A man with one blind spot (apparently)

The writer of the excerpt below is Clive Hamilton, executive director of the Leftist Australia Institute. He starts by acknowledging how baseless political scares usually are so the naive reader might think him plausible when he says that global warming is the exception. It's a clever approach from a diehard warmist but when he gets to the point of hinting at the need to "suspend" democracy, I hope most people can see the Stalinist behind the mask.

His lack of intellectual seriousness can also be seen in his reliance on the pronouncements of chief climate hysteric James Hansen -- who in typical Stalinist style relies of fudged statistics to make his case. If his statistics are not fudged, why will he not release the raw data on which they are based? It's a gross breach of normal scientific procedure not to give open access to your data so Hansen's refusal speaks for itself. It shows he has much to fear from independent examination of his work. Even with the roadblocks put up by Hansen, McKitrick recently found glaring errors in Hansen's statistics so the unreliability of what Hansen says is more than mere suspicion. Hamiliton should know all that but his aim is obviously propagation of panic, not the propagation of truth

As we see next below, Hansen has just now under great pressure at last disgorged some of his "secrets" but where that will lead us remains to be seen. The release has however already raised fresh questions. See below

POLITICAL actors typically engage in exaggeration to advance their agenda, and in the case of climate change the situation is no different. The Labor Party exaggerated the likely damage due to the introduction of the GST, despite the fact that Paul Keating wanted to introduce just such a tax. The Coalition is exaggerating the economic effects of Labor's industrial relations policy. Social-welfare campaigners often overstate the extent of poverty, hoping that appreciation of the magnitude of the problem will spur the public or politicians into doing something about it. Environmental campaigns are no different. Environmentalists have often overstated the effects of environmental decline.

The risks of nuclear power, though considerable, have been exaggerated. The dangers of urban air pollution have been inflated. The threats posed by DDT, lead pollution and pesticides, while significant, have usually been presented as much scarier than they actually are. And the likely effects of genetically modified crops have been blown out of proportion. The purpose of political exaggeration is to stimulate stronger emotional responses, usually fear, and make us more likely to act in the way desired. When your opponents are busily exaggerating the other way, the pressure is almost irresistible.

Yet there is one area where the opposite is the case, where the protagonists on one side have for years systematically understated the dangers. Climate scientists have been afraid to talk about the true extent of the dangers of global warming. Those who have looked closely at what the scientists are concluding believe that the truth is so frightening that, if told, it will stop people from acting, rather than stimulate them to do more. There is a cavernous gap between the urgency of the warnings from science and the political response to it. The concern among the public is way ahead of that of our politicians but it remains true that the public simply has no grasp of the magnitude of the disaster that looms ahead of us.

Nowhere in the rich world, except perhaps in the US, is this radical disconnect greater than in Australia. In June the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics carried a paper by James Hansen and others clarifying the danger of human-induced climate change. Hansen is widely recognised as the world's most eminent climate scientist. The authors concluded that an additional warming of 1C above the year-2000 level will have effects that "may be highly disruptive", using expected sea-level rise as the best indicator of danger. A 1C increase above the 2000 level means an average temperature increase of about 1.7C above the pre-industrial age average. The authors' analysis suggests that this "tipping point" is almost locked in.

They acknowledge that avoiding this danger point is "still technically feasible" but in practice keeping global temperatures from rising by less than 2C is now beyond us. As industrial activity in China and India increases, the effects of global warming will be intensified. In short, we are already past the point that locks in 2C of warming, and will without question go well beyond it. Even a 3C rise is looking very hard to avoid. Very few people, even among environmentalists, have truly faced up to what the science is telling us.

This is because the implications of 3C, let alone 4C or 5C, are so horrible that we look to any possible scenario to head it off, including the canvassing of "emergency" responses such as the suspension of democratic processes.

More here





Hansen disgorges something

Comment below by Steve McIntyre

Hansen has just released what is said to be the source code for their temperature analysis. The release was announced in a shall-we-say ungracious email to his email distribution list and a link is now present at the NASA webpage.

Hansen says resentfully that they would have liked a “week or two” to make a “simplified version” of the program and that it is this version that “people interested in science” will want, as opposed to the version that actually generated their results.

Reto Ruedy has organized into a single document, as well as practical on a short time scale, the programs that produce our global temperature analysis from publicly available data streams of temperature measurements. These are a combination of subroutines written over the past few decades by Sergej Lebedeff, Jay Glascoe, and Reto. Because the programs include a variety of

languages and computer unique functions, Reto would have preferred to have a week or two to combine these into a simpler more transparent structure, but because of a recent flood of demands for the programs, they are being made available as is. People interested in science may want to wait a week or two for a simplified version.

In recent posts, I’ve observed that long rural stations in South America and Africa do not show the pronounced ROW trend (Where’s Waldo?) that is distinct from the U.S. temperature history as well as the total lack of long records from Antarctica covering the 1930s. Without mentioning climateaudit.org or myself by name, Hansen addresses the “lack of quality data from South America and Africa, a legitimate concern”, concluding this lack does not “matter” to the results.

