By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
To those of us who have dared to question on scientific and economic grounds the official story on global warming, it is a continuing surprise that there is so little concern about whether or not that story is objectively true among the many who have swallowed it hook, Party Line and sinker.
For the true-believers, the Party Line is socially convenient, politically expedient, and financially profitable. Above all, it is the Party Line. For those who think as herds or hives, it is safe. It is a grimy security blanket. It is the dismal safety in numbers that is the hallmark of the unreasoning mob.
But is it true? The herd and the hive do not care. Or, rather, they do care. They care very much if anyone dares to ask the question “But is it true?” They are offended, shocked, outraged. They vent their venom and their spleen and their fury on those of us who ask, however politely, “But is it true?”
Their reaction is scarcely distinguishable from the behavior of the adherents of some primitive superstitious cult on learning that someone has questioned some egregiously, self-evidently barmy aspect of the dogma that the high priests have handed down.
They have gotten religion, but they call it science. They have gotten religion, but they do not know they have gotten religion. They have gotten religion, but they have not gotten the point of religion, which, like the point of science, is objective truth.
The question arises: can science function properly or at all in the absence of true religion and of its insistence upon morality? For science, in searching for the truth, is pursuing what is - or very much ought to be - a profoundly moral quest.
Yet what if a handful of bad scientists wilfully tamper with data, fabricate results, and demand assent to assertions for which there is no real scientific justification? And what if the vast majority of their colleagues cravenly look the other way and do nothing about their bent colleagues? What you get is the global warming scare.
As every theologian knows, the simplest and usually the clearest of all tests for the presence of a moral sense is whether or not the truth is being told. The true-believers in the New Superstition are not telling the truth. On any objective test, they are lying, and are profiteering by lying, and are doing so at your expense and mine, and are bidding fair to bring down the Age of Enlightenment and Reason, flinging us back into the dumb, inspissate cheerlessness of a new Dark Age.
Nothing is done about the many lies, of course, because the many lies are the Party Line, and no one ever went to jail who safely parroted the Party Line.
“The Science Is Settled! There’s A Consensus! A 97.1% Consensus! Doubters Are As Bad As Holocaust Deniers! Global Temperature Is Rising Dangerously! It Is Warmer Now Than For 1400 Years! Well, 400 Years, Anyway! Tree-Rings Reliably Tell Us So! The Rate Of Global Warming Is Getting Ever Faster! Global Warming Caused Superstorm Sandy! And Typhoon Haiyan! And 1000 Other Disasters! Arctic Sea Ice Will All Be Gone By 2013! OK, By 2015! Or Maybe 2030! Santa Claus Will Have Nowhere To Live! Cuddly Polar Bears Are Facing Extinction! Starving Polar Bears Will Start Eating Penguins! Himalayan Glaciers Will All Melt By 2035! Er, Make That 2350! Millions Of Species Will Become Extinct! Well, Dozens, Anyway! Sea Level Is Rising Dangerously! It Will Rise 3 Feet! No, 20 Feet! No, 246 Feet! There Will Be 50 Million Climate Refugees From Rising Seas By 2010! OK, Make That 2020! The Oceans Will Acidify! Corals Will Die! Global Warming Kills! There Is A One In Ten Chance Global Warming Will End The World By 2100! We Know What We’re Talking About! We Know Best! We Are The Experts! You Can Trust Us! Our Computer Models Are Correct! The Science Is Settled! There’s A Consensus!”
And so, round and round, ad nauseam, ad ignorantiam, ad infinitum.
Every one of those exclamatory, declamatory statements about the climate is in substance untrue. Most were first uttered by scientists working for once-respected universities and government bodies. For instance, the notion that there is a 1 in 10 chance the world will end by 2100 is the fundamentally fatuous assumption in Lord Stern’s 2006 report on climate economics, written by a team at the U.K. Treasury for the then Socialist Government, which got the answer it wanted but did not get the truth, for it did not want the truth.
