By Andy May
This is the transcript of a talk I gave to the ASME (The American Society of Mechanical Engineers) South Texas Section January 20, 2022
Federal money allows unelected bureaucrats to control scientific research. They dictate the projects, and often the outcomes. They use selective leaks to the press to embarrass anyone who tries to interfere with their control. They trade in fear and relish it. Anyone who disagrees with them is suppressing “science.”
They also use an ignorant and compliant news media, to demonize privately funded scientific research as “corrupted” by “evil” corporations.[1] Government research is “science” and privately funded research is corrupt. Using this narrative, they become the “truth,” and no contrary views are allowed.
President Eisenhower said, quote:
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”
President Eisenhower’s farewell speech, 1961
H. L. Mencken wrote, quote:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
H. L. Mencken, 1918, In Defense of Women
What better way to frighten the public than with a scientist’s prediction?
In Figure 1 we see a cover of freezing weather in Time from January 31, 1977, that discusses the cold winters of the 1970s. Both Time and Newsweek wrote articles about the “coming ice age” in 1975. Contrast this with the April 3, 2006, cover that advises us to be very worried about a hypothesized global warming tipping point.
Government funded research told us we were all going to freeze in a new ice age in 1977, then the world stopped cooling and began to warm and by 2006 the editors of Time decided we are all going to cook due to global warming if we don’t destroy the fossil fuel industry.
I don’t know how much government money was spent to predict a new Ice Age in 1977, but a 2018 Government Accountability Office report claims the U.S. spent over $154 billion on climate change related activities since 1993.[2]
Figure 2 shows two Y2K warnings from 1999. We were all going to die because computers couldn’t tell the difference between 1900 and 2000. This bug would undoubtably (speaking sarcastically) cause computer failures resulting in accidental nuclear bomb detonations, dangerous prisoner releases, and terrorist attacks. But nothing happened. As Ross Perot remarked, he has yet to be hit by a car he saw coming three blocks away. Hospitals were supposedly in danger of overflowing if we didn’t shut the country down due to Covid-19, in the meantime Sweden did nothing, or at least had no lockdowns, and was fine. The list goes on and on.
What has private research done for us? Examples include semiconductors,[3] personal computers,[4] cameras,[5] telephones,[6] automobiles,[7] airplanes,[8] scotch tape,[9] television and movies,[10] Teflon,[11] Velcro,[12] aspirin,[13] and more. Governments, not as many inventions, but examples include atomic bombs,[14] ballistic missiles,[15] AK-47s,[16] and probably COVID-19[17] and the COVID-19 vaccines![18] Private inventions tend to improve our lives, government inventions tend to destroy lives.
But, then the advocates of government-controlled science ask, “What about basic research? What about research that companies will not fund?” This is nonsense, science and technology will advance regardless of government intervention, governments aren’t that important. Witness that both Newton and Leibniz invented Calculus at about the same time and Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell filed for telephone patents on the very same day.[19]
Much government research money is spent on useless or dangerous research. The COVID SARs virus was probably developed partly with U.S. government research dollars. Specific U.S. NIH research grants have gone to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Research dollars have recently funded efforts to addict zebrafish to nicotine, four million dollars was spent to study the connection between drinking alcohol and winding up in the ER.[20] Who would think there was a connection?
It is a myth that science and technology can be conjured up by spending money. It is also a myth that scientific research drives the development of new technology, it is the other way around, scientific breakthroughs are normally the result of technological change. Not the reverse.[21] Thermodynamics was developed because of the steam engine, not the other way around. Einstein’s theory of relativity may not have been developed without the Michelson interferometer and other spectacular inventions in the 19th century.[22] As everyone here should appreciate, the engineering is done first, then science figures out how it happened.
Politicians and bureaucrats control scientific research and research outcomes by selectively funding projects that look for potential disasters, ideally global disasters. Many people love disaster stories, journalists love disaster stories, scientists love to be quoted in newspapers and on television. It’s win-win for everyone but the general public. Princeton physics Professor William Happer once wrote, quote:
“[As] Director of Energy Research of the Department of Energy in the early 1990s I was amazed that the great bulk of federal funds for environmental studies from the DOE, NASA, EPA, and other federal agencies flowed into research programs that reinforced a message of imminent doom: humanity and planet earth devastated by global warming, pestilence, famine, and flood.”[23]
Prof. William Happer, 2003
So, it is not surprising that as government has taken over funding scientific research, scientists have migrated from research that helps people, to researching possible catastrophes, no matter how remote the possibility. Science has devolved from improving human lives to developing plots for disaster movies. And, if humans can be blamed for the catastrophe, it is even better, then the politicians can mandate people change their lives “for the greater good.” The politician’s power then increases because exercising power increases it and people will give up their freedoms in exchange for security, whether the danger is real or not.
