As promised yesterday, here is my report from the fourth International Conference on Climate Change, reprinted with permission from Pajamas Media, where an earlier version of it appeared. This version includes exclusive new material not available previously.
In the wake of the Climategate scandal, panelists and audience members at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC4) indicated growing confidence that the tide is turning in favor of those who believe that manmade global warming is not a crisis.
More than 700 people — including a good many scientists, along with economists, policy analysts, and legislators — gathered together for three days in a Chicago hotel to discuss the once-settled but increasingly controversial proposition of an anthroprogenic global warming (AGW) crisis. Any triumphalism was averted by a general agreement to explore real-world facts and test the assertions of alarmists. The presenters and audience members continually asked whether the data says what the modelers say it does.
The conference opened with a Sunday evening dinner at which Canadian statistical analyst Stephen McIntyre presented a meticulous history of the hugely influential “hockey stick” graph — which found an alarming rise of global temperatures since 1979 and led to the conclusion by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that AGW is causing a global crisis that requires drastic measures. McIntyre had begun publicly questioning the data several years ago, setting off an effort which ultimately led to the recent Climategate scandal, in which it was shown that the people behind the hockey stick graph knowingly altered the temperature record in a way that expanded a relatively common global temperature change into a shocking heat spike.
The scientists’ own words show them as phonying up temperature data “in order to trick you,” as McIntyre noted repeatedly in his presentation, quoting comedian Jon Stewart’s scathing mockery of the alarmists’ attempted evasions. McIntyre quoted extensively from the various parties that perpetrated this massive fraud, but he avoided using such emotionally charged words. Fellow keynote speaker Harrison Schmitt — a Ph.D. scientist and former NASA astronaut — by contrast, embraced the characterization of the Climategate events as a fraud, in response to audience comments in a lively Q&A session after McIntyre’s speech. The questioners strongly criticized McIntyre’s reticence and his argument supporting a central role for government in pressing a climate agenda.
The disagreement demonstrated that the increasing skepticism toward the AGW crisis hypothesis is not the result of an organized effort by energy industry shills but instead a serious movement investigating a scientific proposition carrying enormous political and economic implications. At breakfast on Monday, the eminent environmental sciences scholar Pat Michaels, Ph.D., a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, employed much humor and telling details in documenting an extensive cover-up by alarmists in stopping publication of articles by AGW skeptics in Climate Science and other refereed science journals. Noting that a prominent alarmist called for the editor of Climate Science to be fired for not spiking AGW skeptics’ articles, Michaels observed: “This is a hanging offense in science.”
The real core of the conference was the panel sessions, in which scientists, economists, and other experts presented the facts about the environmental effects of human activity and the causes of global temperature changes. Given that four panels were meeting at any one time, attendees were forced to make some tough choices. But in each case, the emphasis was on presenting the facts, and in the panels I attended I heard some strong words but no polemics.
In a Monday morning science session, for example, Craig Idso, Ph.D., presented preliminary results from his upcoming massive meta-analysis of the scientific literature on ocean acidification — the largest such analysis ever, using results from 568 research studies. “Those who continue to portray CO2-induced ocean acidification as megadisaster-in-the-making are not grounded in the real world data,” he said — but only after presenting the data proving it. And in contrast to the Climategate events outlined in Sunday night’s keynote address by Stephen McIntyre, Idso is publishing all the data online.
At breakfast on Monday, former Virginia governor and U.S. Senator George Allen noted that the United States has the most natural energy resources of any nation, but our government refuses to let us use them. Allen made a strong case for meeting the nation’s future energy needs by allowing innovation and the use of the most efficient and effective sources, such as coal and nuclear energy.
“The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal,” Allen said.
The enormous restrictions the U.S. government places on energy production raise consumer prices and business costs and are thus crushing the economy and stifling economic and technological progress. “Draconian EPA regulations . . . are regressive taxes,” he noted, as they hurt the poor the most, by raising prices.
The economics of AGW policies are becoming an increasingly important issue as draconian cap-and-trade bills make their way through Congress, and presenters offered sobering facts about emission trading schemes. Dr. David Tuerck of the Beacon Hill Institute gave his chilling estimate of the price tag of “ruinously costly,” unnecessary environmental initiatives such as Waxman-Markey ($3.42 trillion) and the Western Climate Initiative ($6-18 billion per year).
