Lorrie Goldstein writes in The Toronto Sun, Green ‘drivel’ exposed – The godfather of global warming lowers the boom on climate change hysteria, 6/23/12.

Excerpts:

Having observed that global temperatures since the turn of the millennium have not gone up in the way computer-based climate models predicted, Lovelock acknowledged, “the problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago.” Now, Lovelock has given a follow-up interview to the UK’s Guardian newspaper in which he delivers more bombshells sure to anger the global green movement, which for years worshipped his Gaia theory and apocalyptic predictions that billions would die from man-made climate change by the end of this century.

Lovelock still believes anthropogenic global warming is occurring and that mankind must lower its greenhouse gas emissions, but says it’s now clear the doomsday predictions, including his own (and Al Gore’s) were incorrect.

He responds to attacks on his revised views by noting that, unlike many climate scientists who fear a loss of government funding if they admit error, as a freelance scientist, he’s never been afraid to revise his theories in the face of new evidence. Indeed, that’s how science advances.

HKO comments:

A scientist changes his theory when it conflicts with reality.  A political ideologue tries to change the reality.  Changing reality requires the heavy hand of a government authority.

Lovelock also notes the reality that few of the climate ideologues wish to face. They accuse those who dispute them for being  interests of the energy companies.  Besides the fact that many of the energy companies support climate ideologues because it thins the herd of their competition, the ideologues also refuse to admit the being paid by the government to find proof of anthropomorphic global warming does not also distort their findings.

The emergence of the scientific method ran into the beliefs of the church and was often treated as heresy.  Skeptics of anthropomorphic global warming are treated the same by the powered elite who seek not a fight for truth but a fight to retain power.

There are three factors that drive my skepticism.  In order:

1.  The universe of factors that affect climate is so vast and changing that there is no list of PhDs that can claim to know the weather years ahead with any accuracy. Nor can they know for certainty all the factors, including man’s activities, that will impact the climate and to what degree.  In fact it seems that those who claimed to have the answers ten years ago missed their predictions by greater margins that some of the heretics. The validity of a theory is directly related to its ability to predict.

2.  History is filled with predictions of disaster and Apocalypse from the educated and the credentialed that fail to come true.  Technology has rendered many scarcities irrelevant. Remember the story of the proposal to close the Patent Office in 1910 because there was nothing left to invent.  You can now Google it on your iPhone.

3.  While the skeptics are treated as unscientific  it is those that call them heretics who are imitating the intolerance o f the Church who fought the development of scientific inquiry.  Science depends on reproducible objective factors.  It is not decided by opinion polls and political ideology.

These points were well made in Concerned Scientists Reply on Global Warming in the Wall Street Journal on February 21. 2012.  The original article, No Need to Panic About Global Warming, ran January 27, 2012, and a number of scientists responded in Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate, on February 1. This was a response to their challenge.

Excerpts:

Trenberth et al. tell us that the managements of major national academies of science have said that “the science is clear, the world is heating up and humans are primarily responsible.” Apparently every generation of humanity needs to relearn that Mother Nature tells us what the science is, not authoritarian academy bureaucrats or computer models.

One reason to be on guard, as we explained in our original op-ed, is that motives other than objective science are at work in much of the scientific establishment. All of us are members of major academies and scientific societies, but we urge Journal readers not to depend on pompous academy pronouncements—on what we say—but to follow the motto of the Royal Society of Great Britain, one of the oldest learned societies in the world: nullius in verba—take nobody’s word for it. As we said in our op-ed, everyone should look at certain stubborn facts that don’t fit the theory espoused in the Trenberth letter, for example—the graph of surface temperature above, and similar data for the temperature of the lower atmosphere and the upper oceans.

One might infer from the Trenberth letter that scientific facts are determined by majority vote. Some postmodern philosophers have made such claims. But scientific facts come from observations, experiments and careful analysis, not from the near-unanimous vote of some group of people.

The Trenberth letter tells us that decarbonization of the world’s economy would “drive decades of economic growth.” This is not a scientific statement nor is there evidence it is true. A premature global-scale transition from hydrocarbon fuels would require massive government intervention to support the deployment of more expensive energy technology. If there were economic advantages to investing in technology that depends on taxpayer support, companies like Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, Solar Millenium, SpectraWatt, Solyndra, Ener1 and the Renewable Energy Development Corporation would be prospering instead of filing for bankruptcy in only the past few months.

HKO:

I encourage you to read the article and the others referenced in the article.  The labeling of skepticism with heresy and the willingness to hold economic growth hostage to ideological dogma is the kind of thinking that brought us the dark ages.

Science was not a strong subject for me and I am certainly not qualified to pass judgment on the hard data and the cases for or against anthropomorphic (man-made) global warming.  Yet I also realize that most of the pundits that express such strong opinion on the subject know just as little about the science as I do.  The language used to describe the ‘opposition’ is the language of political and religious fanatics, not scientists.

Daniel Botkin makes this point well in  Absolute Certainty is Not Scientific, in the Wall Street Journal, 12/2/11.

I felt nostalgic for those times when even the greatest scientific minds admitted limits to what they knew. And when they recognized well that the key to the scientific method is that it is a way of knowing in which you can never completely prove that something is absolutely true. Instead, the important idea about the method is that any statement, to be scientific, must be open to disproof, and a way of knowing how to disprove it exists.

Therefore, “Period, end of story” is something a scientist can say—but it isn’t science.