When a politician uses the phrase “for the greater good” hide your children and hold onto your wallet, he’s after something and up to no good.
When Al Gore was running for Vice President in 1992, he wrote a book Earth in the Balance in which he said on page 5, quote:
“Professor Revelle explained that higher levels of CO2 would create what he called the greenhouse effect, which would cause the earth to grow warmer. The implications of his words were startling; we were looking at only eight years of information, but if this trend continued, human civilization would be forcing a profound and disruptive change in the entire global climate.”
Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
Revelle was a famous scientist who had taught a class that Gore attended at Harvard. He wrote the following in 1991, a year before Gore’s book came out. It is from a Cosmos paper entitled: “What to do about Greenhouse Warming: Look before you Leap,” written in collaboration with Fred Singer and Chauncey Starr, two other famous scientists.
Quoting the paper:
“We can sum up our conclusions in a simple message: The scientific [basis] for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this [time]. There is little risk in delaying policy responses to this century old problem since there is every expectation that scientific understanding will be substantially improved within the next decade.”
(Singer, Revelle, & Starr, 1991)
Revelle had studied the growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for decades and concluded that it might cause some warming, but he was unsure if it would be a problem. His mention of “within the next decade,” was eerily correct, as the famous pause in warming started in the year 2000, just nine years later. It lasted at least until 2014.
Al Gore, who had little training in science, suffered no such doubts. He was sure that burning fossil fuels was causing carbon dioxide to rise to “dangerous” levels in the atmosphere and was convinced this was a problem for civilization through rising sea levels and extreme weather. He was sure we needed to mitigate CO2 for the greater good. There was no evidence to support these assumptions, but Al Gore didn’t need evidence, he could always rely on climate models, and he did. Revelle had a deep distrust of climate models.
The incompatibility between Revelle’s true views and the way they were presented in Gore’s book was noticed by Gregg Easterbrook, a Newsweek editor, who wrote about it in the July 6, 1992 issue of The New Republic.[24]
Al Gore was humiliated by Easterbrook’s article and follow up articles by George Will and others. Justin Lancaster was Revelle’s graduate student and teaching assistant at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 1981 until Revelle’s sudden death in July 1991. He was also an Al Gore supporter. Lancaster claimed that Revelle was “hoodwinked” by Singer into adding his name to the Cosmos “Look before you Leap” article. He also claimed that Revelle was “intensely embarrassed that his name was associated” with it. Lancaster further claimed that Singer’s actions were “unethical” and specifically designed to undercut Senator Al Gore’s global warming policy position. Lancaster harassed Singer in 1992, accusing him of putting Revelle’s name on the article over his objections and demanding that Singer have it removed. He even demanded that the publisher of a volume that was to include the article remove it.[25]
Professor Singer, the Cosmos publisher, and the publisher of the book, objected to these demands and charges. Then Singer sued Lancaster for libel with the help of the Center for Individual Rights in Washington, D.C. Professor Singer and the Center won the lawsuit and forced Lancaster to issue an apology.
The discovery process during the lawsuit revealed that Lancaster was working closely with Al Gore and his staff. In fact, Al Gore personally called Lancaster after the Easterbrook article appeared and asked him about Revelle’s mental capacity in the months before his death in July of 1991. Friends and family of Revelle recall that he was sharp and active right up to the moment when he passed away from a sudden heart attack. But this did not stop Al Gore and Lancaster from claiming Revelle was suffering from senility or dementia and that was why the account in Gore’s book was so different from what Revelle wrote elsewhere, including in the Cosmos article. Lancaster himself had written in a draft letter to Al Gore stating that Revelle was “mentally sharp to the end” and was “not casual about his integrity.”[26]
During the discovery process, Singer and his lawyers found that Lancaster knew everything in the Cosmos article was true and that Revelle agreed with everything in it. The article even included a lot of material that Revelle had previously presented to a 1990 American Academy for the Advancement of Science meeting.
