What the climate wars did to science

In June I published a lengthy essay in Quadrant
magazine on the effect that the global warming debate is having on
science itself:

 

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. 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 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.

What these two ideas have in common is that they had
political support, which enabled them to monopolise debate.
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. It’s tosh that scientists always
try to disprove their own theories, as they sometimes claim, and
nor should they. But they do try to disprove each other’s. Science
has always been decentralised, so Professor Smith challenges
Professor Jones’s claims, and that’s what keeps science honest.

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.

Cheerleaders for alarm

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. In the 1970s, when global temperatures were cooling,
some scientists could not resist the lure of press attention by
arguing that a new ice age was imminent. Others called this
nonsense and the World Meteorological Organisation rightly refused
to endorse the alarm. That’s science working as it should. In the
1980s, as temperatures began to rise again, some of the same
scientists dusted off the greenhouse effect and began to argue that
runaway warming was now likely.

At first, the science establishment reacted
sceptically and a diversity of views was aired. It’s hard to recall
now just how much you were allowed to question the claims in those
days. As Bernie Lewin reminds us in one chapter of a fascinating
new book of essays called Climate Change: The
Facts(hereafter The Facts), as late as
1995 when the second assessment report of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with its last-minute
additional claim of a “discernible human influence” on
climate, Nature magazine warned scientists
against overheating the debate.

Since then, however, inch by inch, the huge green
pressure groups have grown fat on a diet of constant but
ever-changing alarm about the future. That these alarms—over
population growth, pesticides, rain forests, acid rain, ozone
holes, sperm counts, genetically modified crops—have often proved
wildly exaggerated does not matter: the organisations that did the
most exaggeration trousered the most money. In the case of climate,
the alarm is always in the distant future, so can never be
debunked.

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.

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.

Jim Hansen, recently retired as head of the Goddard
Institute of Space Studies at NASA, won over a million dollars in
lucrative green prizes, regularly joined protests against coal
plants and got himself arrested while at the same time he was in
charge of adjusting and homogenising one of the supposedly
objective data sets on global surface temperature. How would he be
likely to react if told of evidence that climate change is not such
a big problem?

Michael Oppenheimer, of Princeton University, who
frequently testifies before Congress in favour of urgent action on
climate change, was the Environmental Defense Fund’s senior
scientist for nineteen years and continues to advise it. The EDF
has assets of $209 million and since 2008 has had over $540 million
from charitable foundations, plus $2.8 million in federal grants.
In that time it has spent $11.3 million on lobbying, and has
fifty-five people on thirty-two federal advisory committees. How
likely is it that they or Oppenheimer would turn around and say
global warming is not likely to be dangerous?

Why is it acceptable, asks the blogger Donna
Laframboise, for the IPCC to “put a man who has spent his career
cashing cheques from both the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and
Greenpeace in charge of its latest chapter on the world’s oceans?”
She’s referring to the University of Queensland’s Ove
Hoegh-Guldberg.

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.

 

What consensus about the future?

Sceptics such as Plimer often complain that
“consensus” has no place in science. Strictly they are right, but I
think it is a red herring. I happily agree that you can have some
degree of scientific consensus about the past and the present. The
earth is a sphere; evolution is true; carbon dioxide is a
greenhouse gas. The IPCC claims in its most recent report that it
is “95 per cent” sure that “more than half” of the (gentle) warming
“since 1950” is man-made. I’ll drink to that, though it’s a pretty
vague claim. But you really cannot have much of a consensus about
the future. Scientists are terrible at making forecasts—indeed as
Dan Gardner documents in his book 
Future Babble they are often worse than laymen. And the
climate is a chaotic system with multiple influences of which human
emissions are just one, which makes prediction even harder.

The IPCC actually admits the possibility of
lukewarming within its consensus, because it gives a range of
possible future temperatures: it thinks the world will be between
about 1.5 and four degrees warmer on average by the end of the
century. That’s a huge range, from marginally beneficial to
terrifyingly harmful, so it is hardly a consensus of danger, and if
you look at the “probability density functions” of climate
sensitivity, they always cluster towards the lower end.

What is more, in the small print describing the
assumptions of the “representative concentration pathways”, it
admits that the top of the range will only be reached if
sensitivity to carbon dioxide is high (which is doubtful); if world
population growth re-accelerates (which is unlikely); if carbon
dioxide absorption by the oceans slows down (which is improbable);
and if the world economy goes in a very odd direction, giving up
gas but increasing coal use tenfold (which is implausible).

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.

