Not so free speech

If we can not have free speech at a university, where in our democratic system will we have it? If ideas can not be discussed in an academic setting, free of bureaucratic constraint, what is the hope for the rest of society?

These questions spring to mind when I read this post by Roger Pielke concerning a recent directive issued at his home university.

Roger is hardly an extremist in the climate blogosphere but if his voice is subject to censorship, what hope is there for the rest of us? Conform or go home apparently.

Be free to speak and lecture, just as long as you say,preach and indoctrinate the correct, approved, consensus dogma and leave all the free-thinking, skepticism, independent learning aspects of education right out.

Just when you think Orwell may have over-stated things, administrative doublespeak fills in the void and doubt, and re-affirms the necessity for individuals to stand up, think and speak for themselves. Democracy is not a right, it must be fought for and defended against those forces in society that find its activities an inconvenience to their truth.

Follow up:
John Mueller has published this excellent commentary in the Canadian University Teachers Bulletin on the integrity of academic work and the insidious way with which ideology is presumed to taint some work but be inherently absent in others.

Of course his commentary won't count academically.

Increasingly academia cares little about the message and more about the noise it is presented with and generates.

It's Water Vapour, Stupid

One of my intuitive objections to the theory of global warming has been the role of carbon dioxide as a trigger mechanism, the driver of changes in the earth's atmosphere. Yes I recognize that levels of carbon dioxide have risen from around 260 ppm to 360 ppm, but I still can't grasp how a gas that represents less than 0.04% of the atmosphere dictates the climate for the whole planet. To my mind, the world is a very complex, dynamic and deeply inter-related system: very robust, very adaptable and very resistant -- certainly, a geological time scale of several hundred million years would seem to both suggest and support this contention.

So why would a trace gas be so crucial? And when did carbon dioxide go from irrelevant to the dominant driver of climate? (For example: past geological records indicate carbon dioxide levels in excess of 7,000 ppm and no correlation with temperature; Gore's famous graph where carbon dioxide lags behind temperature changes by 800 years; and, the more recent disconnects of carbon dioxide levels from temperature changes throughout the past century).

So it was with great interest that I read this post and the associated article on the coupling of water and carbon fluxes via the terrestrial biosphere. This work suggests that the larger water cycle controls the much smaller carbon cycle and not vice versa.

Well duh! Doesn't this seem like common sense? Which is why I personally think so many have heard the global warming rhetoric and are content to accept that human's play a role in modifying the weather but balk at the wider implications of planetary Armageddon as just outside their accepted realm of common sense comprehension. Environmentalists can bitch and whine all they want as long as their views only marginally impinge on real life -- but the lay public is not about to jump off a cliff just because a few loons say it would be a good idea.

It will be very interesting in the coming months how this particular research is treated both within the blogosphere, the mainstream media and within the scientific community itself. Does it get reported, acknowledged and integrated into our increasing knowledge pool? Or, does it get ignored, castigated and otherwise explained away because it threatens the supposed hegemony of the global warming paradigm of science?

The tyranny of science

Science was intended to replace the dogma of religion and the tyranny of monarchy.  Reason was supposed to bring enlightenment.  Science was never intended to become an ideology in and of itself, its own belief system. 

 

Sadly, however, science has become the dominant ideology of our era.  In an excellent essay, Furedi writes:  it frequently seems as if scientific authority is replacing religious and moral authority, and in the process being transformed into a dogma. At first sight, it appears that science has the last word on all the important questions of our time.

 

In short, Furedi's essay shows how science has become the very dogma it was originally intended to replace:

 

• In the absence of political vision and direction, society continually hides behind scientific authority....whatever misgivings people have about science, its authority is unrivalled in the current period.
• ...the environmental lobby depends on the legitimation provided by scientific evidence and expertise. In their public performances, environmentalists frequently use the science in a dogmatic fashion.
• Today, religion and political ideologies no longer inspire significant sections of the public. Politicians find it difficult to justify their work and outlook in the vocabulary of morality.
• Many religious leaders, politicians and environmentalists have little interest in engaging in the voyage of discovery through scientific experimentation. Instead they often appear to be in the business of politicising science, or more accurately, moralising it...(there is a)... growing tendency to treat science as a belief that provides an unquestionable account of the Truth.
• Such science has more in common with the art of divination than the process of experimentation. 

