Honesty is, indeed, the best policy: AGW update 1

[_Coggins7]

From the SEPP Week That Was for March 31:



WARMING ADVOCATES: TRADING TRUTH FOR POWER.
http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2007/0 ... h-for.html

First warming alarmist Al Gore admits that he thinks it entirely valid to over-represent (exaggerate) the dangers of global warming. Now another top bishop in the Church of Anthropogenic Warming, Mike Hulme from the University of East Anglia, says that we need to use a new kind of science to understand the issue. He calls it post-normal science. And it allows them to trade (normal) truth for influence.
Hulme’s problem with regular science is that: Self-evidently dangerous change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking.... So, we won’t get the exact scare-mongering out of the normal scientific process; so we need a new process in order to get the correct inspiration for public policy.
Under this post-normal science, scientists -- and politicians -- must trade (normal) truth for influence. That’s what Al Gore said when he admitted to exaggerating the dangers of warming. He said it appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentation of how dangerous it is in order to open up his film audience to his ideas. One of the granddads of warming hysteria, Stephen Schneider, suggested this tactic years ago, in 1989, when he said, we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we have. He calls this distortion of the facts a right balance between being effective and being honest. All three are saying it’s appropriate to distort facts in order to gain political influence, i.e. power.
All three of these prominent advocates of anthropogenic warming are saying that one must either distort science, exaggerate facts, or give up the normal scientific process in order to further the political agenda they have. Hulme says science is provisional knowledge that can be modified through its interaction with society. He says scientific knowledge is open to change as it rubs up against society.
What? Science is supposed to founded on facts of reality not on social perceptions, ideas or political opinions. We don’t take public opinion polls to determine facts. Opinions don’t change facts. Pasteur was right even if public opinion was against him. Franklin’s lightning rod worked even if the clergy preached against it.
Hulme admits that the AGW theory is filled with uncertainties but says that circumstances require action before we know the facts - but then apparently facts are something of a social construct. He says his post-normal science has to be practiced where the stakes are high, uncertainties large, and decisions urgent. Under this kind of science he says an important issue is who has the ear of policy that is, who sets the political agenda.
What sort of agenda? He describes this as do we have confidence in technology; do we believe in collective action over private enterprise; do we believe we carry obligations to people invisible to us in geography and time? And the problem with normal science, says Hulme, is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, that broadly-based policy will then follow. He finds that defective because it ignores values, perspectives and political preferences. This means we have to take science off centre stage. Get that! We have to move away from the science and concentrate on political preferences.
I have long argued that what was going on with these alarmists was an intentional substitution of political preferences for science. This confession, by a leading alarmist, confirms that. For Hulme, Climate change is too important to be left to scientists -- least of all the normal ones. Instead it has go to politicians who share a specific set of values such as preferring collective action over private enterprise.
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[_harmony]

[quote="Coggins7"]From the SEPP Week That Was for March 31:
A couple of questions and comments:

1. Where is East Anglia?

2. Anything Al Gore says is automatically assumed to be political in nature. Anyone who believes anything Al Gore says is entitled to the rewards thereof.

3. Politics has been invading the latest scientific evidence for centuries. That which gets funded and that which deserves to get funded are often two entirely different things. Science is driven by money. It's the funders who decide what science finds. And it's the politicians, easily the most corrupt individuals at any given time in any given society, who are often the funders.

[_Coggins7]

From the SEPP Week That Was for March 31:
A couple of questions and comments:

1. Where is East Anglia?

Its a part of eastern England. I don't remember actaully going through it when I was there as a child, as we stayed primarily on the coast and in Scotland.


2. Anything Al Gore says is automatically assumed to be political in nature. Anyone who believes anything Al Gore says is entitled to the rewards thereof.

This is the first thing you've ever said I agree with.

3. Politics has been invading the latest scientific evidence for centuries. That which gets funded and that which deserves to get funded are often two entirely different things. Science is driven by money. It's the funders who decide what science finds. And it's the politicians, easily the most corrupt individuals at any given time in any given society, who are often the funders.

Although your comment here is little more than a Post Modern throwing up of the hands to the winds of cynical nihilism, it does contain a grain of truth. At some times, in some eras, and in some sciences, money does have an over influence on scientific research. But your broad brush statement muddies much more water than it clears. Climatology has been seriously corrupted by government money, which in many cases follows from assumptions about what scientists are supposed to find and its policy implications, but hardly the entire discipline, and money doesn't necessarily create the dynamics you claim. Ideologically interested money does, but even when admitting this, its difficult to tell when such money really influences outcomes. This also cuts both ways, for which reasons basic research into IQ and intelligence is almost impossible (the Bell Curve debate brought this into sharp relief in the 90s).

