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Newsletter (March 19, 2010)
Above the Foldby E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D.
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Climate Change and the Death of Science is the most important article we've linked to in quite a long time. If you have time to read nothing else from this issue, read this. It's worth every minute it will take.
As Climategate and other transgressions of fundamental scientific procedure by global warming alarmists continue to unfold, it becomes increasingly clear that a great deal of what's been called "climate science" isn't science at all. It's ideological propaganda, often religious (but certainly not Biblical), masquerading as science.
In Climate Change and the Death of Science, Christian blogger Jerry Bouey nails practitioners of post-normal science fair and square, in their own words, demonstrating that even they know and admit they're no longer doing science but politics. To put it bluntly, they stabbed real science in the back. This article strikes at the very root of many environmentalists' routine practices.
Bouey explains brilliantly how science got hijacked by post-normal science along the hurried way to the “overwhelming scientific consensus” on manmade global warming. Bouey points out that one of the world’s leading global warming alarmists is himself a devotee of post-normal science and therefore a traitor to real science.
The article quotes post-normalist (and therefore not to be suspected of presenting post-normal science in a bad light) Eva Kunseler distinguishing normal and post-normal science thus:
Normal science
[Normal] Science is a logic inductive process leading to theory formulation, while all the way put through critical tests that have been deductively derived from the theory; Popper’s critical rationalist concept of science is an objective progression toward the truth. . . . The term normal science refers to the routine work of scientists within a paradigm; slowly accumulating knowledge in accord with established theoretical assumptions. . . . The paradigm is enlarged and frontiers of knowledge and techniques pushed forward.
The exercise of scholarly activities is defined by the dominance of the Mertonian CUDOS norms of science. They include:
- (C)ommunalism – the common ownership of scientific discoveries, according to which scientists give up intellectual property rights in exchange for recognition and esteem;
- (U)niversalism – according to which claims to truth are evaluated in terms of universal or value-free criteria;
- (D)isinterestedness – according to which scientists are rewarded for acting in ways that appear to be selfless;
- (O)rganized (S)kepticism – all ideas must be tested and are subject to structured community scrutiny.
Post-normal science
A new concept of science was introduced by Funtowicz and Ravetz during the 1990s . . . . The concept of post-normal science goes beyond the traditional assumptions that science is both certain and value-free . . . . The exercise of scholarly activities is defined by the dominance of goal orientation where scientific goals are controlled by political or societal actors . . . . Scientists’ integrity lies not in disinterestedness but in their behaviour as stakeholders. Normal science made the world believe that scientists should and could provide certain, objective factual information. . . . The guiding principle of normal science – the goal of achievement of factual knowledge - must be modified to fit the post-normal principle. . . . For this purpose, post-normal scientists should be capable of establishing extended peer communities and allow for ‘extended facts’ from non-scientific experts . . . . In post-normal science, the maintenance and enhancement of quality, rather than the establishment of factual knowledge, is the key task of scientists . . . . Involved social actors must agree on the definition of perceptions, narratives, interpretation of models, data and indicators . . . . scientists have to contribute to society by learning as quickly as possible about different perceptions . . . instead of seeking deep ultimate knowledge. If real scientists don’t rise up and point out that this emperor--"post-normal science"--has no clothes, the whole scientific enterprise will die. And the world will be a much poorer place for its demise.
To illustrate that people right at the top of the pecking order of alarmist climate-change "scientists" know exactly what they're doing--post-normal science, not real science--Bouey presents these telling quotations from socialist Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre and Professor of Climate Change (note that title--not of climate, but of climate change) at the University of East Anglia, home of the Climatic Research Unit, of Climategate infamy. Hulme prepared climate-change scenarios and reports for the British government, the European Commission, the United Nations Environment Program, the United Nations Population Division, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (as a lead author for the chapter on "Climate scenario development" for the 2001 Assessment Report and a contributing author on several other chapters), and the World Wildlife Fund. Says Hulme:
It has been labelled “post-normal” science. Climate change seems to fall in this category. Disputes in post-normal science focus…on the process of science – who gets funded, who evaluates quality, who has the ear of policy…The IPCC is a classic example of a post-normal scientific activity.
Within a capitalist world order, climate change is actually a convenient phenomenon to come along.
The danger of a “normal” reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow…exchanges often reduce to ones about scientific truth rather than about values, perspectives and political preferences.
. . . 'self-evidently’ dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth-seeking…scientists – and politicians – must trade truth for influence. What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy. . . .
