Leyden and Teixeira: Political “Civil War” Coming Because of Global Warming

The Politicization of Science

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey recently tweeted that Peter Leyden’s and Ruy Teixeira’s article, “The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War,” is a “Great read.” The article both urges and forecasts a blue-state takeover of America where our current political divide gives way to a Democrat dominion. This new “Civil War” is to begin this year and, like the last one will have an economic cause. Unfortunately, the thinking of Leyden and Teixeira is steeped in scientific ignorance which drives their thesis.

According to Leyden and Teixeira both the last, and now upcoming, Civil Wars are about fundamentally different economic systems that cannot coexist. In the mid nineteenth century it was an agrarian economy dependent on slaves versus a capitalist manufacturing economy dependent on free labor. Today, the conflict is between (i) the red states which are dependent on carbon-based energy systems like coal and oil, and (ii) the blue states that are shifting to clean energy and weaning themselves off of carbon. Granting this dubious thesis, why are these two economies so irreconcilable? Because of global warming and the terrible natural disasters it brings:

In the era of climate change, with the mounting pressure of increased natural disasters, something must give.

You read that right. Leyden’s and Teixeira’s thesis is driven by anthropogenic global warming, or AGW, which they sprinkle throughout the article. Red states are bad because they deny it, blue states are good because they face the truth and reckon with it with progressive policies. After all, it is “the scientific consensus that climate change is happening, that human activity is the main cause, and that it is a serious threat.”

It must be nice to go through life with such certainty. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss.

We can begin with the most obvious mistake. While it certainly revs people up to hear that global warming is “a serious threat,” we have little evidence for this. Even those “consensus” scientists agree that we are not justified in claiming the sky is falling. And, no, in spite of what you may have heard, the recent hurricanes were probably not products of global warming.

But what about that scientific consensus that Leyden and Teixeira speak of? Doesn’t that make their case?

Unfortunately, Leyden and Teixeira are the latest example of how historians have utterly failed. In spite of their best efforts, historians, and especially historians of science, have not been able to disabuse people of the myths of science.

In science, as in politics, majorities are majorities until they aren’t. A scientific consensus can occur both for theories that end up enshrined in museums and for theories that end up dumped in the trash bin.

Once upon a time the scientific consensus held the Earth was the center of the universe. Only later did the scientific consensus shift to the Sun as the center of the universe.

Both were wrong.

What Mr. Nelson taught you in seventh grade history class was right after all: If you don’t understand history you will repeat its mistakes. And Leyden and Teixeira are today’s poster children of such naiveté.

A scientific consensus for a theory means just one thing: That the majority of scientists accept the theory. Nothing more, nothing less. The problem with science, as Del Ratzsch once explained, is that it is done by people.

What we do know about AGW is that the data have been massaged, predictions have failed, publications have been manipulated, enormous pressure to conform has been applied, and ever since Lynn White’s 1966 AAAS talk the science has been thoroughly politicized.

None of this means that AGW is false, but the theories that end up in textbooks and museums don’t usually need enormous social and career pressures for sustenance.

As it stands scientists have been walking back the hype (it’s climate change, not global warming anymore), and trying to explain the lack of a hockey stick temperature rise (the ocean is temporarily absorbing the heat); insiders are backing out (see here and here), and new papers are showing current temperatures have not been so out of the ordinary (e.g., here).

AGW is certainly an important theory to study. And perhaps it is true. But its track record of prediction is far more important than the number of people voting for it.

The idea that AGW is the driver behind a new Civil War in America to start, err, later this year is simply absurd. I’m less concerned about Leyden’s and Teixeira’s political desires as I am about the mythologies they are built on.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Galileo and a New Climate Study

A Durable Myth

Science writer Katherine Ellen Foley has another article on anthropogenic global warming, or AGW, in Quartz this past week. The AGW theory states that civilization’s production of green-house gases, such as carbon dioxide, is causing a hockey-stick like rise in the Earth’s temperatures. This has led to a range of dire environmental warnings in recent decades, some of which have already failed. Nonetheless AGW is the consensus theory amongst virtually all climate scientists. How much of this consensus is formed by non empirical factors—more common in science than is often understood—is an open question. Leaked emails have revealed strong-arm tactics—including pressure on publishers—used to squash dissent. Of course none of this means AGW is necessarily anything less than completely true. But it does compromise unsupported claims that AGW is a strong, empirical theory. Press conferences claiming a case closed won’t cut it—that kind of trust and legitimacy was lost years ago. The guiding light here must be the raw science.