When Revelle argued against “drastic” action, he meant measures that would cost trillions of dollars and cripple the fossil fuel industry and developing countries. Up until his death, he thought extreme measures were premature. He clearly believed that we should look before we leap.
Al Gore tried to get Ted Koppel to trash Singer on his weekly TV show, Nightline, and it failed spectacularly. He wanted Koppel to investigate the “antienvironmental movement” and in particular “expose the fact” that Singer and other skeptical scientists were receiving financial support from the coal industry and the wacky Lyndon LaRouche organization. Rather than do Al Gore’s bidding Ted Koppel said the following on television on February 24, 1994.
“There is some irony in the fact that Vice President Gore, one of the most scientifically literate men to sit in the White House in this century, [is] resorting to political means to achieve what should ultimately be resolved on a purely scientific basis. The measure of good science is neither the politics of the scientist nor the people with whom the scientist associates. It is the immersion of hypotheses into the acid of truth. That’s the hard way to do it, but it’s the only way that works.”
Ted Koppel, Nightline, February 24, 1994
Calling Al Gore “scientifically literate” is debatable, but Koppel has the rest of it right. He has integrity that is lacking in journalism today, further he understands the scientific process. The attempt to use Koppel to tar Singer, brought a huge amount of well-deserved criticism down on Gore.
Given this, it is not surprising that Lancaster agreed to issue an apology only two months later, on April 29, 1994. Lancaster’s retraction was specific:
“I retract as being unwarranted any and all statements, oral or written, I have made which state or imply that Professor Revelle was not a true and voluntary coauthor of the Cosmos article, or which in any other way impugn or malign the conduct or motives of Professor Singer with regard to the Cosmos article (including but not limited to its drafting, editing, publication, republication, and circulation). I agree not to make any such statements in future. … I apologize to Professor Singer”
Justin Lancaster, court ordered apology, April 29, 1994
So, in his court affidavit Lancaster admitted he lied about Fred Singer. Then afterward, Lancaster withdrew his court-ordered retraction and reiterated the same charges. He admits he lied under oath in a courtroom and in writing, then tells us he didn’t lie. He admits that Professor Revelle was a true coauthor of the paper, then he states “Revelle did not write it” and “Revelle cannot be an author.”[27] What some people are willing do to their reputations, in the name of an imaginary climate change catastrophe is hard to believe. He retracted his retraction despite documentary evidence in Revelle’s own handwriting, and numerous testimonials from others that Revelle did contribute to the article. A Climate Change catastrophe? Let’s look further.
Figure 3 contains the Nobel Prize committee’s announcement of Yale Professor William Nordhaus’s prize, received in 2018. He was given the prize for his decades of research on climate change economics and for developing the DICE economic model of potential climate change economic damages.
In 1990 Nordhaus wrote, Quote:
“…those who argue for strong measures to slow greenhouse warming have reached their conclusion without any discernible analysis of the cost and benefits…”
(Nordhaus, 1990)
Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize 28 years after writing this. Nordhaus also called Al Gore’s 1997 Kyoto Protocol a:
“… conceptual disaster; it has no coherence politically or economically or environmentally.”[28]
Yale conference minutes
Kyoto had little to do with climate change, it was mainly an enormous transfer of money from wealthy countries to poor countries.
Figure 4 summarizes the result of Nordhaus’s analysis, using graphs from his 2018 Nobel Prize lecture.[29] The slide highlights two economic scenarios, the first is the IPCC recommended path to an average 21st century warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, which reaches two degrees of warming from 2060 to 2080, but then falls. This hypothetical warming scenario is shown in dirty yellow in the left graph. The Nordhaus DICE economic model results of this scenario are shown on the right side of the right graph. The red bar shows the present cost of abatement, or the cost of reducing greenhouse emissions enough to limit the warming to 1.5 degrees. As you can see, we pay over 50 trillion dollars today, to achieve a potential savings of less than five trillion dollars in the future. If everything works out the way the IPCC says it will, it is not a very good deal.