Saul contends that democracy has consistently been placed in the hands of those in society who are the least democratic in their ideology: those who can exercise power through the authority of their religion, their economic power or their military might.  Today we have to add to that list the dogmatic use of science and its manipulation through mass media as the latest form of anti-democratic tyranny, complete with its own priesthood, saints and pious indictment of non-believers.

Snow and cold: caught in the spin cycle

If it snows in Saudi Arabia , and the media fail to report it, did it really happen?

If it snows in Iraq, and the media do not report it, did it really happen?

If it snows in the middle of the South American summer, and the media do not report it, did it really happen?

If there is a mid-winter thaw in the East, but major snowfalls throughout the West of North America, what spin does the media put on the story?

If it's story on today's weather anywhere, and it alludes to climate change, it is spin. Climate is a long-term trend. Weather is day by day and seasonal.

But it is interesting that the spin is always in one direction: be afraid, be very afraid.

Finding Orwell in the Denial Machine

Most skeptics of AGW have been targeted by an organized campaign to discredit them as a lunatic fringe. Mostly, skeptics being skeptics are unruffled by such efforts: by definition, they are non-conformists.

It is an irritant to those who are not really that skeptical of the whole message to find themselves or their views mis-characterized. To find yourself castigated for a perspective you don't embrace is not fun. Neither is it pleasant to have personal abuse thrown your way simply for asking basic questions that seem threaten the hegemony of the prevailing dogma.

But perhaps the greatest offense, is to be subject to a witch hunt that insinuates personal motives for embracing an ideology, by people who live the very activity they find complicit in others.

Thus, "denialists" are presumed to be paid lobbyists, adopting an ideological perspective because they are funded to do so.

Sadly, the truth is much more depressing. As with all myths, the facts do not sustain the advocacy. Those that campaign for AGW actually receive far in excess to those who ask questions about the dogma.

Skeptics are like the chicken going for a ham and egg breakfast with the pig (AGW advocate). The chicken is involved: the pig has to be committed.

If fear promotion was to cease, an awful lot of advocates, zealots, bureaucrats, journalists and "committed" environmentalists would be out of a living. Most sceptics would just continue with their day jobs.

Climate Audit

Steve McIntyre has posted this commentary about his blog Climate Audit. In it, he expresses his concerns about the management of his website and the difficulties posed by the range of topics and commentary it attracts. It is a cogent assessment of the problems faced in seeking to understand the complexities inherent in questions about the dynamics of the climate system, some guidance for how to self-educate and the difficulties in hosting a forum for discussion on such a divisive topic. Among his points:

• we should not assume that all specialists are wrong
• but neither are they infallible
• specialists have a responsibility to communicate to general audiences
• the IPCC has done a poor job of bridging the gap between specialist and general audiences
• no one is an expert in all areas of a complex, dynamic problem

Climate Audit is among the best of the blogs that focus on science and policy. Its posts are informative, it has a focus where it excels and the discussion is both lively and well moderated.

The continued need for such blogs and recognition of the inherent uncertainty of climate change is further re-enforced by the latest findings about ice sheets persisting even during past periods of exceptional warmth, something current climate projections neither predict nor can account for.

Climate science is a developing field. If you are risk-willing, it is premature to make any public policy decisions premised on such nascent information. If you are risk-adverse, the infancy of the field is irrelevant to the convenient support it lends to your dogma.

As Climate Audit shows, dispelling the myths and exposing the inaccuracies, imprecision and uncertainties of the science is not a simple nor a quick process. Neither is it necessarily well-accepted by those fellows of the fraternity whose work is de-frocked by an audit of their methodology and/or ideology.

As this post illustrates, some blogs are particularly obtuse and hypocritical in their reaction to those who have the temerity to question the veracity of the priesthood.