On that same panel, Spanish economics professor Dr. Gabriel Calzada addressed the claims that green policies create large numbers of jobs. In Spain, he observed, “green jobs are created by green rain” — huge taxpayer subsidies: 570,000 euros per green job created. As a result of the tax-subsidized increase in the use of renewables, in 1998-2009 the price of electricity in Spain rose by 77 percent, he observed. Fellow panelist Dr. Carlo Stagnaro, an environmental engineer from Italy, noted that for every green job, 6.9 jobs could be created in the industrial sector for the same investment.
Tuerck bluntly suggested a rational approach to energy efficiency would start by eliminating all subsidies for energy production, across the board. He argued that such an approach could be a populist-style measure on which both free-market advocates and green groups can agree.
The Monday luncheon keynote speech by atmospheric scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT explained how climate models draw disturbingly high estimates of future global temperature increases as a result of higher atmospheric CO2: they introduce arbitrary fudge factors (which they call “strong positive feedbacks”) that jack up the estimates far beyond the scientifically observed fact that a doubling of CO2 would cause only a 1 degree C temp increase.
Overall, the warming observed over the past century is quite trivial, and natural variability explains it fully, he said; no additional, non-natural (human) forcing need be sought in order to understand the data. In fact, real-world observations show the feedback effect as negative. Hence the only way to raise alarm over global mean temperature is to claim future results will be much more extreme than what we’ve observed in the past. That is exactly what AGW alarmists do, Lindzen observed.
More facts: In a standing-room-only Monday afternoon session, meteorologist and Weather Channel co-founder Joseph D’Aleo outlined discrepancies in temperature data from various official sources, documenting the frequent “adjustment” of raw temperature by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which always happens to decrease past temps and increase recent ones. That’s what created the infamous “hockey stick” temperature graph which turned a small observed temperature increase into an alarming hypothesized one. “Manmade warming is real, but it’s made by men in East Anglia and at NOAA,” D’Aleo tartly observed.
Fellow panelist Dr. Fred Singer, the distinguished environmental sciences scholar and coauthor of “Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change,” likewise presented “many reasons to doubt” the surface temperature data showing an unusual increase in global temperatures in the 1980s and ’90s. “My view of the post-1997 warming is that it may be phony,” he said.
Tuesday brought additional useful information. Physicist and former NASA astronaut Walter Cunningham noted that the evidence is on side of the climate realists, but the media unquestioningly accept and repeat the alarmists’ story. Those who rely on scientific data instead of speculative and manipulative models have to do a better job of communicating with the public and the media, Cunningham said.
There is big money in cap and trade, he noted, which gives many people a powerful incentive to advance the AGW crisis hypothesis. In addition, the federal government stands to accumulate a huge amount of power in the guise of averting a global catastrophe.
Economist Todd Wynn of the Cascade Policy Institute asked the important question that should be addressed regardless of whether the AGW crisis hypothesis is true, but which the U.S. media have been loath to ask: Which is better at improving energy efficiency, reducing CO2 emissions, and improving our standard of living—government or markets?
Wynn came down strongly and correctly in favor of the latter. In markets, he noted, competitive pressures lead to energy efficiency—which leads directly to increases in CO2 efficiency (less emission of CO2 for the same amount of production). He presented a large amount of real-world data showing that to be true.
Thus, he noted, economic freedom has a significant and negative effect on carbon dioxide intensity. “Freedom means efficiency, and that includes carbon dioxide intensity.”
Terri Jackson of the Institute of Physics in London, England, outlined the ferocity of suppression of any questioning of AGW crisis hypothesis in Old Blighty, and copiously and winsomely documented the socialist motivations behind the AGW alarmism movement. Jackson told of experiences with censorship of papers and speeches skeptical of the AGW crisis hypothesis at the Institute of Physics and outlined the radical green leadership of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
“We’ve won the battle on science. We must get more politicians involved both in the U.S. and the UK,” Jackson concluded.
Dr. E. Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation outlined the evangelical Christian position regarding the environment and argued that AGW alarmism is based on a perversion of religious impulses, not on science. Beisner said that AGW alarmists are part of a larger movement of “Post-Normal Science” which denies the primacy of the scientific method and encourages the subordination of science to political purposes.
“This stuff is unbelievably insidious,” said Beisner.