The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved…It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change – the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and materials flows that climate change reveals – to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come.
Climate change also teaches us to rethink what we really want for ourselves…mythical ways of thinking about climate change reflect back to us truths about the human condition. . . .
The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identifies and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us…Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs.
. . . climate change has become an idea that now travels well beyond its origins in the natural sciences…climate change takes on new meanings and serves new purposes…climate change has become “the mother of all issues”, the key narrative within which all environmental politics – from global to local – is now framed…Rather than asking “how do we solve climate change?” we need to turn the question around and ask: “how does the idea of climate change alter the way we arrive at and achieve our personal aspirations . . . ?” The warfare between post-normal science and real science is important not just in the debate over “climate change” (see The REAL Climate Change Deniers), but in all kinds of issues in which science interfaces with policy. Like the pseudo-Christian cults that borrow vocabulary from Christianity but redefine all the terms, post-normal science is simply the application of rhetoric borrowed from the sciences to policy debates, cloaking one particular policy preference with the authority of “science,” and successful at doing so only to the extent that policy makers and the public are ignorant of the fact that post-normal science isn’t science at all.
Bouey’s whole article is must reading for anyone who wants truly to understand how the once respectable discipline of science got hijacked and made the slave of environmental alarmism. One of the most amazing things about it is that it was written before Climategate broke. The mushrooming fallout of that shows all the more clearly how right on target Bouey was.
Related items:
Andrew Dessler and Gerald North on Climategate, Climate Alarmism, and the State of Texas’s Challenge to the U.S. EPA’s Endangerment Finding
by Robert L. Bradley, Jr.
Founder & CEO, Institute for Energy Research; Writer, MasterResource.org; Scholar, Cato Institute & Competitive Enterprise Institute; Research Fellow, Center for Energy Economics, University of Texas in Austin; Author, Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy
March 17, 2010
What Real Scientists Do: Global Warming Science vs. Global Whining Scientists
by David W. Schnare
Director, Center for Environmental Stewardship, Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy
MasterResource, March 16, 2010
A Disgrace to Science
by Tom Bethell
Senior Editor, American Spectator; Author, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science
February, 2010Upcoming EventNext week in Philadelphia, Calvin Beisner (Cornwall Alliance), Nancy Pearcey (author of Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity), and David Legates (University of Delaware Climatologist) will address the science, economics, and Christian worldview implications of the global warming debate.
Pastors' Gathering Friday evening before the conference: Nancy Pearcey, Calvin Beisner, and other nationally recognized experts on Christian worldview and environmental stewardship will discuss how to train church members to think Biblically about these issues. Pastors, elders, and other church leaders and their spouses are welcome.
Read more and register online.In this issue
Featured- In Denial: The Meltdown of the Climate Campaign
- We, the EPA
Debate- As Climate Change Debate Wages On, Scientists Turn to Hollywood for Help
- Genetically Modified Famine
- Panel Will Review U.N. Climate Work
- Portrayal of Warming Critics as Creationists and Appeal to Consensus Reveal Ignorance
Science- Climate Change Warnings Over a Century Old
- Direct Evidence that Most U.S. Warming Since 1973 Could Be Spurious
Economics- Wind Energy's Ghosts
- Solar Industry Learns Lessons in Spanish Sun
Upcoming Events
Briefly Noted
Meet the Critics: Dennis T. Avery
Landmark Documents from the Cornwall Alliance
Featuredby Steven F. Hayward
Fellow, American Enterprise Institute; Writer, Weekly Standard
March 15, 2010
It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago—changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more. . . .
The rout has opened up serious divisions within the formerly closed ranks of the climate campaign. Before Climategate, expressing skepticism about catastrophic global warming typically got the hefty IPCC report thrown in your face along with the mantra that “2,500 of the world’s top scientists all agree” about climate change. Now the IPCC is being disavowed like a Mission Impossible team with its cover blown. Senate Environment and Public Works chairman Barbara Boxer insisted on February 23 that she relied solely on U.S. scientific research and not the IPCC to support the EPA’s greenhouse gas “endangerment finding.” In her opening statement at a hearing, Boxer said, “I didn’t quote one international scientist or IPCC report. . . . We are quoting the American scientific community here.” The U.N. has announced that it will launch an “independent review” of the IPCC, though like the British investigation of the CRU, the U.N. review will probably be staffed by “settled science” camp followers who will obligingly produce a whitewash. But Pachauri’s days as IPCC chairman are likely numbered; there are mounting calls from within the IPCC for Pachauri to resign, amid charges of potential conflicts of interest . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Editorial Board, Investor's Business Daily
March 15, 2010
. . . The New York Times says in a Saturday editorial . . . that if Congress fails to enact cap-and-trade legislation such as Waxman-Markey or Kerry-Boxer, the EPA should jam it down our throats.