All of this means that AGW appears to be another fascinating example of how science, for better or for worse, works. What I find particularly interesting are high truth claims for ideas that are politically or metaphysically charged and not obviously empirically supported. The problem with science, as Del Ratzsch has pointed out, is that it is done by people. Non empirical influences are, gasp, sometimes at work and we simply must understand the underlying science rather than blindly accept authoritarian pronouncements.

I am not arguing for or against AGW, but I am arguing for a depth of understanding that too often is missing from partisan accounts. This, unfortunately, characterizes Foley’s Quartz article, which asks the question: What about the research papers questioning AGW? While the vast majority of the literature falls squarely within the AGW-is-true paradigm, there is nonetheless a tiny sliver of papers questioning the theory.

To be sure those papers aren’t having much influence, but according to Foley AGW critics often invoke Galileo as a comparison. Just as Galileo met stiff opposition, so do these AGW dissenters. The implication is that, like Galileo, these researchers will prevail in the end.

Foley explains this is all wrong, both because it is a false analogy and because those papers are scientifically flawed. Specifically, Foley explains that Galileo’s “fellow scientists mostly agreed with his conclusions—it was church leaders who tried to suppress them.” And furthermore, a study of those dissenting papers found them to be biased and faulty.

Foley’s article hit the mark. It has instantly been reposted and retold across the Internet, on blogs, forums, and even videos, such as this one by Jeff Waldorf. Unfortunately Foley’s article is little more than AGW cheerleading, and Waldorf and the others are only too quick to pile on, assigning nefarious motives to anyone who would doubt the consensus theory. It is precisely this kind of hostile, social atmosphere which can be so stifling to science.

Foley’s article is largely a copy and paste job from other sources, and she employs the usual rhetorical devices, such as labelling her targets as “climate-change-denying papers.” Of course they are no such thing. The papers are questioning AGW, not “denying” climate change.  This sort of rhetoric, targeted at reasonable skepticism, is a sign of fake news.

The next problem is with her retelling of the Galileo Affair which is all Warfare Thesis. No it wasn’t science versus religion—that is the myth that Foley is propagating. Galileo did not heroically lead a scientific consensus with powerful and unambiguous empirical evidence against ecclesiastical resistance. Church leaders did not “tr[y] to suppress them.”

Nonetheless this gets picked up and amplified by Waldorf and the others, and historians now have yet another round of Galileo mythology to reckon with. The Galileo myth serves as yet another non empirical mandate for ideas like AGW and evolution, and that is why it is so resistant and durable.

As if to support her Galileo claims, Foley links to a 2011 phony New York Times article by Henry Fountain who provides this absurd retelling of the myth:

Galileo, whose astronomical observations confirmed the Copernican theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun, was basing his assertions on empirical knowledge and faced opposition from the Roman Catholic Church, which supported the Ptolemaic view of an Earth-centered universe.

Of course Galileo’s observations did not “confirm the Copernican theory.” Nor were his “assertions based on empirical knowledge.” Galileo flatly ignored Kepler’s finding that ellipses perfectly described the planetary orbits (as opposed to the lousy circles Galileo advocated which required epicycles). And the lack of stellar parallax observed in the seventeenth century flatly refuted Galileo’s heliocentrism. Furthermore Galileo studiously avoided mentioning Tycho Brahe’s hybrid model which competed well against heliocentrism. Galileo carefully framed the debate as strictly heliocentrism versus geocentrism.

Nor did Galileo face any kind of unified opposition from the Roman Catholic Church. That is another myth. There were many in the church who had no problem with Galileo pursuing his ideas, and the Pope had been a benefactor of Galileo before, that is, Galileo turned on him.

The Galileo Affair is far more complex and nuanced than these pathetic retellings would have it. As one historian put it, it was Galileo’s religion versus the Church’s science. But that, of course, would not service Foley’s message.

Next Foley appeals to a 2015 paper—passed off as something of recent importance—arguing that research papers skeptical of AGW are all flawed.

That’s curious.

Why does Foley now resurrect a 2015 review of even older AGW skepticism? Foley generously draws upon a 2015 Guardian article to fill in her story.

Could this retelling of an old story have anything to do with more recent research posing serious challenges to AGW? Could this be an attempt to forestall emerging skepticism, and delegitimize research that points to AGW’s on-going problems?

Consider a new study by John Abbot and Jennifer Marohasy that is suggesting a rather fundamental failure of AGW. The study shows that pre industrial climate data robustly models twentieth century temperatures.

That should not be the case if AGW is true.