Previously, you could count on getting nothing but the truth from the men in white coats with leaky Biros in the front pocket. Now, particularly if the subject is global warming, you can count on getting little but profitable nonsense from your friendly local university science lab. They make the profits: you get the nonsense.
The central reason why what Professor Niklas Morner has called “the greatest lie ever told” is damaging to civilization arises not from the staggering cost, soon to be $1 billion a day worldwide. Not from the direct threat to the West posed by the avowedly anti-democratic, anti-libertarian policies of the UN, the IPCC, and the costly alphabet-soup of unelected busybody agencies of predatory government that live off the taxpayer’s involuntary generosity. Not from the dire environmental damage caused by windmills and other equally medieval measures intended to make non-existent global warming go away.
The damage caused by the Great Lie arises from the fact that just about the entire global governing class has found it expedient or convenient or profitable to adopt the Great Lie, to peddle it, to parade it, to parrot it, to pass it on, regardless of whether anything that it says on the subject of the climate has any truth in it whatsoever.
The fundamental principle upon which Aristotle built the art and science of Logic is that every individual truth is consistent with every other individual truth. The truth is a seamless robe. Religion or at any rate the Catholic presentation to which I inadequately subscribe (practicing but not perfect) is also built upon that fundamental principle of the oneness of all truth.
Science, too or at any rate the classical scientific method adumbrated by Thales of Miletus and Al-Haytham and brought to fruition by Newton, Huxley, Einstein, and Popper was also rooted in the understanding that there is only one truth, only one physical law, and that, therefore, every truth unearthed by the diligence of the curious and hard-working empiricist or theoretician must, if it be truly true, be consistent at every point and in every particular with every truth that had ever been discovered before, and with every truth yet to be discovered.
It is in the understanding of that central principle of the remarkable oneness and self-consistency of all truth that men of true religion and of true science ought to have become united. For there is an awesome beauty in the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. As Keats put it, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty that is all.”
The beauty of the truth is sullied, the seamless robe rent in sunder, if not merely a few individual scientists but the entire classe politique not merely of a single nation but of the planet advantages itself, enriches the already rich and impoverishes the already poor by lying and lying and lying again in the name of Saving The Planet by offering costly and environmentally destructive non-solutions to what is proving to be a non-problem.
The very fabric of the Universe is distorted by so monstrous and so sullenly persistent a lie. Those scientists who have been caught out trampling the truth, and those universities in which it has become near-universally agreed that the best thing to keep the cash flowing is to say nothing about the Great Lie, are by their actions or inactions repudiating the very justification and raison-d’etre of science: to seek the truth, to find it, to expound it, to expand it, and so to bring us all closer to answering the greatest of all questions: how came we and all around us to be here?
We who are not only men of science but also men of religion believe that the Answer to that question lay 2000 years ago in a manger in Bethlehem. The very human face of the very Divine was “perfectly God and perfectly Man”, as the Council of Chalcedon beautifully put it.
We cannot prove that a Nazarene made the Universe, or that any Divine agency takes the slightest interest in whether we tell the truth. But, for as long as there is no evidence to the contrary, we are free to believe it. And it is in our freedom to believe that which has not been proven false that the value of true religion to true science may yet come to be discerned. For our religion teaches us that truthfulness is right and willful falsehood wrong. We cannot prove that that is so, but we believe it nonetheless.
Science, though, is not a matter of belief (unless you belong to Greenpeace or some other Marxist front organization masquerading as an environmental group). It is a matter of disciplined observation, careful theoretical deduction, and cautious expression of results. The true scientist does not say, “I believe”: but he ought, if there is any curiosity and awe in his soul, to say “I wonder...”. Those two words are the foundation of all genuine scientific enquiry.
Yet the global warming scare has shown how very dangerous is science without morality. The scientist, who takes no one’s word for anything (nullius in verba), does not accept a priori that there is any objectively valuable moral code. He does not necessarily consider himself under any moral obligation either to seek the truth or, once he has found it, to speak it.
