Real science is always provisional, open to correction, and tentative in its conclusions. Scientism on the other hand is an ideological stone – unmovable and inflexible. Thus real scientists will be open to evidence, while the true believers will allow ideology to trump the facts.
We certainly see this played out in the global warming hype. For many this has simply become an article of faith. One must subscribe to anthropogenic global warming, or be hounded out of the public arena as a heretic and renegade. And this despite the fact that thousands of scientists don’t buy the AGW hype.
But you know things are really beginning to unravel when the big cheese groups pushing all this finally start admitting that they may have gotten things wrong. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is now finally admitting that their computer projections may have greatly overstated the case on global warming.
Indeed, the IPCC’s “latest assessment reportedly admits its computer drastically overestimated rising temperatures, and over the past 60 years the world has in fact been warming at half the rate claimed in the previous IPCC report in 2007. More importantly, according to reports in British and US media, the draft report appears to suggest global temperatures were less sensitive to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide than was previously thought.”
As one news report states, “Professor Judith Curry, head of climate science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, told The Daily Mail the leaked summary showed ‘the science is clearly not settled, and is in a state of flux’. The Wall Street Journal said the updated report, due out on September 27, would show ‘the temperature rise we can expect as a result of manmade emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than the IPCC thought in 2007’.”
The truth is, far too many other more important features, such as solar activity, determine the earth’s fluctuating temperatures: “On August 7th, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten quoted Irish solar expert Ian Elliott predicting that lower levels of sunspot activity over the next few years ‘indicates that we may be on the path to a new little ice age.
“‘If you think scientists just couldn’t get any more incompetent, then think again. [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] scientists even appear to believe that cold events are now signs of warming,’ Gosselin points out. ‘When one carefully reads the report, we find that the NOAA findings actually do confirm precisely what the skeptics have been claiming all along:
1. The Earth has stopped warming.
2. The climate models exaggerated future warming [caused by] CO2 climate sensitivity is much lower than we first thought.
‘That’s the real issue at hand,’ he added.”
Yet the panic merchants have made a killing in telling us we are all doomed. They have offered up one false prophecy after another, yet they still continue pimping their bogus alarmism. Consider Al Gore. He assured us in 2007 that by 2013 the North Pole would be “ice-free”.
Um, no Al, wrong again. Just the opposite seems to be occurring. As another report states, “However, instead of completely melting away, the polar icecap is now at its highest level for this time of year since 2006. Satellite photos of the Arctic taken by NASA in August 2012 and August 2013 show a 60 percent increase in the polar ice sheet, more than half the size of Europe, despite ‘realistic’ predictions by climate scientists six years ago that the North Pole would be completely melted by now.
“Instead of shrinking, the NASA photographs clearly show that the Arctic ice sheet is much larger than it was at the same time last year. The thick layer of summer ice, which currently stretches from Canada to Russia, is preventing ships from using the North-West Passage.”
These and other inconvenient truths do not deter the alarmists however. They have too much at stake to change their tune now and align themselves with the actual science. There is certainly too much money at stake. Al Gore might have to relinquish his mansions and all his polluting cars and jets.
As I say, this is a faith-based venture. It is like a religion, or more like a cult, where there must be complete conformity and agreement, or else. There can be no dissent and no disagreement. Everyone must hold to the party line or face the music.
Just as the Communists of old punished anyone who deviated from the official party line, so too today, as Norman Rogers explains: “Global warming is a scientific theory, but is mostly about faith. Faith plays a bigger role in science than we care to admit.
“Allegedly well-meaning intellectuals of the 1930s believed in and defended Stalin’s Russia in the face of massive and accessible evidence that ‘scientific’ communism had given birth to a terroristic, totalitarian state. Today’s believers in global warming, like the intellectuals in the 1930s, fiercely defend their wacky faith in the face of massive and contrary evidence. They are vested in a theory that is precious to them. Their scientific studies pick and choose from an evidence buffet.
“When an ideology is precious, the believers become aggressively hostile toward infidels. The global warmers do not have dungeons or Siberian labor camps, though one wonders how far they would go if they could. James Hansen, a scientist and the most famous global warming preacher after Al Gore, wants to put executives of fossil fuel companies in jail for ‘crimes against humanity.’
“Al Gore thinks that people who deny his faith are like people who think that the moon landing was staged in Hollywood. In other words, those who question the global warming faith are either criminals or crackpots. This is tolerance as practiced by those who have appointed themselves to save us from imaginary disaster.”
He continues, “The enemies of the global warming believers are dissenters, effectively infidels or pagans. Scientists who dissent are especially despised and persecuted because global warming is supposedly based on science and thus scientists who dissent are a special threat to the faith. To the believers, a scientist who dissents is like a bishop of the Catholic Church who becomes a Mormon.
