Science turns malignant
Next week on August 3, I’ll be releasing my latest list of climate scandals, a gate-update (see Current list of climate scandals). This is a month earlier than originally planned.
The list that’s posted now is visited on average about 100 times a day. Clearly it has become some sort of resource.
Unsurprisingly, the new list coming out has grown, and it will continue to grow. This is assured because of the way climate science is operated, funded, rewarded and politicised.
The disease is hopelessly chronic and there is no treatment in sight. The system is designed, built and programmed to keep producing many more scandals. Already I see dozens of new gates in incubation.
“Climate science” even has its own immune system that works to keep out the deadly virus called “truth”. The reality of that immune system became clear with the Muir Russell, Oxburgh and Penn State enquiries.
Soon I will have to break the climate-gate list into Volumes 1 and 2. I have no doubts about this.
The real threat, unfortunately, is that “climate science” risks becoming a malignant cancer that will threaten to spread to other fields of science and to our public institutions. In some cases it already has. Because of “climate science”, the public is losing trust in science and the civic institutions that are supposed to police it. As mistrust of climate science reaches ever higher levels, so will the public mistrust in other fields.
Scientists in these other fields need to take notice.
Honest! I left my first comment this morning before I read this post. What can we do to heal the sick? We’re doing it.
Russell, Oxburgh and Penn have showed beyond doubt the “legal” impenetrable AGW defence.
Here’s how it works.
Courts (ie, the law) can not discuss / decide scientific matters, they MUST defer to the judegement of the most senior “witness” available to the court.
AGW et all have put the appropriate people in the appropriate positions of seniority, so that when “it” goes to court, the most senior witness available will always “testify” to the benefit of, and in favour of AGW.
Regardless of the doubts / criticisms of “others”.
In other words the “flat earthers” are in place,
so the courts have to rule in favour of “flat earth”,
even if we all know the earth isn’t flat.
Anyone remember NASA’s James Hansen being THE witness for (the successful defence of) Greenpeace (AGW propaganda) vandelism of a UK coal fired power plant…
History repeats itself, we have allowed it to happen.
Like botany, AGW “climate studies” (sic) are exercises in hindsight only. Absent formulation of hypotheses subject to empirical falsification [nothing is ever truly verified], “peer review” has no results to replicate. All that’s left are superficially descriptive “models” which give statistical odds but cannot in principle extrapolate or forecast any particular outcome or “mutation” whatsoever.
By Edward Lorenz’s Chaos Theory, complex dynamic systems –those with three or more interacting variables– are intrinsically unpredictable. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions aka the “butterfly effect” engenders “strange attractors” exhibiting Benoit Mandelbrot’s “fractal geometry” whereby phenomena become self-similar on every scale. On geological time-scales, even “climate” as such is not a given.
So long as climatologists of integrity –emphatically excluding Green Gang propagandists sunk in academic, corporate, agency-sponsored Big Government cesspools– understand their limitations, put contemporary data in long-term cyclical context and perspective, credentialed evaluations have some interest. But beware… however plausible, 1910 scenarios bore no resemblance to conditions prevailing over the next hundred years. Now on the threshold of a 70-year “dead sun” Maunder Minimum similar to that of 1645 – 1715, Warmists’ decades-long sabotage of global energy economies may well result in mega-deaths worldwide.
According to Monckton and others, the food-to-biofuel conversion push a while ago doubled food prices for the poorest world-wide, and DID result in magadeaths. At those margins, it doesn’t take much, and price-doubling was overkill.
typo: “megadeaths”, not “mAgadeaths”. Actually, he talks about 100s of millions, not just a few.
PG;
there is a concept called “dynamic conservatism”, which says that any organized group or ideological pattern acts to isolate and expel change agents. Basic is ostracism, the cutting off of communication with the unwanted disrupter.
It’s a paradoxical problem in science especially, because the ideal and nominal “conservative” position is that data rules; theory is passing and temporary, subject to disproof and refutation by anyone at any time. This goes against the psychological/social “dynamic conservatism” by which groups and institutions maintain themselves. That’s necessary, to a point, to prevent random galloping off in all directions, but is also a deadly danger to integrity. It will always be a problem, a conundrum, a shifting balance and conflict.
The problem here is that more than the coherence of a field of study is at stake; it is being leveraged into a potent economic and population-control device and institutional mandate.
Brian H, in re global energy economies–
An English blog called “EU Referendum” cites Britain’s new Energy Secretary Chris Huhne as projecting a rapid one-third increase in householders’ pretax [get that] fuel bills due to “sustainable energy” expenditures plus purposeful dismantling of coal, oil, and nuclear facilities.
Last winter, impoverished pensioners in the U.K. raided library archives in search of old newsprint to heat their cubbyholes. Now as Earth enters on a 70-year “dead sun” Maunder Minimum similar to that of 1645 – 1715, death-eating Luddite sociopaths like Huhne will sit enthroned upon vast heaps of skulls.
John B.;
I am equally pessimistic, except that I hope my fave non-gubmint-funded research company comes up aces and trumps: focusfusion.org seems to have leveraged miniscule funding to approach “scientific break-even”, this year! Its intent is to engineer a waste-free $250K 5MW generator, and license the design for manufacture world-wide, within ~5 yrs. It would cut power costs by >90%, everywhere, and result in many good things. Two of the more notable are:
1) de-facto surging of real, deployable wealth, in all economic classes
2) the utter deflation of CO2 and energy-panic cults and cabals and campaigns.
Research results of its proof-of-concept work to date are better than hoped or anticipated. Fingers crossed!
Since medieval times humans did not change very much. More disturbing is the corruption of science. Physics will survive this crisis, I think, although Roy Spencer recently tried to convince us with thought experiments, about open systems with an external power supply, that the 2nd law of thermodynamics can be circumvented. Similarly, air planes seem to falsify the law of gravity. I think that Gerlich and Tscheuschner will win the debate. But what next? Hundreds of scientists have to admit that they supported an hoax as stupid as the story about Mars invaders. Perhaps science needs this cure. For the long term we should remain optimistic.
They can be beaten. The blogosphere ‘outed’ climategate despite a total MSM blackout. I like the scandals list. Gives us lots of ammo. Great blog. Enjoyed reading it and will return often. Gut gemacht!
Pointman
Pointman;
Though the ‘blackout’ has only partly been lifted, and though the CAGW-Cult control of purse-strings for scientists and academics remains strong, it seems to me that what the “outing” has done is to force the control-conspirators to make their corruption more and more overt and blatant, despite all histrionics and prestigitation.
That can go one of two ways:
1) They get away with it, and force the result they want, despite all objections;
2) It becomes sufficiently egregious and offensive and abusive that breakdowns in the political and legal malfeasance they depend on occur, and their effort crumbles.
(2) can occur through some combination of public awareness, successful legal challenges, or revolt by scientists with more integrity than self-interest.
Reality might strike a blow, too, if some drastic cooling events harm the economy and threaten survival, and make it very clear that there is no imminent “warming” emergency to counter.
(And, of course, as I suggest in my 3:59 am post above, a breakthrough energy technology might render the entire issue moot. A kind of Alexandrian chopping of the Gordian Knot.)
typo: prestidigitation (means ‘sleight of hand’).
One a lie has been told, there is an exponential growth required in supporting lies.