Science, therefore, in too carelessly or callously rejecting any value in religion and in the great code of morality in which men of religion believe and which at least they try however stumblingly to follow, contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
Yea, truth faileth (Isaiah, 59:15). The Great Lie persists precisely because too many of the scientists who utter it no longer live in accordance with the moral yardstick that Christianity once provided, or any moral yardstick, so that they do not consider they have any moral obligation to tell the truth.
That being so, we should no longer consider ourselves as laboring under any obligation, moral or other, to pay any particular heed to scientists seeking to meddle in politics unless and until they have shown themselves once more willing to be what al-Haytham said they should be: seekers after truth.
Two hundred and forty-six feet of sea-level rise, Dr. Hansen? Oh, come off it!
A merry Christmas an’ a roarin’ Hogmanay to one and all.
by Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller
The Environmental Protection Agency silenced scientific advisers who expressed concerns over the agency’s proposed carbon dioxide emissions limits for coal-fired power plants, House Republicans claim.
Republicans on the House’s science committee wrote a letter to EPA administrator Gina McCarthy (see attached) expressing concern that the agency ignored scientists charged with reviewing carbon emissions limits for new power plants. Scientists said that the agency rushed through the regulatory process and that the underlying science of the rule lacked adequate peer review.
“We are concerned about the agency’s apparent disregard for the concerns of its science advisors,” the Republican lawmakers wrote. “Science is a valuable tool to help policymakers navigate complex issues.”
“However, when inconvenient facts are disregarded or when dissenting voices are muzzled, a frank discussion becomes impossible,” the lawmakers continued. “The EPA cannot continue to rush ahead with costly regulations without allowing time for a real-world look at the science.”
Republicans previously asked the EPA about how it responded to the scientific reviewers’ concerns, but agency officials distanced themselves from their own advisers, according to the letter. Specifically, lawmakers questioned the agency’s requirement that coal plants must install carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology in order to be built. The agency, however, said that their new power plant rule does not need to address such concerns about CCS.
“The claim that the rule doesn’t need to address storage concerns highlights your agency’s continued lack of transparency and consistent attempts to avoid accountability,” the Republicans added.
“The EPA’s proposed power plant regulations will put Americans out of work and will make electricity more expensive and less reliable,” they continued. “It is misleading and dangerous for EPA to quietly dismiss inconvenient facts and ignore the consequences of its costly regulations. Americans deserve honesty.”
The EPA’s proposed power plant emissions limits would essentially require that all new coal-fired power plants be built using CCS technology, which is not a commercially proven technology.
“Carbon capture and sequestration technology can help us reduce carbon pollution and move us toward a cleaner, more stable environment,” said Mathy Stanislaus, EPA’s assistant administrator for Solid Waste and Emergency Response.
The agency justified imposing CCS requirements on U.S. coal plants based on three government-backed projects, one under construction in Mississippi and two planned in Texas and California. The agency also cited one Canadian government-backed project under construction.
However, the coal industry argues that there are no commercial-scale coal plants using CCS operating in the country. Republicans also argue that the EPA violated the Environmental Policy Act by mandating technology where the only examples of it are government-supported.
“In light of these statutory prohibitions, we request that the EPA’s proposed rule, which has not yet been published in the Federal Register, be withdrawn,” reads a letter to the EPA from Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “This will ensure that the agency does not propose standards beyond its legal authority. This will also ensure that stakeholders and the public will not have to incur additional costs to respond to a proposal that contravenes applicable law.”
Even former Obama administration officials have expressed skepticism about CCS technology’s commercial viability.
“[I]t is disingenuous to state that the technology is ‘ready,’” said Charles McConnell, who was the assistant secretary of energy until January. He now serves as the executive director of the Energy & Environment Initiative at Rice University.