After all, the Supreme Court said the EPA had the power, even the obligation, to impose draconian restrictions on so-called greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide. The elected representatives of the American people should just get out of the way.
We've heard this argument before. Last April, Time magazine ran a piece titled "EPA'S CO2 Finding: Putting A Gun To Congress' Head." This isn't the government structure the Founding Fathers envisioned.
They had in mind a system of checks and balances between the three branches of government, and the EPA was not one of them. The only gun that should be held to Congress' head is the vote of the American people. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Debateby Gregory M. Lamb
Staff Writer, Christian Science Monitor
March 15, 2010
. . . The importance of getting the word out has science organizations scrambling to explore new channels, from souped up websites to asking Hollywood for help.
The current climate-change furor has become the poster child for what happens when there’s a communications gap between scientists and the public. The vast majority of scientists see compelling evidence that the world’s climate is about to change significantly, and that the change is largely driven by human activity. Yet polls show public opinion becoming more skeptical about climate change. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Chuck Colson
Chairman and Founder, Prison Fellowship Ministries; Host, BreakPoint
March 16, 2010
. . . In 2002, famine brought on by drought and crop failures threatened Zambia and much of southern Africa. People left their land and walked 50 kilometers to towns in the hope of finding food.
Between 1 and 3 million Zambians required food assistance from the United Nations’ World Food Program, whose principal donor is the United States. . . .
Why? Because the food included genetically modified maize and other grains. . . .
He knew that these genetically modified crops were the same food eaten by Americans every day. . . .
But this game of chicken with the lives of Zambians wasn’t primarily about evidence. Mwanawasa and other African leaders were under severe economic pressure from environmentalists and European governments not to accept food that contained genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Some European nations threatened trade sanctions against any country which accepted it. So Zambians continued starving. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by John M. Broder
Writer, New York Times
March 10, 2010
A group of top scientists from around the world will review the research and management practices of the United Nations climate change panel so that it can try to avoid the kinds of errors that have brought its work into question in recent months, officials said Wednesday.
Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, said that the InterAcademy Council, a consortium of the world’s most prestigious scientific societies, would name scientists to take a thorough look at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The panel has come under sharp attack after revelations of several mistakes in its most recent report, published in 2007, including a poorly sourced and exaggerated account of how quickly the Himalayan glaciers are melting. . . .
Read the rest.
Related item:
World's Top Scientists to Review Climate Panel
by Seth Borenstein
Associated Press, March 10, 2010Back to top by E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D.
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
March 18, 2010
The New York Times, otherwise known as the Gray Lady, presumably finding actual discussion of the scientific evidence related to climate change and of the mounting evidence of corruption of scientific process in the wake of Climategate too frightening to engage, launched a flurry of copycat articles in other newspapers and around the blogosphere when she published Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets early this month. You know the tactic: If you can't refute the argument, attack the opponent.
Lauri Lebo, a blogger at "Religion Dispatches, picked up on the meme of discrediting critics of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) by equating them with young-Earth creationists--blissfully (and lazily) unaware that the vast majority of said critics are old-Earth evolutionists. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Scienceby Kirk Myers
Writer, Examiner
March 2, 2010
. . . “Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers. . . all point to a radical change in climate conditions and . . . unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone . . . Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones . . . while at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared.” . . .
The above report of runaway Arctic warming is from a Washington Post story published Nov. 2, 1922 and bears an uncanny resemblance to the tales of global warming splattered across the front pages of today's newspapers. It is one of many historical accounts published during the past 140 years describing climate changes and often predicting catastrophic cooling or warming.
Here are excerpts from a few of those accounts, appearing as early as 1870: . . .
“The question is again being discussed whether recent and long-continued observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period, when the countries now basking in the fostering warmth of a tropical sun will ultimately give way to the perennial frost and snow of the polar regions.” – New York Times, Feb. 24, 1895 . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Roy W. Spencer
Principal Research Scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville; Author, DrRoySpencer.com; Author, Climate Confusion and The Great Global Warming Blunder
March 16, 2010
My last few posts have described a new method for quantifying the average Urban Heat Island (UHI) warming effect as a function of population density, using thousands of pairs of temperature measuring stations within 150 km of each other. The results supported previous work which had shown that UHI warming increases logarithmically with population, with the greatest rate of warming occurring at the lowest population densities as population density increases. . . .
