When I was in the Navy I noticed that seemingly every officer who flew right seat in charge of ordinance was a political science major. I asked if they need to understand this before the bombed the enemy but they didn’t think it was funny. Shut up enlisted peon. Whatever. This is not about political science you study in college. This is about science being replaced with politics and the science of politics.
When I had my revelation about the obvious flaws in global warming I got a few videos, which I recommend everyone do. There is a new one out I haven’t seen called “Not Evil, Just Wrong”. I got Lord Monkton’s “Apocalypse No” and “The Great Global Warming Scam”. The later had a good number of interviews and an extra DVD with more interviews with scientists in the field. It was interesting to see guys like Chris Christy who had been one of the top IPCC guys at the start and had walked away. Christy was all the more interesting because of a common claim of science by consensus. He insisted his name be removed from their summary. He said most scientists gave up and let their remain. (Christy was sincerely interested in global warming and retasked NASA satellites to get the data showing no boundary layer)
This is perhaps one of the most interesting things about such reports. The people in charge of producing an IPCC report are not scientists. They are managers hired by the UN, or as we would say, bureaucrats. Many scientists who originally worked with the IPCC did not agree with their conclusions, but little wonder. I really love Penn & Teller’s Showtime show Bullsh*t. One episode they did was on second hand smoke where they pointed out that the report could find no conclusive evidence as to any health issue. This is not what the World Health Organization wanted in the summary so they wrote a conclusion that was in fact any thing but inconclusive. Here’s the interesting part. They understood that if you have a report that is hundreds or thousands of pages most people are too lazy to read it all and just read a few pages of summary. That means you can commission a report on anything, get whatever data is returned and then say whatever you think you can get people to buy in the summary and you will probably be just fine. Penn & Teller are non smokers BTW in case you want to send them hate mail.
And so we have the assertion put forth of the 2000 plus people involved with the IPCC that they are all scientists and that they all agree completely, every one of them down to a man. Now to sell this really preposterous idea you must present it in a very serious way and with absolute conviction so that nobody smells the undeniable odor of bovine excrement wafting up from the assertion. Think about it. Climate science is a very young discipline. Every year computer modelers get together to see how they did predicting this year’s change and every year they are all 3%-6% off. Compound a 3% error over 100 years and you’re off by 300%. That means in a century what was 70 degrees is now 210, almost hot enough to boil water. At 6% you’re broiling steak at twice that.
It would be great if a fledgling science could somehow suddenly get thousands of selfless scientists who could alert us the the horrible end of civilization only a few short years away that somehow we were all too stupid to know about before Al Gore showed up with an inconvenient message like manna from heaven. On the other hand it took doctors decades to heed the science to wash their hands to stop spreading disease. Granted there was consensus for those decades, but at the cost of many lives for the arrogant educated looking down their nose at real science. But there hasn’t been any dissent on this new idea has there? Funny thing about that. Let’s say that I were to cede that, even though maybe 100 of those people involved in the IPCC reports were scientists instead of railroad engineers or eco-fundraisers, let’s say they are all scientists. We’re talking people with degrees from universities in science, not some knuckle dragging Joe lunchbox out of the public school system. In fact let’s take it a little farther. Let’s say they all had PhDs in some science field. 2,500 PhDs. Now let’s see if we can find any people with the same relative standing to offer a counter opinion.
You know what? Let’s put it this way. You line up your IPCC alarmist fund raiser bozos, the whole kit and kaboodle and I will just see if I can find as many PhDs who disagree. Would that make you think maybe we should revist? Wait… I feel generous. I’ll give you 2 to 1. I need 5,000 science PhDs. Aw what the heck, 3 to 1. If I could show you 7,500 science PhDs who disagree with the IPCC position on global warming then you would reconsider if the science was settled? This is what I thought was so interesting. The petition where each signer was vetted was put together in my home state of Oregon no less by OSU scientists. As of this reading I see 9029 PhDs and 31,486 scientists total. Have a look here.
So let me get back to the politics of science. Al Gore loves to say the science is settled. Doesn’t look settled to me. Does this look settled to you? Let’s consider the politics of science…
When you publish a paper you have to find a scientific journal to publish it. So you have to get to first base with a publishing organization. To be considered peer reviewed you have to submit your paper with your assertion and the documentation. This is given to other scientists who then see if they can duplicate your experiments or verify your formulas and data. The critical factor is that those reviewing cannot have a vested interest in the review. So you can’t have your partner review your new widget you plan to sell to the defense department and say it’s good and expect to have any credibility. So if you could manage to influence the relatively few publishers who wanted your idea to succeed you could in theory keep competing ideas from being published. This was one of the revelations in the climategate emails.
