The difference between academic credentialsim and real intelligence is understanding and knowing the limits of certainty.  It isn’t what you don’t know that gets you. It is what you think you know that isn’t so.

It is curious that the ruling elite that thinks they know so much more than the rest of us is so unable to face the fallacy of their own certainty even when it is presented in the boldest and most inesacapable manner.  We keep hearing how dumb the tea party members are yet Pelosi’s statements make the worst of them look like Rhodes Scholars.

Education is a wonderful thing. Without understanding and an open mind, however,  it is worse than ignorance.

Victor Davis Hanson writes in the National Review Online The New Sophists (January 6, 2011) how the most “intelligent” of our technocrats get it so wrong and are never held to any accountability.

Excerpts:

“Climate change” has superseded “global warming.” After these radically cold winters, the next replacement appears to be “climate chaos.” Yet if next December is neither too hot nor too cold, expect to hear about the doldrum dangers of “climate calm.”

America is huge and diverse, but the world of our credentialed experts is quite small, warped, and monotonous — circumscribed largely by the prestigious university and an office in the incestuous Washington–New York corridor. There are plenty of prizes, honors, and degrees among our policy-setters and experts, but very little experience in running a business in Oklahoma, raising a large family in Kansas, or working on an assembly line in Michigan, a military base in Texas, a boat in Alaska, or a ranch in Idaho.

How many climate doomsayers have well-funded research positions predicated on grants and subsidies that depend on convincing the public and government of impending disasters that the researchers then can be hired to monitor and address? Are there no green antitrust laws? In contrast, how many of our climate theorists run irrigated farms and energy-intensive businesses, which are at the mercy of new regulations that emanate from distant theorizing?

Thomas Malthus

One of the reasons I am skeptical of global warming/ climate change apocalyptic scenarios is  that throughout history such predictions have almost always proven wrong.

Thomas Malthus (1766- 1834) was actually correct when he suggested that population growth would be curtailed by the limitations of available sustenance, and wars and famine would reduce population growth. But he incorrectly deduced that population’s geometric growth rate would have to outstrip the linear growth of food production.

Malthus like many doomsday Nostradamuses failed to see that technology would address many of the limitations of  natural resources.  Paul Erhlich in the 1968 book The Population Bomb offered similar predictions of population problems and the catastrophes of running out of natural resources. Erhlich, a PhD biology professor at Stanford, lost a famous bet with Julian Simon made in 1980 about the future price of metals.  Simon correctly bet that the long term price trend would be down.

When cars switched from carburetors to fuel injectors and other fuel efficient technology mileage more than doubled. This had the same market effect  as doubling the number of gallons of oil.

What even the most brilliant highly educated scientists suffer is not a lack of intelligence or a lack of education or knowledge; it is a lack of vision, imagination and faith in human potential.  Their lack of consideration of unknown unknowns and randomness has made their predictions largely wrong.

In fact most drastic predictions are wrong. Conversely the worst events we have faced such as World Wars and the recent financial collapse were largely unpredicted, at least by the established authorities in politics and academics.  I worry far less about widely predicted catastrophes than the ones few people are talking about.

Rising commodity prices are more likely the result of weak currencies and other restrictive government policies such as oil drilling bans than human consumption. Higher prices attract more production and drive prices to a new equilibrium.  The long term trend of commodities is still down.

The whaling industry (whale blubber was used as heating fuel) ended with the discovery of oil.  Oil may be replaced by new technologies we have not yet found.

Mark Perry writes in Carpe Diem, The Finite World of Paul Krugman’s Thinking,  that the noted economist  continues the shallow and erroneous predictions of depleting resources that have been proven wrong by many highly educated that preceded him. If understanding is the key to predicting why do we still place such value in opinions that keep proving themselves wrong?

Global warming- I mean ‘climate change’- mongers are unfazed by record cold temperatures. They are astute at explaining how record cold temperatures do in fact prove man made global warming and carbon dioxide emissions actually support their warming hypothesis, but only after the fact.   True understanding is of value in the power to predict.

In the American Thinker Howard Richman and Raymond Richman examine who really did understand the climate issues in The Winner of This Year’s ‘Best Climate Predictor’ Award (Clue It Wasn’t Al Gore!). The press seems to give the most coverage to those who understand the issue the least.  The worst predictor, Al Gore himself, received a Noble Prize for the subject he clearly understands very poorly.