If later nineteenth and twentieth century greenhouse gas emissions are causing a hockey stick temperature rise, it should not be consistent with the older data. AGW says that the climate has changed.

Now perhaps Abbot’s and Marohasy’s new research is flawed. Perhaps they have made a mistake, and so AGW is unharmed by their work.

But doesn’t that make for a more interesting article in 2017 than rehashing old myths?

More Threats of Persecution For AGW Dissent

The Penalty For Dissent

Appeals to constitutional rights are becoming quaint ideas as the call for persecution of dissent continues to rise. This month is was leading academic Michael Kraft and none other than the Science Guy, Bill Nye, issuing their opinions that those not going along with AGW (man-made, or anthropomorphic global warming) should face persecution. Kraft writes that “Those who intentionally misled the public about climate change should be held accountable,” and Nye states that “there is a chilling effect [from the threat of persecution] on scientists who are in extreme doubt about climate change, I think that is good.”

Nye is quite correct. Persecution will have a chilling effect, though it is at the extreme of the spectrum. Less aggressive, yet nonetheless effective, tools include the withholding of passing grades, diplomas, letters of recommendations, peer-reviewed publications, academic positions, employment, funding grants, tenure, and legitimization in general—all tools that have been used quite successfully by evolutionists for decades to stamp out dissent.

There is a very real selection process in academia enforcing evolutionary thought. The reason dissent is not tolerated is that once one is allowed even a tiny ray of light the entire edifice comes crashing down. Once one genuinely considers even the mere possibility that evolution may not be true, then the lie is suddenly exposed. Like those optical illusions, suddenly you can see the scientific evidence plainly.

AGW may or may not be accurate, I have no idea. But I know McCarthyism when I see it. A metaphysically-driven idea with failed predictions that is enforced by political and social tactics is not a good sign. The leaked emails revealed the underside of what was already fairly obvious from the outside.

Publications are controlled, journals and careers are threatened, data are manipulated to produce dramatic results, and failed predictions are ignored.

Yes Nye is correct that persecution, or even the threat of persecution, would have a chilling effect. But to be clear, there already is a chilling effect. Kraft and Nye think they are doing a good service by raising the specter of persecution, but that is merely one more tactic, after a long series of less aggressive, yet effective, tactics. McCarthyism didn’t end with McCarthy.

Here is Matt Ridley’s Must Read Article on Climate Science

A Most Dangerous Door

One of the standard defenses of evolution—the Epicurean idea that the world arose spontaneously—is that science is a self-correcting, feedback process and, as such, will always lead to the truth. This is such an ignorant claim it is difficult to know where to begin in rebutting it. First of all, at its best science is a process that takes as input a set of observations and produces as output some generalizations, sometimes called models or hypotheses or theories or laws, about how nature works. A scientist might observe the planetary motions in the sky and hypothesize that the planets travel in elliptical orbits about the Sun. Or a scientist might observe the movement of objects and theorize that the product of the mass and acceleration of an object equals the force applied to it. These are valuable theories that condense a vast amount of observations into simple and useful formulas that can predict future events. But for every one of these successes there are hundreds of failures. Sometimes these failures are rooted out only after decades or centuries of contentious debate with proponents who are convinced they’ve got it right. Indeed, there is no guarantee of a timely resolution of scientific failures. There is no guarantee of a resolution, period. Every engineering student knows that feedback loops do not guarantee accuracy—they don’t even guarantee stability.

Even at its best, science is not guaranteed to produce truth because of some real or imagined feedback process. And the story gets worse in practice because of the many nonscientific influences at work. Scientists have religious, philosophical and political biases as much as anyone else, and too often they are under pressure to conform. Bucking the trend doesn’t usually win the funding grant.

Yet the Warfare Thesis, the myth that in its objective search for truth science is opposed by religion, has persisted and has fueled a strong trend of scientism—the view of science as dispassionate truth giver. It was constructed and promoted by evolutionists to frame the debate in their favor, and it worked.

So the idea that evolution is true because science “says so,” and after all science can’t be wrong, continues to enjoy broad traction. It is for these reasons that Matt Ridley’s brilliant article in Quadrant Online is important. Ridley begins:

For much of my life I have been a science writer. That means I eavesdrop on what’s going on in laboratories so I can tell interesting stories. It’s analogous to the way art critics write about art, but with a difference: we “science critics” rarely criticise. If we think a scientific paper is dumb, we just ignore it. There’s too much good stuff coming out of science to waste time knocking the bad stuff. Sure, we occasionally take a swipe at pseudoscience—homeopathy, astrology, claims that genetically modified food causes cancer, and so on. But the great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses put to the test. So a really bad idea cannot survive long in science. Or so I used to think.