Another favorite target of those who would raise doubt about the reality of global warming is the lack of quality data from South America and Africa, a legitimate concern. You will note in our maps of temperature change some blotches in South America and Africa, which are probably due to bad data. Our procedure does not throw out data because it looks unrealistic, as that would be subjective. But what is the global significance of these regions of exceptionally poor data? As shown by Figure 1, omission of South America and Africa has only a tiny effect on the global temperature change. Indeed, the difference that omitting these areas makes is to increase the global temperature change by (an entirely insignificant) 0.01C.

So United States shows no material change since the 1930s, but this doesn’t matter, South America doesn’t matter, Africa doesn’t matter and Antarctica has no records relevant to the 1930s. Europe and northern Asia would seem to be plausible candidates for locating Waldo. (BTW we are also told that the Medieval Warm Period was a regional phenomenon confined to Europe and northern Asia - go figure.]

On two separate occasions, Hansen, who two weeks ago contrasted royalty with “court jesters” saying that one does not “joust with jesters”, raised the possibility that the outside community is “wondering” why (using the royal “we”) he (a) “bothers to put up with this hassle and the nasty e-mails that it brings” or (b) “subject ourselves to the shenanigans”.

Actually, it wasn’t something that I, for one, was wondering about it all. In my opinion, questions about how he did his calculations are entirely appropriate and he had an obligation to answer the questions - an obligation that would have continued even if had flounced off at the mere indignity of having to answer a mildly probing question. Look, ordinary people get asked questions all the time and most of them don’t have the luxury of “not bothering with the hassle” or “not subjecting themselves to the shenanigans”. They just answer the questions the best they can and don’t complain. So should Hansen.

Hansen provides some interesting historical context to his studies, observing that his analysis was the first analysis to include Southern Hemisphere results, which supposedly showed that, contrary to the situation in the Northern Hemisphere, there wasn’t cooling from the 1940s to the 1970s:

The basic GISS temperature analysis scheme was defined in the late 1970s by Jim Hansen when a method of estimating global temperature change was needed for comparison with one-dimensional global climate models. Prior temperature analyses, most notably those of Murray Mitchell, covered only 20-90N latitudes. Our rationale was that the number of Southern Hemisphere stations was sufficient for a meaningful estimate of global temperature change, because temperature anomalies and trends are highly correlated over substantial geographical distances. Our first published results (Hansen et al., Climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, Science 213, 957, 1981) showed that, contrary to impressions from northern latitudes, global cooling after 1940 was small, and there was net global warming of about 0.4C between the 1880s and 1970s.

Earlier in the short essay, Hansen said that “omission of South America and Africa has only a tiny effect on the global temperature change”. However, they would surely have an impact on land temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere? And, as the above paragraph shows, the calculation of SH land temperatures and their integration into global temperatures seems to have been a central theme in Hansen’s own opus. If Hansen says that South America and Africa don’t matter to “global” and thus presumably to Southern Hemisphere temperature change, then it makes one wonder all the more: what does matter?

Personally, as I’ve said on many occasions, I have little doubt that the late 20th century was warmer than the 19th century. At present, I’m intrigued by the question as to how we know that it’s warmer now than in the 1930s. It seems plausible to me that it is. But how do we know that it is? And why should any scientist think that answering such a question is a “hassle”?

In my first post on the matter, I suggested that Hansen’s most appropriate response was to make his code available promptly and cordially. Since a somewhat embarrassing error had already been identified, I thought that it would be difficult for NASA to completely stonewall the matter regardless of Hansen’s own wishes in the matter. (I hadn’t started an FOI but was going to do so.)

Had Hansen done so, if he wished, he could then have included an expression of confidence that the rest of the code did not include material defects. Now he’s had to disclose the code anyway and has done so in a rather graceless way.

Source






The British conservatives get religion

The Conservatives will unveil tough regulations on televisions, fridges and other household appliances this week as part of a plan to make Britain a world leader in energy-efficiency, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal. Under the proposals, caps would be set on how much energy all electrical appliances can use. Goods exceeding those limits would be banned from sale after a set date. Household electrical goods would also have to be fitted with labels that would allow consumers to see at point of sale how much energy the device will typically use in a year and how it compares with its peers.

The Tories also plan to pull the plug on the "stand-by" function on many electrical goods, which accounts for more than 2 per cent of Britain's electricity use. Electrical goods that could be kept on stand-by indefinitely would also be banned from sale after a set date. The proposals are to be unveiled in the Conservatives' Quality of Life report, the last of the party's eight policy reviews.

Led by the millionaire environmentalist Zac Goldsmith and the former cabinet minister John Gummer, the report examines transport, housing, urban planning, public spaces, energy, waste and pollution. "Reducing our energy use through a massive commitment to energy efficiency in our homes should be the first priority of a government committed to tackling climate change," said a Tory source. The report says that while some progress has been made on making electronic goods more efficient, these gains have been largely undermined by the sharp increase in household goods in recent years. It is said that if all of Britain's 25 million mobile phone chargers were left switched off, the unused energy could power 66,000 homes for a year.

