A Place to Stand

I mentioned earlier that the Australian opposition party had split with many of the most prominent shadow cabinet members resigning over the leader's insistence on supporting global warming. Well now they have a new leader who is sensible on the subject.

This may be a first: a major political party has dumped a global warming believer as leader and replaced him with sceptic who last month called AGW “crap”. Tony Abbott has tempered his public pronouncements since, but has today become the new Liberal leader, toppling warmist Malcolm Turnbull, specifically because he was the only one of the three contenders today to promise to delay the Government’s emissions trading scheme.

And immediately the government's cap & trade bill has been defeated

KEVIN Rudd has lost his bid to deliver an emissions trading scheme in Australia before talks in Copenhagen but won an early election trigger after the Senate formally rejected the laws again today.

Just two Liberal senators broke ranks with a clear mandate among Coalition MPs to delay an ETS and voted with Labor on an emissions trading scheme

Fair dinkum.
Looks like that "early election trigger" will give the people a chance to express their opinion. Iain Dale has an article explaining that the British Conservatives haven't the balls to do this - doesn't phrase it like that but that Cameron has total control of the party. However strong your hold appears you can't stop the tide.

Here is an honest acknowledgement from a previously alarmist journalist of the clear extent of fraud.

Meanwhile our media continue to censor. Last night the BBC's important news about warming was that Antarctica is more doomed than previously thought (it isn't) & John Snow, on a warming junket to Rio promised thet "The Science" says we have catastrophic warming - not "a few people with no scientific principles, paid by government" as he would have said if honest, or "some scientists" if half honest, or "scientists say" if only 75% corrupt, or "some scientific results" if only 87.5% corrupt, or "science says" if only 90% a liar but "The Science says".

And in the personally pleasing stuff I found yesterday that somebody in Australia Googling "Professor Phil Jones" had got me as 8th hit in the entire world. Today it is down to 18th which I still find incredibly unlikely.

History of the CRU
There is also an outstanding article in The Register on warming & I am linking to page 2 of it which gives the history of alarmism & its connection to the CRU.

What I found that I hadn't known is that when the Climate research Unit was founded by Hubert Lamb "the father of climate science" he was not taken in by this. Compare & contrast his assessment of global temperature with the alarmist lies.
Lamb's original graph
Mann's fraud

As you can see not only was Lamb right about the Medieval warming period but he had even got the blip showing 1934 as the warmest of last century which Stephen McIntyre independently rediscovered hidden within America's GISS figures.

This means the fabrication overlays the correct assessment we knew of years ago. So what growth factors caused the fraud to overwhelm the known truth?

CRU was founded in 1972 by the 'Father of Climatology', former Met Office meteorologist Hubert Lamb. Until around 1980, solar modulation was believed to be the driving factor in climatic variation. A not unreasonable idea, you might think, since our energy (unless you live by a volcano vent) is derived from the sun. Without a better understanding of the sun, climatology may be reasonably be called "speculative meteorology".

But CRU's increasing influence, according to its own history, stemmed from politicians taking an interest. "The UK Government became a strong supporter of climate research in the mid-1980s, following a meeting between Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher and a small number of climate researchers, which included Tom Wigley, the CRU director at the time. This and other meetings eventually led to the setting up of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, within the Met Office," the CRU notes.

Lamb (who died in 1997), however remained sceptical of the greenhouse gas hypothesis to the end.

In addition to inheriting all the problems of climatology, the greenhouse gas hypothesis has several unique issues of its own, and addressing them is a challenge for the most scrupulous researcher. How CRU addressed them was to define climatology for two decades - and ultimately defined the public debate and policy, too...

The first IPCC report in 1990 used the established temperature record created by Lamb. It's very different to the one we're familiar with today ...we find Jones unambiguous in an email: "We will be rewriting people's perceived wisdom about the course of temperature change over the past millennium," he wrote...