The second highlighted scenario is the economically “optimal” DICE model. On the left graph, it is the labeled orange line dotted with triangles. It reaches four degrees of warming before leveling out. It is the scenario with the lowest cost to society. The increase in temperature is higher than the IPCC recommends we plan for, and considerably higher than observations suggest we will reach. Four degrees of warming is certainly not physically dangerous to humans, animals, or plants. Temperatures are warming more in the high latitudes, at night, and in the winter. The changes during the daytime, in the tropics, and in the summer are quite small. Life thrives in areas with very high temperatures, so our economy is the main concern, and Nordhaus is saying four degrees of warming is optimal from an economic perspective. As we can see in the right graph, the projected benefits of this optimal scenario (in green) are much higher than the costs (shown in red).
The right graph plots the analysis of all the scenarios plotted in the left graph, except for the “optimal (alt dam)” scenario with uses a different future damage scenario. The “base” scenario is the IPCC RCP8.5 emissions scenario with essentially no attempt at mitigation.
Nordhaus arrives at his conclusions by analyzing the “social cost of carbon” dioxide emissions. If a carbon tax is applied to fossil fuels, then the cost of the fuels goes up causing damage to the economy. Fossil fuels are used to make or distribute nearly everything we use in our daily lives; thus, as a result, implementing the tax increases causes the cost of everything to go up, which reduces consumption and lowers our standard of living. But, if the IPCC’s worst-case scenario is true, and their analysis of the cost of warming is accurate, there will be benefits to raising the cost of fossil fuels because we will use less of them, emit less CO2, and avoid costs due to global warming. The right-hand plot compares the IPCC calculated damages to climate change costs for various CO2 mitigation taxes designed to limit warming for various scenarios.
The IPCC would like us to limit warming to 1.5°C over the pre-industrial era, roughly pre-1900, or the end of the Little Ice Age, when CO2 was about 280 to 290 ppm. But as Nordhaus’s analysis shows this would be an economic disaster and cost over $50 trillion out of an $88T world economy. It would likely impoverish nearly everyone. Even limiting us to less than two degrees of warming in the next 100 years, would lead to an economic catastrophe. Compare this with the IPCC estimate of a trivial 0.2–2% reduction in world GDP in 60 years if we do nothing.
Nordhaus used the IPCC RCP 8.5 emissions scenario for his calculations, this scenario has been shown to be an improbable worst-case scenario and has been discredited by numerous researchers. The other more moderate IPCC scenarios look much better economically and from a supposedly dangerous climate perspective.[30]
Bjørn Lomborg also looked at the potential costs of global warming versus the cost of radically reducing CO2 emissions in a 2020 paper in Technological Forecasting & Social Change.[31] In a detailed analysis of economic projections by Nordhaus, the IPCC, and others, Lomborg also finds an imperceptible change in global GDP today due to climate change. He observes a slight change of -0.28% in GDP at 1.5°C of warming, and a 2.9% reduction in GDP in 2100 with 4°C of warming if we do nothing about climate change.
Lomborg points out that the IPCC projects an increase in human welfare of 450% between now and the end of the 21st century. Projected climate damages, if we do nothing, would reduce this gain in welfare to 434%. Thus, climate change is projected to reduce the gain in global wealth by 4% in 2100.
Lomborg goes on to point out that, while the cost of doing nothing is small, the costs of proposed climate policies are very large. The Paris agreement, if fully implemented, will cost over $800 billion per year in 2030 and will reduce emissions by just 1% of what is needed to limit the average global temperature rise to 1.5°C. Each dollar spent on Paris will result in only 11¢ of benefits. Again, not a very good deal.
The public and the news media, who should be asking probing questions, have become convinced that they cannot understand science. They have elevated science to a form of magic, only understood by witches and warlocks. They are reduced to asking scientists to spoon feed them meaningless sound bites. With a little work, most lay people can understand scientific papers and they should try. Relying on politicians, scientists, and the media to tell us what is happening is not acceptable. Scientists should also write more that can be understood by lay people, as John Tyndall, Svante Arrhenius, and many other early scientists did. Not little 600–800-word op-eds, but real scientific papers, just written for the common man. The news media are awful at writing about science because they often have no interest in what is true, they just want attention and startling predictions. Their goal is attention, not education. As a result, we must figure it out for ourselves. Toward that end remember these words from the great physicist Richard Feynman:
Quote:
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Prof. Richard Feynman
Science is a method of uncovering the truth. It is a methodology, honed over millennia, that can be used to destroy what the majority thinks is true, but isn’t. When a scientist stops challenging the consensus view, he is no longer a scientist.