Ridley’s main concern is the highly politicized idea of anthropomorphic global warming (AGW):

Now, thanks largely to climate science, I have changed my mind. It turns out bad ideas can persist in science for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they can turn into intolerant dogmas.

This piece by Ridley is important because it is a cogent and direct challenge to the dominant and damaging ideas of scientism and the Warfare Thesis. And it is an admission that the problem is rather obvious:

This should have been obvious to me. Lysenkoism, a pseudo-biological theory that plants (and people) could be trained to change their heritable natures, helped starve millions and yet persisted for decades in the Soviet Union, reaching its zenith under Nikita Khrushchev. The theory that dietary fat causes obesity and heart disease, based on a couple of terrible studies in the 1950s, became unchallenged orthodoxy and is only now fading slowly.

Ridley has shed the mythology of the objective scientist driven simply by a pursuit for the truth:

Scientists are just as prone as anybody else to “confirmation bias”, the tendency we all have to seek evidence that supports our favoured hypothesis and dismiss evidence that contradicts it—as if we were counsel for the defence.

And Ridley has learned about scientific hegemony:

What went wrong with Lysenko and dietary fat was that in each case a monopoly was established. Lysenko’s opponents were imprisoned or killed. Nina Teicholz’s book The Big Fat Surprise shows in devastating detail how opponents of Ancel Keys’s dietary fat hypothesis were starved of grants and frozen out of the debate by an intolerant consensus backed by vested interests, echoed and amplified by a docile press.

Ridley observes that global warming has now joined this infamous list of dubious yet dangerous sciences:

This is precisely what has happened with the climate debate and it is at risk of damaging the whole reputation of science. The “bad idea” in this case is not that climate changes, nor that human beings influence climate change; but that the impending change is sufficiently dangerous to require urgent policy responses.

Ridley explains how climate science was hijacked by partisans some 15-20 years ago and since then dogma, not data, has controlled the research:

These huge green multinationals, with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, have now systematically infiltrated science, as well as industry and media, with the result that many high-profile climate scientists and the journalists who cover them have become one-sided cheerleaders for alarm, while a hit squad of increasingly vicious bloggers polices the debate to ensure that anybody who steps out of line is punished. They insist on stamping out all mention of the heresy that climate change might not be lethally dangerous. Today’s climate science, as Ian Plimer points out in his chapter in The Facts, is based on a “pre-ordained conclusion, huge bodies of evidence are ignored and analytical procedures are treated as evidence”. Funds are not available to investigate alternative theories. Those who express even the mildest doubts about dangerous climate change are ostracised, accused of being in the pay of fossil-fuel interests or starved of funds; those who take money from green pressure groups and make wildly exaggerated statements are showered with rewards and treated by the media as neutral.

It is not difficult to imagine how this plays out:

Look what happened to a butterfly ecologist named Camille Parmesan when she published a paper on “Climate and Species Range” that blamed climate change for threatening the Edith checkerspot butterfly with extinction in California by driving its range northward. The paper was cited more than 500 times, she was invited to speak at the White House and she was asked to contribute to the IPCC’s third assessment report. Unfortunately, a distinguished ecologist called Jim Steele found fault with her conclusion: there had been more local extinctions in the southern part of the butterfly’s range due to urban development than in the north, so only the statistical averages moved north, not the butterflies. There was no correlated local change in temperature anyway, and the butterflies have since recovered throughout their range. When Steele asked Parmesan for her data, she refused. Parmesan’s paper continues to be cited as evidence of climate change. Steele meanwhile is derided as a “denier”. No wonder a highly sceptical ecologist I know is very reluctant to break cover.

Ridley explains that this abuse of science is justified and enabled by the propagation of a false dichotomy that casts skeptics as dangerous or ignorant extremists:

These scientists and their guardians of the flame repeatedly insist that there are only two ways of thinking about climate change—that it’s real, man-made and dangerous (the right way), or that it’s not happening (the wrong way). But this is a false dichotomy. There is a third possibility: that it’s real, partly man-made and not dangerous. This is the “lukewarmer” school, and I am happy to put myself in this category. Lukewarmers do not think dangerous climate change is impossible; but they think it is unlikely. I find that very few people even know of this. Most ordinary people who do not follow climate debates assume that either it’s not happening or it’s dangerous. This suits those with vested interests in renewable energy, since it implies that the only way you would be against their boondoggles is if you “didn’t believe” in climate change.

