Following the PNS concept, scientists are no longer striving after ‘truth’ but for ‘quality’ of their ‘narrative’, in other words for politically correct findings. While ‘normal’ science in the sense of Thomas S. Kuhn’s work ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ (1962) is looking for economically useful objective knowledge within the framework of a generally accepted paradigm by means of experimental problem solving, ‘post normal’ science is guided by new created values like ecological righteousness. It is permitted to manipulate evidence (for instance by the ‘Hockey-Stick’ graph) in order to save the ‘narrative’ of man-made global warming and to achieve ‘good’ political ends, for instance establishing emissions trading or subsidising non competitive ‘renewable’ energies. Stalinist charlatan Trofim Lyssenko would not have done better.

Jerome Ravetz was defending against this interpretation of his work in a guest post on the sceptics-blog ‘Watts Up With That (WUWT)’  by explaining ‘Climategate’ as an unfortunate mixture of ‘normal’ science and ‘green’ advocycy in ‘post normal’ situation. More than enough stuff for the British House of Commons Science and Technology Committee that has quizzed the scientists at the centre of the ‘climategate’ scandal this week.

His new book, L’imposture climatique is a more than welcome diatribe against the ecologically correct and constructivist establishment.

For non-French readers, here are a some instructive excerpts (my translation).

On the title:

”It is an imposture to claim that we can foresee the global climate in a century. (…) The second imposture is that there is anthropogenic warming through CO2 emissions.”

What about the supposed relationship and Al Gore?

”The equation between temperature and CO2 variations is simply false. The famous hockey stick curb is false.” (…) ”Everything is false in [Al Gore’s] assertions, yet he presents them as … demonstrations.”

Or just to drive home the argument, an excerpt from the book:

”I don’t use the word ’climate imposture’ lightly. Every time that independent thinkers with a solid scientific background have examined the dossier of ’global warming’ they have either expressed doubt or refuted the alarmist theses of the IPCC.”

Heavy stuff; he’ll get plenty of heat, but three cheers for this initiative.

Photos: freedigitalphotos

Some commentators don’t see it that way at all, but instead take all criticism as a personal insult. The examples are numerous, but the most blatant one I’ve found so far is from an otherwise classical liberal, sensible editorial page in a Swedish newspaper. (In Swedish, but you have to trust my summary, or use Google translator). The headline is, basically, “Wipe that smile of your faces – sceptics”.

Writes Ann-Charlotte Marteus: “When the credibility of the alarms is hurt, the Global Warming theories loose their ‘front pages’. It gets harder to comprehend and easier to ignore. That’s bad, as the climate has lots of natural enemies, and I’m not just thinking about Elisabeth Höglund.” (My clarification: Höglund worked as staff reporter for many years and could only write what she was told. As free lancer, she has now started to question the validity of the alarms. To some dismay in her old circles.)

What the editor writes, this time in my humble interpretation, is basically that it was not a fake. If it was a fake, that would not be a problem either. The problem is that ordinary people – who don’t understand what’s good for them – might think that it was a fake, and then the problems would persist. Because there is a threat out there, and that threat consists of the so called “Sceptics”, who falsely claim that it was a fake. The only solution is that the politicians start spending money again, and speak up, in order to create a general feeling that it was not a fake.

It’s not really circular. It’s something more. Maybe global?

If this is the new alarmist mantra, the debate really is over. In a new way.

Final Frontier

The worst problem, according to experts, is not that the IPCC both screwed up on several points and tried to hide the facts. The real threat is that the “so called ‘Skeptics’” might try to gain momentum for their own obscure beliefs. To get some historical perspective, we managed to dig up fragments from an interview by CFACT.Earth, made sometime during mid 15

^th century, with the High Priest of the Intergovernmental Panel on Earth Preservation, Professor Terra Isma.

- Professor, are the recent revelations about fraud in your report a sign that maybe you were wrong from the start?

