IPCC Insider Admits Climate Consensus Claim Was a Lie
By David J. Theroux • Friday June 18, 2010 5:26 PM PDT • 28 Comments
As reported by Lawrence Solomon in the Financial Post, prominent climate scientist/alarmist Mike Hulme has now admitted that:
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.
“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”
Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia—the university of Climategate fame—is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on “Climate scenario development” for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.
The referenced paper by Hulme and Mahony is “Climate Change: what do we know about the IPCC?” Hulme, also author of the recent book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, is a key proponent of what is called “post-normal science” (see here and here), a postmodern narrative that consists of a complete perversion of standard scientific practice that he supports in order to propagandize for his socialist agenda. As he explained in portions of his book and his article, “The appliance of science,” in the Guardian (March 17, 2007):
“Philosophers and practitioners of science have identified this particular mode of scientific activity as one that occurs…where values are embedded in the way science is done and spoken.”
“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 largest academic conference that has yet been devoted to the subject of climate change finished yesterday [March 12, 2009] in Copenhagen…I attended the Conference, chaired a session…[The] statement drafted by the conference’s Scientific Writing Team…contained…a set of messages drafted largely before the conference started by the organizing committee…interpreting it for a political audience…And the conference chair herself, Professor Katherine Richardson, has described the messages as politically-motivated. All well and good.”
“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.”
“Climate change is telling the story of an idea and how that idea is changing the way in which our societies think, feel, interpret and act. And therefore climate change is extending itself well beyond simply the description of change in physical properties in our world…”
“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.”
“There is something about this idea that makes it very powerful for lots of different interest groups to latch on to, whether for political reasons, for commercial interests, social interests in the case of NGOs, and a whole lot of new social movements looking for counter culture trends.”
“Climate change has moved from being a predominantly physical phenomenon to being a social one…It is circulating anxiously in the worlds of domestic politics and international diplomacy, and with mobilising force in business, law, academia, development, welfare, religion, ethics, art and celebrity.”
“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…?’”
“We need to reveal the creative psychological, spiritual and ethical work that climate change can do and is doing for us…we open up a way of resituating culture and the human spirit…As a resource of the imagination, the idea of climate change can be deployed around our geographical, social and virtual worlds in creative ways…it can inspire new artistic creations in visual, written and dramatised media. The idea of climate change can provoke new ethical and theological thinking about our relationship with the future….We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilise these stories in support of our projects. Whereas a modernist reading of climate may once have regarded it as merely a physical condition for human action, we must now come to terms with climate change operating simultaneously as an overlying, but more fluid, imaginative condition of human existence.”
Such a deception could only have gone on as long and far as it has because of the cultural cover provided by contemporary Western elites who have embraced environmentalism as the new secular religion. This development and its implications are examined in detail in the Independent Institute’s award-winning, new book:
The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America, by Robert H. Nelson
Tags: Corruption, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Integrity, Media, Politics, Propaganda, Religion, Science, Socialism, Transparency, United Nations 
This would be nice if not for the fact that Hulme has repudiated Solomon’s interpretation of his article.
AndrewG | Jun 19, 2010 | Reply
Astonishing, and appalling.
Robert Higgs | Jun 19, 2010 | Reply
Actually, for me, a couple of dozen experts agreeing on something as arcane as man-made climate change actually is about as much as I’d expect in the way of consensus. How many experts deny it?
For me, the more important question is whether it would be cost effective to try to do anything about it. Switching away from cheap fossil fuels may impoverish us to such an extent that we’ll be much worse off than if we do nothing. A richer society has many more resources with which to fight any adverse effects of climate change.
Harold Kyriazi | Jun 20, 2010 | Reply
Andrew,
Dr. Hulme may well claim to have “repudiated” Mr. Solomon’s article, but just as he has been unable to refute the damning revelations from Climategate, his own words revealing the sham behavior of the IPCC and his support for “post-normal science” thoroughly discredit him as having any credibility in the fields of science or public policy. Here incidentally are Hulme’s comments on Climategate, and here is Solomon’s reply to him in which he shows that Hulme is “digging himself deeper into the hole in which he finds himself.”
