and in the intellectual and moral defects of their critics, is now in retrospect perceived as arrogance. For their spokespersons to continue to make light of the damage to the scientific case, and to ignore the ethical dimension of Climategate, is to risk public outrage at a perceived unreformed arrogance. (J Ravetz, WUWT, 9 February, 2010)
MK: Do you expect the University of East Anglia’s new Scientific Assessment Panel to conclude, as you have done, that Climategate has exposed troubling examples of “shoddy science”?
JR: I would be astonished. You may know the dictum of the historian Lord Acton: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. My version of that is ‘responsibility corrupts, and responsibility without power corrupts absolutely’. Those who are required to reassure the public that quite obvious bad things never happen, are trapped most tragically.
To the extent that the improved management of uncertainty and ignorance can remedy the situation, some useful tools are at hand. In the Netherlands, scholars and scientists have developed Knowledge Quality Assessment methodologies for characterising uncertainty in ways that convey the richness of the phenomenon while still performing well as robust tools of analysis and communication. Elsewhere, scholars are exploring methods for managing disagreement among scientists, so that such post-normal issues do not need to become so disastrously polarised.
MK: To what extent do you believe your suggested tools for improving management of uncertainty and ignorance could remedy the situation now confronting climate science?
JR: The tools are there, for such a time when the political will is there. We are now seeing a stirring of critical thinking about the ‘science’ of finance (and more generally economics), and important people are reminding their colleagues that uncertainty and ignorance must be respected. It is possible (I can say no more) that if the present crisis over Climategate matures to the point of confrontation, then in the aftermath there could be a more sophisticate, respectful and might I say humble approach by leading scientists to the complex problems of our age.
And what about the issue itself? Are we really experiencing Anthropogenic Carbon-based Global Warming? If the public loses faith in that claim, then the situation of science in our society will be altered for the worse. There is very unlikely to be a crucial experience that either confirms or refutes the claim; the post-normal situation is just too complex. The consensus is likely to depend on how much trust can still be put in science. The whole vast edifice of policy commitments for Carbon reduction, with their many policy prescriptions and quite totalitarian moral exhortations, will be at risk of public rejection. What sort of chaos would then result? The consequences for science in our civilisation would be extraordinary. (J Ravetz, WUWT, 9 February, 2010)
Michael Kile
14 April 2010
REFERENCES
Funtowicz, S O, & Ravetz, J R, 1990, Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
Moss, R.H. and Schneider, S.H., 2000: Uncertainties in the IPCC TAR: Recommendations to lead authors for more consistent assessment and reporting. In: Guidance Papers on the Cross Cutting Issues of the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC [eds. R. Pachauri, T. Taniguchi and K.Tanaka], World Meteorological Organization, Geneva, pp 33-51
Ravetz, J R, 2010a, Climategate: The unravelling and its consequences. Oxford Magazine, Eighth Week, Hilary Term.
Ravetz, J R, 2010b, Climategate: Plausibility and the blogosphere in the post-normal age. WUWT, 9 February 2010, Climategate plausibility and the blogosphere in the post-normal age
Ravetz, J R, 2010c, Willis, epidemics, rough-tumble debate and post-normal science. WUWT, 12 April 2010, Debate and post-normal science
Ravetz, J R, 1986,” Usable Knowledge, Usable Ignorance: Incomplete Science with Policy Implications. In Clark and Munn, (eds.), Sustainable Development of the Biosphere, New York, Cambridge University Press, pp 415-432.
United Nations, 2007, Climate Change 2007. Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report
Thank God – and NASA – for TESS.
There surely must be an exo-planet somewhere out there – in the Goldilocks Zone – with a Goldilocks climate, and no Post-honest science or scientists.
I guess the old philosophers are correct.
Governors know that when communicating with the governed
The appearence of Truth is more important than the Truth itself… and
The Truth is unacceptable if it doesn’t appear truthful… (Balthasar Graciàn?)
People not only don’t know about Climategate. They truly do not want to know.