Finally, we will end with one last story. Steven Koonin reports in his book Unsettled, that “Senator [Charles] Schumer (together with Senators Carper, Reed, Van Hollen, Whitehouse, Markey, Schatz, Smith, Blumenthal, Shaheen, Booker, Stabenow, Klobuchar, Hassan, Merkley, and Feinstein) introduced Senate bill S.729” , which says in part, quote:
“. . . to prohibit the use of funds to Federal agencies to establish a panel, task force, advisory committee, or other effort to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change…”
Senate Bill S.729
Yes, these Senators were trying to legislate against challenging an unproven scientific hypothesis, basically a scientific opinion, using government research money. It doesn’t get much worse than that. Science is debate, if all sides are not examined and argued, it isn’t science. Thankfully, their effort failed, the last thing we need is for scientific truth to be determined by the U.S. Senate!
“When you mix politics with science, all you get is politics.”[32]
Anthony Sadar, Washington Times,
Politics is about forging a consensus opinion through persuasion and intimidation; science is about challenging that consensus. Debates are about education, let’s hear all sides.
Download the footnotes and the bibliography here.
This talk is mostly drawn from my latest book, Politics & Climate Change: A History
Politics and Climate Change: A History, by Andy May ↑
(Government Accounting Office, 2018) ↑
William Shockley, Bell Labs ↑
John Blanknbaker, Kenbak Corp. ↑
Joseph Nicephore Niepce, French inventor ↑
Either Alexander Bell or Antonio Meucci ↑
Karl Benz ↑
Wright Brothers ↑
Richard Gurley Drew, 3M ↑
Charles Francis Jenkins, Charles Jenkins Laboratories ↑
Roy Plunkett, DuPont ↑
George de Mestral, Swiss engineer ↑
Felix Hoffman, Bayer ↑
Julius Oppenheimer, Manhatten project ↑
Walter Dornberger and Wernher von Braun ↑
Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov, Soviet and Russian army general ↑
Shi, Wuhan Institute of virology, see Viral, by Aline Chan and Matt Ridley ↑
Various manufacturers under contract to the U.S. Government. ↑
(Ridley, 2015) ↑
(Schow, 2019) ↑
(Ridley, 2015) ↑
(Gallucci, 2018) ↑
(Happer, 2003) ↑
(Easterbrook, 1992) ↑
(Geyer, 1993) ↑
(Singer, 2003), Chapter 11 in Politicizing Science by Michael Gough ↑
(Lancaster, 2006), Lancaster “fully rescind and repudiate my 1994 retraction” ↑
(Yale University, n.d.) ↑
(The Nobel Prize, 2018) ↑
Wang and colleagues (Wang, Feng, Tang, Bentley, & Höök, 2017), (Ritchie & Dowlatabadi, 2017) and (Burgess, Ritchie, Shapland, & Pielke Jr., 2020) ↑
(Lomborg, 2020) ↑
(Sadar, 2022) ↑
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“He clearly believed that we should look before we leap.”
If I recall correctly that is the original meaning of the Precautionary Principle before the Rio Conference turned it on its head.
Andy May, thank you for this article. You spoke to the South Texas section of the ASME. I have been a member of the national ASME since my student days in the late 1970’s. In my view, ASME is well positioned historically and technically to help the public understand why the climate crisis claims should be challenged. Yet today they are knee-deep into supporting the fashionable climate narratives. Why? The concept of heat engines, with the supporting thermodynamics and properties of water and air, should equip ASME leadership to explain openly that the emphasis on the “greenhouse effect” is incomplete and therefore highly misleading. Sure, the emission and absorption of infrared energy by the atmosphere produces a static warming effect as the surface looks toward space. But the atmosphere functions far more powerfully as the working fluid of its own heat engine operation, driving circulation to high altitudes where heat energy is more easily emitted to space from the atmosphere itself as longwave radiation. It is highly self-regulating. Now retired, I still pay my annual dues if for no other reason than to write rebuttals to the ASME social media posts about climate change as a member in good standing.
David,
I strongly agree with you that the engineers with a full understanding of the thermodynamics and properties of water and air are best suited to presenting and explaining the to the less educated public as well as general academics of the reality of the water cycle. But in reality it’s likely that few of even mechanical engineers fully understand everything involved. You have to be completely dedicated to dig really deep and takes a lot of pondering as well as a rehash of the entire concept to build on what you think you already know. But it’s absolutely fascinating!!! It takes a “Chess” mind.