“To see examples of the persecution of dissenting scientists is easy. It’s everywhere on the Internet. The websites DeSmogBlog, Climate Central, The Daily Climate, Real Climate, and Skeptical Science, to name a few examples, criticize scientists who don’t toe the ideological line. DeSmogBlog maintains a data base of people it doesn’t like, including scientists. The general theme of these websites is that the infidels are in the pay of oil companies or coal companies.
“This theory is repeated again and again, but in reality the oil and coal companies are far too timid to actively support global warming dissenters. The few examples of coal or oil companies actually giving money to dissenters or dissenting organizations are so minor that one suspects that the gift was an accident or bureaucratic snafu. The theory of a fossil fuel company conspiracy is untrue, but is constantly repeated because the believers are unable to think of any legitimate reason why anyone would dissent from what to them is revealed truth.”
So we have a real faith-based zealotry which cracks down on any doubters, any unbelievers. But persecuting dissenters will not change the real science. And as the evidence mounts that AGW is a theory full of holes and laden with faults, more and more people will see that this has just been another big con-job – and a costly one at that.
We shouldn’t put too much faith in computers. They are very powerful but they aren’t clever. They can only do what they are programmed to do, and a false premise will give false answers. Garbage in gives garbage out.
John Bennett
And if anyone is in doubt, please read ‘Taxing Air’ by Prof Bob Carter, et al. It is not written from a Christian perspective but it is from an honest, factual and scientific one.
Lindsay Smail
Average global temperature history since 1975 is like a hill. We went up the hill from 1975 to 2001 where the average global temperature trend reached a plateau (per the average of the five government agencies that publicly report average global temperature anomalies). The average global temperature trend since 2001 has been flat to slightly declining but is on the plateau at the top of the hill. Claiming that the hill is highest at its top is not very profound. The temperature trend has started to decline but the decline will be slow; about 0.1 K per decade for the planet, approximately twice that fast for land areas.
A licensed mechanical engineer (retired) who has been researching this issue (unfunded) for 6 years, and in the process discovered what actually caused global warming and why it ended, has four papers on the web that you may find of interest. They provide some eye-opening insight on the cause of change to average global temperature and why it has stopped warming. The papers are straight-forward calculations (not just theory) using readily available data up to May, 2013. (data through July made no significant difference)
The first one is ‘Global warming made simple’ at http://lowaltitudeclouds.blogspot.com It shows, with simple thermal radiation calculations, how a tiny change in the amount of low-altitude clouds could account for half of the average global temperature change in the 20th century, and what could have caused that tiny cloud change. (The other half of the temperature change is from net average natural ocean oscillation which is dominated by the PDO)
The second paper is ‘Natural Climate change has been hiding in plain sight’ at http://climatechange90.blogspot.com/2013/05/natural-climate-change-has-been.html . This paper presents a simple equation that, using a single external forcing, calculates average global temperatures since they have been accurately measured world wide (about 1895) with an accuracy of 90%, irrespective of whether the influence of CO2 is included or not. The equation uses a proxy which is the time-integral of sunspot numbers (the external forcing). A graph is included which shows the calculated trajectory overlaid on measurements.
Change to the level of atmospheric CO2 has had no significant effect on average global temperature.
A third paper, ‘The End of Global Warming’ at http://endofgw.blogspot.com/ expands recent (since 1996) measurements and includes a graph showing the growing separation between the rising CO2 and not-rising average global temperature. It also discusses future uncertainties.
Wonder what proportion of these true believers classify evidence-based religion as ‘blind faith’?
Dunstan Hartley
Thanks Bill for another interesting article.
I’ve heard that the scientists who support global warming are on the “gravy train” of funding for believers of the global warming faith. The points you presented in your article confirm this too.
Harold van de Wiel
I was sent this by my brother recently –
Did you know that thousands of scientist have signed a petition in the USA which states there is no convincing proof of climate change and that this has been ignored by Obama’s administration …despite the weight of numbers? SEE: http://www.petitionproject.org/
The purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of “settled science” and an overwhelming “consensus” in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong. No such consensus or settled science exists. As indicated by the petition text and signatory list, a very large number of American scientists reject this hypothesis. Publicists at the United Nations, Mr. Al Gore, and their supporters frequently claim that only a few “skeptics” remain – skeptics who are still unconvinced about the existence of a catastrophic human-caused global warming emergency.
It is evident that 31,487 Americans with university degrees in science – including 9,029 PhDs, are not “a few.” Moreover, from the clear and strong petition statement that they have signed, it is evident that these 31,487 American scientists are not “skeptics.”
These scientists are instead convinced that the human-caused global warming hypothesis is without scientific validity and that government action on the basis of this hypothesis would unnecessarily and counterproductively damage both human prosperity and the natural environment of the Earth.
Al Gore is a fraud. He claimed that carbon dioxide was a kind of pollution (really?!? carbon dioxide is to tree what oxygen is to us). Earlier this year he said that people were treating the “sky like a sewer” when referring to carbon dioxide “poisoning”. What is one of the gases that comes out every time he opens his mouth?