Yet another swipe at the Precuationary Principle by commentators who don’t know its history. It was a policy initiative driven by German fisheries scientists alarmed at the demise of North Sea fisheries in the early 1980s. At the time, the prevailing ‘scientific’ paradigm for dsposal of toxic wastes in industry was what I call ‘dilute and disperse’. That policy depended upon a whole string of monitoring programmes to track the fate of pollutants in the ocean, and then toxicology labs to keep track of the effects of toxics at doses likely to be encountered. The fisheries scientists concerned (Sperling and Dethlevsen) highlighted the obvious errors in the initial assumptions – of two kinds: 1) stuff was moving through the food chains in unexpected ways, 2) new impacts were being discovered in the toxicology labs, BUT, the assumption was that you could then turn off the discharge or dumping taps and the problem would go away. Not so – because so much had been licensed and accummulated and was moving in unexpected ways that it was way too late. This problem manifested with CFCs (licensed as the ‘least toxic substance known to man’); PCBs – not identified as immunosuppressants nor gender-benders; lead in petrol – brain damaged children; acid-rain and downwind lakes in Sweden; plutonium discharges and excess leukaemias along the Irish Sea coast…..there is a long list. The system of protection was not working, but the law required ‘proof’ of damage – and and scientists well know, normal science does not deal in proof, and in complex environmental science the ‘burden of proof’ placed on those with concerns, made change within the old paradigm almost impossible.
The first thing needed appeared to be to reverse the burden of proof. If an industry wanted to discharge a known toxic, it should prove ‘no harm’ before it gets a license. Also almost impossible. The Precautionary Principle then evolved to deal with this – and it usually misrepresented (especially here on WUWT): firstly, it focusses on the limits of science to predict (that is not ‘unscientific’); secondly it recommends not discharging as precaution, but to analyse best pratical means to contain, recycle or not even use the toxic substance in the industrial process – hence averting the risk. When the scientific community (and it was the science community) developed these principles for legal use, they also developed a strategy of a) researching ‘best practice’ b) analysing industrial sector capital renewal cycles c) setting up a global unit to provide this informaiton to industry and regulators. At all times, the PP had a caveat – ‘at reasonable cost’. The community instigated and staffed a Clean Production Unit in Paris, supported by the UN.
Thus the Precautionary Principle is not ‘pseudoscience’. Of course it was resisted by the old guard, protective of lucrative pollution control contracts and consultancies worldwide for their monitoring and toxicology control systems – what I called at the time Goldberg’s Lament – a radioecologist lamenting the drying up of PhD student funds and research capability when programmes do dump radioactive waste in the oceans were abandoned in favour of containment options (or not going nuclear at all). If there are not enough pollutants, the old-guard were out of a job. And research efforts then focussed upon Clean Technology. I recommend the book edited by Tim Jackson – Clean Production Strategies, from the Stockholm Environment Institute.
I declare an interest here: I gave Jackson, one of the brightest physics PhDs of his time, the task of developing the strategy for the UN. I was asked by the International Maritime Organisation to help redraft the ocean protection legislation. Jackson is now a respected professor of sustainable development and a UK government advisor. The UK no longer discharges plutonium wastes to the Irish Sea; there is no nuclear dumping operation in the North Atlantic; sulphur emissions are heavily controlled and there is no acid rain in Sweden; and there are countless improvements to discharges of all toxics in all regional seas. I believe the ocean is cleaner as a result – and industry actually acknowledges that the changes they have made, saved them money, because they could make those changes within their capital renewal cycles and not via much mor eexpensive retrofitting.
I submit that the PP has brought immense benefits to the ocean environment. However, science missed the plastic micro-beads and the nanoparticle fate of all degraded plastic from landfill and litter. We do not know the full implications for ocean and human health. Precaution would have been advised. And the same applies to acidification and CO2 – not because of the ocean in toto, but the sea-surface microlayer, where so much ocean life passes its larval stages – and where recent studies imply a threshold as low as 450 ppmv for ecosystem wide effects. A recent study of CO2 throughout geological time shows a correlation between levels above that threshold and 37 ocean extinction events (Davis, 2017: The relationship between atmospheric CO2 concentration and global temperature for the past 425 million years. Climate 2017, 5, 76; doi:10.3390/cli5040076 (open access).
This is where the PP clause about reasonable cost comes in: the risk of an ocean extinction even is real, but uncertain in timing and impact; however, the cost of averting the risk is enormous – it would be a huge retrofit, and actually impractical, as the huge cost would have massive ‘opportunity cost’ implications. All of that is a political process – which the PP acknowledges is essential, where values and costings and risk are assessed, and most especially, vested interests are accounted. No part of this process is anti-science nor pseudo-science: it is science with all its limitations (and vested interests) within the public sphere of decision making – where the last thing anyone with any political nous should want, is for scientists to be left alone to make the decisions.
