By Peter Berkowitz, Wall Street Journal
Last fall, emails revealed that scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England and colleagues in the U.S. and around the globe deliberately distorted data to support dire global warming scenarios and sought to block scholars with a different view from getting published. What does this scandal say generally about the intellectual habits and norms at our universities?
This is a legitimate question, because our universities, which above all should be cultivating intellectual virtue, are in their day-to-day operations fostering the opposite. Fashionable ideas, the convenience of professors, and the bureaucratic structures of academic life combine to encourage students and faculty alike to defend arguments for which they lack vital information. They pretend to knowledge they don’t possess and invoke the authority of rank and status instead of reasoned debate.
Consider the undergraduate curriculum. Over the last several decades, departments have watered down the requirements needed to complete a major, while core curricula have been hollowed out or abandoned. Only a handful of the nation’s leading universities - Columbia and the University of Chicago at the forefront - insist that all undergraduates must read a common set of books and become conversant with the main ideas and events that shaped Western history and the larger world.
There are no good pedagogical reasons for abandoning the core. Professors and administrators argue that students need and deserve the freedom to shape their own course of study. But how can students who do not know the basics make intelligent decisions about the books they should read and the perspectives they should master?
The real reasons for releasing students from rigorous departmental requirements and fixed core courses are quite different. One is that professors prefer to teach boutique classes focusing on their narrow areas of specialization. In addition, they believe that dropping requirements will lure more students to their departments, which translates into more faculty slots for like-minded colleagues. By far, though, the most important reason is that faculty generally reject the common sense idea that there is a basic body of knowledge that all students should learn. This is consistent with the popular campus dogma that all morals and cultures are relative and that objective knowledge is impossible.
The deplorable but predictable result is that professors constantly call upon students to engage in discussions and write papers in the absence of fundamental background knowledge. Good students quickly absorb the curriculum’s unwritten lesson—cutting corners and vigorously pressing strong but unsubstantiated opinions is the path to intellectual achievement.
The production of scholarship also fosters intellectual vice. Take the peer review process, which because of its supposed impartiality and objectivity is intended to distinguish the work of scholars from that of journalists and commercial authors.
Academic journals typically adopt a double blind system, concealing the names of both authors and reviewers. But any competent scholar can determine an article’s approach or analytical framework within the first few paragraphs. Scholars are likely to have colleagues and graduate students they support and whose careers they wish to advance. A few may even have colleagues whose careers, along with those of their graduate students, they would like to tarnish or destroy. There is no check to prevent them from benefiting their friends by providing preferential treatment for their orientation and similarly punishing their enemies.
That’s because the peer review process violates a fundamental principle of fairness. We don’t allow judges to be parties to a controversy they are adjudicating, and don’t permit athletes to umpire games in which they are playing. In both cases the concern is that their interest in the outcome will bias their judgment and corrupt their integrity. So why should we expect scholars, especially operating under the cloak of anonymity, to fairly and honorably evaluate the work of allies and rivals?
Some university presses exacerbate the problem. Harvard University Press tells a reviewer the name of a book manuscript’s author but withholds the reviewer’s identity from the author. It would be hard to design a system that provided reviewers more opportunity to reward friends and punish enemies.
Harvard Press assumes that its editors will detect and avoid conflicts of interest. But if reviewers are in the same scholarly field as, or in a field related to that of, the author - and why would they be asked for an evaluation if they weren’t? - then the reviewer will always have a conflict of interest.
Then there is the abuse of confidentiality and the overreliance on arguments from authority in hiring, promotion and tenure decisions. Owing to the premium the academy places on specialization, most university departments today contain several fields, and within them several subfields. Thus departmental colleagues are regularly asked to evaluate scholarly work in which they have little more expertise than the man or woman on the street.
Often unable to form independent professional judgments—but unwilling to recuse themselves from important personnel decisions—faculty members routinely rely on confidential letters of evaluation from scholars at other universities. Once again, these letters are written—and solicited—by scholars who are irreducibly interested parties.
There are no easy fixes to this state of affairs. Worse, our universities don’t recognize they have a problem. Instead, professors and university administrators are inclined to indignantly dismiss concerns about the curriculum, peer review, and hiring, promotion and tenure decisions as cynically calling into question their good character. But these concerns are actually rooted in the democratic conviction that professors and university administrators are not cut from finer cloth than their fellow citizens.
Our universities shape young men’s and women’s sensibilities, and our professors are supposed to serve as guardians of authoritative knowledge and exemplars of serious and systematic inquiry. Yet our campuses are home today to a toxic confluence of fashionable ideas that undermine the very notion of intellectual virtue, and to flawed educational practices and procedures that give intellectual vice ample room to flourish.