See my answer to Rick C below about the ASME meeting itself.
Great article. Revel passed away a hero of science and truth. Lancaster will go to his grave carrying the weight of deceit, dishonesty and malice on his shoulders. Gore will be remembered as a warning about lost integrity and what happens when you turn your back on your responsibility to others.
Andy: Good presentation (in spite of the Time mag cover flap). I am curious about how it was received by the ASME section members. As an ME and retired former practitioner, I’m guessing that they would not have had you speak if they were not mostly skeptics already.
Sadly, ASME nationally has been infected with wokeism and jumped onto the Climate Change
band wagongravy train.It was an interesting meeting. The South Texas (Houston) members were enthusiastic, but when the announcement came out the New York Headquarters wanted to make it a pro/con meeting and have someone talk after me with the opposite view. I said fine and so did the chapter officers, so we ask them to find somebody, but nobody volunteered. Several New York folks attended the meeting and made an announcement that the views I expressed were my views and not the ASME views, which was obvious to begin with. But kudos to them, they let me speak.
Interesting! Thanks for describing this aspect of the meeting. It is encouraging to hear that the section members were open to what you had to say. No surprise about the HQ folks.
Andy, exactly what are ASME’s views? Do they deny facts? Do they accept UN IPCC CliSciFi modeling? Do they deny politics and funding affect scientific findings?
Anyway, it is a big stretch for partisans to assert Big Oil money affects scientists, whereas Big Government money doesn’t affect scientists. Anybody that assumes government is a neutral observer deserves what they get. Sadly, we are all affected by politics dictating science.
The headquarters in New York seems to follow the climate change alarmist party line, but the rank and file are as divided as every other group. Remember the ASME is a huge organization with hundreds of sections around the world.
So, Andy, the leadership is out of touch with the rank and file? Has the leadership ignored the inputs of a plurality of its membership?
The government needs to fund basic science. Things like a blood test for cancer, how the body and metals react in space, how to the strengthen the immune system, super conductivity, big broad science.
The government needs to be absolute agnostic about its findings. It should report its findings and let the private sector work out applications that improve our lives.
Andy,
While quoting Ike, don’t forget his third warning, which “ain’t fer down da road” (e.g., Fauchi et al):
“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” – President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (1961)
We were warned
https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=90&page=transcript
President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (1961)
Extract
“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
I am rather confused about the reference to Y2K. What does that have to do with government doing anything?
“But nothing happened” was due to the tremendous amount of work programmers put in updating old code that WAS susceptible to the problem. Many of those systems being used by utilities and banks. The panic and hype was certainly way overblown (as is always the case) but it was a real problem.
I suggest that “one of these things is not like the others”.
TonyG, As one of those who lived through that time, there were a huge number of government regulations generated because of the supposed Y2K dangers. The government funded hundreds, maybe thousands of research projects looking for potential problems. Very little of it helped anyone. It wasn’t that work didn’t need to be done, it was the government overreaction that was the problem.
I lived through that time as well.
It was not clear to me that you were talking about government programs with regard to Y2K, and frankly I don’t remember any of significance. I would guess that your work put you closer to them which is why it seemed so significant – for the rest of us, the primary overreaction wasn’t the government, it was the usual suspects (mainly media followed by those who take what the media says even farther) who love to panic over everything. The panic was there, certainly, and the overreaction, just not so much from the government – at least to us lay people.
If you’re saying that those government programs fed the media hype that I witnessed, I see that as quite possible. In which case I would suggest that perhaps that section could use a little revision to make that more clear.
(BTW I see you were downvoted. Wasn’t me: I don’t engage in that.)
Actually the original government “scientists” were the educated clergy of yore who provided the science of the day of the the king’s right to rule by divine providence. Like todays “scientists” they got to share in the plunder of the peasants as long as they supported the government required conclusion.
Ever since Senator Proxmire issued his Golden Fleece awards, there has been a stigma associated with basic research because it is not evident to the average citizen, or sub-average Congressman, that basic research can be useful to society.
Proxmire’s goals were well-intended. That is, he wanted to reduce wasteful government spending. However, it is well recognized that “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” The unintended consequence is that Congress is now reluctant to authorize spending on projects that don’t have an immediate and obvious public benefit. Unfortunately, the benefit is now usually framed in the context of some emergency or impending catastrophe that even the dullest can appreciate. The problem is that the claims are often invalid, but they serve the purpose of giving the sponsor(s) of the bill cover if anyone questions the practical use of the basic research.