Government money is particularly pernicious for the reason that AGW plays into the hands of the political class; a political class interested in the continued and limitless concentration of power in the state. But good earth science continues unabated nonetheless, funded by private and university funds, and the AGW wave has crested, I believe. Over the next few years we're going to see the fashionable hysteria die down significantly as the evidence becomes ever more overwhelming that the warming of the 20th century can be explained entirely in natural terms.

[_Mister Scratch]

What I don't understand about your continuous humping away at this point, my dear Loran, is why you hate this movement so much... Don't you live in Los Angeles? Don't advocates for AGW and their ilk push for cleaner air? Do you really like the smog in L.A.? I realize that you can make an argument about ends and means with this, but then in the interests of "honesty [as] the best policy," you would need to apply this to the Church as well.

I have noticed that, despite the name of this messageboard, virtually none of your posts are devoted to anything Mormon-related. Instead, you harp endlessly about "The Left", or "The Seventies," or "AGW." I would be very interested in hearing about how your thoughts on these issues relate to Mormonism. Or is that you know your "precious and dear" Church is about as defensible as AGW? Please enlighten me.

[_Coggins7]

What I don't understand about your continuous humping away at this point, my dear Loran, is why you hate this movement so much... Don't you live in Los Angeles? Don't advocates for AGW and their ilk push for cleaner air? Do you really like the smog in L.A.? I realize that you can make an argument about ends and means with this, but then in the interests of "honesty [as] the best policy," you would need to apply this to the Church as well.

I have noticed that, despite the name of this messageboard, virtually none of your posts are devoted to anything Mormon-related. Instead, you harp endlessly about "The Left", or "The Seventies," or "AGW." I would be very interested in hearing about how your thoughts on these issues relate to Mormonism. Or is that you know your "precious and dear" Church is about as defensible as AGW? Please enlighten me.

First, these points need continuous humping away at until the pathetic and vile philosophy that has spawned them is done away. Secondly, the environmental movement, as a movement generally, is not now and has never been, as a movement, about clean anything. Its about the destruction of modern free market economic relations, democratic institutions, representative government, and property rights. Its also a militant neo-Gnostic religion wholly at odds with both the Gospel, and the general Judeo-Christian/Enlightenment background of the American founding.

I have for quite a while been convinced that the day of the EV anti-Mormon has been eclipsed by the rise of a dissident 'left wing" within the church composed of various kinds of alienated, self seeking activist intellectuals typical of the kinds of people who populate most of the institutions of society and the media in the secular world. I think that they have, for all intents and purposes, superseded the old Walter Martin and Ed Decker type of anti-Mormon and are, as wolves in sheep's clothing always are, much more destructive to the mission of the Church than the older Evangelical Protestant critics, at least in a modern context.

A serious Mormon "Left" brings all of the baggage of the traditional Left, including hostility to economic liberty and property rights, moral and cultural relativism, and a sympathy for egalitarian collectivism, into the Church and attempts to remake it in their own image. The Catholic Church and Protestantism have been wrestling with the same phenomena for generations already.

Along with this comes the typical uber Darwinian (in a broad, socio-cultural sense: Darwinian materialism extrapolated to roughly everything), materialist, reductionist, naturalistic template which then becomes the filter through which all phenomena in the Gospel are interpreted, utterly destroying the metaphysical core of the Church's claims and doctrines.

But of course, this is the point.

[_Coggins7]

From Roger Pielke at http://climatesci.colorado.edu/



TIME Magazine on Global Warming: A Guest Weblog by Hendrik Tennekes

Filed under: Guest Weblogs — guest @ 7:00 am



TIME magazine’s April 9 double issue, showing a worried and lonely penguin on the cover, running “The Global Warming Survival Guide” as a banner line, is representative of the public perception of climate change.

As a young faculty member at Penn State forty years ago, I quickly learned what my colleagues thought of the TIME/LIFE empire: “LIFE is the magazine for people who cannot read, TIME is the magazine for people who cannot think.” I am tempted to agree today. But I will resist, because TIME merely follows the anticipated wishes of its subscribers, much as both parties in Congress are slaves to their perception of the wishes of taxpayers. If I want to say anything, I will have to focus on TIME’s interpretation of the perception of its subscribers in the USA.