• Not at all! First of all, it’s a giant job to save the world and a few mistakes are unavoidable. Secondly, you have to remember that there are powerful forces out there, trying to sabotage our work. Scientifically, the debate is over. The few globalists crying out loud present new theories that are unfounded and should not be taken seriously.
• New theories? But already 700 years ago, astronomers established that the earth was round. Why do you leave this out of your report?
• It’s impossible to substantiate what happened so long ago, even as we now have included the research in our new report to shut the big mouths up. What counts is what we can see today, and it’s the imminent risk of the world tipping over.
• And the Hockey Puck? You included this in your earlier report, took it away and now it’s there again, even though your own scientists admit it’s worthless?
• OK, maybe she’s not really a puck. Maybe more like a home-made pizza. Or even a rugby ball! But that’s not the point. Even the globalists admit the earth is not entirely global, they say it shrinks a bit on what they call the poles, but don’t forget, you can fall off a rugby ball too.
• But how about gravitation?
• It’s a beautiful idea, but honestly would you risk the future of the entire world on a theory? After all, we are doing this for our grandchildren.
• How about the earlier claims that hoards of people were falling off on the other side of the mountains, or that half of the population in Frisia had disappeared?
• A small mistake. The son of one of my colleagues disappeared over the mountain top, but it turned out he just went to buy a newspaper. Frisia is a dull area. Impossible to find a decent restaurant at lunch time, but maybe the figures were a bit exaggerated.
• So you kept all this secret before the big international conference in Aachen last year, and that event is still described as a fiasco.
• We succeeded in getting public support, but not a binding treaty. To keep the world afloat, our experts calculate that the population growth must not exceed two percent and migration stop entirely. We managed to get some dedication for the two percent goal, but not for our demand that all countries dedicate 25 percent of its workforce to build a solid wall around the world.
• Why is that?
• The globalists are a powerful force, especially supported by the shipping industry and their propaganda about glorious adventures, exploration and exotic dancers. What destroyed it in the end was naturally the Chinese.
• Who are the Chinese?
• Some sort of foreigners, I believe. From the east.
• But what is the real threat?
• The threat is real.
• But in what way?
• First of all, if people start moving around and gather in the corners, they not only risk their own lives, but increase the risk of the entire world tripping over. That would be doomsday, it’s imminent and there is no more time to talk. We need to act to stop travel. In the short term, the eastern countries would suffer mostly from increased sea faring, as they are dependent on their trade routs on land. We would like to prohibit all ships larger than a raft.
• Don’t you think that even the general public now will start to question your far reaching goals, when you admit to both lying and trying to hide facts?
• The ordinary man does not understand complex issues. That’s why you have to use metafores like the hockey puck. This issue is bigger than any human could comprehend.
• So it’s fundamentally a religious issue?
• It’s been so all along.

In late 2009, at the request of his government, the Indian geologist V.K. Rania (retired) looked into this, and concluded in a White Paper that glaciers (in the Himalayas and elsewhere) advanced and retreated irregularly over the past 150 years, with no direct connection to world heating or cooling.

Meanwhile, this revealed the following version of ”peer review”within the IPCC (a k a the International Politically Correct Conundrum):

- the claim in respect to Himalayan glaciers was lifted from a 2005 report from the World Wildlife Fund
- upon request, the WWF responded that this originated in a quote from an article in the New Science Journal
- but the author of the article, Dr. Hasnain (now head of glaciology at the The Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi) denied having made such a statement.

However, IPCC Chair Pachauri reacted by saying the report was an ”extremely arrogant statement”, dismissing it as ”school boy science”.

Two queries: first, how could admitting to uncertainty be considered arrogant? Second, if this is ”school boy science”, why should the great IPPChief take any notice at all? Further, unlike Pachauri, Rania is a scientist with solid on-site experience in empirical observation of Himalayan glacier development for some 35 years.

Maybe IPCC should contemplate having recourse to such people, rather than scientists trained to follow the leader?

Also, here is a piece from the Spectator, pointing out how the blogosphere makes a difference in spotting inaccuracies and untruths ahead of mainstream media.

Photos: freedigitalphotos

“Climategate” as an argument for a World Environment Organization

The sudden but not unexpected resignation of the head of the UN Climate Secretariat in Bonn Ivo de Boer is feeding speculation about an imminent collapse of the whole global warming swindle. Only a few days earlier, Phil Jones, a leading member of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, substantially admitted in the British newspaper “Daily Mail”that the accusations on the basis of leaked confidential e-mails from CRU (“Climategate“) were well founded, i.e. that the decline of the world’s average temperature since ten to fifteen years was hidden by CRU and that the often quoted “hockey stick”-temperature curve is no proof of man made global warming but a fake.

At the same time, eminent political leaders like Maurice Strong, Al Gore, José Manuel Barroso, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Herman van Rompuy (all members of the mysterious ‘Bilderberg‘ Club), took the fiasco of the Copenhagen Climate Conference as opportunity to look for alternative ways in order to meet their aim of total management of the whole planet Earth.

Already before the Copenhagen climate summit, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel claimed the establishment of a World Environment Organization (WEO) under the auspices of the UN. On 27th January 2010 Sarkozy called for a strong organization financed through a financial transaction tax (Tobin Tax)as counterweight to the influent World Trade Organization (WTO) in his opening speech at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos (Switzerland) . The WEO in close cooperation with the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the World Bank would have to enforce globally uniform health and environmental standards and to fight against social and environmental dumping.