I will restrict the analysis to 1973 and later since (1) this is the primary period of warming allegedly due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions; (2) the period having the largest number of monitoring sites has been since 1973; and (3) a relatively short 37-year record maximizes the number of continuously operating stations, avoiding the need to handle transitions as older stations stop operating and newer ones are added.
Similar to my previous posts, for each U.S. station I average together four temperature measurements per day (00, 06, 12, and 18 UTC) to get a daily average temperature (GHCN uses daily max/min data). There must be at least 20 days of such data for a monthly average to be computed. I then include only those stations having at least 90% complete monthly data from 1973 through 2009. Annual cycles in temperature and anomalies are computed from each station separately. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Economicsby Andrew Walden
Editor, Hawaii Free Press; Writer, American Thinker
February 15, 2010
. . . The Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade Bill appears to be politically dead since Republican Scott Brown's paradigm-shattering Massachusetts Senate victory. But alternative proposals being floated by Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and others still promise billions of dollars to wind developers and commit the United States to generate as much as 20% of its electricity from so-called "renewable" sources.
The ghosts of Kamaoa are not alone in warning us. Five other abandoned wind sites dot the Hawaiian Isles -- but it is in California where the impact of past mandates and subsidies is felt most strongly. Thousands of abandoned wind turbines littered the landscape of wind energy's California "big three" locations -- Altamont Pass, Tehachapi, and San Gorgonio -- considered among the world's best wind sites. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Elisabeth Rosenthal
Writer, New York Times
March 8, 2010
. . . as low-quality, poorly designed solar plants sprang up on Spain’s plateaus, Spanish officials came to realize that they would have to subsidize many of them indefinitely, and that the industry they had created might never produce efficient green energy on its own.
In September the government abruptly changed course, cutting payments and capping solar construction. Puertollano’s brief boom turned bust. Factories and stores shut, thousands of workers lost jobs, foreign companies and banks abandoned contracts that had already been negotiated. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Upcoming EventsThe purpose of ICCC-4 is the same as it was for the first three events: to build momentum and public awareness of the global warming “realism” movement, a network of scientists, economists, policymakers, and concerned citizens who believe sound science and economics, rather than exaggeration and hype, ought to determine what actions, if any, are taken to address the problem of climate change. Speakers will include over a hundred scientists, economists, and other scholars from around the world.
Register online.Back to top Friends of Coal Tennessee and the Tennessee Mining Association are hosting Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer for a screening of their documentary, Mine Your Own Business on April 7, 2010, at 7:30 p.m. at the historic Belcourt Theatre, Nashville, Tenn. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m. and a brief panel discussion will begin at 7:00 p.m., followed by the movie starting at 7:30 p.m. Tickets can be purchased for $5.00 plus a small processing fee on the Belcourt Theatre website. Proceeds from the event support Friends of Coal Tennessee. . . .
Register online.Back to top Briefly NotedMore Carbon Dissidents
Steve McIntyre Annotates Rob Bradley's "Climategate from an Enron Perspective
Robert Bradley, Jr.: Climategate: Seven Hard Questions from the Case Study of the Fall of Enron
Stephen Dinan: Climate Scientists to Fight Back at Skeptics
Ed Morrissey: E-mails from National Academy of Sciences Plot Attacks on AGW SkepticsBack to top Meet the CriticsMeet the Critics gives you basic information on 64 of the leading critics of dangerous manmade global warming. Today's critic:
Dennis T. Avery
Agricultural Analyst for the U.S. Department of State from 1980 through 1988, Dennis T. Avery is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and the Director of their Center for Global Food Issues. Mentioned on page 121 of the Senate report, Avery co-authored (with Fred Singer) Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, offering a symphony of evidence from a wide variety of scientific specialties that recent and foreseeable global warming (and cooling) are not significantly different from the cycles that have occurred throughout Earth's history. He has written many articles on climate change, such as The Massive Food and Land Costs of U.S. Corn Ethanol, Biofuels Forcing World to Ration Food Aid, Alaska's Glaciers Are Growing, and Asia's Brown Pollution Cloud: Caused by Renewable Fuels.
Back to top Landmark Documents from the Cornwall Alliance
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., National Spokesman
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, http://www.cornwallalliance.org/
Information in this newsletter is for scholarly and educational use only and may not be copied or reproduced for any other purposes without prior permission of the copyright holders.
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