“Studies have verified that implementation of [CSS] technology is necessary to comply with EPA’s proposed [EPA carbon-emissions limits] regulation and meet the [greenhouse gas] targets necessary for limiting CO2 emissions to our atmosphere,” McConnell said in his prepared congressional testimony. “However, commercial [CSS] technology currently is not available to meet EPA’s proposed rule. The cost of current CO2 capture technology is much too high to be commercially viable.”
Critics are slamming Reddit over a single moderator’s decision to ban climate-change skeptics from contributing to its science forum, attacking the move as “political censorship.”
In an op-ed titled “Reddit’s science forum banned climate deniers. Why don’t all newspapers do the same?” Nathan Allen—who himself a Ph.D. chemist for a major chemical company and a moderator on Reddit’s “/r/science” forum—explained his decision to wipe comments from some users he dismissed as “problematic.”
“These people were true believers, blind to the fact that their arguments were hopelessly flawed, the result of cherry-picked data and conspiratorial thinking,” Allen said in his article, which is posted on Grist.org. “They had no idea that the smart-sounding talking points from their preferred climate blog were, even to a casual climate science observer, plainly wrong.”
Allen went on to attack climate-change skeptics further, saying that evidence to support their position “simply does not exist” and that such people are “enamored by the emotionally charged and rhetoric-based arguments of pundits on talk radio and Fox News.”
‘[Climate skeptics are] enamored by the emotionally charged ... arguments of pundits on talk radio and Fox News.’
- Reddit moderator Nathan Allen
Finally, Allen called for other news outlets to follow his example, asking “if a half-dozen volunteers can keep a page with more than 4 million users from being a microphone for the antiscientific, is it too much to ask for newspapers to police their own editorial pages as proficiently?”
The move has drawn accusations of hypocrisy, as Reddit claims to be a haven for free speech and debate. The site describes itself as a place “friendly to thought, relationships, arguments, and to those that wish to challenge those genres.”
Brendan O’Neill, in a blog post for the UK Daily Telegraph, said Reddit has “ripped its own reputation to shreds,” and described the move as “political censorship, designed to silence the expression of dissent about climate-change alarmism on one of the Internet’s most popular user-generated forums.”
James Delingpole, columnist, climate skeptic and author of “The Little Green Book Of Eco Fascism,” was even louder in his criticism.
“The greenies—and their many useful idiots in the liberal media—are terrified of open debate on climate-change because the real world evidence long ago parted company with their scientifically threadbare theory,” Delingpole told FoxNews.com, arguing that Allen’s tactic is part of a “classic liberal defense mechanism: If the facts don’t support you, then close down the argument.”
Victoria Taylor, Reddit’s director of communications, told FoxNews.com that while it was Allen’s prerogative to ban climate-change skeptics from “/r/science,” his statements “do not reflect the views of Reddit as a whole, or other science or climate-oriented subreddits.”
“Each subreddit community is entitled to its own views, and anyone who wants to start their own subreddit is welcome to do so devoted to their views, opinions or interests,” Taylor said.
While there is a subreddit dedicated to climate skeptics, it has far less research than the larger science board.
The move follows an October decision by Paul Thornton—the letters section editor for the Los Angeles Times—who said he wouldn’t publish some letters from those skeptical of man’s role in the planet’s warming climate, saying that denying climate-change “is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.’
Kelly McBride, who studies media ethics and is a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute, defended the LA Times decision, telling FoxNews.com in November she was “all in favor” of Thornton refusing skeptics.
“One of our ethical imperatives as journalists is to speak the truth,” McBride said. “And when we constantly allow people to say things that are known falsehoods, we undermine the public perception and the facts of an issue.”
“It’s not like we in society want these voices to go away,” she said. “We just want them in proper tone and context.”
Allen’s climate-change comments are not the first time that Reddit’s moderation has been the subject of controversy. Earlier this year Reddit’s /r/politics” forum banned a variety of sites, including Fox Nation, Huffington Post and National Review, in what it claimed was a move to avoid sensationalized headlines and “bad journalism.”