So when the hockey stick graph that persuaded me global warming must be real was published it seemed very interesting to a couple guys in Canada. Steve McIntire has an award winning blog. Imagine contacting the author of the chart and asking if you could have the data to do a review. Remember if a report is peer reviewed than the data must be available, but it turns out that it wasn’t. In fact this data was never fully made available but with some sleuthing they finally came upon what was being done in weighting a mix of data in such a way that you could have mapped your bathroom visits in the last month and got a hockey stick.
This was the perfect example of how to lie with statistics. Unfortunately we have to trust some people. If you can’t fly an airplane (and don’t have wads of cash) you’re going to have to trust the pilot. However in the case of peer reviewed data that is in fact clearly not peer reviewed… Congressional hearings ensued and it became clear the hockey stick was a fraud.
So what happens when you disagree with the climate orthodoxy? In Iran if you are found to be against God they kill you. During the Spanish inquisition if someone accused you of being a witch they tortured you until you confessed. Confession is good for the soul. Today in America we have come a long way. Unfortunately one consequence of our constitutional freedom is that the orthodoxy is prevented from disposing of those who inconveniently blaspheme their doctrines. Since they can’t simply kill those offensive knuckle dragging flat earth idiots they simply assassinate their character.
Here is the final bastion of irrational thought. First the deacons pontificate and strut about naked proclaiming their silken robes. Many people fall in line because they said they had clothes on with such convictions. Hey if you’re not too smart why call attention to it by pointing out that the emperor has no clothes? Of course calling it into question gets a stern rebuke. Disagreeing requires something stronger. That’s when the condescending name calling starts. Of course the emperor’s robes are nice. Unfortunately they forget the words of Gandhi, “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Here’s the central idea to take away from this. In America our founding fathers had differing ideas on how to construct a government. In the end the back and forth created the most amazing and successful long term government in modern times. No small feat. When you look at all great accomplishments you see that people must come together. They must bring diverse ideas and in the testing and debating the forge a fusion of the strongest elements into something great. No man who possesses a great idea or a worthy proposition is afraid to bring it to the table for debate. The conviction that your idea is worthy, that your discovery is significant, that your research is right… That is something you surly want your chance to prove.
If you are trying to put something over on people you take a different course. You first focus on packaging, because if the content is lacking the packaging had better be great. Then you seek to present where you cannot be questioned or debated. If you are drawn into a one on one discussion where someone can expose the failure of the merits of your assertions it could be your downfall. Most ideally you look to get endorsements from popular voices and finally you present with the confidence that even though this is the first time somebody has heard of it that it is old news and everybody else knows it’s true.
I close with this. Al Gore is a politician. He can say he is heavily invested in carbon trading because of his convictions, but that doesn’t change the fact that he would take pennies on the dollar and become a billionaire. He can say he believes everything he said and that he donated $100,000,000 to charity, a charity he oversees. He can try to tell me that it’s not an awesome tax shelter. The guy debated George Bush on TV when he ran for president. He can debate one of the people challenging him. In fact when the eco-press took the mic away from a film maker asking him an inconvenient question last year it was the first time in four years he had taken a question. Ask yourself, why isn’t Al Gore explaining and supporting his settled science as so many doubt it?
When politicians can deliver science without answering questions and stifling all debate, then ask for the largest tax increase in US history that will make them rich and suggest we need “global governance” I think we can say that is science being co-opted for politics. Not only is the science not settled, the politics aren’t settled either.
So many good points. But this one alone is a good enough argument for me to question the non-debatable science:
“No man who possesses a great idea or a worthy proposition is afraid to bring it to the table for debate. The conviction that your idea is worthy, that your discovery is significant, that your research is right… That is something you surly want your chance to prove.”
Al Gore, prove it!
Instead, he and a few of the CRU scientists have run off and made excuses. Any good scientist I’ve heard from claims the idea that someone would shut the questions out with: “The debate is closed!” has nothing to do with the way real science is conducted. Which is just to confirm your point, the science has been politicized.
Now if only our media would stop propagandizing for Gore and his troupe of twit scientists everyone would know the truth.
Great blog post!