Just look at Climategate.
By Gordon J. Fulks, PhD
I just tried to find University of East Anglia researcher Keith Briffa on Wikipedia, and he was no where to be found! This cached page was available through Yahoo:
It sugests that he must have been removed because of his association with ClimateGate. Apparently Wikipedia does not want to make it easy to research the principle players in this scandal and learn the details of their involvement.
It is a scandal in itself when a supposedly neutral reference is so deliberately obstructive and biased. Or is it what some have speculated that Keith is the Email Whistleblower?
----------------------------
In U.S., Many Environmental Issues at 20-Year-Low Concern
By Charles Clover, Timesonline
Worry about all eight measures tested is down from last year
by Jeffrey M. Jones
PRINCETON, NJ—Americans are less worried about each of eight specific environmental problems than they were a year ago, and on all but global warming and maintenance of the nation’s fresh water supply, concern is the lowest Gallup has measured. Americans worry most about drinking-water pollution and least about global warming (below list enlarged here).
Over time, Americans’ concerns about environmental problems have generally declined. After this year’s drop, for six of the eight items, the percentage who worry “a great deal” is at the lowest point Gallup has measured, which in some cases dates to 1989. The two exceptions are global warming (low point was 24% in 1997) and maintenance of the nation’s fresh water supply for household needs (35% in 2001). See more here.
--------------------
Grandaddy of green, James Lovelock, warms to eco-sceptics
By Charles Clover, Timesonline
Just occasionally you find yourself at an event where there is a sense of history in the air. So it was the other night at the Royal Society, when a small gathering of luminaries turned up to hear that extraordinary nonagenarian, the scientist James Lovelock.
They had all come: David MacKay, chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change; Michael Green, Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge; Michael Wilson, producer of the James Bond movies; Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum; and more. You knew why they had answered the Isaac Newton Institute’s invitation. They wanted to learn where one of the most interesting minds in science stood in the climate debate.
Lovelock has been intimately involved in three of the defining environmental controversies of the past 60 years. He invented an instrument that made it possible to detect the presence of toxic pollutants in the fat of Antarctic penguins - at roughly the same time as Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, her hugely influential book about pollution. In the 1970s the same instrument, his electron capture detector, was used to detect the presence of chlorofluorocarbons - CFCs - in the atmosphere. Although Lovelock mistakenly pronounced these chemicals as no conceivable toxic hazard, the scientists F Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina later won the Nobel prize in chemistry for proving they were destroying the ozone layer.
Then, in 1979, Lovelock published the book-length version of his Gaia theory, which postulates that the Earth functions as a kind of super-organism, with millions of species regulating its temperature. Despite initial scepticism from the Darwinists, who refused to believe that individual organisms could act in harmony, the Gaia theory has been widely accepted and now underlies most atmospheric science.
What, I wondered, would be the great man’s view on the latest twists in the atmospheric story - the Climategate emails and the sloppy science revealed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? To my surprise, he immediately professed his admiration for the climate-change sceptics.
“I think you have to accept that the sceptics have kept us sane - some of them, anyway,” he said. “They have been a breath of fresh air. They have kept us from regarding the science of climate change as a religion. It had gone too far that way. There is a role for sceptics in science. They shouldn’t be brushed aside. It is clear that the angel side wasn’t without sin.”
As we were ushered in to dinner, I couldn’t help wrestling with the irony that the so-called “prophet of climate change”, whose Gaia theory is regarded in some quarters as a faith in itself, was actively cheering on those who would knock science from its pedestal.
Lovelock places great emphasis on proof. The climate change projections by the Meteorological Office’s Hadley Centre - a key contributor to the IPCC consensus - should be taken seriously, he said. But he is concerned that the projections are relying on computer models based primarily on atmospheric physics, because models of that kind have let us down before. Similar models, for example, failed to detect the hole in the ozone layer;
it was eventually found by Joe Farman using a spectrometer.
How, asks Lovelock, can we predict the climate 40 years ahead when there is so much that we don’t know? Surely we should base any assumptions on things we can measure, such as a rise in sea levels. After all, surface temperatures go up and down, but the rise in sea levels reflects both melting ice and thermal expansion. The IPCC, he feels, underestimates the extent to which sea levels are rising.
Do mankind’s emissions matter? Yes, they undoubtedly do.
No one should be complacent about the fact that within the next 20 years we’ll have added nearly a trillion tons of carbon to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. When a geological accident produced a similar carbon rise 55m years ago, it turned up the heat more than 5C. And now? Well, the effect of man-made carbon is unpredictable. Temperatures might go down at first, rather than up, he warns.
How should we be spending our money to prevent possible disaster? In Britain, says Lovelock, we need sea walls and more nuclear power. Heretical stuff, when you consider the vast amount that Europe plans to spend on wind turbines.