Excerpts:

Gore’s prediction is clearly the worst of these three, yet he was awarded a million-dollar Nobel Peace Prize for bringing this issue to the attention of the world.  Schwarzenegger’s prediction comes in second-worst, yet he is angling for a global warming spokesman job in the Obama administration.  The IPCC’s prediction is third-worst, yet it just won a huge expansion of the U.N. bureaucracy at the Cancun Climate Conference.

Corbyn, like many other astrophysicists, has figured out that climate change is mainly due to extraterrestrial forces, including solar activity and cosmic rays, not carbon dioxide.  If you still believe in the theory that carbon dioxide causes climate change, click here to watch an excellent lecture by Jasper Kirkby at the Cern, one of Europe’s most highly respected centers for scientific research.  Astrophysicists have discovered that changes in the rate of cosmic ray inflow cause climate change and that solar activity shields the earth from cosmic rays.

I do not pretend to know enough about the science of climatology to know which side of this debate  is correct, but it is reckless and foolish to pretend that the debate does not exist.  Predictions of catastrophe from a population bomb (Thomas Malthus), massive toxin exposure (Silent Spring), running out of oil (Club of Rome), or now a disastrous outcome of man induced climate change have not ended as predicted even from noted scientists of their day.  How can we be certain that global warming does in fact exist, that it is necessarily a bad thing if it does (more people die from excessive cold that excessive heat and warming could lengthen growing seasons and increase food production), that it is man made and finally, that any of the policies promising to correct it would be effective.

It is hard to imagine any field of science with more known and unknown variables than global climate prediction. When the tone of the language resembles religious fanaticism rather than an objective reality I can not help but remain skeptical whether scenarios of disaster serve the desires of political power rather than constructive scientific inquiry.

From Boston University Professor Angelo Codevilla’s “America’s Ruling Class- And the Perils of Revolution” (July – August 2010 issue). In The American Spectator (online version).

That is why the ruling class is united and adamant about nothing so much as its right to pronounce definitive, “scientific” judgment on whatever it chooses. When the government declares, and its associated press echoes that “scientists say” this or that, ordinary people — or for that matter scientists who “don’t say,” or are not part of the ruling class — lose any right to see the information that went into what “scientists say.” Thus when Virginia’s attorney general subpoenaed the data by which Professor Michael Mann had concluded, while paid by the state of Virginia, that the earth’s temperatures are rising “like a hockey stick” from millennial stability — a conclusion on which billions of dollars’ worth of decisions were made — to investigate the possibility of fraud, the University of Virginia’s faculty senate condemned any inquiry into “scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards” claiming that demands for data “send a chilling message to scientists…and indeed scholars in any discipline.” The Washington Post editorialized that the attorney general’s demands for data amounted to “an assault on reason.” The fact that the “hockey stick” conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are on record manipulating peer review, the fact that science-by-secret-data is an oxymoron, the very distinction between truth and error, all matter far less to the ruling class than the distinction between itself and those they rule.

Thomas Sowell writes in the National Review

The ‘Science’ Mantra

Excerpt:

Today, politicized “science” has too big a stake in the global warming hysteria to let the facts speak for themselves and let the chips fall where they may. Too many people – in politics and in the media, as well as among those climate scientists who are promoting global warming hysteria – let the raw data on which their calculations have been based fall into the “wrong hands.”

People who talk about the corrupting influence of money seem to automatically assume that it is only private money that is corrupting. But, when governments have billions of dollars invested in the global-warming crusade, massive programs are underway, and whole political careers are at risk if that crusade gets undermined, do not expect the disinterested search for truth.

Among the intelligentsia, there have always been many who are ready to jump on virtually any bandwagon that will take them to the promised land, where the wise and noble few – like themselves – can take the rest of us poor dummies in hand and tell us how we had better change the way we live our lives.

No doubt some climate scientists honestly believe that global warming poses a threat. But other climate scientists honestly believe the opposite. That is why the raw data have had to be destroyed before the latter get their hands on it.

This is tragically the case as regards many other issues, besides global warming, where data are made available only to the true believers and kept out of the hands of those who think otherwise.