Peter Taylor,
One who claims such seniority should avoid simple mistakes when reciting a personal view of recent history. For example, the toxicity of ingested lead has the reverse causation doubt, that children said to have IQ affected by Pb were beforehand those of lower IQ and more susceptible to swallowing it. Next, the amounts of Plutonium (which isotopes, they are not all the same) from Britain to the sea were so diluted that no real harm was predictable unless one resorted to highly questionable science like LNT. You might recall if acftual harm has been documented, I do not recall any such conclusions.
My comments arise from my past involvement in these matters, not from what people with agendas spread.
Finally, the improvements that you cite took money. The money came mainly from industry. It came around a time and at a rate that industry could afford. It included the non-trivial cost of partial funding of bureaucracies that were mainly out of touch with the science that mattered. Without them, in jockey terms, there would have been less lead in the saddle and a faster pace. The key industry people never, in my experience, had nasty attitudes to the populace, but were efficient, responsible, more often than not simply caring folk with families to consider.
Why do so many commentators these days write with the apocalyptic view, when ordinary scientific conclusions suffice? Geoff S
“Precautionary Principle” is just an attempt to justify drastic and costly action to prevent an invented, “possible” climate “boogeyman” disaster from happening.
The REAL disaster would be to enact any the proposed solutions.
Quote by Chris Folland of UK Meteorological Office: “The data don’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations [for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions] upon the data. We’re basing them upon the climate models.”
Quote by David Frame, climate modeler, Oxford University: “Rather than seeing models as describing literal truth, we ought to see them as convenient fictions which try to provide something useful.”
Quote by Christine Stewart, former Canadian Environment Minister: “No matter if the science is all phoney, there are collateral environmental benefits…. climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
Quote by Timoth Wirth, U.S./UN functionary, former elected Democrat Senator: “We’ve got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
Quote by Richard Benedik, former U.S./UN bureaucrat: “A global climate treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the greenhouse effect.”
Quote by Al Gore, former U.S. vice president, and large CO2 producer: “Humankind has suddenly entered into a brand new relationship with our planet. Unless we quickly and profoundly change the course of our civilization, we face an immediate and grave danger of destroying the worldwide ecological system that sustains life as we know it.”
Quote from the UN’s Own “Agenda 21”: “Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”
Quote by Ottmar Edenhoffer, high level UN-IPCC official: “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy…Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization…One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”
Quote by Naomi Klein, anti-capitalism, pro-hysteria advocate of global warming: “So the need for another economic model is urgent, and if the climate justice movement can show that responding to climate change is the best chance for a more just economic system…”
Quote by Club of Rome: “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention….and thus the “real enemy, then, is humanity itself….believe humanity requires a common motivation, namely a common adversary in order to realize world government. It does not matter if this common enemy is “a real one or….one invented for the purpose.”
Quote by Maurice Strong, a billionaire elitist, primary power behind UN throne, and large CO2 producer: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Quote by Gus Hall, former leader of the Communist Party USA: “Human society cannot basically stop the destruction of the environment under capitalism. Socialism is the only structure that makes it possible.”
Quote by Daphne Muller, green-progressive-liberal writer for Salon: “This moment requires we the people to rethink democracy as a global mechanism for enacting policy for and by the planet.”
Quote by Christiana Figueres, leader of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history.”
Quote by Peter Berle, President of the National Audubon Society: “We reject the idea of private property.”
Quote by Jack Trevors, Editor-in-Chief of Water, Air, & Soil Pollution: “The capitalistic systems of economy follow the one principal rule: the rule of profit making. All else must bow down to this rule…The current USA is an example of a failed capitalistic state in which essential long-term goals such as prevention of climate change and limitation of human population growth are subjugated to the short-term profit motive and the principle of economic growth.”
Quote by Judi Bari, an American environmentalist and labor leader, a feminist, and the principal organizer of Earth First!: “I think if we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world ecologically,”
Quote by Naomi Klein, anti-capitalism, pro-hysteria advocate of global warming: “It is the fight for a new economy, a new energy system, a new democracy, a new relationship to the planet and to each other, for land, water, and food sovereignty, for Indigenous rights, for human rights and dignity for all people. When climate justice wins we win the world that we want.