“What would you bet will happen this century?” a mathematician asked him. Lovelock predicted a temperature rise in the middle range of current projections - about 1C-2C - which we could live with. Ah, but hadn’t he also said there was a chance that temperature rises could threaten human civilisation within the lifetime of our grandchildren?
He had. In the end, his message was that we should have more respect for uncertainties and learn to live with possibilities rather than striving for the 95% probabilities that climate scientists have been trying to provide. We don’t know what’s going to happen and we don’t know if we can avert disaster - although we should try. His sage advice: enjoy life while you can.
See post and comments here.
By Kirk Myers, Seminole County Environmental Examiner
Several researchers are claiming in a study published last week that rising greenhouse emissions will raise global temperatures by 6.7 to 8.0 degrees by 2100, even if the earth’s climate enters another “Little Ice Age.”
Huh?
In their paper published in the journal of Geophysical Research Letters, Georg Fuelner and Stefan Ramstorf of the Potsdam Institute claim that a long-lasting decline in solar activity - similar to the period from 1300 to 1850 known as the Little Ice Age - would cut only 0.5 degrees from the projected rise in global temperatures this century.
Give Fuelner and Ramstorf credit for not going out on a limb with their prediction. Their forecasting prowess covers only the next 90 years. (A few recently humbled meteorologists at the MET Office in Britain would kill to have such predictive powers.)
Where does such nonsense come from?
According to the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) crowd (e.g., government-paid shills like NASA’s James Hansen, “Hockey Stick” Penn State Professor Michael Mann, and disgraced former Climate Research Unit Director Phil Jones), CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels are being trapped in the atmosphere where they act as a temperature-forcing agent. As CO2 levels continue to rise, the planet will eventually face runaway global warming.
However, there is a problem with their “catastrophic climate change” theory: hard, empirical evidence does not exist to support it.
CO2: forced warming
Let’s start at the beginning. CO2 molecules capture a small portion of surface energy and transfer this energy to other gas molecules in the atmosphere. Some of this energy escapes into space and the rest finds its way back to the surface, where it is eventually re-radiated, beginning the cycle again. Note that CO2 doesn’t actually retain energy. It acts only to transfer captured energy to other molecules in the atmosphere through collisions. In short, the greenhouse effect of CO2, even at concentrations well below current levels, is energy-limited and not concentration-limited.
According to Dr. Pierre Latour, a chemical and process-control engineer, a tripling of CO2 from current levels (approximately 385 parts per million) would not produce any additional warming. In an editorial published in the February issue of Hyrdocarbon Processing magazine, he writes: “CO2 only absorbs and emits specific spectral wavelengths (14.77 microns) that constitute a tiny fraction of solar radiation energy in earth’s atmosphere. The first 50 ppm [parts per million] of CO2 absorbs about half of this tiny energy, [and] each additional 50 ppm absorbs half of the remaining tiny fraction, so at the current 380 ppm, there are almost no absorbable photons left. CO2 could triple to 1,000 ppm, with no additional discernable absorption-emission [warming].”
In other words, all the long-wave radiation that can be absorbed by CO2 is eventually absorbed. So no additional warming is possible. The process is analogous to adding blankets to a bed on a cold night. Adding one extra blanket will have a big effect. But adding more and more extra blankets will have a progressively smaller effect until there is not effect at all.
Some climate scientists claim that water vapor amplifies the radiative “forcing” of man-made CO2 - creating a sort of magic “multiplier effect” that raises surface temperatures. But where’s the proof? There isn’t any. Climate models lack the computational power to accurately simulate clouds and cloud variations. In fact, as recent studies have shown, clouds may act to suppress any warming triggered by greenhouse gases.
Hundreds of thousands of radiosonde measurements have failed to find a pattern of upper trophospheric heating predicted by the models. Global temperatures flat-lined in the late 1990s and have been declining slightly since 2002. The IPCC models predicted a steady upward trend, not a decline. Ergo, their predictions are faulty.over a 10-year period, a pittance compared to the riches heaped on taxpayer-funded scientists by governments and foundations.
Creative computer models
The belief in runaway CO2-induced warming is based solely on computer models that have been manipulated over time to produce a desired political conclusion: ergo, a world being warmed by mankind. It is a theory unsupported by solid scientific evidence.
As Dr. William Gray, professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, writes: “ll the global General Circulation Models (GCMs) which predict future global temperature change for a doubling of CO2 are badly flawed. They do not realistically handle the changes in upper tropospheric water vapor and cloudiness . . . They should never have been used to establish government climate policy.”
