Science, we hear, should not respect anyone’s moral values, aside from the value of truth itself. Any assertion about a fact of nature is either true or false. Isaac Asimov (Foundation) famously said, “Scientific truth is beyond loyalty or disloyalty.” Thus men should look to science to tell fact from fiction, boon from bane, and help from hindrance. Yet that obliges any scientist to search, not for support of a particular policy, but for the truth. And most who practice climate science today, have reneged on that obligation. To support a contention of anthropogenic global warming, scientists have first exaggerated a harm and then lied to support that exaggeration.

Defining global warming

Global warming is the traditional term those who study climate have applied to how they say the climate has recently changed. It means an abrupt trend toward higher temperatures in all parts of the earth. This, say the climatologists, will:

1. Melt the polar ice pack and Antarctic ice shelves. This will in turn flood low-lying islands and destroy coastal real estate.
2. Dry up the earth and turn arable land to desert.
3. Kill millions with heatstroke and sunstroke.

When scientists indulge in such histrionics, they behave badly enough. Richard Muller of MIT condemned such displays in 2003. Scientists, he says, must keep their rhetoric sober. Otherwise, they tempt themselves “to do shoddy work.” Indeed:

Scientists themselves are also at fault. Some are finding fame and glory, and even a sense that they are important. (That’s remarkably rare in science.)

In other words: stop preening, posing, and pretending you’re another Einstein or Lavoisier or Newton!

Lack of insight

Oddly enough, Michael Mann, the foremost global warming alarmist, has taken note of the excesses on his side. A year ago, David Wallace-Wells wrote in New York:

The present tense of climate change — the destruction we’ve already baked into our future — is horrifying enough. Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade.

Mr. Wallace-Wells did in fact “speak” to Michael Mann – and then did not quote or even mention him. Maybe Mann felt Wallace-Wells had slighted him. In any event, he condemned him in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The evidence that climate change is a serious problem that we must contend with now, is overwhelming on its own. There is no need to overstate the evidence, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness.

Oh, yeah? Here is Wallace-Wells’ reply:

Some useful pushback to my worst-case climate story. I feel less "doomist" than "scared," but also that fear is important motivating force. https://t.co/sqnIePPdEc

— David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) July 10, 2017

Note carefully: “fear is an important motivating force.” Wallace-Wells thus is saying, “Of course I sought to strike terror in the hearts of my readers! How else are we going to get people out of their cars? Get with The Program!”

Note also Michael Mann’s appalling lack of insight. He has fed the doomsday narrative throughout his career. And he admitted something else:

The study in question simply showed that one particular satellite temperature dataset that had tended to show “less” warming than the other datasets, has now been brought in line with the other temperature data after some problems with that dataset were dealt with.

To bring in line? And what problems did someone deal with to achieve that result? Nonconformance with The Narrative, perhaps?

A history of exaggerations and lies

In fact, the entire anthropogenic global warming narrative has relied on exaggeration and lies since 1988. Then, James E. Hansen, then at NASA, sounded his first warning. President George H. W. Bush took up that warning. He and several other heads-of-state repaired to Rio de Janeiro in 1990. Out of that Rio Summit came the “Agenda for the Twenty-first Century”: Agenda Twenty-one. And from then on, Mann and others sounded ever more strident warnings.

Then in 2003, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas published this paper: “Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years,” Climate Research, 23:89-110, 2003. In three syllables, Soon and Baliunas said, “Not so fast!” Those thousand-year records showed that the earth had been warmer than now, during the Middle Ages (the Medieval Warm Period). A Little Ice Age succeeded to this, and ended only during the Edwardian Era.

The global warming establishment howled with outrage. They demanded and got the heads of six editors at Climate Research on a proverbial silver platter. Muller expressed his dismay at this censorious attitude and action.

Willie Soon eventually defended himself and his work here.

Don’t trust the Hockey Stick

Muller, for his part, pointed out the only outrageous thing Soon and Baliunas had done, was cast doubt on Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick. With regard to this, Muller said in 2003:

When I first read the Mann papers in 1998, I was disappointed that they did not discuss such systematic biases in much detail, particularly since their conclusions repealed the medieval warm period. In most fields of science, researchers who express the most self-doubt and who understate their conclusions are the ones that are most respected. Scientists regard with disdain those who play their conclusions to the press. I was worried about the hockey stick from the beginning. When I wrote my book on paleoclimate (published in 2000), I initially included the hockey stick graph in the introductory chapter. In the second draft, I cut the figure, although I left a reference. I didn’t trust it enough.

Fudge!

Muller had good reason to doubt the Hockey Stick. Less than a year later he would comment on Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick’s shocking expose of Mann’s math. At issue: the Principle Component Analysis (PCA) Mann said he performed on those thousand years of data.

But it wasnt so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!