Quote by David Brower, a founder of the Sierra Club: “The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature’s proper steward and society’s only hope.”
Quote by UN chief Ban Ki-moon: “Now it is the least developed world who are not responsible for this climate change phenomenon that bore the brunt of climate change consequences so it is morally and politically correct that the developed world who made this climate change be responsible by providing financial support and technological support to these people.”
Quote by David Rockefeller, heir to billion dollar fortune: “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis…”
Quote by Helen Caldicott, an Australian physician and a leading member of the Union of Concerned Scientists: “Free Enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process…Capitalism is destroying the earth.”
Quote by Judi Dench, famous UK actress: “The need for a global structure of control in the form of a world environment court is now more urgent than ever before.”
Quote by Naomi Klein, anti-capitalism, pro-hysteria advocate of global warming: “We cannot change the laws of nature. But we can change our economy. Climate change is our best chance to demand and build a better world.”
Quote by Thomas Stocker, IPCC “scientist” and climate modeler: “We need to devise a plan where all sectors of society contribute to the grand goal of de-carbonizing society.”
Quote by Club of Rome: “A keen and anxious awareness is evolving to suggest that fundamental changes will have to take place in the world order and its power structures, in the distribution of wealth and income.”
Quote by Mikhail Gorbachev, communist and former leader of U.S.S.R.: “The emerging ‘environmentalization’ of our civilization and the need for vigorous action in the interest of the entire global community will inevitably have multiple political consequences. Perhaps the most important of them will be a gradual change in the status of the United Nations. Inevitably, it must assume some aspects of a world government.”
Quote by Gordon Brown, former British prime minister: “A New World Order is required to deal with the Climate Change crisis.”
Quote by Club of Rome: “Now is the time to draw up a master plan for sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all resources and a new global economic system. Ten or twenty years form today it will probably be too late.”
Quote by Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, and founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute: “Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance.”
Quote by Dixy Lee Ray, former liberal Democrat governor of State of Washington, U.S.: “The objective, clearly enunciated by the leaders of UNCED, is to bring about a change in the present system of independent nations. The future is to be World Government with central planning by the United Nations. Fear of environmental crises – whether real or not – is expected to lead to – compliance”
Quote by UN’s Commission on Global Governance: “The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable, indeed a sacred principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation.”
Quote by David Shearman, an IPCC Assessor for 3rd and 4th climate change reports: “Government in the future will be based upon . . . a supreme office of the biosphere. The office will comprise specially trained philosopher/ecologists. These guardians will either rule themselves or advise an authoritarian government of policies based on their ecological training and philosophical sensitivities. These guardians will be specially trained for the task.”
Quote by John Holdren, President Obama’s science czar: “A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States…De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation…Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential, if a decent life is to be provided for every human being.”
Quote by Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary General: “A deal must include an equitable global governance structure. All countries must have a voice in how resources are deployed and managed.”
Quote by Robert Muller, former UN Assistant Secretary General: “In my view, after fifty years of service in the United National system, I perceive the utmost urgency and absolute necessity for proper Earth government. There is no shadow of a doubt that the present political and economic systems are no longer appropriate and will lead to the end of life evolution on this planet. We must therefore absolutely and urgently look for new ways.”
Quote by Jacques Chirac, former French President: “For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument [Kyoto Protocol] of global governance,”…”By acting together, by building this unprecedented instrument, the first component of an authentic global governance, we are working for dialogue and peace.”
Quote by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, architect of the new Germanic masterplan, the ‘Great Transformation’: “Either the Earth System would undergo major phase transitions as a result of unchecked human pressure on nature’s capacities and resources or a “Great Transformation” towards global sustainability would be initiated in due course. Neither transitions nor transformations will be manageable without novel forms of global governance and markets…”
Quote by UN’s Commission on Global Governance: “Regionalism must precede globalism. We foresee a seamless system of governance from local communities, individual states, regional unions and up through to the United Nations itself.”
Quote by Emma Brindal, a climate justice campaigner coordinator for Friends of the Earth: “A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources.”
Quote by Michael Oppenheimer, major environmentalist: “The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
Quote by Louis Proyect, Columbia University: “The answer to global warming is in the abolition of private property and production for human need. A socialist world would place an enormous priority on alternative energy sources. This is what ecologically-minded socialists have been exploring for quite some time now.”