Same type of tactics as used by evolutionists against those that trust the word of God. Try to silence any dissent by intimidation, whether name-calling, withholding funding for research, getting people fired for not toeing the line etc.
Mario Del Giudice
We shouldn’t put too much faith in computers. They are very powerful but they aren’t clever. They can only do what they are programmed to do, and a false premise will give false answers. Garbage in gives garbage out.
John Bennett
And if anyone is in doubt, please read ‘Taxing Air’ by Prof Bob Carter, et al. It is not written from a Christian perspective but it is from an honest, factual and scientific one.
Lindsay Smail
Average global temperature history since 1975 is like a hill. We went up the hill from 1975 to 2001 where the average global temperature trend reached a plateau (per the average of the five government agencies that publicly report average global temperature anomalies). The average global temperature trend since 2001 has been flat to slightly declining but is on the plateau at the top of the hill. Claiming that the hill is highest at its top is not very profound. The temperature trend has started to decline but the decline will be slow; about 0.1 K per decade for the planet, approximately twice that fast for land areas.
A licensed mechanical engineer (retired) who has been researching this issue (unfunded) for 6 years, and in the process discovered what actually caused global warming and why it ended, has four papers on the web that you may find of interest. They provide some eye-opening insight on the cause of change to average global temperature and why it has stopped warming. The papers are straight-forward calculations (not just theory) using readily available data up to May, 2013. (data through July made no significant difference)
The first one is ‘Global warming made simple’ at http://lowaltitudeclouds.blogspot.com It shows, with simple thermal radiation calculations, how a tiny change in the amount of low-altitude clouds could account for half of the average global temperature change in the 20th century, and what could have caused that tiny cloud change. (The other half of the temperature change is from net average natural ocean oscillation which is dominated by the PDO)
The second paper is ‘Natural Climate change has been hiding in plain sight’ at http://climatechange90.blogspot.com/2013/05/natural-climate-change-has-been.html . This paper presents a simple equation that, using a single external forcing, calculates average global temperatures since they have been accurately measured world wide (about 1895) with an accuracy of 90%, irrespective of whether the influence of CO2 is included or not. The equation uses a proxy which is the time-integral of sunspot numbers (the external forcing). A graph is included which shows the calculated trajectory overlaid on measurements.
Change to the level of atmospheric CO2 has had no significant effect on average global temperature.
The time-integral of sunspot numbers since 1610 which is shown at http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/01/blog-post_23.html corroborates the significance of this factor.
A third paper, ‘The End of Global Warming’ at http://endofgw.blogspot.com/ expands recent (since 1996) measurements and includes a graph showing the growing separation between the rising CO2 and not-rising average global temperature. It also discusses future uncertainties.
The fourth paper http://consensusmistakes.blogspot.com/ exposes some of the mistakes that have been made by the ‘Consensus’ and the IPCC.
Dan Pangburn
Wonder what proportion of these true believers classify evidence-based religion as ‘blind faith’?
Dunstan Hartley
Thanks Bill for another interesting article.
I’ve heard that the scientists who support global warming are on the “gravy train” of funding for believers of the global warming faith. The points you presented in your article confirm this too.
Harold van de Wiel
I was sent this by my brother recently –
Did you know that thousands of scientist have signed a petition in the USA which states there is no convincing proof of climate change and that this has been ignored by Obama’s administration …despite the weight of numbers? SEE: http://www.petitionproject.org/
The purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of “settled science” and an overwhelming “consensus” in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong. No such consensus or settled science exists. As indicated by the petition text and signatory list, a very large number of American scientists reject this hypothesis. Publicists at the United Nations, Mr. Al Gore, and their supporters frequently claim that only a few “skeptics” remain – skeptics who are still unconvinced about the existence of a catastrophic human-caused global warming emergency.
It is evident that 31,487 Americans with university degrees in science – including 9,029 PhDs, are not “a few.” Moreover, from the clear and strong petition statement that they have signed, it is evident that these 31,487 American scientists are not “skeptics.”
These scientists are instead convinced that the human-caused global warming hypothesis is without scientific validity and that government action on the basis of this hypothesis would unnecessarily and counterproductively damage both human prosperity and the natural environment of the Earth.
Al Gore is a fraud. He claimed that carbon dioxide was a kind of pollution (really?!? carbon dioxide is to tree what oxygen is to us). Earlier this year he said that people were treating the “sky like a sewer” when referring to carbon dioxide “poisoning”. What is one of the gases that comes out every time he opens his mouth?
You may also wish to check out his $US500 million sale of his TV network to oil-funded Qatar earlier this year: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Al-Gores-Hipocrisy-The-Climate-Crusader-Profits-from-Fossil-Fuels.html
Jo Deller
Same type of tactics as used by evolutionists against those that trust the word of God. Try to silence any dissent by intimidation, whether name-calling, withholding funding for research, getting people fired for not toeing the line etc.
Mario Del Giudice