Politicians love this polarising because it means they
can attack a straw man. It’s what they are good at. “Doubt has been
eliminated,” said Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of
Norway and UN Special Representative on Climate Change, in a speech
in 2007: “It is irresponsible, reckless and deeply immoral to
question the seriousness of the situation. The time for diagnosis
is over. Now it is time to act.” John Kerry says we have no time
for a meeting of the flat-earth society. Barack Obama says that 97
per cent of scientists agree that climate change is “real, man-made
and dangerous”. That’s just a lie (or a very ignorant remark): as I
point out above, there is no consensus that it’s dangerous.

So where’s the outrage from scientists at this
presidential distortion? It’s worse than that, actually. The 97 per
cent figure is derived from two pieces of pseudoscience that would
have embarrassed a homeopath. The first was a poll that found that
97 per cent of just seventy-nine scientists thought climate change
was man-made—not that it was dangerous. A more recent poll of 1854
members of the American Meteorological Society found the true
number is 52 per cent.

The second source of the 97 per cent number was a
survey of scientific papers, which has now been comprehensively
demolished by Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University, who is
probably the world’s leading climate economist. As the
Australian 
blogger Joanne Nova summarised Tol’s findings, John Cook of the
University of Queensland and his team used an unrepresentative
sample, left out much useful data, used biased observers who
disagreed with the authors of the papers they were classifying
nearly two-thirds of the time, and collected and analysed the data
in such a way as to allow the authors to adjust their preliminary
conclusions as they went along, a scientific no-no if ever there
was one. The data could not be replicated, and Cook himself
threatened legal action to hide them. Yet neither the journal nor
the university where Cook works has retracted the paper, and the
scientific establishment refuses to stop citing it, let alone blow
the whistle on it. Its conclusion is too useful.

This should be a huge scandal, not fodder for a tweet
by the leader of the free world. 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.

Scandal after scandal

The Cook paper is one of many scandals and blunders in
climate science. There was the occasion in 2012 when the climate
scientist Peter Gleick stole the identity of a member of the
(sceptical) Heartland Institute’s board of directors, leaked
confidential documents, and included also a “strategy memo”
purporting to describe Heartland’s plans, which was a straight
forgery. Gleick apologised but continues to be a respected climate
scientist.

There was Stephan Lewandowsky, then at the University
of Western Australia, who published a paper titled “
NASA faked the moon landing therefore [climate] science is a
hoax”, from which readers might have deduced, in the words of
a Guardian headline, that “new research finds
that sceptics also tend to support conspiracy theories such as the
moon landing being faked”. Yet in fact in the survey for the paper,
only ten respondents out of 1145 thought that the moon landing was
a hoax, and seven of those did not think climate change was a hoax.
A particular irony here is that two of the men who have actually
been to the moon are vocal climate sceptics: Harrison Schmitt and
Buzz Aldrin.

It took years of persistence before physicist Jonathan
Jones and political scientist Ruth Dixon even managed to get into
print (in March this year) a detailed and devastating critique of
the Lewandowsky article’s methodological flaws and bizarre
reasoning, with one journal allowing Lewandowsky himself to oppose
the publication of their riposte. Lewandowsky published a later
paper claiming that the reactions to his previous paper proved he
was right, but it was so flawed it had to be retracted.

If these examples of odd scientific practice sound too
obscure, try Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC for thirteen
years and often described as the “world’s top climate scientist”.
He once dismissed as “voodoo science” an official report by India’s
leading glaciologist, Vijay Raina, because it had challenged a
bizarre claim in an IPCC report (citing a WWF report which cited an
article in New Scientist), that the Himalayan
glaciers would be gone by 2035. The claim originated with Syed
Hasnain, who subsequently took a job at The Energy and Resources
Institute (TERI), the Delhi-based company of which Dr Pachauri is
director-general, and there his glacier claim enabled TERI to win a
share of a three-million-euro grant from the European Union. No
wonder Dr Pachauri might well not have wanted the 2035 claim
challenged.

Yet Raina was right, it proved to be the IPCC’s most
high-profile blunder, and Dr Pachauri had to withdraw both it and
his “voodoo” remark. The scandal led to a highly critical report
into the IPCC by several of the world’s top science academics,
which recommended among other things that the IPCC chair stand down
after one term. Dr Pachauri ignored this, kept his job, toured the
world while urging others not to, and published a novel, with
steamy scenes of seduction of an older man by young women. (He
resigned this year following criminal allegations of sexual
misconduct with a twenty-nine-year-old female employee, which he
denies, and which are subject to police investigation.)