The review is also expected to unveil a series of green taxes, such as VAT on domestic flights and a "per-flight tax" on airlines. The report will also call for a moratorium on airport expansion and incentives for domestic air passengers to switch to trains. Higher taxes on 4x4 vehicles are also expected to be discussed, along with proposals to make cycling more -attractive.

Source





HOW TO DEFEND SOCIETY AGAINST SCIENCE

Excerpt below from an essay by Paul Feyerabend, a prominent and skeptical philosopher of science

I want to defend society and its inhabitants from all ideologies, science included. All ideologies must be seen in perspective. One must not take them too seriously. One must read them like fairytales which have lots of interesting things to say but which also contain wicked lies, or like ethical prescriptions which may be useful rules of thumb but which are deadly when followed to the letter.

Now, is this not a strange and ridiculous attitude? Science, surely, was always in the forefront of the fight against authoritarianism and superstition. It is to science that we owe our increased intellectual freedom vis-a-vis religious beliefs; it is to science that we owe the liberation of mankind from ancient and rigid forms of thought. Today these forms of thought are nothing but bad dreams-and this we learned from science. Science and enlightenment are one and the same thing-even the most radical critics of society believe this. Kropotkin wants to overthrow all traditional institutions and forms of belief, with the exception of science. Ibsen criticises the most intimate ramifications of nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology, but he leaves science untouched. Levi-Strauss has made us realise that Western Thought is not the lonely peak of human achievement it was once believed to be, but he excludes science from his relativization of ideologies. Marx and Engels were convinced that science would aid the workers in their quest for mental and social liberation.

Are all these people deceived? Are they all mistaken about the role of science? Are they all the victims of a chimaera? To these questions my answer is a firm Yes and No. Now, let me explain my answer. My explanation consists of two parts, one more general, one more specific. The general explanation is simple. Any ideology that breaks the hold a comprehensive system of thought has on the minds of men contributes to the liberation of man. Any ideology that makes man question inherited beliefs is an aid to enlightenment. A truth that reigns without checks and balances is a tyrant who must be overthrown, and any falsehood that can aid us in the over throw of this tyrant is to be welcomed. It follows that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science indeed was an instrument of liberation and enlightenment. It does not follow that science is bound to remain such an instrument.

There is nothing inherent in science or in any other ideology that makes it essentially liberating. Ideologies can deteriorate and become stupid religions. Look at Marxism. And that the science of today is very different from the science of 1650 is evident at the most superficial glance. For example, consider the role science now plays in education. Scientific "facts" are taught at a very early age and in the very same manner in which religious "facts" were taught only a century ago. There is no attempt to waken the critical abilities of the pupil so that he may be able to see things in perspective.

At the universities the situation is even worse, for indoctrination is here carried out in a much more systematic manner. Criticism is not entirely absent. Society, for example, and its institutions, are criticised most severely and often most unfairly and this already at the elementary school level. But science is excepted from the criticism. In society at large the judgement of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgement of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago. The move towards "demythologization," for example, is largely motivated by the wish to avoid any clash between Christianity and scientific ideas. If such a clash occurs, then science is certainly right and Christianity wrong.

Pursue this investigation further and you will see that science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Do not be misled by the fact that today hardly anyone gets killed for joining a scientific heresy. This has nothing to do with science. It has something to do with the general quality of our civilization. Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has to offer.

But-is this description not utterly unfair? Have I not presented the matter in a very distorted light by using tendentious and distorting terminology? Must we not describe the situation in a very different way? I have said that science has become rigid, that it has ceased to be an instrument of change and liberation, without adding that it has found the truth, or a large part thereof. Considering this additional fact we realise, so the objection goes, that the rigidity of science is not due to human wilfulness. It lies in the nature of things. For once we have discovered the truth-what else can we do but follow it?

This trite reply is anything but original. It is used whenever an ideology wants to reinforce the faith of its followers. "Truth" is such a nicely neutral word. Nobody would deny that it is commendable to speak the truth and wicked to tell lies. Nobody would deny that-and yet nobody knows what such an attitude amounts to. So it is easy to twist matters and to change allegiance to truth in one's everyday affairs into allegiance to the Truth of an ideology which is nothing but the dogmatic defense of that ideology.

And it is of course not true that we have to follow the truth. Human life is guided by many ideas. Truth is one of them. Freedom and mental independence are others. If Truth, as conceived by some ideologists, conflicts with freedom, then we have a choice. We may abandon freedom. But we may also abandon Truth. (Alternatively, we may adopt a more sophisticated idea of truth that no longer contradicts freedom; that was Hegel's solution.)

My criticism of modern science is that it inhibits freedom of thought. If the reason is that it has found the truth and now follows it, then I would say that there are better things than first finding, and then following such a monster.

FULL ESSAY here




GLOBAL WARMING TEST

There is a global warming test here that is rather fun.

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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