What does this perception amount to? That is straightforward:

1: Climate Change equals Global Warming
2: Carbon dioxide emissions are to blame
3: Adaptation equals strengthening coastal defenses
4: Global Warming comes without global responsibility

Let me deal with item 2 first. In a light-footed but moralistic mood, TIME gives “51 Things You Can Do to Make a Difference.” Sure, like lowering your thermostat setting in the winter (wear sweaters instead), and turning your air conditioning no lower than 80 degrees in summertime. Yes, these are sensible adjustments to a looming energy shortage. By all means, ride a bike to the office, as many Boulder citizens do. I lived there for half a year in 1987, and rode a bike to my NCAR office on Marine Street as often as weather permitted. I considered that a sensible way of getting the necessary exercise and reducing gasoline expenses at the same time. But one doesn’t need Climate Change as an excuse for energy conservation. Most of the 51 points TIME magazine lists make sense as personal contributions to energy policy concerns. Climate change is an irrelevant underpinning of TIME’s list of things to do. Incidentally, many of TIME’s subscribers in Europe and other continents might feel somewhat offended by the energy conservation measures listed in the magazine. Such measures have been common practice to them for many years.

When I turn to item 4, the issue there, in my opinion, is that we have to look at the Third World first when we wish to apply Roger Pielke Jr.’s vulnerability paradigm. TIME magazine seems to cater primarily to the feelings of wealthy urbanites, who tend to be rather narcissistic. Possible flooding of Holland (of which more below) pales compared to repeated flooding of Bangladesh. I find it repulsive that Dutch dredging companies are happy to construct fancy islands for the wealthy residents of Dubai, but don’t even bother to consider alternatives for flooding defenses in Bangladesh. And the magazine weasels around on the dangers for New Orleans. “The earth’s weather system is too complex to pin blame for Katrina definitively on global warming,” it writes, “but unusually strong hurricanes are exactly what scientists expect to see as global warming intensifies.” Well, this is what TIME subscribers apparently like to hear. Sorry for you, Roger Jr. How often do we have to repeat that twenty years of warnings by the US Corps of Engineers were summarily ignored by local, state, and national politicians?

Item 3 hits home for this Dutchman. TIME embraces adaptation (no mean feat, after all these years), but does not spend a single line on adaptation measures other than strengthening coastal defenses in lowland areas. It is quite specific on the Netherlands:

“The greatest flood danger to the Netherlands comes from the North Sea, which is more powerful and unpredictable than the Dutch rivers. Dutch law has historically required North Sea defenses to deliver a 1-in-10,000 years level of protection. “And now the Parliament wants to raise the North Sea standard to a 1-in-100,000 years level of protection,” says Pier Vellinga, a senior government adviser and professor at Wageningen University and Research Center. Vellinga calculates that to maintain the higher level of protection, the Netherlands would have to commit about $ 1.3 billion annually, 0.2% of its GDP. The alternative is the prospect of losing its coastal cities altogether. “We want foreign visitors and investment to keep coming to the Netherlands,” Vellinga says, “so we must assure them this will remain a safe place.”

It is not hard to provide a context for Dr. Vellinga’s statements. He is Holland’s most prominent climate alarmist and spin doctor, who recently was hired by the Board of Regents of Wageningen University. Vellinga is an effective fund raiser, that’s why. The $1.3 billion he mentions is four times as high as the current estimate by the Ministry of Public Works, based on IPCC projections of about a foot of sea-level rise. I need not go into detail here, because the Director of Holland’s Environmental Assessment Agency, Klaas van Egmond, deemed it necessary to go on state television news last Thursday, April 5. He stated that North Sea protection is well taken care of as long as sea-level rise is less than five feet. Instead, van Egmond stated, river flooding requires priority. The IJssel branch of the Rhine may have to be re-engineered in order to divert flood waters of the Rhine to the former Zuyder Zee, the inland lake in the center of the Netherlands, van Egmond said. I want to add that, apart from everything else, Vellinga has got his priorities mixed up. And I am proud of Dr. van Egmond. It his is job to make assessments and to speak up when needed. He did so forcefully last week. More power to him.

As to item 1, it needs no comment here. ClimateScience was started to fight this disingenuous simplification of climate change. We have a long way to go, fighting all these odds. I wish us well.