By Geraldo Luis Lino, Special to Climate Dispatch

The second keyword for the long overdue reassessment of the climatic issues is knowledge, meaning a more comprehensive and better understanding of the climate dynamics.

However, as a prerequisite it is necessary to clear up a concept commonly misused and abused by the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) defenders: the idea that “science is settled” and that the so-called “scientific consensus” on the subject would be objected to only by some handfuls of diehard “skeptics.”

For starters, there is no such a thing like “settled science,” neither in Climatology nor in any other branch of science. The body of scientific knowledge is an open-ended and permanently ongoing construction that is always open to new evidences, new hypotheses, debate, questioning and revision - that’s how real science advances.

Also, “consensus” is a concept alien to science, which is not a “democratic” activity whose advance is driven by the weight of the number of followers of a certain line of thinking or theory - but by a permanent process of convergence between new hypotheses and evidences collected in the physical world.

Perhaps the best symbol of the meaninglessness of such numbers in science was Albert Einstein’s anthological response to the 1931 pamphlet “100 authors against Einstein,” which was commissioned by the German Nazi Party as a clumsy contradiction to the Relativity Theory, that did not fit the canons of the “Arian science.” He said then: “If I were wrong, then one would have been enough.” [1]

The same distortion has affected the concept of skepticism, which was granted a pejorative connotation in order to label the critics of the AGW - as if a permanent and healthy skepticism were not an indispensable requisite for any scientist worth of his or her salt. As the US National Academy of Sciences felt compelled to remind in a 1995 booklet:

“The fallibility of methods is a valuable reminder of the importance of skepticism in science. Scientific knowledge and scientific methods, whether old or new, must be continually scrutinized for possible errors… Organized and searching skepticism as well as an openness to new ideas are essential to guard against the intrusion of dogma or collective bias into scientific results.” [2]

It is indeed regrettable that this sober advice has been deliberately overlooked by a good deal of the scientific community involved in the climate research and related themes (beginning with the Academy itself). Perhaps, in many cases this attitude has been motivated by the lure of the incentives offered by the AGW machine - plentiful research grants, mediatic exposition, prestige, the professional pride of making part of a branch of science elevated to stardom, business consulting opportunities and many others.

On the other hand, besides the hundreds of billion dollars that have been wasted with the attempt of imposing a theory that is not supported by the physical world evidences, the “warmist” thrust is harming science in quite dangerous ways. First, it is pushing science aside from the perspective of providing a reasoned and relatively well informed assessment of the climate dynamics that may provide an useful guidance for long-term strategies and public policies - absolutely necessary due to the climate’s enormous importance in the human affairs. Second, it is distorting the public perception of science in such a way that the non-partisan climate scientists will likely have a hard time trying to regain the public trust after the seemingly unavoidable wear and tear of the alarmist outlook.

History offers a gloomy precedent of such poisoning of science by ideology and special interests: the infamous Lysenko affair in the former Soviet Union, the ruthless opposition to genetics headed by Trofim D. Lysenko and his cohorts between the 1930s and 1960s. In addition to the physical elimination of stubborn scientists who resisted the “consensual official line” (the “skeptics” of the time), the price of such an irrationality pandemics was enormous, costing the Soviet biological and agricultural sciences a half a century hold-up whose consequences are felt still today.

The AGW scare and its political agenda of restricting the use of fossil fuels are serious candidates to the condition of post-modern equivalents of “Lysenkoism.” [3]

As for the IPCC, it has been a political contrivance from the beginning, dedicated to the task of proving “the risk of human-induced climate change.” [4] So, its methodological procedures are suited to its political agenda of “justifying the greenhouse gases emission control, specially carbon dioxide,” as it was aptly described by S. Fred Singer, one of the deans of the atmospheric sciences still on duty. [5]

In fact, they are limited to a compilation and review of scientific (and others not so much) climate-related works published in between the issuing of its assessment reports (four so far). While this method may be useful to provide some overview of the state of the art of the climatic research, it cannot be relied upon for providing a more realistic and functional understanding of the climate dynamics.