Finally, in an extremely skillful and crowd-pleasing speech at the getaway luncheon, Lord Christopher Monckton of the UK, a former advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, extensively documented falsehoods in Mann’s “hockey stick” graph and misrepresentations in the IPCC report that gave the global warming alarmists their initial inroad toward government imposition of carbon dioxide emissions restrictions.
In light of these malfeasances and cases of outright fraud, Monckton called for the abolition of the IPCC and the indictment of IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri for criminal fraud if he does not withdraw the hockey stick graph and publish a retraction and correction on the IPCC website. A subsequent article in WorldNetDaily confirmed that Monckton was serious about the threat, especially in light of the fact that Pachauri stands to make a huge amount of money on investments that will profit enormously from governmental global-warming mitigation mandates such as carbon trading.
While allowing much room for disagreement on the details, the attendees at ICCC4 agreed on one thing: policies with such enormous consequences should be based on the facts, however inconvenient they might turn out to be.
S. T. Karnick is director of research for The Heartland Institute (the main organization behind the conference) and editor of The American Culture.
POST POST-NORMAL SCIENCE?
a.n.ditchfield
______________________________________________________________________________
Post-normal Science is claimed to be the key to understanding complexity in nature. It is invoked to promote a new world order with sustainable progress on a limited planet.
What is progress? To most minds it comes from the increasingly efficient use of energy and materials, capital and labour, that translates into lower costs, better income for all, freedom from want and ultimately to more means for care of the environment.
Not all agree. The bitterness of Green extremists that swept with gale strength at the Copenhagen 2009 conference on climate pointed to the opposite direction: to limiting world economic activity and even casting away the fruits of two centuries of the Industrial Revolution that they blame for a global warming bound to render the planet uninhabitable. This is a controversial meaning of progress.
Green scare-mongering is too puny to be compared to the 20th century ideologies of Fascism and Communism. Although Green activists are prone to excess, the damage they cause is still trifling when compared to the havoc brought about by two world wars and the waste of a long cold war.
Totalitarians had weapons for their mischief while Green extremists can only brandish words that suggest they would have already capsized the planet, were it not for the ballast of common sense possessed by ordinary folk. They promote public policies too disastrous to be tolerated if implemented. The political reality is that the West resists being rolled back to an idealised Green agrarian past. Forget China and India.
Again, the world is divided into two camps. One side of the climate issue is epitomised by MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen, who sees global warming as a political and journalistic phenomenon, not a physical one. He expects future generations to look back in wonder at the turn of the century hysteria about climate. On the other side stands Jerome Ravetz, theorist of the fashionable Post-normal Science, who contributed to the uncritical acceptance of anthropogenic global warming as settled science. It is not.
Ravetz is no common-or-garden Leftist; he holds a Cambridge PhD degree in mathematics. Steeped in Marxism at the Philadelphia home of his Russian/Jewish parents, his US passport was withdrawn during the McCarthy era, although later restored. He then adopted UK citizenship. A disgruntled Ravetz is the kind of articulate intellectual that Oxford likes to keep for a while to enliven debate, and certainly fits the role with his Post-normal Science. He admits that the scientific method cannot be surpassed in its realm of simple phenomena; he argues that there is another realm with different laws, to deal with complex matters, such as climate, in which the stakes are high and scientific certainties low. Enter the Precautionary Principle: if the cause is just and the science unsettled, uncertainties should not stand in the way of acts of government promoted by official propaganda. Enter the Ministry of Truth…
The truth is that we don’t know – and may never know – how much of global climate change comes by hand of man or by hand of nature, to what degree and when. We do know that hiding uncertainties for the sake of expediency is at best misleading and at worst fraud, when it abets self-serving politics.
The uncertainties of complexity are not new; they been around since the time of the philosophers of Ancient Greece. After them, Hegel and Marx believed they had the instruments to navigate on uncharted and turbulent waters of history, politics and economics. Others argue that questions concerning human nature will always remain in the domain of the intuition of statesmen, of the religious, of the mystics, poets and artists who have the feel, not the thought, to discern in matters beyond the reach of reason – and therefore of science. Their intuition cannot be generalised into a soulless ideological system.