David Theroux | Jun 20, 2010 | Reply
I may be a little thick but is this an accurate summation of what Mr. Hulme has written? “WE will push our socialist agenda, facts be damned”. I’ve never heard of “post-normal” science but my god, what a load of crap.
daddysteve | Jun 21, 2010 | Reply
Hulme has done little if any scientific research in this field, which has few peers.
richard | Jun 22, 2010 | Reply
Mr. Theroux,
Hulme, as quoted by Solomon, was a prize catch for those who claim the whole anthropomorpic global warming deal is a scientific fraud. Now that he’s claimed it wasn’t the IPPC that misleads people, but other commentators, he’s fair game for disparagement, isn’t he.
In one of the two pieces Hulme wrote to clarify what was quoted in the press, he stated:
“And for the record ... I believe that the warming of the climate system is unequivocal and that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid 20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”
There are clones of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity all over, eagerly awaiting the next shocking revelation and ready to distribute it to the rabid denial community throughout the media and blogosphere for the usual gratitude and applause.
Jim Taylor | Jun 24, 2010 | Reply
Jim,
You are quite correct that Hulme is defending the IPCCs claims for which he has been such a major figure in orchestrating. And the quote you cite is in keeping with this ideological conviction he holds to climate alarmism.
However and your ad hominem comments aside about “clones of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity”, what Hulme (and you) will not address is the fact that Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” claims that formed so central a place in the IPCC’s verdict have been thoroughly refuted by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, resulting in the IPCC quietly dropping the chart from its latest report, yet continuing its now clearly unfounded claims. Add to this the scandal of Climategate in which Hulme plays such a key role and that after many years of refusing to comply with FOI requests, Hulme’s colleague Phil Jones (Climate Research Unit Director) finally admitted in an email to climate scientist Roger Pielke and others that they had deliberately destroyed the entire original date sets upon which all of the CRU’s claims are based.
Furthermore and as I and others have documented, Hulme’s own statements as a major advocate of the pathetic views of “post-normal science” add up to one conclusion: Hulme is not a scientist at all but instead a political activist who has been pushing his collectivist agenda regardless of the science.
It would also appear that given this and your other comments on The Beacon, your own career at the disastrous and folly-ridden Inter-American Development Bank may be clouding your assessment of the “conventional wisdom” of the Zeitgeist pertaining to the nature and impact of government claims and policies. Hulme’s admission that the IPCC never had “2,500″ scientists in any consensus, but “only a few dozen experts” should be a clue to both the fact that “consensus science” is not science and that Hulme himself has been shown to be at best, to use his own term, “disingenuous.”
David Theroux | Jun 25, 2010 | Reply
David,
I’m flattered at your detailed response.
Michael Hulme doesn’t inform my views on climate change. It was actually your piece that brought him to my attention. What I find interesting is that he apparently betrayed his own agenda by, according to your article, (a) admitting that the IPCC claim of consensus was a lie, while (b) being a strong advocate of AGW. Either he is a fool who is subverting his own advocacy or he has been, as he claims, misinterpreted.
Hulme is an inconsequential figure as far as the real science of climate change is concerned. Unfortunately, much of the public debate about climate change involves inconsequential figures at the periphery of the scientific debate that are easy to attack, such as Al Gore. There is an elephant in the room, however, that the denialists conveniently ignore. The elephant is virtually the entire institutional infrastructure of American science, including: the National Academy of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Meteorological Society, the American Astronomical Society, the American Chemical Society, the American Quaternary Association, the American Institute of Physics, the American Geophysical Union and others, all of which have taken positions endorsing AGW (this is detailed in Wiki’s page on “Scientific opinion on climate change”).
Regarding Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick analysis you will recall that the controversy has to do with his techniques of statistical analysis. This and the whole of the IPCC analysis were reviewed by the American Statistical Association (ASA). While the ASA found some imperfections in Mann’s statistical methodology, they concluded (as I recall), that his major finding was still valid and gave their very prestigious endorsement to the conclusions of the IPCC. BTW, the statistician Edward Wegman, who criticized Mann’s analysis and was featured in a piece by Lawrence Solomon, and was himself a former member of the Board of the ASA, praised the ASA as the “premier statistical association in the United States.” Ironically, they didn’t uphold Wegman’s position on the Hockey Stick controversy.
With respect to the CRU, this was another occasion in which there was a triumphal roar by AGW deniers when the revelations were made public, as if this laid waste to the entire body of scientific work in support of the AGW theory. If you are aware of the other data sources and analyses that concur with the CRU, such as the worldwide temperature series of the Smithsonian Institute, you should realize that this gloating was premature.