And given this false dichotomy, the next step is the vilification of the skeptic in a full-scale demagoguery:

But the commentators ignore all these caveats and babble on about warming of “up to” four degrees (or even more), then castigate as a “denier” anybody who says, as I do, the lower end of the scale looks much more likely given the actual data. This is a deliberate tactic. Following what the psychologist Philip Tetlock called the “psychology of taboo”, there has been a systematic and thorough campaign to rule out the middle ground as heretical: not just wrong, but mistaken, immoral and beyond the pale. That’s what the word denier with its deliberate connotations of Holocaust denial is intended to do. For reasons I do not fully understand, journalists have been shamefully happy to go along with this fundamentally religious project.

And behind all the demagoguery, politics, fallacies and manipulation is just plain old bad nineteenth century science:

Joanne Nova, incidentally, is an example of a new breed of science critic that the climate debate has spawned. With little backing, and facing ostracism for her heresy, this talented science journalist had abandoned any chance of a normal, lucrative career and systematically set out to expose the way the huge financial gravy train that is climate science has distorted the methods of science. In her chapter in The Facts, Nova points out that the entire trillion-dollar industry of climate change policy rests on a single hypothetical assumption, first advanced in 1896, for which to this day there is no evidence. The assumption is that modest warming from carbon dioxide must be trebly amplified by extra water vapour—that as the air warms there will be an increase in absolute humidity providing “a positive feedback”. That assumption led to specific predictions that could be tested. And the tests come back negative again and again. The large positive feedback that can turn a mild warming into a dangerous one just is not there. There is no tropical troposphere hot-spot. Ice cores unambiguously show that temperature can fall while carbon dioxide stays high. Estimates of climate sensitivity, which should be high if positive feedbacks are strong, are instead getting lower and lower. Above all, the temperature has failed to rise as predicted by the models.

Ridley chronicles the long sordid history of manipulating evidence and mindless predictions that, though one after the next turned up false, never mattered and even though they failed ridiculously were used anyway as confirmations of AGW:

Excusing failed predictions is a staple of astrology; it’s the way pseudoscientists argue. In science, as Karl Popper long ago insisted, if you make predictions and they fail, you don’t just make excuses and insist you’re even more right than before.

In the end all of this will ultimately harm science. Its hard won reputation can withstand only so many religious and political intrusions. For Ridley himself, it gets personal:

That complacency has shocked me, and done more than anything else to weaken my long-standing support for science as an institution. … I feel genuinely betrayed by the profession that I have spent so much of my career championing.

But this goes far beyond feels of personal disappointment and betrayal. The consequences are enormous:

None of this would matter if it was just scientific inquiry, though that rarely comes cheap in itself. The big difference is that these scientists who insist that we take their word for it, and who get cross if we don’t, are also asking us to make huge, expensive and risky changes to the world economy and to people’s livelihoods.

Ridley’s article is a must read for anyone who is true to science. But for all of its import, it is only the beginning. Ridley is obviously a discerning man but there has been another misadventure and abuse of science that dwarfs climate science. Virtually everything he points out in this excellent piece could be restated, but to even greater extremes, regarding evolution science.

Ridley was once an AGW proponent who now has pulled himself out of its mire. He has stepped back and now the landscape has become all too clear. It is not that there is no warming, or that carbon dioxide has no effects. That’s hardly the point. The problem is in the misrepresentations of the science, the control of the funding, the publication control and blackballing, the demonization, the false dichotomies, the political intrusions, the dangerous impact on public policy, and so forth. This is not science, it a hijacking of science for nonscientific purposes.

Ridley sees all of this. He sees how it really is, and he doesn’t like what he sees. What Ridley does not yet see is that evolution science is all of this, but on a grander scale. Ridley has opened a door, but he is focusing on the first step. It is a most dangerous door, for behind it are all manner of truths people prefer to avoid.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Christopher Booker: The Fiddling With Temperature Data is the Biggest Science Scandal Ever

Not Following the Data

Regardless of whether evolution it true, false, or somewhere in between, one of evolution’s many influences is the enlistment of science to support ulterior motives. In evolution, the science is enlisted to support a strictly naturalistic origins narrative. Simply put, thinkers such as Darwin became convinced that divine creation must be false. It was a purely religious and metaphysical argument. The empirical evidence does not support very well the idea that the biological world arose spontaneously, so evolutionary “science” is needed to reinterpret the evidence.