Thus, even if the climate swindle imploded completely and the IPCC was dissolved, the advocates of “global governance” would nevertheless achieve an important step towards a world government claimed by them with the help of the WEO, which would be competent for all environmental problems from waste and sewage treatment over the promotion of renewable energy and cleaning the air to freshwater supply. It can therefore not be excluded that interested parties had their fingers in the pie, when the series of scandals that undermined the credibility of the IPCC broke out. At least Nicolas Sarkozy seems to have quickly grasped the opportunities of the global eco-dictatorship that “Climategate” and the fiasco of Copenhagen offer him and his Bilderberg friends. Do we have to expect the unexpected? The friends of liberty can probably still be confident that the “Gore Effect”will thwart the arrogant plans of the Bilderbergers.  

If (some) climate scientists were a little less intent on seeking politicised funding and more focused on facts, they would be pleased to discover the recent piecemeal apology from the now-famous professor Phil Jones (CRU, University of East Anglia).

We should all express sincere compassion in this respect: here’s an honest scientist who (apart from losing some essential data) is obviously set on advancing knowledge about the current situation. Nobody should be reproached with occasional lack of cleaning out the office, right?

It depends; according to the UK Daily Mail it may not be that simple.

The professor made several concessions, and not only about disorder on his desk. Several more serious issues are involved.

The most significant: there has been no significant warming over the past 15 years; he argued however that ”this was a blip rather than the long-term trend”.But admitted that the medieval warm period was possible; this puts a significant dent also into the “hockey stick” hypothesis however, ie how should human activity be accounted for.

The issue here is not about whether the above is true or not. But whether we can finally establish a debate where scientific evidence may be freely debated; and not be subject to frameworks where terms are dictated for the sake of attention and public funding.

If so, professor Jones will have contributed greatly to a better climate of opinion. Regardless of the heat that he put himself into.

Photos: freedigitalphotos

Greenpeace International has now issued a statementsaying that they do not support the earlier demand by their UK chief that IPCC Chair, Dr Pachauri resigns. And besides, their executive director UK John Sauven was probably misunderstood by the Times. And in spite of the record cold winter, it’s hard to find snow in Vancouver.

Well well, when the going gets tough, unite behind the guy up front. At lease for a while.

Greenpeace also includes a rather well written list of all the “gates” recently, complete with an etymological and historic explanation. For some reason, the false claims about the polar beers, which their colleague organization WWF International already has refuted, or the mysterious “Hockey Stick” that whas removed from earlier IPCC reports, but somehow crept back in with the last report before Copenhagen, are not listed.

The most important issue is not if the IPCC report is a giant fraud. It’s not. And it’s not a conspiracy. All scientific predictions, and sometimes observations, can turn out to be at least partly wrong. It’s the essence of the scientific process. And virtually all attempted conspiracies, beyond a surprise party, tend to fail in the end. Life, and human interaction is simply too complicated.

The important question is why all these revelations – except from the initial Climate Gate - did surface after the Copenhagen summit. And why did the IPCC researchers accept to reintroduce the Hockey Stick, which they knew was wrong?

A likely explanation is that (though still no conspiracy here) the stakes were so high, the expectations and built-up hysteria before Copenhagen so immense, that among all the stakeholders, from IPCC to all fractions of the green lobby, no one dared – or could be heard – to point out that maybe the emperor was naked. This is not an unusual phenomena and most often, when later all the cards are on the table, the only thing left to do before it’s business as usual again, is to pick a scapegoat or two and send him to the wolves.

This is just a theory and I’m a bit surprised that Dr Pachauri has not yet resigned. However, if you have observed this peculiar world of power play for a while, which I admit to having done, you learn to recognize the footprints of the lamb on its way to be sacrificed.

“AGW is the biggest and most far-reaching scientific scandal in history, whose tentacles spread into almost every aspect of our lives, from how we dispose of our trash and how we light up our homes, to how we travel and how we are taxed and regulated.” This is chief blogger James Delingpole’s conclusion from the series of science frauds that he had outlined. In opposition to leading members of the IPCC who are now claiming Pachauri’s demission in order to save what is remaining from climate policy after the Copenhagen fiasco James Delingpole ironically asks him to stay.

We know from chemicals policy: If scientific disputes become political issues, the main danger is not biasing the researcher’s answers but their questions. So I prefer to ask: Do we really need an intergovernmental scientific advisory council like IPCC? Would the Global Warming issue even exist without the IPCC? Are there really global problems that need to be resolved by global governance? I think that there is no affirmative answer to these questions. For it becomes now day by day more evident that climate change is natural and cannot be stopped by humans. There is no alternative to adaptation by local and regional initiatives because a “world climate” does not exist and has never existed, instead there are many regional and local climates. That is why central planning (like global carbon rationing) is absolutely counterproductive. Last but not least we do not need scientific advice on global questions when politics remain focussed on local and regional issues.