With the obsessive fixation on carbon dioxide, the AGW thrust inoculated the climate science with the “reductionism virus,” the epistemological concept according to which complex phenomena can be understood by means of the sum of the understanding of their constituent parts, as with the solving of a puzzle game or the assemblage of a complex machine. However, if such an approach is useful for technological and engineering uses or even for some more simple phenomena, it is completely unsuitable in the case of complex, non-linear and chaotic systems like climate.

For this reason, the Apollo Program, the greatest technological accomplishment of the 20th century, could be achieved by NASA with a total computing capacity inferior to a modern cell phone’s - simply because all the scientific and technological requisites for that great enterprise were based on known physical and chemical laws and properties. In contrast, all the world’s computers now existing linked together could not provide a precise simulation of the climate dynamics - because the programmers would lack the proper knowledge of its functioning as a system and of all the interacting factors that influence it.

The present supercomputer-run Global Climate Models (GCMs) so dear to the AGW defenders are quintessential reductionist instruments. In a simplified way, a typical GCM divides the atmosphere in grid “boxes” of hundreds or thousands of square kilometers and some kilometers high, and tries to ascertain and quantify the energy flows and their influences on the climatic parameters in and between the “boxes.” As every “box” comprises several degrees of latitude and longitude and a multiplicity of physical and biological environments (kind of surface, relief, vegetation etc.), one can imagine the complexity of the process - that cannot provide but a very crude approximation of the physical world. Besides, as many factors that influence such flows are poorly known or even unknown, they are usually “adjusted,” “fixed,” ("parametrized" in the jargon) or simply ignored by the modelers. So, no wonder the discrepancies between the models and the real world observations are generally considerable. [6]

For this reason, it is hard to see how a comprehensive understanding of the climate dynamics could be obtained by putting “atmospheric boxes” together like the pieces of a global scale puzzle ‘ a practice whose uses should be restricted to academic drills.

For that task an “holistic” approach is needed, one that regards the climate as an integral system in itself and study its evolution along the Earth’s geological history thoroughly, taking into account all the astrophysical, atmospheric, oceanic, geological, geomorphologic and biological factors that influence it and their multiple and complex interactions, many of them - it’s worth repeating - are still poorly known.

The model of epistemological approach and international scientific cooperation needed for a serious advancement of the climate science is not the IPCC, but the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year (IGY), the remarkable effort that united tens of thousands of scientists from 66 countries at the height of the Cold War in order to advance the systemic and comprehensive knowledge of the Earth dynamics and its interactions with the Sun and the Cosmos. The motivation and the mood of that great enterprise, as well as the “holistic” kind of approach chosen for its research programs, can be seen in the following passage of one of the many contemporary popular books written to present the IGY to the general public:

“(...) The whole Earth and the ‘laboratory’ of the Solar System are necessary for a comprehensive study of the weather, the air, the oceans and the ice of the Earth; the upper atmosphere or ionosphere; the solid earth; the energy that comes at the Earth from space, and the Sun, the main source of energy. These phenomena are too closely interrelated to be studied separately… All of the great phenomena of the dynamic Earth are being studied at one time, ‘synoptically,’ and the millions of facts being gathered will be compared. The IGY is the largest fact-finding enterprise ever undertaken. It is seeking answers to some of the most important questions that man has ever asked.” [7]

The IGY still stands as Mankind’s greatest collective scientific enterprise ever. The spirit of global cooperation, the epistemological approach, the methodologies, standards and procedures developed for its coordinated and joint researches, the huge mass of gathered data, the quality of the obtained results and the optimistic visions of science and its role for the progress it helped to instill among the general public were enormous contributions for the advancement of science and brought forth a great deal of benefits for all Mankind - a feat diametrically opposed to the disservice done by the IPCC.

One can only regret that the 50th anniversary of that great endeavor has gone almost unnoticed by the global media and academia.

Perhaps if the development of the “holistic” approach to the geophysical phenomena that inspired the IGY had not been interrupted by the “warmist” tsunami, climate science could be now much more advanced towards the epistemological “quantum leap” needed for the systemic understanding of the Earth’s climate.