Jim Taylor | Jun 25, 2010 | Reply
Jim, As I have noted, “consensus science” is not science.
Mann’s analysis indeed does still have some political standing because it serves a useful purpose for various corporate-state interest groups and those who worship at the climate alarmist altar, but it has no scientific standing at all anymore. Indeed, Mann’s work and the entire climate issue is not about science at all, as has now been shown now on many levels. As for Hulme, he is certainly not inconsequential at all, but one of the central figures in the IPCC story.
Here is just a sampling of recent non-technical books by climate scientists that I would recommend:
The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists, by Roy Spencer
Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies That Hurt the Poor, by Roy Spencer
Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know, by Patrick J. Michaels
David Theroux | Jun 26, 2010 | Reply
Dear David and Mary and Robert,
I think the Independent Review needs to analyze how the rise of Government-funded science may have been detrimental to honest science and lead to the rise in propaganda campaigns like this along with nanny-statism. I STRONGLY suspect there is a link, but I’m just a lowly layman non-academic. The Independent Institute probably has the resources for such an investigation.
Contemplationist | Jun 26, 2010 | Reply
Contemplationist,
Thank you for your suggestion. We have in fact run numerous articles in The Independent Review critiquing government involvement and funding of science. Here is a sampling:
“Institutional Review Board Mission Creep: The Common Rule, Social Science, and the Nanny State,” by Ronald F. White (The Independent Review, Spring 2007)
“Government and Science: A Dangerous Liaison?”, by William N. Butos and Thomas J. McQuade (The Independent Review, Fall 2006)
“Science as a Market Process,” by Allan M. Walstad (The Independent Review, Summer 2002)
David Theroux | Jun 26, 2010 | Reply
David
Those papers look fantastic. Thanks!
In our society it is considered axiomatic even by conservatives that government funded “basic-science” research is a non-offensive, completely defensible line item on the budget due its various supposedly proven benefits, which simply couldn’t be done by “short-term, profit-oriented” corporations.
We need to push this view out in the mainstream
Contemplationist | Jun 26, 2010 | Reply
David,
The position statements of the scientific organizations I listed reflect a consensus among scientists who are actively engaged in the profession scientific analysis, especially as it relates to climate change. I would distinguish this from the contrarian consensus that exists among conservative and libertarian ideologues and media agents who are not themselves scientists, yet often defame the mainstream scientists by characterizing them as Bolshevists who are engaged in promoting a scientific fraud in order to undermine our economic system.
Regarding your recommended reading list, I am familiar with Patrick Michaels, and attended a presentation of his sponsored by CATO and the Competitive Enterprise Institute on the occasion of the publication of the book you cited. I am also familiar with the ideas of other well-known dissidents, such as Richard Lindzen of MIT. Dissidence is welcome and healthy, but when non-scientists like yourself extol the views of every dissident that comes along and demean the rest, you have to wonder about their agenda.
I also have to wonder why you think I should read books by Roy Spencer, but have nothing to say about Susan Solomon. Solomon is a world renowned atmospheric chemist, who has been honored for her path-breaking work on the ozone hole. She now does research related to climate change. See http://archive.sciencewatch.com/sept-oct2002/sw_sept-oct2002_page3.htm
Any recommended reading list for the non-scientist should include the publications of the National Academy of Sciences, including the 2008 edition of CLIMATE CHANGE, which can be accessed on line.
Finally, please tell your readers where you obtained the scientific competence to declare that Mann’s analysis only has political standing, despite surviving a review by the American Statistical Association (ASA) and the National Research Council. It has not only survived the original criticism, but has been reworked by Mann and others, using alternative statistical methodologies, with results that are widely accepted among his scientific peers. Any interested readers can find a detailed discussion of the this topic at the Wiki page on “The Hockey Stick Controversy.” Also available online is a narrative in the newsletter of the ASA on what transpired during a meeting on the topic that was organized by Ed Wegman and Richard Smith. It includes a morsel you should find inviting – a summary of the debate between Roy Spencer and other climate scientists. In case you’d like to reproduce this text for the edification of your readers, the article is:
“The role of statisticians in public policy debates over climate change,” and it’s accessible at
http://www.amstat-online.org/sections/envr/ssenews/ENVR_9_1.pdf. The author’s email address is there so that, if you don’t like what he says, you can tell him he’s been tainted by socialism.
