Top British boffin: Time to ditch the climate consensus
Don’t use science to get round politics, says Hulme
EXCERPTS:
Interview Just two years ago, Mike Hulme would have been about the last person you’d expect to hear criticising conventional climate change wisdom. Back then, he was the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, an organisation so revered by environmentalists that it could be mistaken for the academic wing of the green movement. Since leaving Tyndall – and as we found out in a telephone interview – he has come out of the climate change closet as an outspoken critic of such sacred cows as the UN’s IPCC, the “consensus”, the over-emphasis on scientific evidence in political debates about climate change, and to defend the rights of so-called “deniers” to contribute to those debates.
As Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, Hulme remains one of the UK’s most distinguished and high-profile climate scientists.
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He treats climate change not as a problem that we need to solve – indeed, he believes that the complexity of the issue means that it cannot be solved, only lived with – and instead considers it as much of a cultural idea as a physical phenomenon.”
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When we spoke to him on the phone, Hulme cited as evidence the 2007 protests against Heathrow’s third runway, where marchers made their case by waving a research paper at the TV cameras under a banner bearing the slogan “We are armed only with peer reviewed science”.
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Sounds like a thoughtful, reasonable fellow who just caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror.
If any of this nonsense about CO2 makes it into legislation in the form of taxes or cap and trade here in the US, I for one will volunteer my time to sit in jail for my refusal to pay any additional costs to what I buy as a result of this voodoo snake oil science. In other words, a tea party sounds like a good idea in the near future.
The book is excellent, and should be read by both sceptics and warmists.
Another Hulme remark worth sharing was along the lines of, ‘zero degrees temperature rise causes climate problems for billions of people in the world.’
(see http://fora.tv/2007/10/28/Science_and_Politics_of_Climate_Change#Mike_Hulme_Misconceptions_About_Climate_Change)
“Climate change can only be understood from a position of dis-census, rather than artificially solved by creating consensus,”
Karl Popper would approve.
Show us the falsifiable content.
Anthony, thanks for posting this in its entirety. Very well written.
Does he have any choice other than to ditch the consensus?
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/05/ocean-heat-agw-climate-models-v-reality.html
I think he’s blowing the whistle too late!
The steamroller has Prince Charles and his mates coming out of the closet now. It is a high climate profile year for the old chap and my thoughts go to succession.
Sorry to go off topic.
Climate skepticism is a broad church, all are welcome. Well done Mike for recognising the damage being done to science and society by the the AGW orthodoxy. No doubt he will become subject to personal abuse by alarmists for making his views public.
This Fora TV clip with Mike Hulme in a panel debate is good. Politicians should see it! (*)
I made a translation of a part of what Hulme says:
http://magnusorerar.blogspot.com/2008/09/tror-p-antropogen-uppvrmning-emot-kyoto.html
I noted that a democrat politician behind the Waxman-Markey bill, Edward Markey, made the completely opposite statement regarding the responsibility of scientists vs. politicians, 1:07:30 into this clip (I think he comment the rejection before of Cap and Trade…(?)) :
youtube.com/watch?v=VzDutBRMsXw
“…the problem back in that era was that rather than to listening to National Academy of Sciences this congress […] decided that they would […] ignoring the National Academy of Sciences. So it was not a science based decision. It was strictly political, and that’s what we now reeping the harvest of, because when you put something in your river […]”
It amazes me that there is such widespread consensus/fallacy that government sponsored or peer review science is the only analysis that maintains integrity. Today’s SF Chronicle tells yet another story the spotlights that fallacy. National Park Service scientists with held and misrepresented data trying to frame an oyster fisherman as environmentally harmful. Imagine that. Falsifying science and not being paid by big oil.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/06/MNIQ17ERPE.DTL
Don’t use *science* to get around *politics* ??? They’ve still got it backwards.
Pamela – the point Mike Hulme is making, and I do recommend his book, is that we loose a part of our humanity if we start throwing stuff around like ‘voodoo snake oil science’!! I hope it was in jest!
Hulme’s book, which I have had for review, is true scholarship – but I could find no critique of the orthodox ‘science’ that underpins the politics and policy. Mike is foremost a social scientist rather than a hands-on climatologist, and so would not be in a position to analyse the science. Its not voodoo snake oil that we have to deal with – if it were, decent people such as he would have spotted it. The orthodox view is built upon computer models that create a virtual planetary ecosystem. Those models cannot handle cycles. All they can do is posit a natural variability – regarded as essentially random. It is an inherent limitation of the maths.
In the whole of Mike Hulme’s book you will find no reference to cycles. The real problem we have is that Mike’s viewpoint – that the establishment should open discourse with its critics, is not shared by the climate modelling community. Thus, he makes no reference to the detailed scientific critique of the model that shows how cycles – particularly the oscillations in ocean basins, created the late 20th century peak, and have brought global cooling since. Nor does he reference the solar science that points to a possible new Little Ice Age by 2030.
If we are not getting through to such an open person as Mike Hulme, then I have to say, I don’t know what course remains…..but we must not fall into the trap of slagging off the orthodox science created by a skilled and well-meaning community of climate modellers who simply cannot see their error, and who are protected from engagement in a wider debate by their managers eager to provide the simple answers that policy makers demand.
Well, it seems that the story of gobal warming is coming to an end finally.
However as it is said above “due to the fact that action on climate change is widely seen as a progressive goal…” a strong retaliation should be expected, because from a psychological point of view, to all those who their Berlin Wall unexpectedly fell down, won’t let this global warming or climate change wall to fall so easily…they surely will desesperate and turn violent.