In any case, the revival of that pioneering and gripping spirit (and the corresponding dumping of the “warmism") is a necessity if we really intend to be serious about the climate. See more here. See part 3 here.

By James Delingpole

Whether you believe it’s part of a sinister conspiracy which will lead inexorably to one world government or whether you think it’s just an innocent high-level talking shop, there’s one thing that can’t be denied: it knows which way the wind is blowing.

At its June meeting in Sitges, Spain (unreported and held in camera, as is Bilderberg’s way), some of the world’s most powerful CEOs rubbed shoulders with notable academics and leading politicians. They included: the chairman of Fiat, the Irish Attorney General Paul Gallagher, the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, Henry Kissinger, Bill Gates, Dick Perle, the Queen of the Netherlands, the editor of the Economist. Definitely not Z-list, in other words.

Which is what makes one particular item on the group’s discussion agenda so tremendously significant. See if you can spot the one I mean: “The 58th Bilderberg Meeting will be held in Sitges, Spain 3 - 6 June 2010. The Conference will deal mainly with Financial Reform, Security, Cyber Technology, Energy, Pakistan, Afghanistan, World Food Problem, Global Cooling, Social Networking, Medical Science, EU-US relations”.

Yep, that’s right. Global Cooling. Which means one of two things.

Either it was a printing error.

Or the global elite is perfectly well aware that global cooling represents a far more serious and imminent threat to the world than global warming, but is so far unwilling to admit it except behind closed doors.

Let me explain briefly why this is a bombshell waiting to explode.

Almost every government in the Western world from the USA to Britain to all the other EU states to Australia and New Zealand is currently committed to a policy of “decarbonisation.” This in turn is justified to (increasingly sceptical) electorates on the grounds that man-made CO2 is a prime driver of dangerous global warming and must therefore be reduced drastically, at no matter what social, economic and environmental cost. In the Eighties and Nineties, the global elite had a nice run of hot weather to support their (scientifically dubious) claims. But now they don’t. Winters are getting colder. Fuel bills are rising (in the name of combating climate change, natch). The wheels are starting to come off the AGW bandwagon. Ordinary people, resisting two decades of concerted brainwashing, are starting to notice.

All this, of course, spells big trouble for the global power elite. As well as leading to food shortages (as, for example, it becomes harder to grow wheat in northerly latitudes; adding, of course, to such already-present disasters as biofuels and the rejection of GM), global cooling is going to find electorates increasingly angry that they have been sold a pup.

Our fuel bills have risen inexorably; our countryside, our views and our property values have been ravaged by hideous wind farms; our holidays have been made more expensive; our cost of living has been driven up by green taxes; our freedoms have been curtailed in any number of pettily irritating ways from what kind of light bulbs we are permitted to use to how we dispose of our rubbish. And to what end?

If man-made global warming was really happening and really a problem we might possibly have carried on putting up with all these constraints on our liberty and assaults on our income. But if it turns out to have been a myth...Well then, all bets are off.

The next few years are going to be very interesting. Watch the global power elite squirming to reposition itself as it slowly distances itself from Anthropogenic Global Warming ("Who? Us? No. We never thought of it as more than a quaint theory..."), and tries to find new ways of justifying green taxation and control. (Ocean acidification; biodiversity; et al). You’ll notice sly shifts in policy spin. In Britain, for example, Chris “Chicken Little” Huhne’s suicidal “dash for wind” will be re-invented as a vital step towards “energy security.” There will be less talk of “combating climate change” and more talk of “mitigation”. You’ll hear enviro-Nazis like Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren avoid reference to “global warming like the plague, preferring the more reliably vague phrase “global climate disruption.”

And you know what the worst thing is? If we allow them to, they’re going to get away with it.

Our duty as free citizens over the next few years is to make sure that they don’t.

