Stirring, crusading stuff. And all the more valuable for the fact so few people were wise to it. If they had been, WUWT readers would not have given Ravetz such unqualified praise to his first guest post. After all, from a climate sceptic’s perspective, Jerome Ravetz is essentially the Antichrist. This man framed the moral philosophy that wiped out the scientific integrity so revered by the many decent, upstanding engineers, geologists and physicists who tend to congregate on WUWT. Possibly still worse, he is the man who made the whole AGW scam possible.
‘Facts uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent.’ This, according to Ravetz – and he should know: he did invent it – is what he calls the ‘mantram’ at the heart of PNS. It presupposes that certain scenarios exist in which the values of Normal science – you know: facts, empiricism, rigour, honesty, that kind of old-fashioned stuff – simply aren’t up to snuff, and that a newer, improved more post-modern kind of science is needed to get the job done.
Ravetz is a left-leaning, US-born academic and Communist Party fellow traveller. He formulated his ‘PNS’ theory at Leeds University in the early 1990s with Silvio Funtowicz. In the abstract for their 1993 treatise ‘Science for the Post-Normal Age’, they claimed:
…a new type of science – ‘post-normal’ – is emerging … in contrast to traditional problem-solving strategies, including core science, applied science, and professional consultancy… Post-normal science can provide a path to the democratisation of science, and also a response to the current tendencies to post-modernity.
No, don’t worry if it doesn’t make much sense. That’s the whole point. This is the language of academia in the finest traditions of Derrida and Foucault and Barthes and De Saussure and Chomsky. Add to it that whole ragbag of Structuralist, Post-Structuralist and Marxist thinkers whose writings are so labyrinthine and obscure that no one (possibly not even the authors themselves) could unravel them. They are designed not to celebrate old-school values like lucidity and logic, but rather to subvert them. The medium is the message: everything you think you know is wrong; welcome to the new order.
In the case of Ravetz and Funtowicz, this new order (a kind of scientific variant on the post-modernist movement in art and literature) entailed making science less elitist and hierarchical, more democratic and responsive to the needs of the modern age. Instead of pursuing the obsolete and possibly dangerous concept of ‘truth’, their theory posited that a scientist’s new duty ought to be towards something called ‘quality’. And by ‘quality’ they meant something more akin to rhetoric – the ability to manipulate evidence and present it in such a way as to achieve particular, desirable political ends.
You can see why this philosophy might have appealed to the cabal of activist-scientists responsible for pushing the AGW scare. Here was Mother Earth – they couldn’t be sure, the facts being uncertain, but they felt it in their bones – facing the greatest threat to her existence in the entire history of mankind. The stakes were so high, and doom so imminent, there simply wasn’t time to waste with any of that tedious, old-fashioned researching and debating nonsense. The time for action was now, or, preferably, yesterday. It really was that serious.
This, you’ll remember, was the overriding message of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth: ‘The science is settled.’ Only cranks and crackpots and weirdoes on the outer fringes, Big Al assured us, now disputed ‘The Consensus’ in AGW. The science had segued, with a haste and urgency that in older times might have been considered indecent, into political process.
That, of course, is the essence of PNS. It belongs less in a laboratory than the Ministry of Propaganda. Among those who certainly understood this early on was Mike Hulme of the Tyndall Centre, who once wrote:
Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking, although science will gain some insights into the question if it recognises the socially contingent dimensions of a post-normal science.
In the wake of Climategate, Hulme has often positioned himself in radio interviews and debates as the likable, accessible, undogmatic centre ground between the Warmists and the Sceptics. This seems to me like a ploy of dissembling genius given that:
a) as Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, he has worked closely with many of those implicated in the Climategate scandal; and
b) he’s an ardent advocate of the very philosophy that made Climategate possible.
Not unlike Ravetz himself, Hulme sounds plausible, reasonable, moderate – until you work out what it is he’s actually saying. At least Joseph Bast in American Thinker was wise to his game – as he showed in his review of Hulme’s book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change:
More than a few people will be tempted to buy this book based on the promise, implicit in its title, that it offers an examination of the ideas and motives of both sides in the global warming debate. But that is not what this book is about. Rather, it is the musings of a British socialist about how to use the global warming issue as a means of persuading ‘the masses’ to give up their economic liberties.
He went on:
…socialists like Hulme can frame the global warming issue in such a way as to achieve seemingly unrelated goals such as sustainable development, income redistribution, population control, social justice, and many other items on the liberal/socialist wish-list.
It is troubling to read a prominent scientist who has so clearly lost sight of his cardinal duty – to be sceptical of all theories and always open to new data. It is particularly troubling when this same scientist endorses lying by others to advance his personal political agenda.
Well indeed. But it’s not as though Hulme has ever been coy about his position. Rather, he employs the beguiling technique of hiding his views in plain sight, as when he declares:
The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved… It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change – the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and material flows that climate change reveals – to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come.
‘Climate change’, in other words, has little if anything to do with ‘science’ as you or I might understand the concept. It’s not a genuine problem to be solved, but a handy excuse – with a fashionable green patina – to advance a particular social and political agenda under the cloak of ecological righteousness and scientific authority.
After Climategate, we are entitled to ask: ‘Whose scientific authority?’ It’s all very well for someone like Lord Rees to defend the Royal Society’s position on global warming by brandishing Nullius in Verba as if it were still the emblem of irrefutable truth. But the fact is that his institution’s integrity – like that of its US cousin the National Academy of Sciences – lies in tatters precisely because it has done the thing its motto says it never does. It listened to a coterie of post-normal scientists who were more interested in political activism than objective truth – and took their word for it.
SIX
A FEW THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW
ABOUT ‘GLOBAL WARMING’
DIANE: This generation are disaster junkies… Every day they wake up craving a narrative fix. When they see a photograph of a polar bear, hitching a lift on a passing ice flow, they cannot see a wild animal at ease in its natural habitat. What they see is the last five minutes of Titanic!
From The Heretic (2011), a play by Richard Bean
WHO: James Delingpole – but more importantly, dozens of eminent oceanographers, economists, geologists, physicists, astrophysicists (etc.)
WHAT: Heartland Institute’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change
WHERE: Marriott Magnificent Mile, Chicago
WHEN: 16 May to 18 May 2010
You’d imagine the Heartland I
nstitute’s climate conference would be pretty dull, a meeting of 700 mostly male, mostly middle-aged-plus climate sceptics (or ‘realists’, as one of the keynote speakers, Richard Lindzen, tells us we must learn to call ourselves). We’re cooped up in a downtown hotel for two and half days of intense panel sessions (‘Quantifying the Effects of Ocean Acidification on Marine Organisms’; ‘Green Eggs and Scam: the Myth of Green Jobs’; ‘Analysis of the Russian Segment of the HADCRUT3 Database’) and lectures (beginning at 7.30am). But I haven’t had so much fun in years.
First, the hospitality. They know how to look after you, these right-leaning US think tanks – even modest-sized ones like the free-market Heartland Institute. Of course, it suffers the ‘misfortune’ of being largely funded by private donors rather than – contrary to what you’ve been told by many greens – ‘Big Oil’, ‘Big Carbon’ or ‘Big Totally Evil’. Food is good. Booze is plentiful. There is little wimping out – especially not from the strong Aussie delegation including Senator Cory Bernardi and scientists Bob Carter and Ian Plimer.
Second, the people. Here I am, a mere blogger and polemicist, rubbing shoulders with some of the world’s most eminent oceanographers, economists, geologists, physicists, astrophysicists – even a couple of astronauts. I can’t believe it. I am not worthy. But instead of shunning me, they’re coming up and shaking my hand and thanking me for the modest service I have done for their cause. Our cause.
Little do they know yet that I’m about to betray them. Not horribly betray them. It’s not like I planned to let a bunch of deep green activists through a side-door (anyway, the organisers seem to have employed several burly men to check badges and prevent any foul play). It’s not like I’m going to write an op-ed for the New York Times, saying: ‘I recant. ManBearPig is real and we’re all going to fry.’
What I am going to tell them, in the speech I have prepared, is that for all the difference they’re going to make in this debate on global warming they might as well go home right now.
Obviously, I don’t phrase it quite as bluntly as that. These are decent, principled people, after all, several of whom – since I began covering Climategate – have become my personal heroes. Three of them are on my panel: physicist Fred Singer, Ross McKitrick and meteorologist Joe D’Aleo (whose research into the siting of weather stations and the Urban Heat Island effect has cast serious doubt on the extent of late twentieth-century ‘global warming’). The last thing I’d want to do is make them feel unwanted.
So I begin by declaring how honoured I am to be among these experts: ‘Like a humble shepherd boy who has suddenly found himself translated to Mount Olympus.’ I mean it, too. Every sceptical climate scientist is, almost by definition, a hero because in order to maintain his stance he will have sacrificed money, job security and career advancement in return for little more than the slim satisfaction of moral principle.
But I also mean what I say next, which is essentially that the work of these fine men is now all but redundant. It really doesn’t matter how many more brilliant papers Roy Spencer produces on cloud cover feedback or how many times that Nils-Axel Mörner proves that sea levels show absolutely no sign of dangerous increase. This is a debate that sceptic scientists can never possibly win, no matter how much apparently overwhelmingly persuasive evidence they produce. That’s because the debate was never about ‘the science’ in the first place. It was, is and always will be about politics.
The Heartland Institute conference took place exactly six months after the Climategate documents were posted onto the internet in November 2009. And almost every day after it provided us sceptics – sorry, ‘realists’ – with yet another humdinger of a story exposing either the flimsiness of AGW theory or the corruption, incompetence, mendacity or malfeasance of the various vested interests pushing that theory.
With tremendous originality (yeah, like I’m in a position to complain) many of these new scandals were christened with the suffix ‘-gate’. One blogger, P. Gosselin, claimed to have counted no fewer than seventy of them.
Pachaurigate exposed the shady dealings of Rajendra Pachauri, the extravagantly bearded, cricket-loving, Indian yogic who has served as chairman – and at the time of writing still bizarrely is – of the IPCC since 2002. The former railway engineer (who has also dabbled in writing soft porn) famously urged, shortly before Climategate, that in order to correct humanity’s ‘unsustainable’ lifestyles we should all learn to ‘eat less meat’, to do without iced water in restaurants, to pay a special levy for air-conditioning in hotels and to be forced, through high taxes, to avoid the ‘irrational’ decision to fly.
Strangely, none of these rules (apart from the one banning meat: easy enough to observe if, like Pachauri, you’re already a vegetarian) seems to have applied to the bearded love guru himself. He clocks up innumerable air miles every year, sometimes on IPCC business, sometimes merely to watch a cricket match, invariably travelling in grand style and staying in the best air-conditioned hotels.
Thanks to the digging of investigative blogger Richard North, we have learned that Pachauri enjoys a millionaire lifestyle, including a house in one of Delhi’s most expensive neighbourhoods. Pachauri’s tangled web of business interests, directorships and advisory positions in the climate change and energy industry represent, at the very least, a clear conflict of interest with his position as head of so politically and economically influential an organisation as the IPCC.
There have been questions, too, about Pachauri’s directorship of a consultancy operation called The Energy Research Institute (TERI) in New Delhi. TERI professes to be a non-profit-making organisation, but appears (from its sketchy accounts) to have fingers in all sorts of unlikely pies. Why, for example, given its mission to ‘work towards global sustainable development, creating innovative solutions for a better tomorrow’, does its campus run a golf course in a parched district of India, using up to 300,000 gallons of water a day? And why, given that the land was given to TERI by the local development authority for ‘institutional or public or semi-public purpose’ was TERI found to be selling club membership to rich Indians for Rs. 25,000 (£550)?
Many of the other ‘-gates’ focused on inaccuracies and absurdities in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. Africagate, for example, exposed its dubious claim that climate change could by 2020 cause yields from rain-fed agriculture in some African countries to fall by as much as 50 per cent. This claim – as Richard North drily noted on his EU Referendum blog – turned out to have been ‘a wild exaggeration, unsupported by any scientific research, referenced only to a report produced by a Canadian advocacy group, written by an obscure Moroccan academic who specialises in carbon trading, citing references which do not support his claims’.
Amazongate concerned another dodgy claim made in the FAR: that climate change, leading to a reduction in rainfall, was threatening the survival of ‘up to 40 per cent of the Amazonian rainforest’. However, on further examination, again by the indefatigable North, the only ‘evidence’ provided to support this claim originated from a non-peer-reviewed paper produced by green activists for the WWF (of aforementioned carbon credit fame in the Amazon). The claim was eventually sourced to a paper by another green activist – ex-WWF employee, Dr Daniel Nepstad – now working for the Woods Hole Research Center. Nepstad’s paper, though peer-reviewed, made no mention whatsoever of climate change. That’s because it was about the effects of logging and forest fires.
Most damaging, though, was Glaciergate. This was a big deal for numerous reasons, not least because melting glaciers have become such a major symbol in the catastrophists’ litany: right up there with melting ice caps, drowning polar bears and the sinking Maldives. Al Gore used melting glaciers to drive home his point in An Inconvenient Truth, noting how the vast Himalayan ice sheet feeds seven of the world’s major river systems, thus contributing to fresh water supplies for 40 per cent of the world’s population.
So, naturally enough, when the IPCC’s 2007 report claimed that the likelihoo
d of the glaciers disappearing by 2035 – and perhaps sooner – was ‘very high’, it seemed to confirm all the pant-wettingly pessimistic predictions by eco-doom-mongers. If we didn’t act soon, then an entire subcontinent would be dying of thirst. And not at some unimaginably distant date, but actually so soon that many of us would live to witness it via satellite on our spiffy new hologram TV sets, quite possibly featuring smell-o-vision and even empatho-pain facilities too (technology permitting).
Except it wasn’t true, at all. The year 2035, it emerged, originated from a claim made by Dr Syed Hasnain in an April 1999 interview with an Indian environmental magazine – Down to Earth. This in turn was picked up and used almost verbatim in that gold standard of peer-reviewed reliability, the IPCC’s FAR. However, perhaps sensing that a quote lifted from an obscure Indian eco-journal might not quite carry the weight it should, the IPCC instead decided to cite as its reference point a 2005 report by the WWF, which had quoted another, similar, interview Dr Hasnain had given to the British magazine New Scientist. This report wasn’t peer-reviewed either.
In fact, the closest Dr Hasnain’s claims came to being peer-reviewed was when an eminent Austrian glaciologist called Dr Georg Kaser had described them as ‘so wrong that it is not even worth dismissing’. Subsequently, India’s leading glaciologist, Dr Vijay Raina, produced a report called ‘Himalayan Glaciers: A State-of-the-Art Review of Glacial Studies, Glacial Retreat and Climate Change’ which showed these claims to be rubbish. This prompted an ill-advised intervention by IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, who rose to defend Hasnain’s claims by accusing Raina of ‘voodoo science’. India’s environment minister subsequently asked Pachauri to apologise.
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 12