I mean that Edward Markey says that there are scientific answer on politics, so that politicians shall not debate politics but just obey when scientists says what is truth for science and for political action. So Edward Markeys view exclude political debate, but I therefor rather define it as fascism.
“To hide behind the dubious precision of scientific numbers, and not actually expose one’s own ideologies or beliefs or values and judgements is undermining both politics and science”, says Hulme.
So, how can we get our elected officials to understand that we need individuals with this perspective leading the discussions on AGW instead of the passionate ideologues who currently are in charge?
Hulme recognizes a simple fact about human behavior which is, the more passionate, emotionally connected and outspoken one is to a position or cause, the more resistant and less rational and logical one will be in accepting any information that runs to the contrary.
I would argue that one cannot be both a legitimate scientist and an advocate. A good scientist needs to be objective, analytical, detached, unbiased and impassive. Once you advocate for a cause, your ego, self-esteem, accumulated power and influence and career all are at risk if the positions that you advocate are shown to be false or even less true.
Peter Taylor,
The point is that AGW is a social science problem, and not a climate science problem, at all.
A thoughtful article, indicative of the slowing “Ship of Climate.” Were it not for the alarmist attempts to obfuscate their political agenda with ever-more complicated science – the debate would not have devolved as it has. The alarmist approach, used successfully in the past, is to attack critics by appeal to authority, re-framing arguments, and ad hominem slur.
The red flags should have flown high when the first critical voices of science were shouted down. Then came the river of cash in the form of liberal grants for those researchers who towed the agenda – aka “payoffs.” The SUNY Albany case is the first of many needed to correct the tainted results.
The article states:
“In pushing to open up climate change debates to non-scientific disciplines, Hulme runs the risk perhaps of attracting accusations of not only “denier”, but also of “relativist”, which is almost as dirty a word in scientific circles. Hulme’s Christian beliefs might be a further invitation to ad hominem responses.”
Indeed. To be labeled a “relativist,” and commanded to limit uncertainties is confining in the classical sense. But the fact is uncertainties are far less today than when the debate began. Even while natural variability suggests a certain amount of chaos to be normal with climate.
Hulme’s suggestion to include non-science disciplines is a good one. There is a place in the heart of artists that deeply respects truth, regardless of political propriety. And alarmists must confront their outed “psychology of shame” – wherein evolved practitioners accuse primitive humanity of fouling the nest. The accusation has merit when discussing real toxic pollutants. It has zero merit when applied to man-made CO2. And social scientists should question the reasons for social engineering. Is it based on sound community approval, or mob reaction to mass media scare tactics?
Today, “business as usual” is the continuance of a fear-based campaign designed to limit market economies and tax the emission of a naturally occurring trace gas. The tax revenues are to finance social and political agendas by circumventing the democratic process. This is an attack not only on good scientific method founded on skepticism – it is an attack on the very nature of man. And those who oppose it deserve the honorific: humanitarian.
This is an excellent INDEPENDENT report of GW: http://www.osta.com/gw/GWanalysis.htm
A breath of fresh air from an AGW believer. The thing that so many of these frantic “true-believers” don’t grasp is that what they call “global warming” involves a lot of separate theses, only a few of which involve climate science. For example, “global warming would be a bad thing” isn’t so much climate science as agriculture and economics and marine biology and so on. “Global warming can best be stopped by restricting CO2 output” is a statement not about climate science at all, but about the economics and technology of the 21st century, which NO ONE knows much of anything about.
To summarize this long winded article, “Can’t we all just get along?”
Somewhere in the Guardian website – probably in Comment is Free – there is a piece by Mike Hulme from about two years ago, in which he calls for something he named “Post-normal Science”. As I recall, he felt that that pesky things like evidence should be o’er-leaped, so that politically correct conclusions could be drawn on global warming.
If he has really repented of his folly, then good.
Another True Believer leaves the fold (though not the belief). And now when he tries to speak in the language of true science, can expect to become yet another target for ad hominem attacks.
He helped create the monster he now laments; he should not be surprised when it turns on him as well (as he is already apparently aware).
despite the “poorly understood connection,” that won’t prevent us from publishing sensational statements like…
In fact some researchers think the next predicted solar activity peak, in 2012, could be one of the strongest ever, potentially kicking up storms that could bring modern technology to its knees.
Little Ice Age Unlikely, Scientists Say
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090505-sun-quiet.html
so, we dismiss out of hand the low levels of activity but hold out hope that the peak in 2012 will be one of the strongest ever, regardless of what the data suggest. i guess i shouldn’t be surprised…this kind of yellow journalism and science has become far too common these days!
bsneath (09:07:46) :
I would argue that one cannot be both a legitimate scientist and an advocate.
I’ve made this argument about Hansen on many occasions. Once he became an advocate, he was no longer a legitimate scientist, no matter how long his laundry list of accomplishments. This was not intended to diminish past accomplishments in any way – since I’m not really familiar with his non-advocate work, just to point out that NOW, he is behaving like an ideologue, not a scientist and the head of NASA GISS.
Mark
Magnus A
You are right, it is facism. To maintain power they must preserve the “consensus” by avoiding debate and ridiculing or discrediting the opposition. We all know that we should fear “police states.” But police are just a manifestation of authority. Scientists/Academics also have power of authority, which we must trust is supported by greater education and understanding. What is a NATIONAL Academy of Sciences? If, as Markey suggests, science should take precedence over democratic ideals, then we must submit to a scientific dictatorship. Is that better than any other dictatorship?