Regards,
Jim
Jim Taylor | Jun 27, 2010 | Reply
Jim,
Let’s see. Mike Hulme writes a major interim report for the IPCC and admits that there is no “climate science consensus” and yet you still believe that there is. Climategate releases thousands of documents that show a deliberate pattern of fraud, stonewalling and then destruction of data, smear mongering, gaming the peer-review process, etc., and yet you still believe otherwise.
Need I also really point out that in reply to another of your ad hominem arguments that you are a non-scientist as well? Of course, the same holds for Al Gore, but this has not stopped him from winning a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award while making all sorts of claims, all of which are now in dispute. Indeed, there has been no effort on the part of NAS, ASA, NRC, etc., to critique Gore’s propaganda film, despite the lies it is based on. On the contrary, the politician and corporate-state crony Gore is fested and invited to speak and testify uncritically as the global spokesman for the science of climate change! Why? Because the interest groups that stand to make billions from a climate-government-industrial complex wish it so and climate true believers, including government-funded court scientists provide the convenient cover.
As for Susan Solomon’s work on relating the opening and closing of the ozone hole to chlorofluorcarbons (CFCs), she has remarkably claimed that ozone depletions will be accelerated by large volcanoes that release lots of chlorine, bromine, etc., into the stratosphere. Yet as climate scientist Patrick Michaels has noted:
The ozone “layer” is just a few millimeters thick and is continually and naturally created and destroyed by solar radiation and chlorine compounds naturally evaporating from the ocean. The “hole” is a totally bogus issue. Solomon attributed the chlorine matter to CFCs—and then without evidence concluded that the cause was man-made, conveniently ignoring the natural solar-radiation effects. The ozone hole is still there and still opens and closes annually as it has for millions of years.
Also and as I have noted, the Mann chart was dropped from the IPCC report because it was found to be erroneous. Indeed, Mann refused to share his data. (Wikipedia is incidentally not a peer-reviewed source.) But even Phil Jones has admitted that the claims of record warming are untrue as there has been no warming since 1995, despite CO2 levels. As atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer has stated:
As for your comment on “socialism,” coming from you as someone who has spent a career at the Inter-American Development Bank with its track-record of funding socialism and corporatism in Latin America countries and the subsequent destruction of economic development there, perhaps the following books from us will be of help:
Making Poor Nations Rich: Entrepreneurship and the Process of Economic Development, edited by Benjamin Powell
Liberty for Latin America: How to Undo Five Hundred Years of State Oppression, by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
Lessons from the Poor: Triumph of the Entrepreneurial Spirit, edited by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
David Theroux | Jun 28, 2010 | Reply
David,
Consensus certainly exists among major scientific organizations in the U.S., as listed by Wiki and partially enumerated in my previous email. If you go to Wiki, there are links to the statements of each of the organizations, at their own websites. Each organizations represents hundreds or thousands of scientists. A key one is the American Meteorological Society, which has 14,000 members and sponsors nine publications in the fields of atmospheric, oceanographic and hydrologic studies.
You may have heard that a paper presented recently an a National Academy of Sciences meeting which indicated that among climate scientists who publish frequently in professional journals, about 97-98% support the basic tenets of anthropogenic climate change.I had no idea the majority was that overwhelming. Of course, contrarian climate scientists with a weak record of publishing in peer-reviewed journals claim that they are the victims of discrimination. I don’t know how valid their claims are or how important they are numerically.
The preceding are strong indications of consensus. I found Hulme’s statement confusing, which is probably why he has offered clarifications. He indicates that the consensus within the IPCC team refers to one among “a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies; other IPCC authors are experts in other fields.” I take this to read that the consensus is shaped by a few dozen experts, and that the authors of the articles they read in ancillary fields are not formally part of the IPCC consensus and not necessarily contrarian. This is hardly the scandal Lawrence Solomon made it out to be.
I don’t claim to be a climate scientist, nor do I presume to offer anyone the final word on the subject. What I attempt to do is understand the principal issues and areas of disagreement, and learn where the scientific community stands. Readers at this site who are interested in doing the same are well advised to go outside the bounds of the opinions and sources you cite..
