Archive for the ‘science’ Category
The global-warming hoax on trial
Friday, June 11th, 2010
A review of the peer-edited literature reveals a systematic tendency of the climate establishment to engage in a variety of stylized rhetorical techniques that seem to oversell what is actually known about climate change while concealing fundamental uncertainties and open questions regarding many of the key processes involved in climate change. [emphasis added]
Jason Johnston is Robert G. Fuller, Jr. Professor of Law and Director, Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He holds JD and PhD degrees from the University of Michigan. From these and other facts, I conclude that (a) he is not a dummy, (b) he is trained in the examination and evaluation of both written testimony and physical evidence, and (c) he knows something about the relationship between the environment industry and the fields of law and economics (his PhD is in economics). He is the author of “Global Warming Advocacy Science: a Cross Examination” (which can be downloaded for free here).
The cross-examination conducted in this paper reveals many additional areas where the peer-edited literature seems to conflict with the picture painted by establishment climate science, ranging from the magnitude of 20th century surface temperature increases and their relation to past temperatures; the possibility that inherent variability in the earth’s non-linear climate system, and not increases in CO2, may explain observed late 20th century warming; the ability of climate models to actually explain past temperatures; and, finally, substantial doubt about the methodological validity of models used to make highly publicized predictions of global warming impacts such as species loss.[emphasis added]
Consensus Science
At the heart of the hoax is the phony assertion that there is a “consensus” among scientists that anthropogenic global warming is an undeniable “fact”:
In recent Congressional hearings, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts stated that not a single peer-reviewed scientific paper contradicts the “consensus” view that increasing greenhouse gas emissions will lead to a “catastrophic” two degree Celsius increase in global mean temperatures. Senator Kerry is hardly alone in this belief. Virtually all environmental law scholars seem to believe that there is now a “scientific consensus” that anthropogenic greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions have caused late twentieth century global warming and that if dramatic steps are not immediately taken to reduce those emissions, then the warming trend will continue, with catastrophic consequences for the world. [emphasis added]
If ever there was ever a red flag in any discussion of science, the word consensus is it. The late author Michael Crichton warned of this sort of anti-science in a speech at Cal Tech in 2003.
I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. [emphasis added] [The text of this speech seems to have mysteriously disappeared from the “official” Crichton site. I’m just sayin’.]
With politicians like Kerry, it’s hard to know if he is just ignorant or willfully lying in order to promote Obama’s Marxist agenda, but Johnston cites dozens of peer-reviewed papers in the course of his cross-examination of the hoaxers.
It is virtually impossible to find anywhere in the legal or the policy literature on global warming anything like a sustained discussion of the actual state of the scientific literature on ghg emissions and climate change. Instead, legal and policy scholars simply defer to a very general statement of the climate establishment’s opinion (except when it seems too conservative), generally failing even to mention work questioning the establishment climate story, unless to dismiss it with the ad hominem argument that such work is the product of untrustworthy, industry-funded “skeptics” and “deniers.”
The danger to America is that, since
the most significant ghg emission reduction policies are intended to completely alter the basic fuel sources upon which industrial economies and societies are based, with the costs uncertain but potentially in the many trillions of dollars, one would suppose that before such policies are undertaken, it would be worthwhile to verify that the climate establishment’s view really does reflect an unbiased and objective assessment of the current state of climate science.
But the leaders to which we have entrusted our economic and political future are not interested. Al Gore, Congress, White House advisors, and the UN’s fraudulent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are focused on destroying America’s free-market economy. Real science can only get in their way, so they evangelize us with their brand of true religion – unquestioning faith in “consensus science” and an inquisition for the “untrustworthy, industry-funded ‘skeptics’ and ‘deniers’”.
Posted in Politics, science | No Comments »
Must Watch TV: "Hide the Decline"
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
Some interesting videos discussing the fabrication of “global warming” data and efforts to stifle opponents. The videos describe what happens when scientists becomes prostitutes to political objectives.
Al Gore’s “inconvenient falsehoods”
Learn more at Climate Depot.
Emails reveal efforts to promote “global warming”
fiction and punish dissidents
The corrupt peer review process
behind “global warming”
Posted in Culture, science | No Comments »
Why do they call me an IDiot?