With Post-normal Science, Marxists try to bring back, as serious, their Alice in Wonderland thought. Their tactics have changed. They now follow the book of Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party in the 1920s. As an exile in Moscow, Gramsci saw the brutal realities of Stalin’s regime and realised the futility of seizing power with revolution and holding onto power with armed force. It led to oppression, not liberty. Christianity is the main opponent of Marxism. A revolutionary assault on Christian societies entrenched behind a rampart of values upheld for two thousand years is doomed to failure. Gramsci proposed an alternative approach: evolution, not revolution, is the way to the ideal classless society, in a long but sure process. Marxism should spread in concentric circles until it grows into a consensus. First win over the opinion formers; then the university professors, the intellectuals they educate, the journalists, teachers, leaders of civic and religious organisations, political parties. Finally, with the leadership in the fold, the masses would follow. Marxism would rule with no compulsion, in place of societies based on religious values.
After Communist regimes collapsed into universal discredit Gramsci’s suave approach gained favour, and in now under way. This was perceived by Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, who collected clippings of amusing things written by post-modernists (mainly Marxists) about hard science, especially those who use abstruse mathematical terms to make their text incomprehensible, so as to pass as profound. He grew weary of nonsense written about physics, held by social “scientists” to be white, male and euro-centric. He came to the conclusion that there is no such thing called a social science, because anything goes. He submitted his opinion to experimental proof.
PROPOSITION
That a prestigious sociology journal would publish an essay full of absurd statements, provided it was:
· Well written, of scholarly appearance;
· Cloaked as incomprehensible physics;
· Attuned with prejudices of the editor.
Sokal’s essay announced his discovery of Quantum Gravity, the synthesis of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, on a superior plane that supersedes both. He suggests he had done it with the methods of social sciences, in a feat that did away with the outworn formal logic and systematic experiment, still in use and unduly so. The implications were so revolutionary that the essay had been rejected for publication in peer-reviewed journals of physics, and this was the reason to seek its publication in Social Text, known for a mind open to innovation.
The essay contains nonsense galore immediately perceptible as a hoax by an engineering student. The essay favoured mathematics freed from the shackles of the rules of arithmetic and stood against the teaching of the outworn geometry of Euclid, a tool for oppression of the working class. There was anti-feminist prejudice in fluid mechanics. Truth is relative. Constants such as the speed of light, (299 792 km/s), universal gravitational constant G (6.67438×10-11N(m/kg)2), and the number pi (3.1416) have values set by the current social context but such values may change in a different future social context.
No absurdity was contrived by Sokal; all were extracted from what was stated by post-modern thinkers about hard science and he supports it with more than one hundred references to published articles.
PROOF
Sokal’s essay, Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity was indeed published as submitted, with no comment, although Sokal repeatedly asked whether there were any questions to be clarified.
“Social Text” #46/47, pp. 217-252 (1996).
QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM
In another journal, at the time of publication, Sokal explained what he had done at Social Text and regretted that a silent tide of irrationality threatened institutions of higher learning to dictate, from a blind and intolerant pulpit, what is right to do, say and think.
An inquiring mind shuns Gospel according to St. Marx. Critical reviewers at Social Text could have asked: if a future society decrees that pi = 4 will circles be squares and heavenly bodies cubes? None asked.
With its pretence of a short cut to deal with complexity, Post-normal Science amounts to sophistry of the kind lampooned by Sokal. Its previous failure was in economics and the new one in climate. It is a grab for power to ration use of energy worldwide and thus control the lives of every human being. Its followers are not above deceit to exploit emotions of a guilt-ridden West.
A confident West had worked wonders. French contributions to mathematics are found in the work of Descartes, Pascal, Fermat, D’Alembert, Delambre, Fourier, Lagrange, Monge, Poisson, Laplace, Cauchy, Galois, Poincaré, Benoit Mandelbrot. Then came Post-normal Science with Humpty Dumpty scruple: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”. It is Mock Science with Mock Turtle arithmetic of: Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, Derision.
No Post Post-normal Science is needed to dialectically supplant Post-normal Science; a return to Science would do.
Sokal’s essay is available on Internet at: .
“Lord Christopher Monckton of the UK, a former advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, extensively documented falsehoods in Mann’s “hockey stick” graph and misrepresentations in the IPCC report”
Snort Snort Snort.
Seems Monckton is nothing but a charlatan and a crank who has done a lot of misrepresenting himself:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/jun/03/monckton-us-climate-change-talk-denial?showallcomments=true
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