We could have a lengthy discussion on each of the specific scientific points you raised. I’ll limit myself to one at this juncture. As to the recent trend in global temperatures, the base period that is chosen can have a major influence in determining the nature of a trend or lack thereof. Rather than a single year than may be far from representative, comparisons of a longer period of time should be made. Here’s what the National Climate Data Center(NCDC) reported.“The 2000-2009 decade was the warmest on record, easily surpassing the previous hottest decade — the 1990s — researchers said Tuesday in a report providing fresh evidence that the planet may be warming at a potentially disastrous rate.”
Your readers may be interested in looking at the NCDC site. It contains a wealth of data and analysis. See http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html.
Each one of your quotes and the people you site are intentionally selected to demean the work of scientists like Susan Solomon. Your readers will get a different story if they take the trouble to look for themselves.
Jim
Jim Taylor | Jul 1, 2010 | Reply
Jim,
The climate debate has been overwhelmingly biased for decades now in favor of the alarmist view with billions of dollars spent annually by the federal government and other interest groups that benefit from the creation of a climate “crisis” with which global, environment central planning can be pursued. The process fits with the secular, environmental-religious beliefs of political and intellectual elites of the West who would be the ones to implement and benefit from a resulting global climate corporatism.
As for the NCDC claim that 2000-2009 has been the warmest decade on record, even Phil Jones has disputed this myth which is based on the projections of the various climate models and goes exactly against all of the temperature data. There has been no warming since 1998 and probably 1995.
As for the “hockey stick” which is the graphic version of the NCDC claim, the discredited author Michael Mann has recently announced that “I always thought it was somewhat misplaced to make it a central icon of the climate change debate” and that there were “uncertainties” in his work. I’ll say.
Here also is a recent Powerpoint presentation by Don Easterbrook (Professor of Geology, Western Washington University) on the evidence that there has been no warming for the past decade and more and that climate change correlates with solar activity, not CO2 levels.
In short, there is no “climate consensus” within the “scientific community” and to claim otherwise is a reflection of politics, not science.
David Theroux | Jul 8, 2010 | Reply
Dear Beacon Blogger:*
First, let’s correct a major error from your previous post. The statement I quoted from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) regarding the warming trend in recent decades is not based on “projections” from various climate models, it is based on actual, recorded data. The NCDC is officially responsible for describing the climate of the United States, and has the world’s largest archive of weather data. The NCDC also operates the World Data Center for Meteorology, located in Asheville, North Carolina , and the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology, at Boulder, Colorado. You have provided your readers (such as they may be) with a libelous caricature of this agency, by characterizing their statements as myths that go against all of the temperature data.
By the way, data from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia is consistent with the NCDC figures. The CRU, you will recall, is where Phil Jones was employed. The 1998 figure, which have emphasized, is a statistical outlier that resulted from a powerful el Niño effect. Despite this, the decade of the nineties still wasn’t as hot as the 2000-2009 decade., and, according to some sources, the 1998 temperature was exceeded in 2005 and 2009.
Regarding Don Easterbrook’s paper, you shouldn’t be surprised that to learn that it hasn’t been as acclaimed within the scientific community as it has by the Heartland Institute. All climatologists are aware of the effect of solar cycles on earth’s temperatures, but the consensus, as reflected in the position statement of the American Meteorological Society, appears to be that solar phenomenon alone can’t explain the recent warming trend. BTW, Easterbrook, as you have quoted him, is completely wrong about the temperature trend of the last decade
We can argue about what consists of a consensus, but there is no doubt that a preponderance of opinion in favor of AGW exists among major scientific organizations in the U.S. and throughout the world, as well as among the climate scientists who publish most frequently in scientific journals. In fact, in response to an effort by the State of Texas to challenge the EPA on global warming, a group of Texas climate scientists wrote the following in March 2010:
“The national academies of science of 32 nations, and every major scientific organization in the United States whose members include climate experts, have issued statements endorsing these points. The entire faculty of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M as well as the Climate System Science group at the University of Texas have issued their own statements endorsing these views. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, there are no climate scientists in Texas who disagree with the mainstream view of climate science.
You have called this a political consensus, which is very much in the spirit of those who call it junk science that is promoted as part of a socialist agenda. This is conspiracy theory run amok. The real political consensus exists among ideologically driven organizations like the Heartland Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Dead Hand, the Marshall Institute, the Independent Institute, etc, and their fellow-travelers in the media, which have an ideological agenda but no capacity for scientific research – yet they have the unbelievable gall to feign scientific authority.