Quote by UK’s Keith Farnish, environmental writer, philosopher and activist: “The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization…Unloading essentially means the removal of an existing burden: for instance, removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine.”
Quote by James Lovelock, known as founder of ‘Gaia’ concept: “I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”
Quote by Jeffery Sachs, Columbia University, Director of The Earth Institute: “Obama is already setting a new historic course by reorienting the economy from private consumption to public investments…free-market pundits bemoan the evident intention of Obama and team to ‘tell us what kind of car to drive’. Yet that is exactly what they intend to do…and rightly so. Free-market ideology is an anachronism in an era of climate change.”
Yet another example of an ideologue – incapable of original thought – who assumes that all history begins and ends with the methodologies provided by their favourite brand of totalitarianism!
Who could have possibly known that universally, the the oldest and most common form of “Wisdom” is the cautionary aphorism… doh!
So much for “look before you leap” and “better safe than sorry.”
But we can “thank our lucky stars” the UN is here to invent wisdom… apparently! /wit
However, my Precautionary Approach would be to warn people against using the “PP” based on the more ancient principle of “first do no harm” and to remember that it is only the second law of therapeutics to do good!
CAGW is a deception. If warming results is a catastrophe we would have had it already in Earth history. We know that [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate] for example, “a 3°C change in mean annual temperature corresponds to a shift in isotherms of approximately 300–400 km in latitude (in the temperate zone) or 500 m in elevation. Therefore, species are expected to move upwards in elevation or towards the poles in latitude in response to shifting climate zones”. Now they tell that a 0,5C change is the end of world.
Look at the climate zones also. They are not moving rapidly in a 10-100 year timescale but 10 000 years is another story.
Who will win the Golden PNS Award for 2019? There are many esteemed and unprecedented nominees.
Peter Taylor November 17, 2019 at 3:56 am
Thank you for the history, Peter, interesting. As you say, the Precautionary Principle (PP) is not pseudoscience.
However, it is almost universally misunderstood. From the United Nations Rio de Janeiro Declaration on the Environment (1992), here’s their original formulation:
This is an excellent statement of the PP, as it distinguishes it from such things as carrying umbrellas, denying bank loans, approving the Kyoto Protocol, invading Afghanistan, or using seat belts.
The three key parts of the PP (emphasis mine) are:
1) A threat of serious or irreversible damage.
2) A lack of full scientific certainty (in other words, the existence of partial but not conclusive scientific evidence).
3) The availability of cost-effective measures that we know will prevent the problem.
Knowing that, let’s consider the PP case regarding CO2. The claim is that in fifty years, we’ll be sorry if we don’t stop producing CO2 now. However, we don’t know whether CO2 will cause any damage at all in fifty years, much less whether it will cause serious or irreversible damage. We have very little evidence that CO2 will cause “dangerous” warming other than fanciful forecasts from untested, unverified, unvalidated climate models which have not been subjected to software quality assurance of any kind.
We also have little evidence that a warmer world is a worse world. It might be a better world.
Finally, the proposed remedies are estimated to cost on the order of a trillion dollars a year … hardly cost effective under any analysis. Nor do we have any certainty whether the proposed remedies will prevent the projected problem.
So cutting CO2, and most especially cutting fossil fuel use, fails to qualify for the PP under all three of the criteria.
In closing, let me say … Post-Normal Science did kill itself …
Best to all,
w.
“PP”, the Precautionary Pawn to promote “The Cause”.
Precautionary principle, n., 1. A trick or tactic evoked by a person or agency to justify a preferred course of action, esp. in the absence of evidence or a verifiable law. 2. Climate-craft: a deliberate strategy to exaggerate possible risks of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, dupe the public and advance a global decarbonisation agenda.
“The Devil’s Dictionary of Climate Change – Wicked words to impress your friends and upset your enemies”, George Lexicon, Athena Books, 2018, Amazon/Kindle)
The precautionary principle might well be seen as a plea for a kind of regulatory insurance…. Nonetheless, the principle cannot be fully defended on that basis, simply because risks are on all sides of social situations. Any effort to be universally precautionary will be paralysing, forbidding every imaginable step, including no step at all….A rational system of risk regulation certainly takes precautions. But it does not adopt the Precautionary Principle. (C R Sunstein, Regulation, 2003)