Some scientists make “period, end of story” claims that human-induced global warming definitely, absolutely either is or isn’t happening. For me, the extreme limit of this attitude was expressed by economist Paul Krugman, also a Nobel laureate, who wrote in his New York Times column in June, “Betraying the Planet” that “as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason—treason against the planet.” What had begun as a true scientific question with possibly major practical implications had become accepted as an infallible belief (or if you’re on the other side, an infallible disbelief), and any further questions were met, Joe-McCarthy style, “with me or agin me.”

Not only is it poor science to claim absolute truth, but it also leads to the kind of destructive and distrustful debate we’ve had in last decade about global warming. The history of science and technology suggests that such absolutism on both sides of a scientific debate doesn’t often lead to practical solutions.

HKO Comment:

Is there in fact a trend of Global warming?

Is the amount of global warming bad?

Is it predominantly caused by man?

Does the environmental ecosystem have any self correcting capabilities?

Will the solutions proposed have any measurable effects?

While I barely know which end of the test tube the cork goes into, it seems absurd that we could know the answers to these questions with any degree of certainty.  If global warming was so certain then why has ‘climate change’  been substituted?  Who determines if warming is bad? Haven’t more people died from cold extremes?  Exactly how much warming is bad?  Does anyone really know what the optimal temperature is? If we are so certain that man is causing this, then how do we explain previous periods of climate change when man’s global foot print was significantly smaller?

It appears that mixing politics and science is no more palatable than mixing religion with politics.  Politics pollutes them both.

Studying the financial bubbles we can see several common characteristics.

During the bubble inflation we see markets taken to an extreme by financial greed, but as Walter Sowell so appropriately metaphored on the housing bubble, “blaming the crash on greed is like blaming an airplane crash on gravity”; it is accurate but not very useful. We have had greed with us since the Garden of Eden.  Why does it only seem to rear its head to an extreme only every few years?

We see common sense dissolved in ‘new paradigms’, ‘permanently high plateaus’, ‘irreversible trends’, and ‘progressive thinking.’  Motivated by financial gain we believe whatever will support our belief in the unsupportable.

During the dot.com bubble we accepted billion dollar valuations of companies with no customers, no available products and only promising markets.  As 25 year old entrepreneurs became billionaires we believed that they were smart. There is this common aspect of bubbles that equates wealth with intelligence.  We want to believe that our new wealth is a reflection of our superior insight rather than mere luck.

When these bubbles burst and reality restores common sense we do not want to accept our own foolishness for buying into the speculative fever, we want to blame someone.  The geniuses who adorned the magazine covers as the faces of the bubbles either become villains or fade to obscurity.

In the distant past bubbles were fueled by individual greed buying into bad ideas, or at least good ideas taken to an extreme. But more recently bubbles have been enlarged by government policy.  Beyond just misguided monetary policy, the recent housing bubble was fueled by government policy that added to the demand for housing by pushing programs to help people buy homes who could not afford them.  By eliminating down payments and guaranteeing otherwise obviously risky loans the Government through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac created one of the biggest bubbles seen to date.

The cover of Newsweek with the picture of Al Gore as “The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man” strikes me as a sign of a new bubble inflating. The subtitle “Al Gore’s new plan for the planet” is the hubris of bubbles.

We never seem to recognize bubbles when we are in the middle of them. They only seem visible when they burst.  Yet the new green industrial complex is growing with massive investments that seem guided more by wishful thinking and paranoia than common sense and reason.

From the administration’s stated belief that green energy will provide the jobs that will lift us out of massive unemployment and recession to the policies that will create the drive to capitalize on the new government direction, we now see massive investment into irrational markets.

Al Gore is the chairman of Generation Investment Management, an investment firm making capital investments in firms with potential to capitalize on the green movement and policies. He is also founder and chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection, an outfit promoting the green economy. With money from people interested in promoting the public interest of environmentalism, the Alliance for Climate Protection is spending $300 million to promote the lifestyle that will benefit the investments of Al’s firm.

To be sure others besides Al Gore are on Capitol Hill promoting climate bills that will financially benefit their own interests.  Members of the Bush administration were chastised for their oil interests and criticized for letting it influence their policy decisions.  But we are assured that those now promoting their financial interests in their preferred energy sector are altruistic.

Gore is the face of the green industrial complex, but there are many seeking to profit from their foresight and concern to help save the planet. Gore is a genius for getting public policy firms to advertise heavily to support the market for his investments. The best entrepreneurs from the previous bubbles were never able to get $175,000 to make speeches promoting their industry. Gore may be the first green billionaire.

As in previous bubbles skeptics are marginalized, often demonized. As in so many previous bubbles delusional certainty is hurled at skepticism and reason more like an offensive than a defensive weapon . Gore boldly claims, “The debate is over.”

Believers who do not know which end of the test tube the cork goes into post scientific articles to confirm their belief. Confirmation, not information, is the object of their reading.

As I read about the genius of Al Gore on the cover of Newsweek,  I recall the prophetic words of John Kenneth Galbraith in his book , “A Short History of Financial Bubbles,” .

“Genius is before the fall.”

At the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit our saviors arrive in 1,200 limousines and 140 private jets.

Can their arrogance be any more blinding?

Read in the UK Telegraph:

Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges

Do you remember the outrage when our auto executives took a private plane to DC for their hearing?  Where is the outrage for this fiasco?