Jim
* This is addressed to the “Beacon Blogger,” rather than David Theroux. I have read David Theroux’s CV and am very impressed. I also share David Theroux’s admiration of C.S. Lewis and Friedrich Hayek, and find it difficult to believe that a man of Theroux’s stature has written the texts of this thread that bear his name.
Jim Taylor | Jul 17, 2010 | Reply
Jim,
I would advise that you drop the personal attacks which are not appropriate for this blog.
As for your continued efforts to defend climate alarmism, I have provided innumerable scientific studies by leading climate scientists within and without the IPCC that show that your claims are not supported by the evidence, and yet you continue to use the myth of “consensus” as an argument and the basis for science. The enterprise of science is based on reason and the evidence, not what “other people think.” Since the evidence seems to have little effect on your views, we can only conclude that your belief system regarding climate change is rooted in a secular, environmental religion as is discussed in our award-winning book by Robert H. Nelson, The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America (Pennsylvania State University Press).
Furthermore, your ad hominem arguments have no standing. Nonetheless, here is just a small sampling of the many recent articles that further refute your claims:
“June 2010 UAH Global Temperature Update: +0.44 deg. C,” by Roy Spencer
“750 Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of “Man-Made” Global Warming (AGW) Alarm”
“Report from the Climategate Guardian debate”
“Does the Latest Climategate Investigation Exonerate the Scientists Involved?”, by Mary Theroux
“The problem with blindly trusting scientists,” by Rod Dreher
“When to Doubt a Scientific ‘Consensus’,” by Jay Richards
“By the Numbers: A terrific new book of essays encourages us all to be skeptical about statistics,” by Jack Shafer
“Amazongate: The smoking gun”
“Another Bogus Claim by IPCC: 40% of Amazon Rainforest at Risk from Global Warming,” by E. Calvin Beisner
“Climate change: a collective flight from reality,” by Roger Helmer
David Theroux | Jul 17, 2010 | Reply
David,
Re inappropriate ad hominem remarks, need I remind you that in your response to my original post you attempted to discredit me with comments of personal nature that were unrelated to the subject matter of this thread. You continued this in the preceding post by associating me with environmental alarmism that is rooted in a secular, environmental religion (actully, this is pretty amusing!).
Don’t know if I’ll get to it, but Nelson’s book looks interesting. In the past there were some excellent people in the environmental/natural resources field at the U. of Maryland, though he seems to come at the subject matter from a philosophic rather than a scientific viewpoint. I concur with his statement in the Acton Institute about how environmentalists should not view the market as the enemy, something I preached beginning about four decades ago. BTW, have you told your readers how, during the Presidency of G. Bush Sr., the cap and trade system was used successfully to deal with the problem of acid rain, and that it gained favor within his administration because it was a market-based, conservative approach? See http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Presence-of-Mind-Blue-Sky-Thinking.html?c=y&page=1
Re your reading list, thanks, but I think I already indicated that I’ve kept abreast of the main ideas of eminent skeptics such as Singer, Lindzen, Michaels, McKittrick, etc. However, in closing, there is no reason why I should believe you or your carefully screened list of experts over the National Academy of Sciences, national association’s of physics, chemistry, meteorology,Scientific American magazine, etc. You have also resorted to low-level ad hominem smears of these individuals and institutions.I dont have the background to make an authoritative scientific conclusion, but I have a pretty good idea of where the consensus of scientific opinion lies.
Best wishes,
Jim
Jim Taylor | Jul 24, 2010 | Reply
Another relevant question, besides “whether it would be cost effective to try to do anything about it”, would be what it would mean to “try to do something about it”. Anyone is of course free to let out less green house gasses. But what if someone else doesn’t want to limit his outlet? Do we have the right to force this person to not continue his activities? In other words, is it morally defensible to limit a person’s freedom based on what scientists have agreed upon? What if China doesn’t want to follow suit, do we start a war with them to try to force them into complying? As much as I love planet earth, and would hate to see more land turn into desert, I’m not sure starting a war is the solution, or even that it would be preferable to global warming.
Rune K. Svendsen | Jul 2, 2012 | Reply