However, even major corporations are scrutinized by upper-management, board members, stock holders, and the general public. Thus, they are reluctant to support basic research that isn’t related directly to their quarterly profit, and therefore, tend to focus on applied research that can be defended easily.
In my opinion, the federal government can probably play an important role in basic research, albeit it is best to leave the specific decision making to organizations like the National Science Foundation, with the stipulation that basic research be given equal footing with applied research for current problems like pandemics, or uncontroversial technology needs. ‘Research’ into areas where there is an obvious desired political outcome, such as gun control, should be strongly discouraged as inappropriate applied research. The typical Congressman with a background in law, or simply a dedicated career politician, is usually not qualified to properly appraise the importance of science research. It raises the question whether they are responding to requests of lobbyists.
There is little question that Eisenhower’s prescient admonition about the corrupting influence of the Military-Industrial Complex has been ignored and needs to be corrected.
https://www.americanexperiment.org/president-eisenhowers-farewell-address-warned-about-science-as-an-appeal-to-authority/
The “talk” isn’t ANYTHING like a scientific review of the research, a thoroughly vetted into the real workings of scientific research, but mere fear mongering, bordering on paranoid ravings of a nonscientist who has never received any federal money for any sort of research.
Therefore it’s not useful at all. Merely a parade of opinions wrapped up as science. In fact I would like to borrow and bastardize a phrase from Stephen Colbert here and call this entire opinion “Scienceyness.”
EXACTLY the kind of drivel lapped up eagerly by fellows in denial and psychosis … Those who gather here because there’s no other place for such ignorance and lack of reality (thus, sanity) to be celebrated like birthdays of Charles Manson and Frederick Seitz, the celebrated liar (or at the very least mentally disabled due to age-related cognitive deterioration) scientist hired by the tobacco industry to falsely cast doubt on the dangers of cigarette smoke…
A little background on Frederick Seitz:
He “was a central figure amongst skeptics of global warming.[6][28] He was the highest-ranking scientist among a band of doubters who, beginning in the early 1990s, resolutely disputed suggestions that global warming was serious threat.[29] Seitz argued that the science behind global warming was inconclusive and “certainly didn’t warrant imposing mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions”.[29] In 2001 Seitz and Jastrow questioned whether global warming is anthropogenic.[30]
“Seitz signed the 1995 Leipzig Declaration and, in an open letter inviting scientists to sign the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine’s global warming petition, called for the United States to reject the Kyoto Protocol.[6] The letter was accompanied by a 12-page article on climate change which followed a style and format nearly identical to that of a contribution to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a scientific journal,[31] even including a date of publication (“October 26”) and volume number (“Vol. 13: 149–164 1999”), but was not actually a publication of the National Academy of Science (NAS). In response the United States National Academy of Sciences took what the New York Times called “the extraordinary step of refuting the position of one [of] its former presidents.”[6][32][33] The NAS also made it clear that “The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy.”[32]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Seitz
Yet his type of disinformation and misleading BS — fueled by a mind decaying into Alzheimer’s or other dementia — formed the basis of an entire industry denying global warming and/or its anthropogenic source by a host of seemingly well-meaning but often misled, undereducated dupes.
I challenge every reader here to obtain a climate science PhD and publish their own work before judging that of the international climate science community. If you’re too lazy to study it, you’re not worthy to doubt it in public except under a bright yellow label: “100% hearsay and undereducated opinion.”
Hey fellow readers! I hope you enjoy the “intrusion” of intelligent discourse and calls for more research and learning into the vast swaths of ignorance apparent here. For what is science worth, if most of it is to be so rapidly and obviously ignored by so many readers here?
I know that it’s not easy for people who aren’t smart to recognize they aren’t smart because the Dunning-Kruger Effect, but…
PLEASE do more research, open your minds and stop believing people who don’t have advanced climate science degrees, and in general stop being such LAZY butts who accept only opinions you already agree with, based on vast ignorance. (Uh-oh, here’s the Dunning-Kruger problem again: How do you know you’re ignorant if you’re too ignorant to know you’re ignorant?? I guess we’ll know who they are when they start calling names instead of debating using scientific facts.)