Fallacies about Global Warming

A new website, Science and Public Policy, offers accessible and easily comprehensible analyses of the issues around climate change.  For example, this report offers a succinct 8 page summation of the flaws in the AGW hypothesis for anyone not yet familiar with the basis for so many people's scepticism.  The report is nicely presented and available in PDF format.

 

The remainder of the site is excellent, presenting its purpose, prevailing ideology and the credentials of its organizers in a site navigation that contains links and an index.  The site lists the most recent posts and popular articles and is easily navigated.  All in all, both a welcomed and strong addition to the resources available to questioning minds on the topic.

Statistical Jungle

An important reminder from Phillip Stott on the use of statistics in ecomyths.

 

It is a widely accepted ecomyth that tropical rainforests are in sharp decline owing to massive clearcutting.  Associated with this supposed decline are estimates for species extinction and links to the impact on climate change of lost carbon sinks, etc..  In the 1980s and early 1990s the fate of Amazonia was a celebrity cause with the likes of Sting and others predicting dire consequences for the globe if a treaty on bio-diversity could not be imposed.  The loss of tropical rainforest was the poster statistic for this ecomyth.

 

Which is all fine and dandy, except that the tropical rainforests are not actually in decline over all -- a fact that Lomborg pointed out and a fact that he was disparaged for highlighting.  Stott brings attention to the latest empirical science that shows there has been no net loss of tropical rainforest over the past 3 decades.  He also suggests where, and how, the ecomyth of the tropical rainforest was invented.

Mass media, mass conformity

We are awash with junk knowledge:

The hard reality is that if you want to understand anything -- the great currents of change at work on the planet or anything else for that matter -- you are going to have to invest time and energy in educating yourself on that subject. You are going to have to actively go looking for alternative sources of information, checking the provenance of sources, cross - checking for logical inconsistencies, vested interests etc. You are categorically not going to get it on a plate from the world's media.

Today's media is a loudhailer for politically correct mass hysteria and the witch hunts that follow in it its wake.

Powerful but true words, eloquently expressed in this post.

Two excellent illustrations are the posted exchanges in response to Tierney's query about weather alarmism and the continued efforts to pillory those who question climate dogma (which have prompted this response).

Still with climate orthodoxy, the refusal to allow for full disclosure and inclusion of perspectives at Bali and the continued absence of empirical data by advocates, are two more prominent examples of media conformity promoting a particular dogma.

The problem is, of course, rooted in the failings of contemporary education which promote:

• conformity over individual thought
• compliance over creative expression
• test scores for the memorization of knowledge over the evaluation of creative application of learning

As Kierkegaard remarked: People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

Is there any weather inconsistent with the the scientific consensus on climate?

Following up on the Junk Science $125,000 challenge for anyone proving the AGW hypothesis, John Iierney has stirred up a bit of a hornet's nest by asking a deceptively simple question: are there any weather data proponents of AGW will recognize as invalidating their hypothesis?
See here and here.

What's interesting is both the hysteria embedded in the reaction to this question and that the central point of the question has been missed.

Weather and climate are not the same: but we only observe weather patterns in our day to day lives. So, either proponents of AGW have to stop using weather activities/extremes as indicators of climate change to promote fear and to validate their message, or they must be willing to acknowledge what activities/extremes of weather would be inconsistent with their hypothesis.

As the responses to this question indicate, while claiming weather is not climate, advocates of AGW will not identify any weather patterns or extremes that they would acknowledge as invalidating the AGW hypothesis. Weather extremes are routinely used as opportunities by AGW advocates to warn of impending doom should global warming measures not be taken. This is called having your cake and eating it too.

So where does that leave us? We have no knowledge of future climate. So any estimates, models or conjectures about future climate can not be disproved. Anything that is not open to disproof is not scientific, it is a statement of faith.

Well we do have the past climate record.

Yes, we do. And for many people that past record does not substantiate an AGW hypothesis as:

• temperatures have been this warm previously
• past periods of warming do not correlate with CO2 levels
• past temperatures do correlate with sun spot activity
• climate is a complex dynamic system with a large range of variables, many of them poorly understood
  

We do have a choice. Instead of seeking to control climate and people by imposing power over them, we can seek to empower people and focus on adaptation to change:

• It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables. We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation.