PC; MultiCulturism:- Welfare, Collectivsm

The causes of PC multiculturalism
by Free Hal

In case you’ve forgotten, here are a few more-or-less random examples of multiculturalism in action:

A 14-year-old schoolgirl arrested, fingerprinted, photographed, held in a police cell for 3½ hours, and questioned on suspicion of a race-based public order offence. She had asked to sit at a different science table because the other three pupils only spoke Urdu.

A 10-year-old boy (just inside the age of criminal responsibility, “doli incapax” ending at age 10) arrested, charged, and brought before a judge. He had responded to taunts from an 11-year-old that he was a “skunk” and a “Teletubby” with the word “Paki”.

The makers of the Channel 4 documentary “Undercover Mosque” subjected to a year-long police investigation for investigating extremism in mosques.

You can find similar stories most days, usually accompanied by a helping of bafflement.

We know multiculturalism exists. The question is why?

In this essay I maintain that the cause of PC multiculturalism and self-loathing is the welfare state and, specifically, the welfare state’s justifying ideology, collectivism.

By “collectivism” I mean the morality of group rights. The idea that you are judged, and have rights, based on your group identity. You’re poorer than average? Here’s some money. You’ve come here from a poor country? Here’s a house, some money, and a TV. Feel bad about those cartoons? We’ll ban them.

Collectivism clashes with traditional morality, which is based on our individual actions and intentions. You built a house from nothing? It’s yours. You bashed an old lady over the head for her handbag? Jail for you.

Think of the welfare system as the computer hardware, collectivism as the operating system, and the various PC utopias as the software applications.

Surprisingly, few of the thinkers who warn us about cultural relativism and multiculturalism have convincingly traced its roots.

A summary of some of the best explanations follows: Melanie Phillips, Theodore Dalrymple, Paul Gottfried, Fjordman, Geert Wilders, and Mark Steyn. There isn’t the space to do them justice, and I would recommend reading all of them.

Melanie Phillips- - - - - - - - -
She puts our enervating political culture down to the general philosophy of relativism amongst intellectual elites, and a lack of appropriate pride in our institutions and traditions.

You can’t disagree with this view. But it restates the situation rather than explains it. It would be wrong to call her reasoning tautologous, but moral and cultural relativism describe the texture of western self-loathing rather than its roots.

Where did the cultural relativism come from? You get the impression that we only need a good shake to get out of it.

Theodore Dalrymple
He explains political correctness as “communist propaganda writ small”. Marxism, unlike fascism, survived its denouement, and has retained its attraction to intellectuals because of the status it gives them, and they have evolved it into a more resilient form.

Theodore Dalrymple puts the blame on European political elites’ attempts to make the public financially dependent and their attempt to reduce belief in European culture.

These points go further than Melanie Phillips’, but still strike me as observations rather than explanations. They do not explain why the non-elites, the voters, have allowed political correctness to continue. Commentators generally skirt around this issue. British scepticism for egg-heads, and scorn for politicians, are poor soil for a self-serving elite. It is unlikely that British voters tolerate soft-core Marxism for the privilege of supporting unnecessary academics.

Theodore Dalrymple seems to me to come close to a theory about elites conspiring to manipulate and rob their electorates. In other words, the public are unwilling dupes. Whilst he is right about the anaesthetic effects of political correctness and the welfare dependence, I don’t think these factors are enough to force the public to get themselves robbed. Given that every percentage point of the vote must be fought over, it is hard to see the public as mere victims here.

Modern day liberal Marxism goes a long way to explain the mentality of PC self-loathing, but doesn’t explain how it arises.

Paul Gottfried

In “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy”, Paul Gottfried states that multiculturalism denies civil society its independence by casting it into competing groups. All of them are subject to the state’s authority, and depend on its patronage. Heretics fare badly, and there is “the substitution of designated victims for the older adoration of religious martyrs”. “Third World, gender, and lifestyle victims” become the new “suffering just”.

Paul Gottfried is right about the guilt-trip side of multiculturalism, and the state’s interest in undermining civil independence. But he too falls for the temptation to blame the elites rather than the public.

This is a similar to Theodore Dalrymple’s belief that multiculturalism is a deliberate government policy. It is true, but doesn’t explain public tolerance of it.

Fjordman

A brilliant and sensitive defender of our western heritage. His conclusions — e.g. that we have “no intellectual cadre that can think” — are the more devastating for being thoughtfully researched.

For him, “cultural Marxism” is a Gramscian strain that survived the fall of communism, and our treacherous elites promote it for their selfish ends. He is right. But like others, he avoids the unpalatable conclusion that those self-serving elites may be doing the public’s bidding. To be fair, he has expressed doubt that democracy is up to the challenge (“Democracy not Working”), but I think he lays too much emphasis on the role of (admittedly unscrupulous) elites.

Geert Wilders

His speeches to the Dutch Parliament accuse a cowardly and self-serving elite of handing over Western civilisation as an outgoing President might hand over the keys to the Oval Office. In a 2008 budget debate he stressed the disconnection between “the leftist canal-zone” (the high-price areas near to the Amsterdam canals where left-wing celebrities and politicians tend to live) and “The other Netherlands (which) consists of people who have to pay the bills”.

As one might expect from a democratic politician who still values state provision, this line avoids criticism of the electorate. Elite swindlers dupe the unsuspecting tax-paying public, and the public haven’t queried the bill yet.

Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn looks further than the elite for an explanation. First, he sees PC multiculturalism as one of the absurd symptoms of “civilisational exhaustion”. And the most civilisationally exhausted society, Europe, is the most absurdly multiculturalist.

Like Melanie Phillips, his argument doesn’t quite get to the root of the problem. For example, does PC multiculturalism cause civilisational exhaustion, or vice versa? No-one with sense would describe self-loathing and cultural relativism as a symptom of “civilisational vigour”. And if civilisational exhaustion is the deeper cause, how did it arise? And what is the cure? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that a good shake is all we need.

Second, he appears to suggest that that exhaustion is the result of deathbed demographics — or is it the other way around? The question matters because unless you can identify a relatively fundamental cause, then it’s hard to find an intervention point that will work.

Perhaps it is just a matter of age — western civilisation has had a good long run and has had enough of leading? Mark Steyn, rightly, has little time for historical inevitability.

In “America Alone”, he suggests it is the result of the luxury of American military protection since World War I. If that were the case then it would not explain why America shares much of Europe’s self-loathing.

Second, why should self-loathing and multiculturalism, be the symptoms of shrinking demographics? Japan and China have deathbed demographics, and yet neither of them is falling for our PC multiculturalism. Japan still has low levels of immigration, and virtually no Islamic immigration, and shows no sign of abandoning its orderly culture. China appears to be combining a demographic crunch with civilisational resurgence, and is cited by Mark Steyn as an example of the ‘strong horse’ feared and respected by Jihadis. Russia has, if anything, even worse demographics, owing to disease and low male life expectancy, but shows no wish to abase itself before Europe. And whilst the British birth rate is significantly higher than Germany’s, PC multiculturalism appears to be higher in Britain. And America, whose population passed the 300 million mark two years ago, is playing catch-up with Britain in the self-loathing stakes.

I’m exaggerating slightly. And I think that there is merit to Mark Steyn’s view about demographics. But, those demographics look more like a reinforcer of self-loathing than its main cause.

I go along with these writers in that Europe’s elites bear a disproportionate share of the blame since they are not mere agents but trustees. However, they couldn’t get away with it without the implied consent of the voters.

Collectivism — the philosophical poison

Collectivism is the philosophical poison at the heart of Western self-loathing and PC multiculturalism.

At least half of all wealth created in European countries is spent by the state, which generally forces higher earners to subsidise consumption for lower earners. It is a good deal for lower-earners, who make up a majority of the electorate.

This system operates by coercion, but it is not just a mafia racket. It requires stability for the wealth to be created in the first place, and a justifying ideology to minimise opposition. Monarchies use the ideology of the divine right of kings. Welfare democracy uses collectivism.

Collectivism has been successful. Its meaningless language about “compassion” (forcible extraction of money from someone else), “social justice” (equal incomes), “investment” (subsidised consumption), and “giving money to the rich” (reducing tax), is accepted at face value.

Collective wishes trump individual rights at the ballot box. And collectivism trumps individual morality philosophically, for lacking “social justice”, “compassion”, and “investment”, and for “giving money to the rich”. The days before collectivism were the Bad Old Days.

There are plenty of self-serving intellectuals to flesh out this crude orthodoxy: western culture was dull and unspectacular; individual responsibility is oppressive; self-restraint is repression; self-reliance is impossible.

Collectivist rights extend to other victim groups as well as the below average-earning majority: religious rights, racial minority rights, gender rights. Anyone who can stake a claim to a collective hardship has a collective entitlement, via the taxman.

This process irritates Europeans who find themselves on the wrong end of minority entitlements, e.g. the right not to be offended. This explains the tension on the ground between socialism and multiculturalism. But most recipients tolerate this rather than endanger the welfare flow.

The general public don’t much like the absurdities of multiculturalism, or the abuse of their history. But most will put up with it in favour of the drive for “services”. Not because they like it but because it is useful.

None of this happens suddenly or calculatedly. It is more like a set of habits that reproduce and develop over time, which explains their unquestioning acceptance.

Why multiculturalism?

Multiculturalism’s power derives from guilt. A century ago, British history focused on the high points of our history: the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Trafalgar and Waterloo. Today, it focuses on guilt: guilt over the Nazis (whom the British resisted); guilt over slavery (which the British eradicated); guilt over racism (which, prior to PC multiculturalism, was seldom a problem within Britain).

Multiculturalism is so useful because it disempowers people before the state. People will do appalling things if the state doesn’t take control for them. And it fits neatly with collectivist ideas which are lucrative to the majority of voters.

Multiculturalists are not slow to take up the opportunity. See for instance the calculated comments of the head of the Muslim Council of Britain, on the eve of Remembrance Sunday 2007, that Britain was becoming like Nazi Germany. Or, in 2000, Jack Straw’s (the UK Home Secretary) comments that the English are “potentially very aggressive, very violent” and — shock, horror! — “increasingly articulating their Englishness”.

Guilt overpowers opposition. Any accusation of chauvinism, or “being right-wing”, is enough to end discussion. Godwin’s Law states that “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one” and the discussion is effectively ended. This is why it is used so frequently to vilify opponents — see, for instance, Pim Fortuyn, here, and here.

Multiculturalism is a very efficient method of overcoming opposition to collectivism and its utopias.

The future

What does all this mean now that things appear to be unravelling?

If I am right — that PC multiculturalism stems from the welfare state — then PC multiculturalism will continue. But it will cause more and more ethnic conflict as the limits to the tax-take hit home.

If people can’t increase overall tax-take by going after higher earners, they will transfer that hostility to other groups competing for welfare. Different groups will blame each other for taking more than their fair share of the welfare pot, and will cast each other as less deserving.

We can expect this scramble for welfare to fall out along ethnic lines. Partly because of the disproportionate consumption by Islamic populations; partly because European populations don’t see immigrant groups as having such strong collectivist entitlements as themselves; partly because multiculturalism entrenches ethnicity; and partly because the European ethnic divide is so deep.

The collapse of the welfare state will turn PC self-loathing into a sense of betrayal that is deaf to reason. Ethnic hostility may not be the primary or immediate cause of European breakdown but will be its apparent cause — a harbinger, and the thing that people blame.

Conclusion

It should be obvious from the above that I have deep misgivings about welfare democracy, and that I think collectivism and its tendrils are poisonous.

If welfare is the underlying cause of these problems, then the question is whether a state can be devised that doesn’t become a welfare state. The experience of America, from Founding Fathers to President George Bush, let alone President Obama, suggests that this isn’t possible. If not, then we need to devise ways to live and flourish without a state authority.



Baron Bodissey | 12/14/2009 02:48:00 PM

6 Comments:

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mriggs said...
The cause of PC multiculturalism is the Frankfurt School, a marxist-derived ideology designed in the 1920's to destroy western culture, and so make the west ripe for marxist revolution (which had failed to materialize, contrary to expections after WW1).
PC in particular is the Frankfurt School's rejection of classic logical argument, in that the conclusion must be examined in isolation from the arguments to determine its validity. If the conclusion is deemed invalid, then the arguments are invalid too. This is PC in a nutshell. Multiculturalism then is a consequence of the sanctioned view that all races and cultures are equal, although the white race is less equal than all others and western culture is less equal than all others.

12/14/2009 4:16 PM
Viking said...
Excellent Post, and some serious research done!

I would want to add Shelby Steele to this list.

He talks about the loss of 'moral accountability' and uses the language of 'redemption' to describe how liberals (=socialists) use displays of generosity to redeem their collective consciences.

There is merit in this analysis because it sets the blame wider that just 'elites', accounts for the difficulty in countering this way of thinking, and also holds some authority as Steele is not of the white majority.

Steele provides interesting analysis of how the multicult bullies have seized a moral high ground that can only be retaken with the language of individualism. And it is too easy for the left to paint individualism as 'selfishness'.

12/14/2009 4:25 PM
ChrisLA said...
This is a thought-provoking essay, and addressing this subject is timely and important. From my perspective, the CAUSE of PC Multiculturalism can be found in Christian values, namely, the Golden Rule and the Galatians 3:28concept that all of us are equal, regardless of race, sex, or social status. Thus, the notion of redistributing wealth from the more fortunate to the less fortunate (either through charity or taxation) was a normal extension of these concepts. Combined with this was the idea that those of foreign cultures could be assimilated into the dominant culture if they were accepted and tolerated during the transition.

The FAILURE of PC Multiculturalism is because those good deeds were exploited by people who had no respect for them. After World War II, Western societies were faced with immigrants who brought with them a well-engrained culture that is hostile to Western values, namely, Islam. Islam (as defined by the Quran) refuses to assimilate. (Surahs 5:51 and 9:123) Islam revels in taking wealth from non-Muslims. (Surahs 9:29 and 48:20) Islam uses terror to intimidate non-Muslims (Surah 8:12 and 8:59) Islam does not value striving for material success in preference to jihad. (Surahs 9:91-93 and 9:111)

As a result, instead of having a society that helped one another advance, the advent of the Islamic populations became a severe drain on the resources and good will of their host countries, with little prospect of a future payback. (This is generally not true in the U.S., where most Muslim immigrants were middle- and upper-class professionals.)

Perhaps the WAY OUT of the PC Multiculturalism trap is to insist on another Christian value:"Be on your guard against false prophets. . . A healthy tree bears good fruit, but a poor tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a poor tree cannot bar good fruit. And any tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know the false prophets by what they do."
(Matthew 7:15-20)

12/14/2009 4:39 PM
Chechar said...
While I applaud Hal’s skepticism about the most common explanations, including Fjordman’s, Melanie Philipps’ and Mark Stein’s “explanations”, I still believe that the psycho-biographical appropriation I do of Conservative Swede’s view (“in Secular Christianity each person has to be like Jesus himself, doing self-sacrifice, since there’s no other way to realize Christian ethics”) may provide the whole picture.

See e.g., what I’ve just posted in another thread.

12/14/2009 5:26 PM
4Symbols said...
One problem is we are in a post-industrial and post-labour intensive society, most european states have a labour surplus by a factor of millions a problem that has been inflated by mass-imigration and outsourcing to the third world - globalization.

Subsistance welfare is not the cause of the above in fact if anything it has saved Britian from a political collapse that would have gifted Britian to totalitarianism.

If anything cultural relativism has been deployed against subsistance welfare and its indigenous recipients - check out Nulabours Benefit thieves propaganda that crimialises this section of society.

If I wanted civil war in the U.K. tomorrow, I would end subsistance welfare, Free Hal are you advocating this and the starvation of millions of children.

To blame PC multiculturalism and self-loathing on subsistance welfare is absurd and scapegoating, try the Frankfurt School and the political elite most of whom have never done an honest days work in their lives.

12/14/2009 7:00 PM
Chechar said...
@ “Try the Frankfurt School…” —4Symbols

This is insufficient. As I said in another thread (linked above), today’s crisis can best be understood if we go beyond Gramscian or commie brainwash into a meta-perspective that involves Christian ethics. I learnt this from Con Swede.



12/14/2009 7:12 PM

Climate Gate: Journalist

SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: Climate change emails row deepens as Russians admit they DID come from their Siberian server

By David Rose
Last updated at 4:58 PM on 13th December 2009
Comments (373) Add to My Stories
Hot topic: Model Helena Christensen speaking yesterday at the UN climate change conference
The claim was both simple and terrifying: that temperatures on planet Earth are now ‘likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years’.
As its authors from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) must have expected, it made headlines around the world.
Yet some of the scientists who helped to draft it, The Mail on Sunday can reveal, harboured uncomfortable doubts.
In the words of one, David Rind from the US space agency Nasa, it ‘looks like there were years around 1000AD that could have been just as warm’.
Keith Briffa from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which plays a key role in forming IPCC assessments, urged caution, warning that when it came to historical climate records, there was no new data, only the ‘same old evidence’ that had been around for years.

‘Let us not try to over-egg the pudding,’ he wrote in an email to an IPCC colleague in September 2006.
‘True, there have been many different techniques used to aggregate and scale data - but the efficacy of these is still far from established.’
But when the ‘warmest for 1,300 years’ claim was published in 2007 in the IPCC’s fourth report, the doubters kept silent.

It is only now that their concerns have started to emerge from the thousands of pages of ‘Warmergate’ emails leaked last month from the CRU’s computers, along with references to performing a ‘trick’ to ‘hide’ temperature decline and instructions to resist all efforts by the CRU’s critics to use the Freedom of Information Act to check the unit’s data and conclusions.
Last week, as an official inquiry by the former civil servant Sir Muir Russell began, I tried to assess Warmergate’s wider significance.
The CRU’s supporters insisted it was limited. ‘In the long term, it will make very little difference to the scientific consensus, and to the way politicians respond to it,’ Professor Trevor Davies, the university’s Pro-Vice Chancellor and a former CRU director, told me. ‘I am certain that the science is rock solid.’
He admitted that his CRU colleagues had sometimes used ‘injudicious phrases’, but that was because they kept on being ‘diverted’ from their work by those who wished to scrutinise it. ‘It’s understandable that sometimes people get frustrated,’ he said.

The only lesson the affair had for him was that ‘we have got to get better in terms of explanation. Some scientists still find it quite it difficult to communicate with the public.’
Others, however, were less optimistic. Roger Pielke, Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado, could in no sense be described as a climate change sceptic, let alone a ‘denier’.

‘Human-caused climate change is real, and I’m a strong advocate for action,’ he said. ‘But I’m also a strong advocate for integrity in science.’
Pielke’s verdict on the scandal is damning.

‘These emails open up the possibility that big scientific questions we’ve regarded as settled may need another look.

'They reveal that some of these scientists saw themselves not as neutral investigators but as warriors engaged in battle with the so-called sceptics.
‘They have lost a lot of credibility and as far as their being leading spokespeople on this issue of huge public importance, there is no going back.’
Climate science is complicated, and often the only way to make sense of raw data is through sophisticated statistical computer programs.
The consequence is that most lay individuals - politicians and members of the public alike - have little choice but to take the assurances of scientists such as Davies on trust.
He and other ‘global warmists’ often insist that when it comes to the IPCC’s main conclusions - that the Earth is in a period of potentially catastrophic warming and that the main culprit is man-made greenhouse gas emission - no serious scientist dissents from the conventional view.


More...Copenhagen climate change summit: 900 arrested and two Britons deported

Hence, perhaps, Gordon Brown’s recent comment that those who disagree are ‘behind-the-times, antiscience, flat-Earth climate sceptics’.
In fact, there is a large body of highly-respected academic experts who fiercely contest this thesis: people such as Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a disillusioned former IPCC member, and Dr Tom Segalstad, head of geology at Oslo University, who has stated that ‘most leading geologists throughout the world know that the IPCC’s view of Earth processes are implausible if not impossible’.
These dissenters focus their criticisms on the IPCC’s analysis of the way the atmosphere works and the models it uses to predict the future.

However, Warmergate strikes at something more fundamental - the science that justifies the basic assumption that the present warming really is unprecedented, at least in the past few thousand years.
Take the now-notorious email that the CRU’s currently suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, sent to his IPCC colleagues on November 16, 1999, when he wrote he had ‘just completed Mike’s Nature trick’ and had so managed to ‘hide the decline’.
For example, some suggest that the ‘medieval warm period’ was considerably warmer than even 1998. Of course, this is inconvenient to climate change believers because there were no cars or factories pumping out greenhouse gases in 1000AD - yet the Earth still warmed. The CRU’s supporters have protested bitterly about the attention paid to this message. In the course of an extraordinary BBC interview in which he called an American critic an ‘****hole’ live on air, Jones’s colleague Professor Andrew Watson insisted that the fuss was completely unjustified, because all Jones had been talking about was ‘tweaking a diagram’.
Davies told me that the email had been ‘taken out of context’ adding: ‘One definition of the word “trick” is “the best way of doing something”. What Phil did was standard practice and the facts are out there in the peer-reviewed literature.’
However, the full context of that ‘trick’ email, as shown by a new and until now unreported analysis by the Canadian climate statistician Steve McIntyre, is extremely troubling.
Derived from close examination of some of the thousands of other leaked emails, he says it suggests the ‘trick’ undermines not only the CRU but the IPCC.
There is a widespread misconception that the ‘decline’ Jones was referring to is the fall in global temperatures from their peak in 1998, which probably was the hottest year for a long time. In fact, its subject was more technical - and much more significant.
It is true that, in Watson’s phrase, in the autumn of 1999 Jones and his colleagues were trying to ‘tweak’ a diagram. But it wasn’t just any old diagram.

It was the chart displayed on the first page of the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ of the 2001 IPCC report - the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph that has been endlessly reproduced in everything from newspapers to primary-school textbooks ever since, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a dizzying, almost vertical rise in the late 20th Century.
There could be no simpler or more dramatic representation of global warming, and if the origin of worldwide concern over climate change could be traced to a single image, it would be the hockey stick.
Drawing a diagram such as this is far from straightforward.
Gabriel Fahrenheit did not invent the mercury thermometer until 1724, so scientists who want to reconstruct earlier climate history have to use ‘proxy data’ - measurements derived from records such as ice cores, tree-rings and growing season dates.
However, different proxies give very different results.
For example, some suggest that the ‘medieval warm period’, the 350-year era that started around 1000, when red wine grapes flourished in southern England and the Vikings tilled now-frozen farms in Greenland, was considerably warmer than even 1998.

Of course, this is inconvenient to climate change believers because there were no cars or factories pumping out greenhouse gases in 1000AD - yet the Earth still warmed.
Some tree-ring data eliminates the medieval warmth altogether, while others reflect it. In September 1999, Jones’s IPCC colleague Michael Mann of Penn State University in America - who is now also the subject of an official investigation --was working with Jones on the hockey stick. As they debated which data to use, they discussed a long tree-ring analysis carried out by Keith Briffa.
Briffa knew exactly why they wanted it, writing in an email on September 22: ‘I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.’ But his conscience was troubled. ‘In reality the situation is not quite so simple - I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.’

Agenda: An Iceberg projection highlighting the Copenhagen UN summit shows the high level of political interest in climate change - and why scientists may be desperate to prove it is a man-made problem we can solve
Another British scientist - Chris Folland of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre - wrote the same day that using Briffa’s data might be awkward, because it suggested the past was too warm. This, he lamented, ‘dilutes the message rather significantly’.
Over the next few days, Briffa, Jones, Folland and Mann emailed each other furiously. Mann was fearful that if Briffa’s trees made the IPCC diagram, ‘the sceptics [would] have a field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith [in them] - I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!’
Finally, Briffa changed the way he computed his data and submitted a revised version. This brought his work into line for earlier centuries, and ‘cooled’ them significantly. But alas, it created another, potentially even more serious, problem.
According to his tree rings, the period since 1960 had not seen a steep rise in temperature, as actual temperature readings showed - but a large and steady decline, so calling into question the accuracy of the earlier data derived from tree rings.
This is the context in which, seven
weeks later, Jones presented his ‘trick’ - as simple as it was deceptive.
All he had to do was cut off Briffa’s inconvenient data at the point where the decline started, in 1961, and replace it with actual temperature readings, which showed an increase.
On the hockey stick graph, his line is abruptly terminated - but the end of the line is obscured by the other lines.
‘Any scientist ought to know that you just can’t mix and match proxy and actual data,’ said Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
‘They’re apples and oranges. Yet that’s exactly what he did.’
Since Warmergate-broke, some of the CRU’s supporters have claimed that Jones and his colleagues made a ‘full disclosure’ of what they did to Briffa’s data in order to produce the hockey stick.
But as McIntyre points out, ‘contrary to claims by various climate scientists, the IPCC Third Assessment Report did not disclose the deletion of the post-1960 values’.
On the final diagram, the cut off was simply concealed by the other lines.
By 2007, when the IPCC produced its fourth report, McIntyre had become aware of the manipulation of the Briffa data and Briffa himself, as shown at the start of this article, continued to have serious qualms.
McIntyre by now was an IPCC ‘reviewer’ and he urged the IPCC not to delete the post-1961 data in its 2007 graph. ‘They refused,’ he said, ‘stating this would be “inappropriate”.’
‘Any scientist ought to know that you just can’t mix and match proxy and actual data’Yet even this, Pielke told me, may not ultimately be the biggest consequence of Warmergate.
Some of the most controversial leaked emails concern attempts by Jones and his colleagues to avoid disclosure of the CRU’s temperature database - its vast library of readings from more than 1,000 weather stations around the world, the ultimate resource that records how temperatures have changed.
In one email from 2005, Jones warned Mann not to leave such data lying around on searchable websites, because ‘you never know who is trawling them’.
Critics such as McIntyre had been ‘after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone’.
Yesterday Davies said that, contrary to some reports, none of this data has in fact been deleted. But in the wake of the scandal, its reliability too is up for grabs.
The problem is that, just like tree rings or ice cores, readings from thermometers or electronic ‘thermistors’ are open to interpretation.
The sites of weather stations that were once open countryside become built up areas, so trapping heat, and the type of equipment used changes over time.
The result is what climate scientists call ‘inhomogeneities’ - anomalies between readings that need to be ‘adjusted’.
But can we trust the way such ‘adjustments’ are made?
Last week, an article posted on a popular climate sceptic website analysed the data from the past 130 years in Darwin, Australia.
This suggested that average temperatures had risen there by about two degrees Celsius. However, the raw data had been ‘adjusted’ in a series of abrupt upward steps by exactly the same amount: without the adjustment, the Darwin temperature record would have stayed level.
In 2007, McIntyre examined records across America. He found that between 1999 and 2007, the US equivalent of the Met Office had changed the way it adjusted old data.
The result was to make the Thirties seem cooler, and the years since 1990 much warmer. Previously, the warmest year since records began in America had been 1934.
CRU 'can't be trusted' says MP Norman Lamb

The MP whose father founded the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia says it is important that trust in the unit’s work is restored.
Liberal Democrat frontbencher Norman Lamb is the son of Professor Hubert Lamb, who was the first director of the CRU in 1971.
Under his leadership, it gained an international reputation for authoritative and ground-breaking research.

Last night, Norman Lamb, MP for North Norfolk, said: ‘My father was always very concerned that the highest possible standards were met.

'The university has done the right thing in calling for an independent investigation.

‘It is of critical importance that trust is re-established. We want truth and accuracy, both in small detail and the bigger picture.’

Prof Lamb died in 1997, aged 84.
Now, in line with CRU and IPCC orthodoxy, it was 1998.
At the CRU, said Davies, some stations’ readings were adjusted by unit and in such cases, raw and adjusted data could be compared.
But in about 90 per cent of cases, the adjustment was carried out in the countries that collected the data, and the CRU would not know exactly how this had been done.
Davies said: ‘All I can say is that the process is careful and considered. To get the details, the best way would be to go the various national meteorological services.’
The consequences of that, Stott said, may be explosive. ‘If you take Darwin, the gap between the two just looks too big.
‘If that applies elsewhere, it’s going to get really interesting. It’s no longer going to be good enough for the Met Office and CRU to put the data out there.
‘To know we can trust it, we’ve got to know what adjustments have been made, and why.’
Last week, at the Copenhagen climate summit, the Met Office said that the Noughties have been the warmest decade in history. Depending on how the data has been adjusted, Stott said, that statement may not be true.
Pielke agreed. ‘After Climategate, the surface temperature record is being called into question.’ To experts such as McIntyre and Pielke, perhaps the most baffling thing has been the near-unanimity over global warming in the world’s mainstream media - a unanimity much greater than that found among scientists.
In part, this is the result of strongarm tactics.
For example, last year the BBC environment reporter Roger Harrabin made substantial changes to an article on the corporation website that asked why global warming seemed to have stalled since 1998 - caving in to direct pressure from a climate change activist, Jo Abbess.
‘Personally, I think it is highly irresponsible to play into the hands of the sceptics who continually promote the idea that “global warming finished in 1998” when that is so patently not true,’ she told him in an email.
After a brief exchange, he complied and sent a final note: ‘Have a look in ten minutes and tell me you are happier. We have changed headline and more.’
Afterwards, Abbess boasted on her website: ‘Climate Changers, Remember to challenge any piece of media that seems like it’s been subject to spin or scepticism. Here’s my go for today. The BBC actually changed an article I requested a correction for.’
Last week, Michael Schlesinger, Professor of Atmospheric Studies at the University of Illinois, sent a still cruder threat to Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, accusing him of ‘gutter reportage’, and warning: ‘The vibe that I am getting from here, there and everywhere is that your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists ... I sense that you are about to experience the “Big Cutoff” from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included.’
But in the wake of Warmergate, such threats - and the readiness to bow to them - may become rarer.
‘A year ago, if a reporter called me, all I got was questions about why I’m trying to deny climate change and am threatening the future of the planet,’ said Professor Ross McKitrick of Guelph University near Toronto, a long-time collaborator with McIntyre.
‘Now, I’m getting questions about how they did the hockey stick and the problems with the data.
‘Maybe the emails have started to open people’s eyes.’
Yes, emails came from here - but we didn't do it, say Russians Tomsk: Emails were sent from this Siberian town

Russian secret service agents admitted yesterday that the hacked ‘Warmergate’ emails were uploaded on a Siberian internet server, but strenuously denied a clandestine state-sponsored operation to wreck the Copenhagen summit.
The FSB - formerly the KGB - confirmed that thousands of messages to and from scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were distributed to the world from the city of Tomsk, as revealed by The Mail on Sunday last week.

Now, it has emerged that IT experts specialising in hacking techniques were brought in by the Russian authorities following this newspaper’s exposure of the Tomsk link.

They have gathered evidence about how and where the operation was carried out, although they are not prepared to say at this stage who they think was responsible.
A Russian intelligence source claimed the FSB had new information which could cast light on who was behind the elaborate operation.

‘We are not prepared to release details, but we might if the false claims about the FSB’s involvement do not stop,’ he said. ‘The emails were uploaded to the Tomsk server but we are sure this was done from outside Russia.’
The Kremlin’s top climate change official, Alexander Bedritsky, denied the Russian government was involved in breaking into the CRU’s computer system.

‘You can post information on a computer from any other country. It is nonsense to blame Russia,’ he said.


Explore more:People: Gordon Brown, Helena Christensen Places: London, Toronto, Copenhagen, United Kingdom, Australia, Russia, America Organisations: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Russian intelligence, Met Office

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1235395/SPECIAL-INVESTIGATION-Climate-change-emails-row-deepens--Russians-admit-DID-send-them.html#ixzz0ZfB8d3Ij

Madness of Crowds; Political Science

Beyond debate?
10 December 2009

The Copenhagen summit is in full force, and so too is the idea that man-made global warming is incontrovertible. But Martin Cohen argues that the consensus is less a triumph of science and rationality than of PR and fear-mongering

Is belief in global-warming science another example of the "madness of crowds"? That strange but powerful social phenomenon, first described by Charles Mackay in 1841, turns a widely shared prejudice into an irresistible "authority". Could it indeed represent the final triumph of irrationality? After all, how rational is it to pass laws banning one kind of light bulb (and insisting on their replacement by ones filled with poisonous mercury vapour) in order to "save electricity", while ploughing money into schemes to run cars on ... electricity? How rational is it to pay the Russians once for fossil fuels, and a second time for permission (via carbon credits) to burn them (see box page 36)? And how rational is it to suppose that the effects of increased CO2 in the atmosphere take between 200 and 1,000 years to be felt, but that solutions can take effect almost instantaneously?

Whether rational or not, global warming theory has become a political orthodoxy. So entrenched is it that those showing any resistance to it are described as "heretics" or even likened to "Holocaust deniers".

Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University and columnist for The New York Times, has said: "Is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn't it politics as usual? Yes, it is - and that's why it's unforgivable ... the deniers are choosing, wilfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it's in their political interest to pretend that there's nothing to worry about. If that's not betrayal, I don't know what is."

Another columnist, this time for The Boston Globe, has written: "I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, although one denies the past and the other denies the present and future."

Such pronouncements from these commentators and from other people highly placed in government, international organisations, the press, academia and science make the debate seem closed and the conclusion beyond dispute. Yet the plain fact is that there is something deeply unscientific about the theory of global warming. Despite this, it has gained such widespread, uncritical acceptance that any scientist expressing a doubt often finds his or her actions tarred with accusations of the rankest political and personal motivations.

How this situation came about says much about how science is co-opted to sway public opinion. The case is built, deliberately or not, on misleading images and interpretations that have been perpetuated by parties with a vested interest. It morphs into a tool for governments to intimidate their populations into passive acceptance of very real changes: from the tiny, such as accepting miserable fluorescent light instead of the incandescent light we've been used to; to the major, like welcoming nuclear power plants and obliging rainforest tribes to make way for biofuel plantations.

Indeed, much of what is presented as hard scientific evidence for the theory of global warming is false. "Second-rate myth" may be a better term, as the philosopher Paul Feyerabend called science in his 1975 polemic, Against Method.

"This myth is a complex explanatory system that contains numerous auxiliary hypotheses designed to cover special cases, as it easily achieves a high degree of confirmation on the basis of observation," Feyerabend writes. "It has been taught for a long time; its content is enforced by fear, prejudice and ignorance, as well as by a jealous and cruel priesthood. Its ideas penetrate the most common idiom, infect all modes of thinking and many decisions which mean a great deal in human life ... ".

But call it what you will, as long as you don't think that by calling it "science" it becomes irrefutable. Because that it ain't.

Consider the presentation in one of the most popular works arguing the case for global warming and the need for action. In Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, the scientists are reduced to a walk-on part: they are, in essence, an audience invited to applaud the decisions of politicians. The former Vice-President unveils as the "scientific" highlight of his presentation a graph offering a clear correlation between CO2 and temperature, as discovered in core samples of polar ice. He goes on to state that as levels of carbon dioxide rise, the Earth's temperature increases because the atmosphere traps more heat from the Sun.

Driving his point home, Gore extends the lines on the graph to terrifying, if distorted, levels (see box, opposite).

To show that these effects are already being felt, the film presents striking images of "global warming", from forlorn boats in dried-up seas to that haunting image at the end of the film of polar bears clinging desperately to a shrinking block of ice (see box, above).

The film - like the theory it is advancing - is not defensible in terms either of factual accuracy or of argumentative logic.

Fine, you may say, but even if the case for global warming really boils down to a few media tricks, how come everyone believes in it? Yet, as Solomon Asch, a social psychologist, discovered in the 1950s via a series of experiments, people are quite prepared to change their minds on even quite straightforward factual matters in order to "go along with the crowd".

You can't blame folk for doing that. Especially when to do otherwise would mean taking a close look at the scientific issues in climate-change theory. Much of the argument for global warming is based on modelling. The mathematics is sophisticated and certainly intimidating to everyone but experts.

As some of the top climate-change modellers have remarked: "Modellers have an inbuilt bias towards forced climate change because the causes and effect are clear." (That comes from the paper "General circulation modelling of Holocene climate variability", by Gavin Schmidt, Drew Shindell, Ron Miller, Michael Mann and David Rind, published in Quaternary Science Review in 2004.)

And there is an impressive degree of consensus in their predictions. Take the modelling of one of the key components of "greenhouse theory", the degree to which warming of the oceans leads to more water vapour in the atmosphere "trapping" the Sun's heat. Advocates of the theory rely on this to show how a little bit of warming owing to CO2 can create very significant changes in the way the climate system operates.

A paper by Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi, called "On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data", published in July 2009 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, examined the modellers' case for CO2-induced global warming. It offered 12 graphs, 11 of them based on the most sophisticated climate models, all but one of which showed that as the temperature of the surface of the seas increases slightly, the amount of heat then trapped in the atmosphere by water vapour increases - a key element in accelerating the "greenhouse effect". We should be worried.

Yet there was that odd graph out, the 12th one. As Lubo? Motl, a sceptical physicist, joked, could it be that this was a tainted model - with its assumptions "tweaked" to fit prejudices by climate-change "deniers" funded by the oil industry? But no - the graph that contradicted all the others was the one based not on a model but on satellite measurements. It showed the Earth's oceans dampening the heating effect.

So what sort of factors mess up the models? Things like changes in ocean currents, changes in the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere, changes in cloud cover - just about everything that determines climate, really. Alas, there is as yet no way to calculate these. And so, the simple fact is, in our climate modellers' own words: "At present, no climate models have included the full range of effects."

Policymakers seem not to be aware of what the modellers know: that the results of their climate simulations are "likely to remain speculative for some time to come" and that people should be "extremely wary of extrapolating results to longer periods".

This demonstrates that the present climate-change models aren't just useless - by offering spurious precision, they are worse than useless.

How, then, does a theory that is incomplete and missing essential data become orthodoxy?

The reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - whose landmark 2001 report paved the way to ratification of the Kyoto Protocol - are not based on any new or original research, but merely reflect the efforts of participants, including government representatives, to overcome uncertainties in knowledge. Policymakers then use the IPCC reports, nuanced findings or not, to demand that the public change their ways. And most of the public are inclined to fall in line.

Social scientists call it "cascade theory": the idea is that information cascades down the side of an "informational pyramid", like a waterfall. It is easier for people, if they do not have either the ability or the interest to find out for themselves, to adopt the views of others. This is, without doubt, a useful social instinct. As it has been put, cascade theory reconciles "herd behaviour" with rational choice, because it is often rational for individuals to rely on information passed on to them by others.

Unfortunately, it is less rational to follow wrong information, and that is what can often happen. We find people cascading uselessly - like so many wildebeest fleeing a non-existent lion - in so many everyday ways. A lot of economic activity and business behaviour, including management fads, the adoption of new technologies and innovations, not to mention the vexed issues of health and safety regulation, reflect exactly this tendency of the herd to follow poor information.

Some people say that what is needed in response is to encourage a range of views to be heard, even when they are annoying to the "majority" - for instance, one should allow people to contest global warming. Or let teachers in schools and universities decide what they are going to teach. But more people say, on the contrary, that what is needed is stricter control of information to stop "wrong views" being spread. It is that view that is cascading down the pyramid now.

One of the best examples of cascade theory is that of the entirely false consensus that built up in the 1970s around the danger of "fatty foods". In fact, this consensus still exists, even though it has never had any scientific basis.

The theory can be traced back to a single researcher, Ancel Keys, who published a paper saying that Americans were suffering from "an epidemic" of heart disease because their diet was more fatty than their bodies were used to after thousands of years of evolution.

In 1953, Keys added additional evidence from a comparative study of the US, Japan and four other countries. Country by country, this showed that a high-fat diet coincided with high rates of heart disease.

Unfortunately for this theory, it turned out that prehistoric "traditional diets" were not especially low-fat after all - indeed, even the hunter-gatherers of yore, if they relied on eating their prey, would have had more fat in their diet than most people do today. As Science magazine pointed out, in the most relevant period of 100 years before the supposed "epidemic" of heart disease, Americans were actually consuming large amounts of fatty meat, so the epidemic followed a reduction in the amount of dietary fat Americans consumed - not an increase.

Keys' country-by-country comparison had also been skewed, with countries that did not fit the theory (such as France and Italy with their oily, fatty cuisines) being excluded. The American Heart Association (AHA), considered to be the voice of experts, issued a report in 1957 stating plainly that the fats-cause-heart-disease claims did not "stand up to critical examination". The case for there being any such epidemic was dubious, too - the obvious cause of higher rates of heart disease was that people were living longer, long enough to develop heart disease. But it was too late: the cascade had started.

Three years later, the AHA issued a new statement, reversing its view. It had no new evidence but it did have some new members writing the report, in the form of Keys himself and one of his friends. The new report made the cover of Time magazine and was picked up by non-specialists at the US Department of Agriculture, who then asked a supporter of the theory to draw up "health guidelines" for them. Soon, scarcely a doctor could be found prepared to speak out against such an overwhelming "consensus", even if a few specialised researchers still protested. And all this was good enough for the highest medical officer in the US, the Surgeon General, in 1988 to issue a doom-laden warning about fat in foods, and claiming that ice-cream was a health menace on a par with tobacco smoking.

It was a pretty silly theory, and certainly not one based on good evidence. In fact, in recent years, in large-scale studies in which comparable groups have been put on controlled diets (low fat and high fat) a correlation has at last been found. It turns out that the low-fat diet seems to be unhealthy. But no one is quite sure why.

The fact is, science has always been about PR, and as this example shows, it is easy for opinion leaders and experts to be misled. These days, it is not merely fellow researchers but professional marketeers vying to press their agenda and that of their clients (see box, page 34).

At the Kyoto summit in 1997, Fenton Communications, a New York PR firm, was working with "green NGOs and leaders", including Gore and the IPCC, to advise on how to "mainstream the climate threat" and to "harness the public 'tipping point'" on the issue and inspire action, as its website today boasts. And indeed, the public have been well and truly tipped.

The IPCC reports, which are dull but widely used by governments as the basis for their policy discussions, have become steadily more dramatic. (Not for nothing does the head of the IPCC, R.K. Pachauri, have his own dedicated marketing adviser.) Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis says that "numerous long-term changes in climate have been observed (including) changes in Arctic temperatures and ice, widespread changes in precipitation amounts, ocean salinity, wind patterns and aspects of extreme weather including droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves and the intensity of tropical cyclones".

Yet none of this is science. It certainly offends against the principle that Karl Popper calls "falsification" - in the case of climate change, there is no possibility of falsification. If you listen to proponents of climate-change theory, there is apparently nothing that counts as evidence against it. Increased rainfall in the northern hemisphere is evidence of climate change, but so is decreased rainfall in the southern hemisphere. Melting of ice in the Arctic is evidence of global warming, but cooling of the Antarctic is not evidence against, but attributed to "other effects".

The fact is, the IPCC report's statement quoted above is speculation and fear-mongering. So how did such language get in the report? Alas, it seems that the social and scientific reality is as Feyerabend describes, and that the language of fear has now "penetrated the most common idiom and infected all modes of thinking".

I have seen the effects of this up close, witnessing how truth can go out of the window in the rush to save the planet. I was co-ordinator of a small Yorkshire Friends of the Earth group, charged with protecting, among other things, the local river, the Wharfe, from a water company. In 1995, Yorkshire experienced just slightly less rain than normal, and the local water company found itself faced with the prospect of empty reservoirs. As standpipes went up in the cities of Leeds and Bradford, and trucks brought water in from afar, it desperately turned to the local rivers to try to make up the shortfall. The national press featured large photos of dried-up reservoir beds, waxed lyrical about how British society would soon break down in water wars, and urged its readers to sympathise with Yorkshire Water.

But our local group was not sympathetic because we felt that the company had failed to invest in its reservoirs and infrastructure. We proposed to put an advert in the Yorkshire Post highlighting this. And at this point, an official of Friends of the Earth formally instructed us that this independent line could not be permitted because it was national policy to attribute the shortages of water in the county that summer to runaway climate change. The "small is beautiful", "start locally" element of environmental tradition had disappeared. We were instructed that if we continued to argue that Yorkshire's water shortages were the result of anything other than global warming, we had to do so outside Friends of the Earth.

This highlighted the dangerous tendency of pressure groups to make specific statements for some supposed worthy campaign end. Ten years on, with Yorkshire racked by the usual floods, the director of Friends of the Earth, Tony Juniper, was pleased to warn against companies using climate change as an excuse. In The Observer on 3 July 2005, he said: "This situation emerges with depressing regularity, where you find insufficient capacity to meet people's needs because there's been a minor fluctuation in rain."

But that wasn't the line in the summer of 1995. Fortunately, our local group ignored the order to abandon our river to a water company and voted to continue to highlight what we saw as the "real causes" of the water supply problems, as an independent group.

Alas, in the climate-change debate, there is a worrying amount of irrationality, incomplete science and skewed presentation. The scientists apparently "cherry-picking" and hiding their data revealed recently in the University of East Anglia email scandal are only following in a long tradition that includes even Galileo "cheating" by saying that the Earth must orbit round the Sun - in a perfect circle. Yet, surely most objectionable of all is the use of gullibility and fear as tactics in campaigns. And if fear requires a world of zero risk, that certainly won't include those mercury-filled light bulbs and nuclear power stations.

Today, global-warming "deniers" have all been told they must fall into line with "the science". But this is not science, this is propaganda. And we are not being asked to be more rational but to suspend our own judgment completely. That, not "runaway climate change", is the most dangerous threat to the world today.

MISLEADING PORTRAITS

There are many ways to fool people, and linking images with complex theories is a good one.

One of the most potent images used to show the impact of rising global temperatures was that of fishing boats stranded in a desert that was once the world's largest freshwater sea. It features in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and in his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit.

But the Aral Sea is actually not a sea, but rather a huge lake supplied by rivers, which have been gradually choked off since the end of the Second World War by Soviet-era irrigation schemes. Its plight has nothing to do with global warming.

Nor do polar bears.

When Gore used a picture of two polar bears supposedly stranded on a melting iceberg to support his claims about global warming, he chose a photo that had been taken by Amanda Byrd, a marine biology student, on a research cruise in August 2004, a time of year when the fringe of the Arctic ice cap normally melts. The image was later distributed by Environment Canada, a Canadian government department, to media agencies.

With that polar bear picture on the screen behind him, Gore says, "Their habitat is melting ... beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet. They're in trouble, got nowhere else to go."

However, Byrd says that when she took the picture, the bears didn't appear to be in any danger. An Environment Canada spokesman, Denis Simard, told The National Post, a Canadian newspaper, that you "have to keep in mind that the bears aren't in danger at all. It was, if you will, their playground for 15 minutes ... they were not that far from the coast, and it was possible for them to swim."

The polar bear is still the symbol of the effects of global warming - but it is a cleverly designed marketing symbol, and not a rational, scientific marker.

GRAPHIC SLIPS

Although global warming theorists say they are concerned for the fate of the planet, it does not necessarily mean that their methods are beyond critique. Indeed, much of the "evidence" that makes up the "scientific case" is flawed.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore unveils as the "scientific" highlight a graph offering a clear correlation between temperature and CO2, as discovered in core samples of polar ice, with these words: "The relationship is actually very complicated, but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others - and it is this. When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer, because it traps more heat from the Sun inside."

He then asks "Do they go together?" and extends the lines on the graph to terrifying levels.

Well, hang on a minute. First of all, historically, CO2 levels and temperatures have not marched in "lock step". Over geological time, the only thing the two variables share is a random walk. The Late Ordovician period saw CO2 concentrations nearly 12 times higher than those of today - and it was also an Ice Age. In fact, over the past 600 million years, only on two occasions have CO2 levels been as low as they are now, at below 400 parts per million.

Even restricting our survey to the past 100,000 years, the relationship is not as Gore and others think. Far from increases in CO2 leading to higher temperatures, the ice-core record shows rises in temperatures preceding (by between 200 and 1,000 years) increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Which is what you would expect. Slightly higher temperatures mean more plant and animal life, and that means more CO2.

Nor do claims of record high temperatures have anything to do with the theory of anthropogenic global warming. The theory concerns the amount of heat radiated back into space at night, not how much heat "gets in" during the day. It is interested only in the supposed warming of the surface of the seas at night under a cocoon of atmospheric CO2 - the greenhouse. And is that happening? Er, no, as recent satellite surveys have found.

But let's return to that graph. It's not that complicated. We can start by looking at the recent history of the climate and the so-called hockey stick curve. The chart, which correlates temperatures and carbon dioxide levels, is called the hockey stick because it depicts the northern hemisphere's temperatures over the past 1,000 years as a fairly regular flat line until the late 20th century, when it curves sharply upwards as runaway warming appears.

The graph contradicted all the previous research into climate, which had indicated that there was a warm period about 1,000 years ago followed by the "Little Ice Age" in the 14th century.

By the time climatologists had pointed out that the graph had missed both the well-known warm periods and ice ages alike, and by the time mathematicians had had a chance to challenge the methodology and sample size, it was too late.

The exact relationship between CO2 and temperature remains elusive.

BIG GREEN MACHINE

Those making the case for global warming present the theory as the unvarnished work of hard-working and sober scientists who have been guided by evidence.

That view would be underlined by anyone reading the glowing endorsement of the "science" behind An Inconvenient Truth published by the website RealClimate.org, which is edited by Gavin Schmidt, a mathematician at Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

There, Eric Steig of the University of Washington's Earth and Space Sciences Centre answers the question "How well does the (Gore) film handle the science?" by saying unambiguously: "Admirably, I thought. It is remarkably up to date, with reference to some of the very latest research."

RealClimate's site is hosted by Environmental Media Services (EMS), which sounds very suitable until one discovers that EMS was a creation of Fenton Communications, a New York public relations firm.

The scientists writing on the site are not being paid for their campaigning. But clearly the debate is attracting groups outside science and policy that have interests of their own.

Global warming's believers are quick to note the presence of the fossil-fuel industry behind a variety of lobby groups and reports.

But the green side has its allies, too. Take Fenton, which prefers to be known as "a public interest communications firm". It describes itself as using "sophisticated communications tools that Madison Avenue executives and corporations use and harness[ing] them for progressive change".

And so, of course, it was at the Kyoto summit in 1997 working with people and groups including Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to "highlight" the climate threat.

It has a presence in Gore's circle through Amy "Kalee" Kreider, Gore's communications director and environmental adviser, who can be spotted standing alongside him whenever he testifies on environmental matters to Senate committees, and who was a staffer at Fenton when the firm was advising Gore. Before that, she was a campaigner for Ozone Action in charge of handing out "ozone-friendly" strawberries to the press.

Fenton may hold no sway over Gore, but its involvement shows how sophisticated the forces involved in the debate are.

Fenton's campaigns are never random issues. It specialises in scary stories of the potential human health dangers of many substances such as Alar (a chemical used to control the growth of apples and improve their appearance), plasticisers (chemicals, especially phthalates, used in plastics) and bovine growth hormones.

In 1989, the firm played a pivotal role in the anti-Alar campaign, which resulted in sales of apples and apple products plummeting in the US.

Years after what would come to be known as "the great Alar scare", Fenton's biggest project is climate change. Among its clients are all the most respected names in the environmental business, from Greenpeace USA and Friends of the Earth US to the National Geographic Society and the UN Environment Programme.

Climate change is a big business, and it's not surprising that they want to have the world's biggest "public interest" PR firm running the campaign.

WITH ALL THE GAS AROUND, THERE'S SOME BLOAT

"We are witnessing the birth of the greatest and most complex commodity market the world has seen," wrote The Times' environment editor, Jonathan Leake, in a November 2008 article.

Carbon-trading schemes originate from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Governments adhering to the protocol impose limits on the CO2 that companies can emit; the firms are then obliged to buy annual permits to exceed them. Permits are bought from governments or from carbon traders in the City who charge a commission. In terms of dollars, the World Bank has estimated that the size of the carbon market was $11 billion (£6.6 billion) in 2005, $30 billion in 2006 and $64 billion in 2007. The money collected by the UK Treasury, for example, came mainly from UK power companies, with the cost added directly to heating bills.

Meanwhile Russia - because when the Kremlin signed up to the Kyoto treaty it was given an annual emissions limit based on the dirty old Soviet industries - has accumulated emissions permits for about 4 billion tonnes of CO2. Call it a £50 billion early Christmas present from Western consumers.

Many companies, too, have found the initiative profitable. SRF Ltd, which produces refrigeration gases at a chemical plant in India, made £300 million from selling certificates to transnationals including Shell and Barclays. It spent just £1.4 million on equipment to reduce its emissions, and used the profit to expand production of another greenhouse gas 1,000-fold.

Postscript :

Martin Cohen is editor of The Philosopher, and himself an environmental activist involved in many campaigns. His latest book is Mind Games (in press), which discusses the psychology of societies, and he is actively researching a critique of climate change for Pluto Press provisionally titled Climate, Chaos and Irrationality: How the Green Agenda Was Hijacked by Global Warming Theorists.

Vietnam Media War

tom hunter (1,554) Says:
May 29th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/05/the_apologies.html
Of course some ‘anti-war’ people have had the decency to look back at their involvement with regret. It’s years late of course, and their commentary is not repeated by Campbell Live and co. Here is what former West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto said in the International Herald Tribune back in the late 70’s:

Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.

Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed in North Viet Nam. We knew that after the division of the country nearly one million North Vietnamese had fled to the South. Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women, and children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year.

Why, for heaven’s sake, did we not report about these expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively as of the My Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were definitely not part of the U.S. policy in Viet Nam?

What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?

Why did we ignore the fact that the man responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was—and still is—one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi. What made us think that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South Vietnamese? What compelled, for example, Anthony Lewis shortly after the fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and write, “so much for the talk of a massacre”?

True, no Cambodian-style massacre took place in Viet Nam. It’s just that Hanoi coolly drives its ethnic Chinese and opponents into the sea.

Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive? Did we not turn public opinion against them, portraying them, as one singularly ignoble cartoon did in the United States, as a bunch of pimps, whores, war profiteers, corrupt generals, or, at best, outright reactionaries?

Considering that today’s Viet Nam tragedy may have a lot to do with the way we reported yesterday’s Viet Nam tragedy, considering that we journalists might have our fair share of guilt for the inhuman way the world treats those who are being expelled by an inhuman regime which some of us had pictured as heroic, I think at least a little humility would be in order for us old Viet Nam hands. . .

Ah well, history repeats as farce:


How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam
By Robert Elegant

Reprinted from Encounter (London), vol. LVII, No. 2, August 1981, pp. 73-90

Instructive on a larger scale is the contrast between the coverage of the American massacre at My Lai and the Viet Cong massacre at Hue. At My Lai, a junior American officer allowed his men to kill dozens of presumably uninvolved farmers in full violation of standing orders.

At Hue, the former imperial capital, the Viet Cong killed several thousand community leaders, including a number of Europeans, in accordance with standing orders to “destroy the bourgeoisie.” The U.S. military’s attempt to suppress reports of the My Lai massacre, of course, made it even worse when the story was finally released by the Dispatch News Agency, a curious organization that came into existence in Viet Nam with unknown financial backing and vanished once its purpose of opposing the war had brought Hanoi victory.

But the Hue massacre was, somehow, uninteresting. Few correspondents reported that clear signal of the real policies the North Vietnamese would pursue once they had conquered the South.

By the same token, American restraint was not news, even to the experienced correspondents, because it was a “non-event.” Flying in a command helicopter of the Ninth Division over the Mekong Delta, another U.S. correspondent and I heard the brigade commander countermand his battalion commander’s order to the infantry and the helicopter gunships to attack some 100 enemy who were pouring out of a surrounded village, still firing.

“Do not, repeat do not, attack,” the colonel directed. “They’re using women and children as shields.”

Neither my colleague nor myself thought the incident worth reporting; that was a palpable error of judgment induced by the atmosphere in which we were working. If the Ninth Division had killed the civilians, we would have filed copiously.

 http://academics.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietnam/Readings/elegant.htm

Long range climate History

Sorry unable to copy/paste the grapths

http://web.me.com/sinfonia1/Clamour_Of_The_Times/Clamour_Of_The_Times/Entries/2009/12/8_What_the_UK_Met_Office_is_Not_Telling_Us.html

What the UK Met Office is Not Telling Us
Tuesday, 8 December 2009


Context and contingency are everything when interpreting temperature trends. The UK Met Office wants us to regard the last decade as exceptionally warm, because this hots up the Copenhagen Conference. But four key graphs tell a very different story:


Graph 1: The Last 2,000 Years


[Source: Loehle, C., 2007. ‘A 2000-year global temperature reconstruction based on non-treering proxies.’ Energy & Environment 18(7-8): 1049-1058]



First, let us consider the changing temperature over the last 2,000 years. Because currently-understood tree-ring data have now been exposed as possibly unacceptable for this purpose - their application is even under scrutiny by the inquiries into the hacked/leaked e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia - we must turn to a curve produced without such tree-ring proxy measurements. On this curve, I have added MWP for the ‘Medieval Warm Period’, and LIA for the ‘Little Ice Age’. The pattern could not be clearer. With tree-ring proxies removed, the Medieval Warm Period stands out as much warmer than today. No wonder Eric the Red flourished in Greenland [main picture]:

Graph 2: 1975 to 2010





[Source: the HadCRUT3 graph of the global temperature anomaly since 1975. See: ‘Cherrypicking a Standstill’ for a full comment on this graph]



Secondly, if we now turn our attention to the last thirty five years - the very right-hand end of the 2,ooo-year period shown in the first graph - and employ the Climatic Research Unit’s own ‘adjusted’ figures, we can see that, since 2001, the rise in temperature from 1975 has started to flatten out, and perhaps it may even have fallen:


Graph 3: What Does ‘Adjusting’ Do To Weather Station Records?


[Source: ‘The Smoking Gun at Darwin Zero’, December 8, 2009: data from NOAA/GHCN, the Global Historical Climate Network, one of the world’s three main global temperature data sets. Includes a full explanation of the methods employed, and the meaning of the results]


Thirdly, we must refer to a most timely insight into what ‘adjusting’ does to the the overall trend of temperatures from 1880 to 2010, i.e., for the so-called industrial period of ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions. Such adjustments claim to deal with what are termed, somewhat inelegantly, ‘inhomogeneity’. What does this mean? Most long-term climate stations have undergone changes that make a time-series of their observations ‘inhomogeneous’. There can be many causes for these discontinuities, including changes in instruments, shelters, the environment around the shelter, the location of the station, the time of observation, and the method used to calculate mean temperature. Often several of these problems may occur at the same time in the same location. Before one can reliably use such climate data for analysis of long-term climate change, it is thus argued that ‘adjustments’ are needed to compensate for the non-climatic discontinuities. Yet, this is far from easy, and the resultant data is only as good as our understanding of the changes at each particular weather station.


Now, here are the quite extraordinary results of one such set of ‘adjustments’ for a key Australian station, namely that at Darwin Airport. The glaring discrepancy between the raw data and the ‘adjusted’ graph is staggering. The raw, unadjusted, data actually exhibit a steady cooling trend from 1880 to 2010. The IPCC employs ‘adjusted’ data. But, even with the ‘adjusted’ data, note the decline since 2001:


Willis Eschenbach, the very hard-working analyst of all this data, understandably comments:



“What this does show is that there is at least one temperature station where the trend has been artificially increased to give a false warming where the raw data shows cooling. In addition, the average raw data for Northern Australia is quite different from the adjusted, so there must be a number of … mmm … let me say ‘interesting’ adjustments in Northern Australia other than just Darwin.”


You may find this concerning.



Conclusions From These First Three Graphs


As a highly-respected professorial colleague said to me last week: “Whoever would have thought that a retrospective regression fit would ever have constituted ‘foundational’ evidence, or even, dare I say it, ’science’?”
So what can we conclude from an assessment of these first three graphs?




(1)The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) does indeed seem to have been much warmer than today’s warm period, and that certainly wasn’t due to the human emission of ‘greenhouse gases’ And there is one monk [left], at least, who certainly seems to be enjoying the balmy days;

(2)Warming and cooling periods look entirely cyclical over the last 2,000 years, and largely naturally-driven;


(3) Over the last 9 years, the mean world temperature has either flattened off or fallen a little;


(4) Since 1880, it appears that one only achieves a general warming trend by adding in complex ‘adjustments’ to the raw data set, which, at one important sample station, namely Darwin, Australia, actually exhibits cooling;


(5) More importantly, none of this information, ‘adjusted’ or not, tells us about cause. It is a major error in science to move uncritically from form to function, from graph to cause and correlation;


(6)The idea that the ‘science’ is settled is dangerous nonsense;


(7)We cannot commit thousands of billions of dollars at Copenhagen on the basis such a specious retrospective correlation between CO2 and temperature.



Graph 4: The Longer View And The ‘Climatic Optimum’


[Source: Global Warming Art, reproduced here under the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2]


Finally, let us take the very long view, and examine this splendid graph to see precisely where we stand today in relation to the last 12,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age?


Yes, that is quite right. Despite our little bit of recent warming, we are still in a long-term cooling trend, and we remain cooler than - wait for it - the period we call the ‘Climatic Optimum’. So warm, folks, is good!


Well, I think that graphically exposes the nonsense of our current flunk over climate change, don’t you?



That medieval monk certainly has us over a barrel.

“I’ll drink to that!”


From The Foresight Institute

One thing that Climategate does is give us an opportunity to step back from the details of the AGW argument and say, maybe these are heat-of-the-moment stuff, and in the long run will look as silly as the Durants’ allergy to Eisenhower. And perhaps, if we can put climate arguments in perspective, it will allow us to put the much smaller nano arguments (pun intended) into perspective too.

So let’s look at some ice.

I’m looking at the temperature record as read from this central Greenland ice core. It gives us about as close as we can come to a direct, experimental measurement of temperature at that one spot for the past 50,000 years. As far as I know, the data are not adjusted according to any fancy computer climate model or anything else like that.

So what does it tell us about, say, the past 500 years? Well, whaddaya know — a hockey stick. In fact, the “blade” continues up in the 20th century at least another half a degree. But how long is the handle? How unprecedented is the current warming trend?

Yes, Virginia, there was a Medieval Warm Period, in central Greenland at any rate. But we knew that — that’s when the Vikings were naming it Greenland, after all. And the following Little Ice Age is what killed them off, and caused widespread crop failures (and the consequent burning of witches) across Europe. But was the MWP itself unusual?

Well, no — over the period of recorded history, the average temperature was about equal to the height of the MWP . Rises not only as high, but as rapid, as the current hockey stick blade have been the rule, not the exception.

In fact for the entire Holocene — the period over which, by some odd coincidence, humanity developed agriculture and civilization — the temperature has been higher than now, and the trend over the past 4000 years is a marked decline. From this perspective, it’s the LIA that was unusual, and the current warming trend simply represents a return to the mean. If it lasts.

From the perspective of the Holocene as a whole, our current hockeystick is beginning to look pretty dinky. By far the possibility I would worry about, if I were the worrying sort, would be the return to an ice age — since interglacials, over the past half million years or so, have tended to last only 10,000 years or so. And Ice ages are not conducive to agriculture.

… and ice ages have a better claim on being the natural state of Earth’s climate than interglacials. This next graph, for the longest period, we have to go to an Antarctic core (Vostok):

In other words, we’re pretty lucky to be here during this rare, warm period in climate history. But the broader lesson is, climate doesn’t stand still. It doesn’t even stand stay on the relatively constrained range of the last 10,000 years for more than about 10,000 years at a time.

Does this mean that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas? No.

Does it mean that it isn’t warming? No.

Does it mean that we shouldn’t develop clean, efficient technology that gets its energy elsewhere than burning fossil fuels? Of course not. We should do all those things for many reasons — but there’s plenty of time to do them the right way, by developing nanotech. (There’s plenty of money, too, but it’s all going to climate science at the moment. ) And that will be a very good thing to have done if we do fall back into an ice age, believe me.

For climate science it means that the Hockey Team climatologists’ insistence that human-emitted CO2 is the only thing that could account for the recent warming trend is probably poppycock.

As David Farrar would say Indeed!

The Precautionary Principle

Liberal academic shoots down Precautionary Principle
Environment & Climate News > July 2002
Environment
Environment > Risk Assessment

Email a Friend
Written By: James M. Taylor
Published In: Environment & Climate News > July 2002
Publication date: 07/01/2002
Publisher: The Heartland Institute

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Precautionary Principle—a popular theory holding that speculative, unproven environmental risks are entitled to primacy in any environmental debate so long as any risks exist—has been harshly criticized in a just-released law and economics paper.

While a thoughtful analysis finding fatal flaws in the Precautionary Principle is neither a new development or unique, what makes “Beyond the Precautionary Principle” noteworthy is its author: University of Chicago law professor and prominent liberal theorist Cass Sunstein.

Reminiscent of Bjorn Lomborg’s groundbreaking book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, Sunstein’s dismissal of the Precautionary Principle is a dagger in the heart of speculative claims made by left-wing environmental activist groups.

Sunstein’s liberal leanings, as well as his academic credentials, are strongly established. He is the Karl. N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence in the Law School and Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He has taught law at Harvard and Columbia.

And, importantly, he has written such articles as “Originalism for Liberals,” “Why We Should Celebrate Paying Taxes,” “The Courts’ Perilous Right Turn,” and “Environmentalism and Economics.”


Defining terms
Sunstein begins the paper by clearing up some ambiguities about what the Precautionary Principle means.

In its most benign form, some interpret the principle simply to mean “that a lack of decisive evidence of harm should not be a ground for refusing to regulate.” This interpretation basically means that if the evidence is mixed we may still find it desirable to regulate.

Such an interpretation reflects common sense. However, environmental activists go much further in defining what the Precautionary Principle requires. According to the widely publicized Wingspread Declaration, from a meeting of environmental activist groups in 1998, “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not established scientifically.”

A quick glance may call to mind the old saying, “better safe than sorry.” But a closer examination of both the declaration’s language and its real-world application show a categorically more intrusive intent.


Decision-making paralysis

The Wingspread Declaration of the Precautionary Principle, reasons Sunstein, is undesirable because “the threshold is minimal, and once it is met, there is something like a presumption in favor of stringent regulatory controls.”

“The principle is literally paralyzing,” explains Sunstein, “forbidding inaction, stringent regulation, and everything in between.” Such paralysis occurs because all societal decisions, including the decision not to act at all, entail risks of harm. Sunstein offers several illustrations:

The justification for a reduced arsenic level in public drinking water is that by reducing arsenic from 50 parts per billion (ppb) to 10 ppb, over 100 lives per year might be saved. At first blush, the Precautionary Principle would seem to call for the stricter standard, as this would effectuate the principle’s bias toward preserving human health.
However, like virtually all decisions, there is a countervailing risk to the stricter standard. As water costs climb due to the added purification steps, rural and poorer citizens will increase the use of free well water. Ironically, by using more well water, these residents will be exposed to higher arsenic levels than if the 50 ppb standard were never abridged.
Either decision, therefore, runs afoul of the Precautionary Principle, resulting in a paralysis of decision.
Many environmental activists cite the Precautionary Principle to justify a ban on genetic food enhancements. Even though no adverse effects of genetically enhanced foods have been discovered, such side effects may someday be found.
The Precautionary Principle cuts both ways here, too.
Genetically enhanced crops are more productive than the crops they replace, resulting in cheaper and more available food. Not allowing biotechnology to advance could cause more malnutrition, malnutrition-related health complications, and even third-world starvation.
The Precautionary Principle can be invoked to prevent the low-but-theoretically-possible emergence of adverse human health effects ... or to prevent over-regulation of promising new ways to relieve human suffering caused by malnutrition. Once again, the result is a paralysis of decision.
Global warming may occur, resulting in a broad range of potential harms. Here, many environmental activists call for a drastic reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases, pursuant to the Precautionary Principle.
However, reducing greenhouse gas emissions would entail stunning economic costs, diverting money from many health programs and putting at risk the lives of countless world citizens.
Once again, the Precautionary Principle gives little guidance for policy decision-making.
The use of nuclear power carries with it a small but theoretically possible risk of a plant meltdown and resulting tragedy. According to many environmental activists, the Precautionary Principle therefore prohibits the use of nuclear power.
The cost of foregoing nuclear power, though, is greater reliance on fossil fuels, which cause their own environmental harms and pose greater safety risks to workers. The Precautionary Principle can be employed either on behalf of or against nuclear power.

Popular in spite of its flaws

According to Sunstein, there are several reasons why the Precautionary Principle has gained popularity despite its unavoidable contradictions. These include:

Loss aversion. People are more concerned about losing what they have than missing out on what they might potentially gain. By seemingly supporting a presumption in favor of the status quo, the Precautionary Principle is marketed as a form of societal risk aversion.
Visible versus less-visible concerns. The Precautionary Principle is generally invoked to deter high-visibility risks ... often at the price of increasing less visible, but equally probable, risks. Even if two hazards pose a similar threat to human life, the one that captures more public concern will be the one defended by proponents of the Precautionary Principle.
Probability neglect. People often invoke the precautionary principle against low-risk activities, when a proper probability analysis will show the invocation actually leads to greater risks in other contexts. A lack of issue awareness and education leads to the neglect of proper probability analysis.
System neglect. Many people see only the harm that is to be prevented, ignoring the indirect and unintended consequences either of action or inaction. The problem is commonplace in economics: In the case of free trade, for example, people may see the jobs that move to Mexico but fail to understand how specialization and lower consumer prices create much greater long-term benefits for the U.S.

Risk reduction by more rational means

Proponents of the Precautionary Principle fail to recognize that all resources—including the time, effort, and money available to reduce risk—are limited, Sunstein explains. Resources invested in deterring low-probability risks are not available to deter higher-probability risks.

The Precautionary Principle “is a crude and sometimes perverse way” of managing risk, Sunstein concludes. Policymakers “need to use more direct effective strategies to pursue the salutary goals of risk regulation.” That requires a “fair accounting of the universe of dangers,” says Sunstein: a careful balancing of the costs and benefits of inaction, regulation, and everything between.

Only after such an accounting has been made can risk-management resources be invested where they will achieve the most “bang for the buck” ... and that should be the ultimate goal.

“A rational system of risk regulation certainly takes precautions,” concludes Sunstein. But it does not adopt the precautionary principle.”


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For more information ...

Cass Sunstein’s University of Chicago working paper, “Beyond the Precautionary Principle,” is available through PolicyBot as document #2313446.

You can also search PolicyBot for the topic/subtopic combination Environment/Cost Benefit Analysis and Risk Assessment. More than 80 documents are available on the topic.

Environment & Climate News has covered the precautionary principle often in past issues. See, for example, “Precautionary Principle at odds with science” (September 2001), “ICCS conference tackles the precautionary principle” (December 2000), and “Precautionary Foolishness” (December 2000).

Fake Conspirisist fooled a country

Trofim Lysenko
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Trofim Lysenko


Lysenko studying wheat
Born September 29, 1898 (1898-09-29)
Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire
(now Ukraine)
Died November 20, 1976 (1976-11-21)
Moscow, Soviet Union

Nationality Ukrainian
Fields biologist
agronomist
Institutions Soviet biology
Known for Lysenkoism
hybridization
rejecting Mendelian inheritance
Influences Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (Russian: Трофи́м Дени́сович Лысе́нко, Ukrainian: Трофим Денисович Лисенко, Trofym Denysovych Lysenko) (September 29, 1898–November 20, 1976) was a Ukrainian agronomist who was director of Soviet biology under Joseph Stalin. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of the hybridization theories of Russian horticulturist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, and adopted them into a powerful political scientific movement termed Lysenkoism. His unorthodox experimental research in improved crop yields earned the support of Soviet leadership, especially following the famine and loss of productivity resulting from forced collectivization in several regions of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. In 1940 he became director of the Institute of Genetics within the USSR's Academy of Sciences, and Lysenko's anti-Mendelian doctrines were further secured in Soviet science and education by the exercise of political influence and power. Scientific dissent from Lysenko's theories of environmentally acquired inheritance was formally outlawed in 1948, and for the next several years opponents were purged from held positions, and many imprisoned. Lysenko's work was officially discredited in the Soviet Union in 1964, leading to a renewed emphasis there to re-institute Mendelian genetics and orthodox science.

Though Lysenko remained at his post in the Institute of Genetics until 1965,[1] his influence on Soviet agricultural practice declined by the 1950s. The Soviet Union quietly abandoned Lysenko's agricultural practices in favor of modern agricultural practices after the crop yields he promised failed to materialize. Today much of Lysenko's agricultural experimentation and research is largely viewed as fraudulent.



Lysenko, the son of Denis and Oksana Lysenko, came from a peasant family in Ukraine and attended the Kiev Agricultural Institute. In 1927, at 29 years of age and working at an agricultural experiment station in Azerbaijan, he was credited by the Soviet newspaper Pravda with having discovered a method to fertilize fields without using fertilizers or minerals, and with having proved that a winter crop of peas could be grown in Azerbaijan, "turning the barren fields of the Transcaucasus green in winter, so that cattle will not perish from poor feeding, and the peasant Turk will live through the winter without trembling for tomorrow."[2] In succeeding years, however, further attempts to grow the peas were unsuccessful.


Lysenko speaking at the Kremlin in 1935. At the back (left to right) are Stanislav Kosior, Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Andreyev and the Soviet leader, Joseph StalinSimilar Soviet media reports heralding Lysenko's further discoveries in agriculture continued from 1927 until 1964; reports of amazing (and seemingly impossible) successes, each one replaced with new success claims as earlier ones failed. Few of the successes attributed to Lysenko could be duplicated. Nevertheless, with the media's help, Lysenko enjoyed the popular image of the "barefoot scientist"—the embodiment of the mythic Soviet peasant genius.

By the late 1920s, the Soviet political bosses had given their support to Lysenko. This support was a consequence, in part, of policies put in place by Communist party personnel to rapidly promote members of the proletariat into leadership positions in agriculture, science and industry. Party officials were looking for promising candidates with backgrounds similar to Lysenko's: born of a peasant family, without formal academic training or affiliations to the academic community.[3]

Lysenko in particular impressed political officials further with his success in motivating peasants to return to farming.[4] The Soviet's Collectivist reforms forced the confiscation of agricultural landholdings from the peasant farmers and heavily damaged the country's overall food production, and the dispossessed peasant farmers posed new problems for the regime. Many had abandoned the farms altogether; many more waged resistance to collectivization by poor work quality and pilfering. The dislocated and disenchanted peasant farmers were a major political concern to Soviet Leadership.[5] Lysenko emerged during this period inaugurating radically new agricultural methods, and also promising that the new methods provided wider opportunities for year round work in agriculture. Lysenko proved himself very useful to Soviet leadership by reengaging peasants to return to work, helping to secure from them a personal stake in the overall success of the Soviet revolutionary experiment.[4]

Lysenko's theories were grounded in Lamarckism. His work was primarily devoted to developing new techniques and practices in agriculture. But he also contributed a new theoretical framework which would become the foundation to all Soviet agriculture: a discipline called agrobiology that is a fusion of plant physiology, cytology, genetics and evolutionary theory. Central to Lysenko's tenets was the concept of the inheritability of acquired characteristics. In 1932 Lysenko was given his own journal, The Bulletin of Vernalization, and it became the main outlet for touting emerging developments of Lysenkoist research.[3]

One of the most celebrated of the earliest agricultural applications developed by Lysenko was a process of increasing the success of wheat crops by soaking the grain and storing the wet seed in snow to refrigerate over the winter ("vernalization"). Though his work was scientifically unsound on a number of levels, Lysenko's claims delighted Soviet journalists and agricultural officials, who were impressed by its promise to minimize the resources spent in theoretical scientific laboratory work. The Soviet political leadership had come to view orthodox science as offering empty promises, as unproductive in meeting the challenges and needs of the Communist state. Lysenko was viewed as someone who could deliver practical methods more rapidly, and with superior results.[2]

Lysenko himself spent much time denouncing academic scientists and geneticists, claiming that their isolated laboratory work was not helping the Soviet people. By 1929 Lysenko's skeptics were politically censured, accused of offering only criticisms, and for failing to prescribe any new solutions themselves. In December 1929, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin gave a famous speech praising "practice" above "theory", elevating the political bosses above the scientists and technical specialists. Though for a period the Soviet government under Stalin continued its support of agricultural scientists, after 1935 the balance of power abruptly swung towards Lysenko and his followers.


Lysenko (right) with Khrushchev in an experimental fieldLysenko was put in charge of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the Soviet Union and made responsible for ending the propagation of "harmful" ideas among Soviet scientists. Lysenko served this purpose by causing the expulsion, imprisonment, and death of hundreds of scientists and eliminating all study and research involving Mendelian genetics throughout the Soviet Union. This period is known as Lysenkoism. He bears particular responsibility for the persecution of his predecessor and rival, prominent Soviet biologist Nikolai Vavilov, which ended in 1943 with the imprisoned Vavilov's death by starvation. In 1941 he was awarded the USSR State Prize.

[edit] After Stalin
Following Stalin's death in 1953, Lysenko retained his position, with the support of the new leader Nikita Khrushchev. However, mainstream scientists re-emerged, and found new willingness within Soviet government leadership to tolerate criticism of Lysenko, the first opportunity since the late 1920s. In 1962 three of the most prominent Soviet physicists, Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich, Vitaly Ginzburg, and Pyotr Kapitsa, presented a case against Lysenko, proclaiming his work as false science. They also denounced Lysenko's application of political power to silence opposition and eliminate his opponents within the scientific community. These denunciations occurred during a period of structural upheaval in Soviet government, during which the major institutions were to be purged of the strictly ideological and political machinations which had controlled the work of the Soviet Union's scientific community for several decades under Stalin.

In 1964, physicist Andrei Sakharov spoke out against Lysenko in the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences:

He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists. [2]
The Soviet press was soon filled with anti-Lysenkoite articles and appeals for the restoration of scientific methods to all fields of biology and agricultural science. Lysenko was removed from his post as director of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences and restricted to an experimental farm in Moscow's Lenin Hills (the Institute itself was soon dissolved). After Khrushchev's dismissal in 1964, the president of the Academy of Sciences declared that Lysenko's immunity to criticism had officially ended. An expert commission was sent to investigate records kept at Lysenko's experimental farm. A few months later, a devastating critique of Lysenko was made public. As a result, Lysenko was immediately disgraced in the Soviet Union, although his work continued to have impact in China for many years after.

Lysenko died in 1976.

Truth, Fake, Money

From Times Online June 4, 2009

One in seven scientists say colleagues fake dataHannah Devlin
Recommend? (3)
Faking scientific data and failing to report commercial conflicts of interest are far more prevalent than previously thought, a study suggests.

One in seven scientists says that they are aware of colleagues having seriously breached acceptable conduct by inventing results. And around 46 per cent say that they have observed fellow scientists engage in “questionable practices”, such as presenting data selectively or changing the conclusions of a study in response to pressure from a funding source.

However, when scientists were asked about their own behaviour only 2 per cent admitted to having faked results.

Daniele Fanelli, of the University of Edinburgh, who carried out the investigation, believes that high-profile cases such as that of Hwang Woo-Suk, the South Korean scientist disgraced for fabricating human stem cell data, are less unusual than is generally assumed. “Increasing evidence suggests that known frauds are just the tip of the iceberg and that many cases are never discovered,” he said.

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The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS One, are based on a review of 21 scientific misconduct surveys carried out between 1986 and 2005. The results paint a picture of a profession in which dishonesty and misrepresentation are widespread.

In all the surveys people were asked about both their own research practices and those of colleagues. Misconduct was divided into two categories: fabrication, the actual invention of data; and lesser breaches that went under the heading “questionable practices”. These included dropping data points based on a “gut feeling” and failing to publish data that contradict one’s previous research.

The discrepancy between the number of scientists owning up to misconduct and those having been observed by colleagues is likely to be in part due to fears over anonymity, Dr Fanelli suggests. “Anyone who has ever falsified research is probably unwilling to reveal it despite all guarantees of anonymity.”

The study predicts that the 2 per cent figure, although higher than most previous estimates, is still likely to be conservative.

Another explanation for the differences between the self-report results and colleague-report results could be that people consider themselves to be more moral than others. In a marginal case, people might characterise their colleagues’ behaviour as misconduct more readily than they would their own.

The study included scientists from a range of disciplines. Misconduct was far more frequently admitted by medical or pharmacological researchers than others, supporting fears that the field of medical research is being biased by commercial interests.

Follow the Money

Science and Technology News

Government monopsony distorts climate science, says SPPI
The climate industry is costing taxpayers $79 billion and counting

Washington, DC 7/22/2009 09:12 p.m. GMT (TransWorldNews)



The Science and Public Policy Institute announces the publication of Climate Money, a study by Joanne Nova revealing that the federal Government has a near-monopsony on climate science funding. This distorts the science towards self-serving alarmism. Key findings:



Ø The US Government has spent more than $79 billion of taxpayers’ money since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, propaganda campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks. Most of this spending was unnecessary.



Ø Despite the billions wasted, audits of the science are left to unpaid volunteers. A dedicated but largely uncoordinated grassroots movement of scientists has sprung up around the globe to test the integrity of “global warming” theory and to compete with a lavishly-funded, highly-organized climate monopsony. Major errors have been exposed again and again.



Ø Carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion in 2008. Banks, which profit most, are calling for more. Experts are predicting the carbon market will reach $2 - $10 trillion in the near future. Hot air will soon be the largest single commodity traded on global exchanges.



Ø Meanwhile, in a distracting sideshow, Exxon-Mobil Corp is repeatedly attacked for paying just $23 million to skeptics—less than a thousandth of what the US government spends on alarmists, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in 2008 alone.



Ø The large expenditure designed to prove the non-existent connection between carbon and climate has created a powerful alliance of self-serving vested interests.



Ø By pouring so much money into pushing a single, scientifically-baseless agenda, the Government has created not an unbiased investigation but a self-fulfilling prophecy.



Ø Sound science cannot easily survive the vice-like grip of politics and finance.



Says Nova, “For the first time, the numbers from government documents have been compiled in one place. It’s time to start talking of “Monopolistic Science”. It’s time to expose the lie that those who claim “to save the planet” are the underdogs. And it’s time to get serious about auditing science, especially when it comes to pronouncements that are used to justify giant government programs and massive movements of money.”



Robert Ferguson, SPPI’s president, says: “This study counts the cost of years of wasted Federal spending on the ‘global warming’ non-problem. Government bodies, big businesses and environmental NGOs have behaved like big tobacco: recruiting, controlling and rewarding their own “group-think” scientists who bend climate modeling to justify the State’s near-maniacal quest for power, control, wealth and forced population reduction.



“Joanne Nova, who wrote our study, speaks for thousands of scientists in questioning whether a clique of taxpayer-funded climate modelers are getting the data right, or just getting the “right” data. Are politicians paying out billions of our dollars for evidence-driven policy-making, or policy-driven evidence-making? The truth is more crucial than ever, because American lives, property and constitutional liberties are at risk.”



Read Joanne Nova’s important paper Climate Money here: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/climate_money.html



Contact Robert Ferguson: http://www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org/

bferguson@sppinstitute.org Tel. 202-288-5699

electrifyilng

Last weekend I saw something at Larry’s Pistol & Pawn Shop that sparked my interest. The occasion was our 15th anniversary and I was looking for a little something extra for my wife Julie. What I came across was a 100,000-volt, pocket/purse-sized taser. The effects of the taser were supposed to be short lived, with no long-term adverse affect on your assailant, allowing her adequate time to retreat to safety….?? WAY TOO COOL!
Long story short, I bought the device and brought it home. I loaded two AAA batteries in the darn thing and pushed the button. Nothing! I was disappointed. I learned, however, that if I pushed the button AND pressed it against a metal surface at the same time; I’d get the blue arc of electricity darting back and forth between the prongs. AWESOME!!! Unfortunately, I have yet to explain to Julie what that burn spot is on the face of her microwave. Okay, so I was home alone with this new toy, thinking to myself that it couldn’t be all that bad with only two triple-A batteries, right?
There I sat in my recliner, my cat Gracie looking on intently (trusting little soul) while I was reading the directions and thinking that I really needed to try this thing out on a flesh & blood moving target. I must admit I thought about zapping Gracie (for a fraction of a second) and thought better of it. She is such a sweet cat. But, if I was going to give this thing to my wife to protect herself against a mugger, I did want some assurance that it would work as advertised. Am I wrong? So, there I sat in a pair of shorts and a tank top with my reading glasses perched delicately on the bridge of my nose, directions in one hand, and taser in another.
The directions said that a one-second burst would shock and disorient your assailant; a two-second burst was supposed to cause muscle spasms and a major loss of bodily control; a three-second burst would purportedly make your assailant flop on the ground like a fish out of water. Any burst longer than three seconds would be wasting the batteries. All the while I’m looking at this little device measuring about 5′ long, less than 3/4 inch in circumference; pretty cute really and (loaded with two itsy, bitsy triple-A batteries) thinking to myself, ‘no possible way!’
What happened next is almost beyond description, but I’ll do my best…? I’m sitting there alone, Gracie looking on with her head cocked to one side as to say, ‘don’t do it dipshit,’ reasoning that a one second burst from such a tiny little ole thing couldn’t hurt all that bad. I decided to give myself a one second burst just for heck of it. I touched the prongs to my naked thigh, pushed the button, and . . . HOLY MOTHER OF GOD . . . WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION . . . WHAT THE HELL!!!
I’m pretty sure Jessie Ventura ran in through the side door, picked me up in the recliner, then body slammed us both on the carpet, over and over and over Again. I vaguely recall waking up on my side in the fetal position, with tears in my eyes, body soaking wet, both nipples on fire, testicles nowhere to be found, with my left arm tucked under my body in the oddest position, and tingling in my legs?
The cat was making meowing sounds I had never heard before, clinging to a picture frame hanging above the fireplace, obviously in an attempt to avoid getting slammed by my body flopping all over the living room. Note: If you ever feel compelled to ‘mug’ yourself with a taser, one note of caution: there is no such thing as a one second burst when you zap yourself! You will not let go of that thing until it is dislodged from your hand by a violent thrashing about on the floor. A three second burst would be considered conservative?
*S-O-B, THAT HURT LIKE HE**!!!
A minute or so later (I can’t be sure, as time was a relative thing at that point), I collected my wits (what little I had left), sat up and surveyed the landscape. My bent reading glasses were on the mantel of the fireplace. The recliner was upside down and about 8 feet or so from where it originally was. My triceps, right thigh and both nipples were still twitching. My face felt like it had been shot up with Novocain, and my bottom lip weighed 88 lbs. I had no control over the drooling.
Apparently I shit myself, but was too numb to know for sure and my sense of smell was gone. I saw a faint smoke cloud above my head which I believe was coming from my hair. I’m still looking for my nuts and I’m offering a significant reward for their safe return!!
P. S. My wife loved the gift, and now regularly threatens me with it!
MAWM