Charles Darwin was by no means the first to contort evidence to fit a preconceived notion, but since 1859 the creative use of science has become increasingly common. A recent example of this is the theory of AGW (anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming). Like evolution the theory must be true, regardless of the science. Hence there is substantial social, career advancement and funding pressures to obtain confirmations of theory. And as Christopher Booker reminded his readers in this weekend’s Telegraph, the data are adjusted to support the theory. It is, says Booker, the biggest science scandal ever:

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Even if this is all true, it does not mean AGW is necessarily false. But it is another example of how easily science is enlisted to support preconceived conclusions. Darwin’s friend TH Huxley said we should follow the data, like a child, wherever it leads. Huxley himself failed to do that, and that trend has continued ever since.

Here’s That Story in the Los Angeles Times about Global Warming

Give Credit Where Credit is Due

Because when the Los Angeles Times runs a piece questioning the A in AGW (anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming), then you know something is wrong:

A new study makes the case that human activity played very little role in the warming of the northeast Pacific Ocean over the past century or so. … Naturally occurring changes in winds, not human-caused climate change, are responsible for most of the warming on land and in the sea along the West Coast of North America over the last century, a study has found. … This latest research shows that similar changes in atmospheric and ocean circulation can drive trends that last a century or longer, overshadowing the effects of human-generated increase in greenhouse gases, the study's authors said.

It is not news that AGW is has its share of scientific challenges. But give credit to the Los Angeles Times for running such a story in the politically-charged environment we are in. We need to let the science speak for itself.

Climate Justice: It’s Only Getting Stronger

The Warfare Thesis in Action

James Lawrence Powell holds a Ph.D. in Geochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, taught Geology at Oberlin College for over 20 years, served as Acting President of Oberlin, President of Franklin and Marshall College, President of Reed College, President of the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, and President and Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. President Reagan and later, President George H. W. Bush, appointed Powell to the National Science Board, where he served for 12 years. He is the author of eleven books and currently serves as Executive Director of the National Physical Science Consortium. James Lawrence Powell also believes in AGW (anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming).

Powell has created what some are calling the one chart that proves AGW. It is a pie chart comparing scientific papers about “global warming,” “global climate change,” or “climate change.” Powell has reviewed these papers and found that only a couple dozen of them, out of almost 14,000, reject AGW. So what can we conclude, Powell asks.

According to Powell, these papers demonstrate that there is a mountain of scientific evidence in favor of AGW and no convincing evidence against it. That those who deny anthropogenic global warming have no alternative theory to explain the observed rise in atmospheric CO2 and global temperature. And that these two facts together mean that the so-called debate over global warming is an illusion, a hoax conjured up by a handful of apostate scientists and a misguided and sometimes colluding media, aided and abetted by funding from fossil fuel companies and right wing foundations.

An over-the-top caricature? No, I’m quoting from Powell’s site. For Powell it is all about the Warfare Thesis, with the truth-seeking scientists in their unstained clean white lab coats on the one side, and the unwashed, unruly superstitious mob fueled by sinister forces on the other side:

On the one side, we have a mountain of scientific evidence, on the other, ideology and arm-waving. On that basis, we are endangering our grandchildren’s future and pushing humanity toward the destruction of civilization.

I have no idea what Powell’s motives are, but given his background it would be surprising if Powell actually believed any of this. Perhaps so, but anyone vaguely familiar with the world of science knows that counting papers is not the way to scientific realism and truth. There are so many obvious, well known problems with Powell’s logic here it is difficult to know where to begin.

First, notice that Powell did not actually say that the 14,000 papers proved or demonstrated AGW. That’s because they don’t. Powell is an inside player and he knows not to make such a mistake.

In science, research programs tend to work within paradigms. Scientists are not forever questioning theories as the textbooks like to say; rather, they explore the details of the paradigm they are working within, whether or not they are true or make sense of the data. That’s a generalization, but in many fields it is often true.

If you look for papers with keywords such as “global warming,” “global climate change,” and “climate change,” as did Powell, then you’re going to find papers that are exploring AGW not questioning it.

That’s the way science works, and Powell of course knows this.

Imagine 50 years ago searching through papers about neo Darwinism and the New Synthesis and wondering whether the papers will be for or against evolution. That would be silly. The ratio would be at least as skewed as Powell’s pie chart.

But of course today we know that neo Darwinism is false. Mutations are not neutral, and the adaptation we observe is not slow and caused by the selection of blind variation. And even evolutionists agree that there must be some other mechanism to account for large-scale evolutionary change.