Yet the climate bloggers who constantly smear sceptics
managed to avoid even reporting most of this. If you want to follow
Dr Pachauri’s career you have to rely on a tireless but self-funded
investigative journalist: the Canadian Donna Laframboise. In her
chapter in The Facts, Laframboise details how Dr
Pachauri has managed to get the world to describe him as a Nobel
laureate, even though this is simply not true.

Notice, by the way, how many of these fearless
free-thinkers prepared to tell emperors they are naked are women.
Susan Crockford, a Canadian zoologist, has 
steadfastly exposed the myth-making that goes into polar bear
alarmism, to the obvious discomfort of the doyens of that
field. Jennifer Marohasy of Central Queensland University, by
persistently asking 
why cooling trends recorded at Australian weather stations with no
recorded moves were being altered to warming trends, has
embarrassed the Bureau of Meteorology into a review of their
procedures. Her chapter in The Factsunderlines
the failure of computer models to predict rainfall.

But male sceptics have scored successes too. There was
the case of the paper the IPCC relied upon to show that urban heat
islands (the fact that cities are generally warmer than the
surrounding countryside, so urbanisation causes local, but not
global, warming) had not exaggerated recent warming. This paper
turned out—as the sceptic Doug Keenan proved—to be based
partly on
non-existent data on forty-nine weather stations in China. When
corrected, it emerged that the urban heat island effect actually
accounted for 40 per cent of the warming in China.

There was the Scandinavian lake sediment core that was
cited as evidence of sudden recent warming, when it was actually
being used “upside down”—the opposite way the authors of the study
thought it should be used: so if anything it showed cooling.

There was the graph showing unprecedented recent
warming that turned out to depend on 
just one larch tree in the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia.

There was the southern hemisphere hockey-stick that
had been created by the omission of inconvenient data series.

There was the infamous “
hide the decline” incident when a tree-ring-derived graph had
been truncated to disguise the fact that it seemed to show recent
cooling.

And of course there was the
mother of all scandals, the “hockey stick” itself: a graph that
purported to show the warming of the last three decades of the
twentieth century as unprecedented in a millennium, a graph that
the IPCC was so thrilled with that it published it six times in its
third assessment report and displayed it behind the IPCC chairman
at his press conference. It was a graph that persuaded me to
abandon my scepticism (until I found out about its flaws), because
I thought Nature magazine would never have
published it without checking. And it is a graph that was
systematically shown by Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick to be
wholly misleading, as McKitrick recounts in glorious detail in his
chapter in The Facts.

Its hockey-stick shape depended heavily on one set of
data from bristlecone pine trees in the American south-west,
enhanced by a statistical approach to over-emphasise some 200 times
any hockey-stick shaped graph. Yet bristlecone tree-rings do not,
according to those who collected the data, reflect temperature at
all. What is more, the scientist behind the original paper, Michael
Mann, had known all along that his data depended heavily on these
inappropriate trees and a few other series, because when finally
prevailed upon to release his data he accidentally included a file
called “censored” that proved as much: he had tested the effect of
removing the bristlecone pine series and one other, and found that
the hockey-stick shape disappeared.

In March this year Dr 
Mann published a paper claiming the Gulf Stream was slowing
down. This garnered headlines all across the world.
Astonishingly, his evidence that the Gulf Stream is slowing down
came not from the Gulf Stream, but from “proxies” which
included—yes—bristlecone pine trees in Arizona, upside-down lake
sediments in Scandinavia and larch trees in Siberia.

The democratisation of science

Any one of these scandals in, say, medicine might
result in suspensions, inquiries or retractions. Yet the climate
scientific establishment repeatedly reacts as if nothing is wrong.
It calls out any errors on the lukewarming end, but ignores those
on the exaggeration end. That complacency has shocked me, and done
more than anything else to weaken my long-standing support for
science as an institution. I repeat that I am not a full sceptic of
climate change, let alone a “denier”. I think
carbon-dioxide-induced warming during this century is likely,
though I think it is unlikely to prove rapid and dangerous. So I
don’t agree with those who say the warming is all natural, or all
driven by the sun, or only an artefact of bad measurement, but nor
do I think anything excuses bad scientific practice in support of
the carbon dioxide theory, and every time one of these scandals
erupts and the scientific establishment asks us to ignore it, I
wonder if the extreme sceptics are not on to something. I feel
genuinely betrayed by the profession that I have spent so much of
my career championing.

