Category Archives: Media Criticism

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Global Warming Theory

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…is the new Lysenkoism:

All the climate alarmist organizations simply rubber stamp the irregular Assessment Reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). None of them do any original science on the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming. But the United Nations is a proven, corrupt, power grabbing institution. The science of their Assessment Reports has been thoroughly rebutted by the hundreds of pages of science in Climate Change Reconsidered, and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, both written by dozens of scientists with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, and published by the Heartland Institute, the international headquarters of the skeptics of the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.

Again, check it out for yourself. You don’t have to read every one of the well over a thousand pages of careful science in both volumes to see at least that there is a real scientific debate.

The editors of the once respected journals of Science and Nature have abandoned science for Lysenkoism on this issue as well. They have become as political as the editorial pages of the New York Times. They claim their published papers are peer reviewed, but those reviews are conducted on the friends and family plan when it comes to the subject of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming. There can be no peer review at all when authors refuse to release their data and computer codes for public inspection and attempted reconstruction of reported results by other scientists. They have been forced to backtrack on recent publications relying on novel, dubious, statistical methodologies not in accordance with established methodologies of complex statistical analysis.

Formerly respected scientific bodies in the U.S. and other western countries have been commandeered by political activist Lysenkoists seizing leadership positions. They then proceed with politically correct pronouncements on the issue of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming heedless of the views of the membership of actual scientists. Most of what you see and hear from alarmists regarding global warming can be most accurately described as play acting on the meme of settled science. The above noted publications demonstrate beyond the point where reasonable people can differ that no actual scientist can claim that the science of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming has been settled or that there is a settled “consensus” that rules out reasonable dissent.

My emphasis.

Climate “science” doesn’t seem to have very many actual scientists involved with it.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Climate Hearings On The Hill

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Judith Curry’s prepared testimony:

My written testimony summarizes the evidence for, and against, the hypothesis that humans are playing a dominant role in global warming. I’ll make no attempt to summarize this evidence in my brief comments this morning. I will state that there are major uncertainties in many of the key observational data sets, particularly before 1980. There are also major uncertainties in climate models, particularly with regards to the treatments of clouds and the multidecadal ocean oscillations.

The prospect of increased frequency or severity of extreme weather in a warmer climate is potentially the most serious near term impact of climate change. A recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found limited observational evidence for worsening of most types of extreme weather events. Attempts to determine the role of global warming in extreme weather events is complicated by the rarity of these events and also by their dependence on natural weather and climate regimes that are simulated poorly by climate models.

Given these uncertainties, there would seem to be plenty of scope for disagreement among scientists. Nevertheless, the consensus about dangerous anthropogenic climate change is portrayed as nearly total among climate scientists. Further, the consensus has been endorsed by all of the relevant national and international science academies and scientific societies.

I have been trying to understand how there can be such a strong consensus given these uncertainties. How to reason about uncertainties in the complex climate system is neither simple nor obvious. Scientific debates involve controversies over the value and importance of particular classes of evidence, failure to account for indeterminacy and ignorance, as well as disagreement about the appropriate logical framework for assessing the evidence.

For the past three years, I’ve been working towards understanding the dynamics of uncertainty at the climate science-policy interface. This research has led me to question whether these dynamics are operating in a manner that is healthy for either the science or the policy process.

No kidding. And emphasis mine. I’ve been trying to understand that, too. It increasingly appears to be driven by politics.

[Update a few minutes later]

This comment, from a post earlier today, seems apropos:

When I was young, I was taught history as a narrative of mistakes, errors of judgment, and closed minded attitudes which were subsequently found to be irrational. The motivations of those benighted souls who believed these things were effectively random ignorance and bias, with no logical basis or external impetus.

The implication to a naive, young mind was that, that was all in the past, and we had now monotonically converged upon an era of unprecedented enlightenment, and humans now were effectively immune from the foibles of the past. Adults knew everything that was needed to know, and only a small minority of troglodytes, who were invariably the butt of derision on evening sit-coms, had failed to keep up.

The “science” of the past was full of leeches, geocentricism, and arbitrary religious conviction. Today’s scientists were immune to bias, their conclusions based on objective, reproducible evidence, and infused with 20/20 foresight. Knowledge was the key. The more knowledge you had, the less vulnerable you were to irrationalism. But, knowledge and wisdom are not, in fact, synonymous.

Eventually, as I grew and gained knowledge, I realized that the people of the past were no different than those of today. That they made erroneous inferences based on pat answers which seemed “obvious” based on the knowledge base of the day, and that we were no more immune to mistakes of that sort than they were. But, today, a large portion of the average population remains in the arrested stage of my youth, in which “scientists” are authorities whose word is inviolable holy writ, and anyone who questions “science” is a troglodyte worthy of being made the butt of derision on evening TV.

It is not just bizarre and surreal, but utterly teeth gnashing to see these fools strut their faith and ignorance in smug certitude that they stand on unshifting, bedrock solid ground. They have no inkling that they are the believers in leechcraft and other folderal of today. And, they will carry us all into the abyss with unblinking faith that they are the righteous heirs of the enlightenment, whose ends justify whatever means necessary to rescue we troglodytes from ourselves.

Indeed. This isn’t about science — it is about the false faith of scientism.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Our Long-Term Unemployment Problem

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Is it caused by the government?

Yes. Next question?

I think that she underestimates the effects of regulatory uncertainty and the war on business that started rhetorically in 2008, and for real in 2009. I also think that she’s missing another problem — the huge mismatch between skills and employers’ needs, which are themselves a result of terrible government education policies.

[Update early afternoon]

One other point. We also have a labor mobility problem, due to the housing crisis, in which many are still unable to sell their homes and move to where the jobs are. That too was caused by government policies.