This is by no means an isolated example. The history of science is full of examples of paradigms gone wrong, masses of scientists who go along to get along, and non scientific influences. Social pressures, political pressures, funding pressures, career and prestige pressures—they are part of the job.

And no less so in the field of climatology where heavy-handed AGW zealots have engaged in political maneuvering, peer review manipulation, blackballing, and so forth.

Meanwhile AGW has not fared well on the science. To the point that serious thinkers are voicing concerns. The science is just not that simple.

But it never was about the science. As usual, this is not about the facts, it is about the narrative. Powell had that part right, and it is only getting stronger. Academics are calling for the incarceration of AGW skeptics, and powerful politicians, only a little less enraged, want malpractice suits. NASA scientist James Hansen told Congress that oil company CEOs “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.” You can see more examples here, here.

It really doesn’t matter whether the Earth is cooling, warming, or maintaining an equilibrium, any scenario can be cast into the narrative of the good guys versus the bad guys. That narrative was nowhere more obvious than in yesterday’s Climate March in New York City where Leonardo DiCaprio refused to answer questions about his yacht and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. accused industrialists who do not agree with AGW of treason and said they should be imprisoned as war criminals. Likeminded politicians are “contempable human beings,” though the son of the late great Attorney General lamented that they could not be prosecuted.

What we are seeing are classic defamation tactics. Evolution’s Warfare Thesis has lit all kinds of fires and emotions are running high. With evolution there is no law, just narrative. Today it focuses on climate, but it could jump to any number of issues.

So is AGW true? I have no idea. But neither does Powell, Kennedy and the rest. And we’re not going to figure it out with vigilante justice fueled by pseudo science.

Here’s Something Orwell Didn’t Predict

Health Warnings for Anyone Who Disagrees With AGW

According to a report from The Times earlier this year, policy makers in Britain are attempting to enforce AGW (anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming) by mandating politicians who are skeptical to “shut up” about it and the BBC to give less airtime to anyone who points out its many scientific problems. One mechanism that was recommended was to have appearances by such trouble-makers accompanied by health warnings. How about stickers in textbooks?

Global Warming and Information Manipulation

Now if we Could Just Get the Chinese to Look at Evolution

Here is a paper out of the PRC that raises some awkward questions about the intellectual climate surrounding global warming. Apparently with all the blackballing, peer-review control, publication manipulation, and funding and career threats, the Chinese suspect there might be some manipulation of information at work.

It appears that news media and some pro-environmental organizations have the tendency to accentuate or even exaggerate the damage caused by climate change. This article provides a rationale for this tendency by using a modified International Environmental Agreement (IEA) model with asymmetric information. We find that the information manipulation has an instrumental value, as it ex post induces more countries to participate in an IEA, which will eventually enhance global welfare. From the ex ante perspective, however, the impact that manipulating information has on the level of participation in an IEA and on welfare is ambiguous.

In other news, last week Rapid City had the earliest snow since 1888.

If the Chinese are sensing something awry in global warming, I can’t wait until they cast their gaze on evolution.

James Lovelock: I Was “a Little Too Certain”

An Environmentalists Decides to Follow the Data

If even evolutionist Matt Ridley’s criticism of AGW (anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming) has no effect on environmentalists then surely James Lovelock, Mr. Gaia Hypothesis himself, should open eyes. Lovelock now admits that he was “a little too certain” and that “You just can’t tell what’s going to happen.” And as for the environmental movement, Lovelock says, “It’s become a religion, and religions don’t worry too much about facts.” It is not that Lovelock rejects AGW altogether, but he realizes the problem is far more complex and uncertain than the dogmatic insistence of AGW proponents would have it. That is to his credit.

Government Now Says Denial of the Science is Malpractice

Another Slice

When we recently warned that professor Lawrence Torcello—who calls for the incarceration of those who question the faltering AGW (anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming) theory—might not merely be an extremist but rather may be the leading edge of the next logical move in evolutionary thought’s abuse of science, we did not expect a disturbing confirmation to come within days. But with the publication of the latest report from the United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change—which once predicted radical changes to the Himalayan mountain range due to AGW, and now urges and requires governments to take immediate action against AGW because harsh, widespread and irreversible impacts are on the way, including floods, damaged crops, worse health, deeper poverty and dangerous economic shocks—Secretary of State John Kerry now states that our way of life is “literally in jeopardy,” and that “denial of the science is malpractice.”

This term “denier” is a favorite pejorative of evolutionists. It is Orwellian newspeak for those who do not automatically affirm the politically-correct answer, and the charge of malpractice from the government is extremely serious. Torcello calls for governments to enact laws enabling the incarceration of climate “denialists,” and now the government is, yes, equating AGW skepticism with malpractice.