Understand: Michael Mann’s program produced a hockey stick as a guaranteed result. To assume that Mann simply forgot to do Monte Carlo analysis, is far too charitable. That would be equivalent to marketing a new drug without first testing it against a placebo. Worse: it would be equivalent to dissembling about whether one tested the drug against a placebo or not!

McIntyre and McKitrick submitted their findings to the journal Nature. And Nature rejected it. So McIntyre and McKitrick shared their work, and the referees’ comments, here for all to read.

Falsification of data

Tony Heller, alias Steven Goddard, in the summer of 2016, gave this history of a worse problem. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change willfully suppresses earlier findings that contradict the new narrative. Which is: since the Industrial Revolution, Western civilization has dumped enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to cook the planet.

Heller here describes how he went from a global warming believer to a global warming skeptic. Who wouldn’t take a skeptical attitude, after finding that the proponents of a certain point of view have lied? He reminds us also: in 1975, scientists convinced themselves that the globe would freeze.

Nor does falsification of data confine itself to climate science. Here, a graduate student offers damning evidence of corruption of science in other fields.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrGRP2mu0GA

The university community officially frowns on such practices. In 1976, the Yale University Student Handbook carried this dire warning to any student who might make stuff up in a laboratory course:

The practice [of] “dry-labbing,” constructing observations out of one’s own head or misappropriating the observations of others, is an offense of such gravity that it warrants excommunication from the community of scientists. At Yale the comparable sanction is expulsion.

But in fact no court of competent jurisdiction exists to prevent such fraud. So when it serves a narrow, venal purpose, professors do it all the time. And when vast government funding and public policy are at stake, the problem becomes exponentially worse.

Motive

A class of politicians has arisen who want to control all aspects of people’s lives. They have hijacked the public purses in their countries. Now they pay serious money to any who wears the white smock and will produce “results” that support their policies. And what are these policies? At best, a limit of all energy to ground-based solar and wind power only. And at worst, a regime of curfew, candlelight and curtailment of human activity.

These politicians sit to the left of their colleagues. And while they pretend at higher maturity, they behave immaturely. They want fossil-fuel use to stop now. Today. This instant. As you read this. Nowhere do they allow time for the development of any new technologies.

Remember: these same politicians repair to luxurious venues like Paris, France, to write their latest sovereignty-abolishing treaties against global warming. Rarely has your editor ever heard anyone ask those delegates to lead by example. So: why won’t they lead by example? Because they don’t believe it themselves. But they hope to make the rest of us believe it. And what better costume for selling a concept, however fallacious, than a white smock?

The failure of renewables

Imagine what a regime of “ground based solar and wind only” would mean. The sun does not shine brightly enough, nor the wind blow hard enough, to replace totally all uses of all other fuels today. True enough, scientists say they do. They even discuss generating some power at sea. (The Kennedys of Hyannisport will refuse, don’t forget.) But they base their claim on the amount of stationary electric power available today. (And even so, they admit some countries would still have to import electricity under this regime.) They say nothing about replacing:

1. Automobiles and buses.
2. Heavy-duty trucks that haul garbage, assist with electric-line repair, etc.
3. Long- and short-haul delivery trucks.
4. Cranes, bulldozers, dump trucks, earth movers, and the like.

Nor do they mention the most important mobile energy user of all: aircraft. This optimistic display of concepts in all-electric aircraft illustrates the problem. Try to imagine delivering passengers and freight on one of these aircraft. One simply cannot.

More recently came this paper discussing land use in a regime using solar power only. (Wind power occupies even more land than does solar for generating the same amount of “juice.”) They flat-out admit: we haven’t enough wide-open space to do it. “Create new vulnerabilities and/or reinforce existing ones in terms of energy and food security and biodiversity conservation,” they write. Meaning: they can’t even guarantee to replace the electricity we make today. Not without seriously compromising the ability to put food on the table and to conserve wildlife.

Agenda Twenty-one

Suddenly Agenda Twenty-one makes sense. Its highlights, or rather lowlights, are:

1. Reduce the “human footprint” by ninety percent. That means ordering people to live in mixed-use dwelling/commercial buildings. It also means: leave the driving to us. Literally. By order.
2. Revert the rest of the land area to the wild.

Worse yet, consider this:

Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.

Source: Ehrlich P., Ehrlich A., and Holdren J., Ecoscience: Population, Resources and Environment, 1977. Yes, that Holdren. John Holdren. Science Adviser to “President” Barack Obama.

Happy Hunger Games, everyone. And may the odds be ever in your favor. Not!

Cornucopia!

Cornucopia omnibus!

Clamose sonato,

Clamosem audimus,

Numquamque claudebimus.

Cornucopia omnibus!

Capitoli, lucet adamas tuus,

Tributum diebus atterimis!

Cornucopia omnibus!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXIGNtKpwKQ

(With apologies to James Newton Howard.)