There is, however, one good thing that has happened to
science as a result of the climate debate: the democratisation of
science by sceptic bloggers. It is no accident that sceptic sites
keep winning the “Bloggies” awards. There is nothing quite like
them for massive traffic, rich debate and genuinely open peer
review. Following Steven McIntyre on tree rings, Anthony Watts or
Paul Homewood on temperature records, Judith Curry on uncertainty,
Willis Eschenbach on clouds or ice cores, or Andrew Montford on
media coverage has been one of the delights of recent years for
those interested in science. Papers that had passed formal peer
review and been published in journals have nonetheless been torn
apart in minutes on the blogs. There was the time Steven McIntyre
found that an Antarctic temperature trend arose “entirely from the
impact of splicing the two data sets together”. Or when Willis
Eschenbach showed a published chart had “cut the modern end of the
ice core carbon dioxide record short, right at the time when carbon
dioxide started to rise again” about 8000 years ago, thus omitting
the startling but inconvenient fact that carbon dioxide levels rose
while temperatures fell over the following millennia.

Scientists don’t like this lèse
majesté, of course. But it’s the citizen science that the
internet has long promised. This is what eavesdropping on science
should be like—following the twists and turns of each story, the
ripostes and counter-ripostes, making up your own mind based on the
evidence. And that is precisely what the non-sceptical side just
does not get. Its bloggers are almost universally wearily
condescending. They are behaving like sixteenth-century priests who
do not think the Bible should be translated into English.

Renegade heretics in science itself are especially
targeted. The BBC was subjected to torrents of abuse for even
interviewing Bob Carter, a distinguished geologist and climate
science expert who does not toe the alarmed line and who is one of
the editors of Climate Change Reconsidered, a serious and
comprehensive survey of the state of climate science organised by
the Non-governmental Panel on Climate Change and ignored by the
mainstream media.

Judith Curry of Georgia Tech moved from alarm to mild
scepticism and has endured vitriolic criticism for it. She recently
wrote:

There is enormous pressure for climate
scientists to conform to the so-called consensus. This pressure
comes not only from politicians, but from federal funding agencies,
universities and professional societies, and scientists themselves
who are green activists and advocates. Reinforcing this consensus
are strong monetary, reputational, and authority interests. The
closing of minds on the climate change issue is a tragedy for both
science and society.

The distinguished Swedish meteorologist Lennart
Bengtsson was so frightened for his own family and his health after
he announced last year that he was joining the advisory board of
the Global Warming Policy Foundation that he withdrew, saying, “It
is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy.”

The astrophysicist Willie Soon was falsely accused by
a Greenpeace activist of failing to disclose conflicts of interest
to an academic journal, an accusation widely repeated by mainstream
media.

 

Clearing the middle ground

Much of this climate war parallels what has happened
with Islamism, and it is the result of a similar deliberate policy
of polarisation and silencing of debate. Labelling opponents
“Islamophobes” or “deniers” is in the vast majority of cases
equally inaccurate and equally intended to polarise. As Asra Nomani
wrote in the Washington Post recently, a
community of anti-blasphemy police arose out of a deliberate policy
decision by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation:

and began trying to control the debate on Islam.
This wider corps throws the label of “Islamophobe” on pundits,
journalists and others who dare to talk about extremist ideology in
the religion … The insults may look similar to Internet trolling
and vitriolic comments you can find on any blog or news site. But
they’re more coordinated, frightening and persistent.

Compare that to what happened to Roger Pielke Jr, as
recounted by James Delingpole in The Facts. Pielke is a professor
of environmental studies at the University of Colorado and a hugely
respected expert on disasters. He is no denier, thinking man-made
global warming is real. But in his own area of expertise he is very
clear that the rise in insurance losses is because the world is
getting wealthier and we have more stuff to lose, not because more
storms are happening. This is incontrovertibly true, and the IPCC
agrees with him. But when he said this on Nate Silver’s
FiveThirtyEight website he and Silver were savaged by commenters,
led by one Rob Honeycutt. Crushed by the fury he had unleashed,
Silver apologised and dropped Pielke as a contributor.

Rob Honeycutt and his allies knew what they were
doing. Delingpole points out that Honeycutt (on a different
website) urged people to “send in the troops to hammer down”
anything moderate or sceptical, and to “grow the team of crushers”.
Those of us who have been on the end of this sort of stuff know it
is exactly like what the blasphemy police do with Islamophobia. We
get falsely labelled “deniers” and attacked for heresy in often the
most ad-hominem way.