Here’s a 100% reasonable challenge to all those dubious (yet mostly uninformed because they aren’t climate scientists) of the current advanced state of climate science:
Get a Master’s in climate science.
Get a PhD in climate science.
Join a climate science research team and get your name on published, peer-reviewed papers.
Publish your own work in established journals that vett the science.
In other words, for the love of God and everything holy and unholy, PLEASE *FULLY* EDUCATE YOURSELVES
in climate science and STOP POSTING SUCH IGNORANT MISINFORMATION AND DISINFORMATION.
And have a nice day. QUIETLY. UNTIL you are fully informed.
Finally, if you can’t trust scientific experts who are trusted by other similarly educated experts, you have a trust problem. It’s NOT a problem within the science, which has well established protocols for checking validity in every area of modern science, but a problem within YOU.
If you have a trust problem in other areas such as unwarranted fear of governments that have never harmed you, fear of being lied to by “official” sources (yet swallow corporate hype and marketing wholesale, as well as non-scientific statements and theories promoted by non scientists and politicians whose campaigns are funded by such corporations), and/or belief in conspiracy theories, you have a huge MENTAL HEALTH ISSUE.
Who are you?
Sunsettommy looks like we have a new troll. But this one doesn’t seem to be as much fun as the regulars.
I only skimmed this article and I’m skimming it again and came upon the research by Nordhaus.
The author quotes studies done literally 32 years ago in an environment bereft of the vast knowledge we’ve acquired about climate change and potential effects. So why is the author using 32-year-old research when obviously the underpinnings of that research is mostly outdated?
I haven’t done any research on Nordhaus, nor Fred Singer, but the likely deficiencies of 32-year-old research in our current environment with incredibly advanced tools now compared to then, should be obvious.
When a writer has to cherry-pick economic research 32 years old as opposed to updated information, can’t anyone here see the obvious ramifications, that his conclusions cannot possibly be close to reality?
Not only that, the writer has totally ignored environmental consequences and costs. Never in the article is it mentioned that entire Islands are being lost under the rising seas. Never in the article isn’t mentioned about the potential cascading effects of species lost and the loss of keystone species upon which many others depend.
WHY IS SO MUCH VITAL INFORMATION PURPOSELY IGNORED IN THE OPS POST??
The only reason I can figure is that he’s cherry-picking data ONLY to fit a previously chosen position that’s NOT BASED IN SCIENCE. In other words, it’s an anti-science, ignorant conclusion that ignores huge swaths of information, learning, and scientific data collected since at least 32 years after the allegedly key (but clearly outdated) economic research he quotes.
Of course capitalist oriented types will grasp onto it like a straw in a pile of hay, totally ignoring every environmental consequence, every unknown, every daytime that doesn’t fit their preconceived IDIOTIC (and notably, ever-shifting) notions like “global warming isn’t real,” or “if it is real we didn’t cause it,” or “if we did cause it, it’s not that bad and might even be good!”
100% BUNK, DEBUNKED.
Guess what, conned snowflakes? The Big Heat-up and the Scary Sea Rise are coming. If you own coastal property, you’d better get out of it now. If you live in an island nation, your nation’s island may be gone, some of them by the end of the century and some sooner!
By the way, scientific facts and climate model projections aren’t “alarmist” unless you’re a fear-mongering snowflake who’s afraid of his own shadow. Like most conservatives are. Which is why they “have to” own guns. Which is why gun deaths and gun accidents are so prevalent here — oh yeah, also because most conservatives are, compared to libs’ average 8 to 11 points scientifically measured higher IQs, stupid as hell.
The label “alarmist” (99% incorrectly and imprecisely applied by cons in the case of global warming/climate change) is the typical scaredy-cat conservative’s way to deny or downplay a realistically likely event in order to reduce his/her own anxiety.
It’s also an inaccurate label that amounts to projection, a way of transferring their own fear of something into a *false* accusation about others, which is often required by conservatives in order to avoid dealing with an unpleasant reality they can’t mentally and emotionally handle, being such a snowflakes.
Which makes them wackadoodle in general. And society suffers the results when a male conservative stupidly endures, without asking for help, severe enough mental health issues, and they typically blow their gaskets and shoot innocents in malls or a McDonald’s or a post office. (Female conservatives react differently. They usually simply abuse their children or kill those kids. Or lose them after spinning downhill into, typically, alcohol or meth addiction.)
https://share.newsbreak.com/dwngvlg9