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.

In American Thinker Randall Hoven writes Science for Stupid Idiots, 9/22/11.

Excerpts:

we get to why we must believe “science,” meaning taking whatever “scientists” say is incontrovertible truth.  If we start having doubts about any of it, we just might start thinking for ourselves.  We will no longer simply swallow what our betters feed us.

The irony is that so many “scientists” have become the enemy they once fought.  They now sit like the elders of the Church at the time of the Guttenberg press.  Imagine the chaos that would result if people could read the Bible themselves!  Better not teach them to read.

Real science is the scientific method.  It means skepticism.  It means publishing your data (as Samuel Morton did).  It means doubt.  It means humility.

HKO comments:

I may not know which end of the test tube the cork goes into, but I do realize that there are so many variables and unknowns in the world of climate that the debate is never over.   Scientists can fall into the same emotional and logical bias traps as any other.   Hoven’s article makes a grand tour of the fallibility of science.

When skepticism is demonized, truth suffers.  Ideologues  present us with a false choice; if we do not ‘believe’ then we are fools, deniers,  and idiots.  This not the logic of science; it is the logic of narrow minded fanaticism.  When ‘non-believers’ are demonized as Al Gore has done so often he is acting like a religious fanatic, not a scientist.

Evolution is a theory, but it is a pretty damn good one.  It does have gaps, which should simply invite further study.  This does not mean that the theory is thus proven false.  And the only alternative to evolution is not creationism.  Creationism can be a poetic metaphor, but as an explanation of our world it is not science and it is foolish to treat it as such.

There is always the unknown, the unfound and the unproven.  Perhaps evolution  will evolve into or be replaced by a better theory.

Philosophers have long debated the intersections of religion and science.  While religion and science may not mix well, they both mix poorly with politics.

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?

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.

Science is a realm of discovery, skepticism, understanding, confirmation and challenge. But throughout history science has been polluted by political considerations.  In the Middle Ages the church considered any theory of the universe without the earth at the center heresy.

More currently science has been polluted by attempts to attach the certainty of science to the unknowable and the uncertain.  When science is hijacked to support political causes  skepticism and confirmation are treated as heresy the same as  the church condemned the heliocentric theories of the Middle Ages.

Wall Street bankers deluded themselves into thinking that the vastly complicated uncertainty of global markets and risk could be made certain with complicated mathematical formulas.  Blinded by vast sums of money they believed the ridiculous because they so wanted to. A philosophical understanding of risk was replaced with delusional mathematical certainty.

A political push to control wealth is served by the global warming/ climate change hysteria; credentialism and intelligence offers no more clarity to the future than the Gaussian Cupola Formula offered Wall Street.

That anyone could purport to know the future climate of the earth decades out with any degree of certainty defies common sense. The models offered to support such “science” are no more credible than the formulas created by the PhD quants on Wall Street who proposed to turn junk mortgages into AAA securities.