'Climategate' raises far more questions than it answers, and one of the most intriguing of these is how a small group (backing a new theory, in an infant field) came to have such a huge effect on global policy making. Is it fair to hang CRU Director Jones and his colleagues out to dry - as some climate campaigners such as George Monbiot have suggested? If the buck doesn't stop with the CRU climatologists - then who or what is really to blame?

Poring over the archive, it's easy to find a nose here, and a large leathery foot over there - and to conclude that the owner of the room may have a very strange taste in furnishings. The elephant in the room can go unnoticed...

the very nature of the problem itself has led the "science" onto shaky ground - onto modelling (which has no predictive value) and anecdotal evidence (which merely demonstrates correlation, but not causation). That's why the 'Hockey Stick' was a very big deal: it substituted for hard evidence; if fossil fuel emissions affected the climate at all significantly, this remained a future threat, and certainly not an urgent one.

The demand from institutions, (principally the UN, through its IPCC), national policy makers and the media has taken climate scientists into areas where they struggle to do good science. Add professional activists to the mix - who bring with them the Precautionary Principle - and the element of urgency is introduced.

So that is what happened. "Policy makers" (aka politicians) decided, with the fall of the USSR, as detailed in Michael Crichton's State of Fear, to quite deliberately fund, push & demand a scare story which was completely opposite to that which the emerging climate science had already proven. With money & a very small number of buyable "scientists" such as Jones & Mann replacing a real giant & perverting his life's work & the obedient media, at least within the English speaking & NATO areas, to promote this false story they had deliberately manufactured this fraud.

This goes somewhat beyond climate science. On another blog, where the reasons why climate science, social science & economics don't achieve the level of scientific accuracy that physics takes for granted. The conventional explanation is that these sciences are newer & have unique problems. One commenter explained:

This science has a lot of similarities with social sciences (like economics):

(1) The system you're trying to understand is complex.

(2) Controlled experiments are difficult or impossible.

(3) The knowledge you can be somewhat confident about is qualitative, not quantitative.

(4) Given the inability to reach verifiable, quantitative conclusions, there will be a tendency for scientists to reach conclusions on a non-scientific basis (such as a desire to conform to the consensus).

I disagreed saying

A 5th similarity to social sciences & economics is that the main customer, usually government, is more interested in funding findings that support what they have already decided to do than which will, in due course, turn out to be accurate. I suspect this is the main thing holding all these proto-sciences back...

Climate science differs from proto-sciences like social science& economics in that it used to be a real, albeit boring, science, having liked day by day weather forecasting, because of satellites, it was making slow but steady progress in understanding underlying trends. Then it became politically useful & vast amounts of money were poured into it but only to climate modellers who produced the required scare stories. This enhances my earlier point that the thing holding back proto-sciences is not lack of information or their complexity (compare with quantum physics) but that they are funded by politicians who want their prejudices confirmed rather than accurate science.

...when Hubert Lamb established the CRU it was doing good, mathematically rigorous, science. Then the politicians & their political spinners moved in & it "just growed". Lamb's graph of climate differs in all respects from the present one, particularly in being far less jazzy looking & in being correct - not only showing the Medieval warming but also the 1934 peak McIntyre rediscovered by analysing GISS figures.

Political support has caused this Lysenko style perversion ...

I regard the accuracy of Lamb's initial graph as proof that climate science was & thus could be a real rigorous science before the politicians took control of it by their control of funding. The effects of state funding of science seem to be negative. The lesson for anybody who wants real sciences of sociology or economics is clear. I believe we could have accurate replicable sciences of economics & sociology if the funders did not simply want their interests catered too.

This article has a similar opinion of the "Voodoo sciences".

UPDATE An interesting Wall Street Journal article on the government funding of alarmism & pressure to prevent any funding at all of anything sceptical. I think that supports the point made here entirely. H/T to Al Fin who links other articles too.

Labels: Fear, global warming, Government parasitism, International politics, Science/technology