Even more shocking has been the bullying lynch mob
assembled this year by alarmists to prevent the University of
Western Australia, erstwhile employers of the serially debunked
conspiracy theorist Stephan Lewandowsky, giving a job to the
economist Bjorn Lomborg. The grounds were that Lomborg is a
“denier”. But he’s not. He does not challenge the science at all.
He challenges on economic grounds some climate change policies, and
the skewed priorities that lead to the ineffective spending of
money on the wrong environmental solutions. His approach has been
repeatedly vindicated over many years in many different topics, by
many of the world’s leading economists. Yet there was barely a
squeak of protest from the academic establishment at the way he was
howled down and defamed for having the temerity to try to set up a
research group at a university.

Well, internet trolls are roaming the woods in every
subject, so what am I complaining about? The difference is that in
the climate debate they have the tacit or explicit support of the
scientific establishment. Venerable bodies like the Royal Society
almost never criticise journalists for being excessively alarmist,
only for being too lukewarm, and increasingly behave like
pseudoscientists, explaining away inconvenient facts.

Making excuses for failed predictions

For example, scientists predicted a retreat of
Antarctic sea ice but it has expanded instead, and nowadays they
are claiming, like any astrologer, that this is because of warming
after all. “Please,” says Mark Steyn in The
Facts:

No tittering, it’s so puerile—every professor of
climatology knows that the thickest ice ever is a clear sign of
thin ice, because as the oceans warm, glaciers break off the
Himalayas and are carried by the El Ninja down the Gore Stream past
the Cape of Good Horn where they merge into the melting ice sheet,
named after the awareness-raising rapper Ice Sheet …

Or consider this example, from the Royal Society’s
recent booklet on climate change:

Does the recent slowdown of warming mean that
climate change is no longer happening? No. Since the very warm
surface temperatures of 1998 which followed the strong 1997-98 El
Niño, the increase in average surface temperature has slowed
relative to the previous decade of rapid temperature increases,
with more of the excess heat being stored in the oceans.

You would never know from this that the “it’s hiding
in the oceans” excuse is just one unproven hypothesis—and one that
implies that natural variation exaggerated the warming in the
1990s, so reinforcing the lukewarm argument. Nor would you know (as
Andrew Bolt recounts in his chapter in The Facts)
that the pause in global warming contradicts specific and explicit
predictions such as this, from the UK Met Office: “by 2014 we’re
predicting it will be 0.3 degrees warmer than in 2004”. Or that the
length of the pause is now past the point where many scientists
said it would disprove the hypothesis of rapid man-made warming. Dr
Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of
East Anglia, said in 2009: “Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has
to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.” It now
has.

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. The
Royal Society once used to promise “never to give their opinion, as
a body, upon any subject”. Its very motto is “nullius in verba”:
take nobody’s word for it. Now it puts out catechisms of what you
must believe in. Surely, the handing down of dogmas is for
churches, not science academies. Expertise, authority and
leadership should count for nothing in science. The great Thomas
Henry Huxley put it this way: “The improver of natural knowledge
absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him,
scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one
unpardonable sin.” Richard Feynman was even pithier: “Science is
the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

The harm to science

I dread to think what harm this episode will have done
to the reputation of science in general when the dust has settled.
Science will need a reformation. Garth Paltridge is a distinguished
Australian climate scientist, who, in The Facts,
pens a wise paragraph that I fear will be the epitaph of climate
science:

We have at least to consider the possibility
that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue
has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate
problem—or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating
the uncertainties associated with the climate problem—in its effort
to promote the cause. It is a particularly nasty trap in the
context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for
centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty
which is the basis for society’s respect for scientific
endeavour.

And it’s not working anyway. Despite avalanches of
money being spent on research to find evidence of rapid man-made
warming, despite even more spent on propaganda and marketing and
subsidising renewable energy, the public remains unconvinced. The
most recent polling data from Gallup shows the number of Americans
who worry “a great deal” about climate change is down slightly on
thirty years ago, while the number who worry “not at all” has
doubled from 12 per cent to 24 per cent—and now exceeds the number
who worry “only a little” or “a fair amount”. All that
fear-mongering has achieved less than nothing: if anything it has
hardened scepticism.

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. They want us to spend a fortune getting
emissions down as soon as possible. And they want us to do that
even if it hurts poor people today, because, they say, their
grandchildren (who, as Nigel Lawson points out, in The
Facts, and their models assume, are going to be very
wealthy) matter more.

Yet they are not prepared to debate the science behind
their concern. That seems wrong to me.