Al Gore, George Soros, Bill Gates, Carol Browner, John Holdren, Barack Obama, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Tim Yeo, Michael Mann, Ted Turner, Robert Redford, Phil Jones, Chris Huhne, John Howard (yes really, he was supposed to be a conservative, but he was the man who kicked off Australia’s ETS), Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Yvo de Boer, Rajendra Pachauri...The list of the guilty goes on and on. Each in his own way - and whether through ignorance, naivety idealism or cynicism, it really doesn’t matter for the result has been the same - has done his bit to push the greatest con-trick in the history of science, forcing on global consumers the biggest bill in the history taxation, using “global warming” as an excuse to extend the reach of government further than it has ever gone before.

It is time we put a stop to this. In the US, the Tea Party movement is showing us the way. We need to punish these dodgy politicians at the ballot box. We need to ensure that those scientists guilty of malfeasance are, at the very least thrown out of the jobs which we taxpayers have been funding these last decades. We need to ensure that corporatist profiteers are no longer able to benefit from the distortion and corruption of the markets which result from green regulation.

We need a “Global Warming” Nuremberg.

James Delingpole is an English journalist, author and blogger who helped break the Climategate scandal. He is the author of numerous books including a series of adventure stories set in World War II (the first is called Coward On The Beach), an anti-Obama polemic called Welcome To Obamaland: I’ve Seen Your Future And It Doesn’t Work, and a new one called Watermelons which describes in gory detail how Man-Made Global Warming represents the biggest outbreak of mass hysteria in global history. He blogs regularly at the Daily Telegraph. His personal blog, in which all his writing is collated by his wondrous Kiwi helper Josie Jackson, here.

By Christine Hall

Washington, D.C., November 10, 2010 - The Politico late Tuesday broke a story that the White House “rewrote crucial sections of an Interior Department report to suggest an independent group of scientists and engineers supported a six-month ban on offshore oil drilling,” according to a report by the Interior inspector general.

In response, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market, government watchdog group, called for the firing of White House Climate Czar Carol Browner.

“President Obama should fire Carol Browner for this manipulation of science,” said Myron Ebell, Director of CEI’s Center for Energy and Environment.

“President Obama has talked about the importance of ‘ensuring scientific data is not distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda,’ and claimed that his administration would ‘make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology,’” said Ebell. “Unless that’s dishonest rhetoric, President Obama must fire Browner for distorting and concealing scientific data to serve a political agenda.”

Browner reportedly sent two edited versions of the Interior Department report on offshore drilling back to the department on May 27. “The language had been changed to insinuate the seven-member panel of outside experts - who reviewed a draft of various safety recommendations - endorsed the moratorium,” Politico reported, citing the Interior Inspector General report.

KEY QUOTES & FACTS ON OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SCIENCE POLICY

President Obama at inauguration: “We will restore science to its rightful place.”

President Obama on March 9 rollout of pro-stem cell exec order: “It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda - and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”

Background to Office of Inspector General report:

• May 27: In wake of Deepwater Horizon disaster, Department of Interior extends offshore drilling moratorium 6 months; DOE issues an attendant report, “Increased Safety Measures for Energy Development on the Outer Continental Shelf.”

• According to the Executive Summary of the report ("Increased Safety Measures for Energy Development on the Outer Continental Shelf"), “The recommendations contained in this report have been peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering.” The clear implication was that the peer review panel approved of the moratorium. Yet, as noted by the OIG, “the proposed moratorium had not been discussed with the peer reviewers prior to the issuance of the Report.” So where did the implication come from?

• “At 2:13 a.m. on May 27, 2010, [Carol] Browner’s staff member sent an email...that contained two edited versions of the Executive Summary...Both version, however, revised and re-ordered the Executive Summary, placing the peer-review language immediately following the moratorium recommendation causing the distinction between the Secretary’s [Interior Secretary Ken Salazaar’s] moratorium recommendation - which had not been peer-reviewed - and the recommendations contained in the 30-day Report - which had been peer-reviewed - to become effectively lost.”

• That’s why, “The OIG determined that the White House edit of the original DOE draft Executive Summary led to the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer-reviewed by the experts.” The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty.

See story here.