Gray also observes that models “failed to account for the weak global cooling over the last decade,” so how can they be expected to make long-range predictions? “t is also important to note that the GCM groups do not make official shorter-range global temperature forecasts of one to 0 years, which could accurately be verified. If they won’t do this, why should we believe their forecasts at 50 to 100 years? “Any experienced meteorologist or climate scientist who would actually believes a long range climate model should really have their head examined. They are living in a dream world,” he concludes.
Dr. Willie Soon, a solar and climate scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, challenges the rubber-stamped theory that blames CO2 emissions for global warming while disregarding the sun’s influence on climate. “The sun, of course, with its light energy output is probably the only true external driver of the earth’s climate system . . . There is no other force on earth that would supply that amount of energy for the air to move around, for the ocean currents to move around and for the trees to grow,” Soon explains.
The theory that increasing CO2 levels lead to warming is false, according to Soon. In fact, the process is exactly reversed: Increases in CO2 follow, rather than precede, warmer climate periods, he says. “Published papers [analyzing ice core data] clearly, clearly show that it is always temperature that rises first by at least several hundred years . . . then the CO2 curve response follows. It is a very clear scientific consensus on this issue,” Soon says.
Politicized IPPC research
Nevertheless, the AGW camp, including the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), claims the “sence is settled” and it continues to finger human-generated CO2 as the principal cause of global warming. There seems to be more “political science” at work than actual science, Soon laments.
“Those [AGW] views are promoted by political bodies . . . and there appears to be a corrupted process, in my opinion, of the bodies, here science and scientists are . . . misusing [data] in a lot of ways. This is all becoming a war of words instead of a war of evidence and science,” Soon says.
Dr. David Legates, associate professor of Climatology in the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware, accuses IPPC policymakers of rigging the findings in “working group” science documents so they match the conclusions in the IPPC Assessment Report’s “Summary for Policymakers.”
“In many cases, they [policymakers] go back to scientists and say, “Can you change this science document to match our summary? We want to beef this up. We want to make it look worse.” That’s not the way science is done,” Legates says.
The impact of the sun and ocean currents on climate is simply ignored in the IPCC climate models. CO2, a plant food, is the default climate-change scapegoat blamed for everything from “acne” to “longer allergy seasons” by scientists trolling for their next research grant.
Billions of dollars are pouring into the study of man-made global warming. It is the Mother Lode that keeps the grant money flowing. If the theory were given the proper burial it deserves, research dollars would dry up, forcing scientists to hunt for other sources of funding. As a result, the theory is defended with wolf-pack determination by scientists who stand to lose the most, including their reputations.
A favorite canard of global warming alarmists-turned-conspiracy theorists is the claim that AGW skeptics and their climate blogs are funded by corporate interests, especially “big oil.” But the reverse is actually true. The truly big money is pouring into climate-change research. The U.S. government has spent $79 billion since 1989 on climate research and technology, 3,500 times the amount contributed to skeptics, according to Joanne Nova, a science writer who runs the Web site JoNova. “The money buys a bandwagon of support, a repetitive rain of press releases, and includes PR departments of institutions like NOAA, NASA, the Climate Change Science Program and the Climate Change Technology Program. The $79 billion figure does not include money from other western governments, private industry, and is not adjusted for inflation. In other words, it could be…a lot bigger,” Nova says.
By comparison, the skeptics’ camp is largely self-funded. Greepeace, after conducting its own investigation, discovered that Exxon funneled $23 million to so-called skeptics.
CO2: a plant nutrient
CO2 is not the global menace described by climate-change scaremongers. It is an essential planetary nutrient. “The move to label it as a pollutant is simply preposterous,” writes physical science and mathematics professor Richard F. Yada physical . “The notion would be laughable if it were not so tragically real.”
Rising CO2 levels will not lead to runaway global warming and may very well provide a nutritional boost to agriculture, according to Dr. S. Fred Singer, professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia.
“The observational evidence . . . suggests that any warming from the growth of greenhouse gases is likely to be minor, difficult to detect above the natural fluctuations of the climate, and therefore inconsequential. In addition, the impacts of warming and of higher CO2 levels are likely to be beneficial for human activities and especially for agriculture,” Singer writes.
But many climate researchers continue to peddle CO2 horror stories supported by a mish-mash of inaccurate, incomplete and misleading analyses that fall apart under close examination. The CO2 fantasy is driven by both money and a profound hatred of “polluters,” those nasty industrial capitalists on a mission to destroy Mother Earth through their relentless efforts to raise mankind’s standard of living. It is a falsehood that deserves a place alongside a belief in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.
Breaking news update: This BBC headline just came across the Examiner.com news desk: “Climate change makes birds shrink in North America.” You can’t make this stuff up. See Kirk’s post here.