Monday, August 17th, 2009
I’ve been having a lively discussion on a “science blog” (“Dispatches from the culture wars“) about Intelligent Design (ID) and the nature of Darwinism. In the discussion, I noticed a new term, “IDiot”. The term is used to imply that anyone who defends ID is an idiot. This is fairly typical of a large segment of people who continue to defend Darwin. I suppose those who persisted in defending a flat Earth in the face of mounting evidence of the planet’s roundness had a similarly snarky attitude and for the same reason. (To be fair, no one in the discussion referred to me specifically as an IDiot.)
Anyway, in the discussion, I mentioned a brief filed in the case of Edwards v. Aquillard in which the Supreme Court ordered (correctly, in my opinion) that Biblical Creationism could not be taught alongside evolution in public schools. Despite what both the Darwinists and Creation Scientists would like you to believe, ID is not stealth creationism. It’s a valid scientific hypothesis that continues to gain traction in the secular scientific community despite decidedly non-scientific attempts to suppress it.
One of those in the debate asked me “of all the cases you could’ve brought up, why in the Intelligent Designer’s name did you pick Edwards v. Aguillard?” I replied that I brought it up because there is something much greater than specific biological questions at stake. According to the brief,
Science is devoted to formulating and testing naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena. It is a process for systematically collecting and recording data about the physical world, then categorizing and studying the collected data in an effort to infer the principles of nature that best explain the observed phenomena. Science is not equipped to evaluate supernatural explanations for our observations….
Science seeks only naturalistic explanations. Sounds reasonable, but it isn’t. The a priori assumption is that a naturalistic explanation exists for every natural phenomenon (i.e. observed event in the “physical world”). If evidence points to a supernatural cause, science won’t bow out of the investigation but will continue to pursue (and promote) a naturalistic one – whether one exists or not. (The state of modern science is such that any crummy naturalistic explanation is better than admitting the possibility of a supernatural one.)
Now you might claim that these scientists just made a simple statement of fact because “natural” (phenomena) is identical in meaning to “naturalistic” (explanations). If that were the case, however, the statement would be tacitly acknowledging the possibility of non-natural phenomena that might also be observed in the physical world (otherwise, why qualify it?). The original statement could then be recast as something like “science looks for naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena but does not look for non-naturalistic explanations for non-natural phenomena”.
But that would introduce the fundamental problem of categorization - how could science, without determining all of their causes, possibly separate the non-natural phenomena from the natural ones and study only those? The inability to categorize the observed phenomena would leave science with no legitimate areas of inquiry. That position would obviously be untenable, so the signatories to this brief did the best they could; they punted.
More specifically, they created the (possibly false) impression that any phenomenon that occurs in the physical world is both “natural” and subject to a “naturalistic explanation”. But there’s that sneaky a priori assumption again – based only on philosophy, not science. The assumption is neither verifiable nor falsifiable. And it’s not falsifiable because science specifically declares that any effort to falsify it is outside the bounds of science! Neat.
The brief also claims that “without passing judgment on the truth or falsity of supernatural explanations, science leaves their consideration to the domain of religious faith.” But of course it doesn’t. Whether it’s rooted in petulant hatred of God and his followers (atheist stooge Richard Dawkins) or simple hubris, many scientists do indeed pass such judgments. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of epistemology (the philosophical study of what knowledge is and how we get it) knows that there are ways of knowing other than the scientific method (and a seriously compromised one at that). When scientists become amateur philosophers and operate on the ridiculous assumption that theirs is the only way of knowing, their credibility suffers.
There’s a reason the public does not trust science as it once did. Arrogant scientists will look outward and blame it on public stupidity, Walmart, and talk radio. Smart scientists will look inward to see if they’ve overstepped their bounds, particularly their own. Science has been defined by a majority of its practitioners (by no means unanimously) as an endeavor that by definition must always reject ID and must always support a naturalistic explanation even if it is repeatedly shown to be fatally flawed and barely credible.
Why would anyone – whether they have confidence in other ways of knowing or not – trust such an enterprise?
Posted in Culture, science | No Comments »