When industries falter they seek protection and unfair advantage via government mandate and controls. Similarly, evolution has a long history of marshaling government controls to enforce its non scientific claim of spontaneous origins.

In recent years environmentalism has also been moving toward this strategy. But the labeling of those who don’t go along with questionable and urgent claims as “science deniers,” and charging them as guilty of malpractice, takes evolutionary thought to a whole a new level.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

New IPCC Report Forced to Soften the Rhetoric

Science Prevails

Because when people like Matt Ridley question your theory, and when even the notorious United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change so much as softens the rhetoric, you know the hypothesis—in this case anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming—is in trouble. To wit, Ridley points out that in its next report the IPCC moves toward a more sober view of AGW. Gone are the various warnings which inevitably will turn out to be false. Instead the IPCC will issue sufficiently vague warnings, such as dangerous cyclones and changes in rainfall, that are resistant to falsification. And the cost of all this calamity will be scaled back from the 5-20% of the world’s gross domestic product that has been discussed, to less than 2%. The IPCC will be forced now to admit that the economic impact of global warming will be, err, “small relative to the impacts of other drivers.” The report will also admit that not only has climate change not brought any species to extinction, but that the IPCC has “very little confidence” that it will do so. Not surprisingly, as AGW wanes, the IPCC will begin to lay the groundwork for other environmental catastrophes to be alarmed about, showing that, as with evolution, while the various hypotheses are forfeitable (global cooling, global warming, acid rain, the ozone hole, etc.), it is the theoretical core (in this case, environmentalism) that must be protected. None of this is to say that protecting the environment is not important. In fact, it is crucial.

Professor Proposes Dystopia Where Climate Deniers Bold Enough to Talk Face Incarceration

It’s All About Control

Ground crews around the country are battling permafrost for the upcoming baseball season, the Coast Guard is dealing with 30 inch ice on Lake Superior and another major snow storm just put Philadelphia over 67 inches of snow making this winter the second snowiest on record there while another major Nor’Easter appears to be shaping up. March certainly isn’t going out like a lamb and all of this is merely an exclamation point on the frigid cold from earlier in the season. From the snow in Cairo to the coldest football game ever played, the weather has not cooperated with the so-called AGW (anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming) theory. AGW has a trail of failed predictions and years ago leaked emails revealed a massive effort to manipulate and control the science by AGW proponents. So it was already clear that AGW did not come from unbiased, objective truth-seeking scientists in their clean white lab coats. And their recruitment of Al Gore to shout-out the message further demonstrated AGW was about more than “just science.” Of course none of this necessarily means AGW is incorrect. It is possible that politics, abuse of science, manipulation and theoretical failures are just accidentally tainting what at the core is legitimate and thoughtful science. It does however reveal the dogmatic AGW truth claims for what they are. As the old saying goes, it’s not what they don’t know that scares me, but what they know for sure. AGW may well be true, it may be false, or it may be somewhere in between. We just don’t know for sure. But that’s the point—we don’t know, and what we need are thoughtful minds to come forward on this important issue. Instead AGW proponents are doubling down.

This month Lawrence Torcello, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, asks the question, “Is misinformation about the climate criminally negligent?” Torcello’s use of the term “climate denial” foreshadows his answer. This question of climate change is too important and too complicated for such overreach, but for Torcello if you do not support AGW then you are in “climate denial” and if you talk about it then your next stop should be jail.

Torcello thinks the government should enact laws enabling the incarceration of climate denialists who, after all, are “not only corrupt and deceitful, but criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life.” It is time for modern societies, Torcello concludes ominously, to “update their legal systems accordingly.”

Torcello’s concern for human life stands in contrast to his advocacy of the termination of unborn human beings, for elsewhere he “promotes completely the permissive position on abortion from conception to birth.” According to Torcello, murder of the unborn should be legal but questioning AGW should be illegal because, after all, it demonstrates a “willful disregard for human life.”

And does anyone believe that in such a perverse world the inquisition will stop with climate deniers? Certainly evolution denial is at least as dangerous.

While one would hope that Torcello is an academic anomaly, the fact is he is not alone and his new found interest in criminal justice will likely help to earn him tenure. There was, for example, University of Texas evolutionist Eric Pianka who advocated the elimination of 90% of the human population (deadly viruses were his weapons of choice) and received standing ovations, and an award from his peers at the Texas Academy of Science.

Religion drives science, and it matters.