RUTHFULLY YOURS

Way, way back in April 2017, scientists around the world participated in the ‘March for Science’ as a show of force and unity against an allegedly anti-science Trump administration. Their motto was “science not silence”: many wrote that mantra on pieces of duct tape and stuck it across their mouths.

March for Science organizers claimed that “the best way to ensure science will influence policy is to encourage people to appreciate and engage with science. That can only happen through education, communication, and ties of mutual respect between scientists and their communities — the paths of communication must go both ways.”

But that was so three months ago.

Many scientists are now rejecting an open debate on anthropogenic global warming. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt appears ready to move forward with a “red-team, blue-team” exercise, where two groups of scientists publicly challenge each other’s evidence on manmade climate change. The idea was floated during a Congressional hearing last spring and outlined in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Steve Koonin, former undersecretary of energy in the Obama administration. Koonin said the public is unaware of the intense debate in climate science and how “consensus statements necessarily conceal judgment calls and debates and so feed the “settled,” “hoax” and “don’t know” memes that plague the political dialogue around climate change.”

It would work this way: A red team of scientists critiques a key climate assessment. The blue team responds. The back-and-forth continues until all the evidence is aired and refuted, followed by public hearings and an action plan based on the findings. It happens entirely out in the open. Koonin said this approach is used in high-consequence situations and “very different and more rigorous than traditional peer review, which is usually confidential and always adjudicated, rather than public and moderated.” (Climate scientist Judith Curry has a good primer on this concept here.)

Pruitt is prepared to pull the trigger on this idea, according to an article in E&E News last week. In an interview with Breitbart News on June 5, Pruitt touted the red-team, blue-team initiative, saying that “the American people need to have that type of honest open discussion, and it’s something we hope to provide as part of our leadership.”
Instead Of Dialoguing, Climate Scientists Preach

Now you would think the scientific establishment would embrace an opportunity to present their case to a wary, if disinterested, public. You would think the 97 percent of scientists who supposedly all agree human activity is causing climate change would eagerly line up to vanquish climate deniers, especially those in the Trump administration. You would think the same folks who fear a science-averse President Trump would be relieved his administration is encouraging a rigorous, forensic inquiry into the most consequential scientific issue of our time that has wide-ranging economic, social, and political ramifications around the world.

You would think.

But instead, many scientists and activists are expressing outrage at this logical suggestion, even advising colleagues not to participate. In a June 21 Washington Post op-ed, three top climate scientists repudiated the red-team concept, offended by the slightest suggestion that climate science needs fixing. Naomi Oreskes, Benjamin Salter, and Kerry Emanuel wrote that “calls for special teams of investigators are not about honest scientific debate. They are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science.”

There haven’t been any sunspots for the last 44 days, and some scientists believe that the sun is entering a period called a “deep solar minimum,” with unpredictable, but potentially devastating effects. But don’t worry: even if we don’t know what’s going to happen over the next couple of years, it is still “settled science” (ask Al Gore, if you doubt this) that in a century the “earth’s temperature” will rise and cause catastrophe.

Meanwhile, in the ort run, the science isn’t looking very settled. The New York Post reprints a story from the UK Sun:

The sun might soon batter us with a shower of deep space rays so intense, it could cause part of our atmosphere to collapse.

Space scientists reckon we are on the verge of a “deep solar minimum,” which is a period of low activity.

Unlike the name suggests, this could cause an outer layer of the atmosphere called the thermosphere to contract — and it’s not entirely clear what the effects of this could be on our planet.

Professor Yvonne Elsworth at the University of Birmingham in England believes that a “fundamental change in the nature of the [sun’s magnetic] dynamo may be in progress.”

It’s backed up by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory’s daily snaps, which have shown a spotless sun for 44 days in a row.

This led scientists to believe that it’s nearing a tumultuous period not seen since 2008.

There is too much “may” and “might” floating around here for me to be 100% confident that the atmosphere will “collapse.”

One finding that I have arrived at (and I am a “social scientist” with a PhD in Sociology, after all) is that claiming catastrophe is a good way for a scientist to get attention. Maybe even some grant money.

Back in 1974, the US physicist and polymath warned graduating students of ‘cargo cult science’ and the careerist urge to confirm the flawed orthodoxy of earlier and inaccurate results. Climate “science” was then in its infancy but the trajectory of its corruption has confirmed all his worst fears.

The trouble with mainstream climate scientists is that they’re third-rate scientists, and the reason they’re third-rate is that they’re dishonest. My authority for this statement is physicist Richard Feynman (picturd), who has been dead for 29 years but was ranked by his peers as one of the ten greatest physicists of all time. Feynman set out the parameters for honest science in general, and I’ve never yet seen a mainstream climate scientist live up to Feynman’s honesty test.

In 2015 I was transiting through Los Angeles airport and killing time in a bookshop. I bought Feynman’s paperback Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! because it seemed unusual for physicists to take pride in being funny.

In the book’s first essay he tells how, as a small kid, he earned pocket-money repairing people’s radios. A customer would tell him about a fault, and that would be enough to diagnose the problem without even turning on the set.

The book’s final essay – in between there’s wonderful entertainment – is called “Cargo Cult Science”. It’s the commencement address he gave to freshers at Caltech in 1974. The original cargo cults, as you probably know, involved post-war tribesmen in PNG building mock airstrips and control towers in the hope that this would attract US cargo planes to again deliver their cargoes of desirable goods. “They follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land,” Feynman told the students. He went on to talk about what is missing in bad science – honesty.

“It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

“Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

“In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

“We’ve learned from experience that the truth will out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. [Climate science is intrinsically not experimental but its modelling can now be checked against reality]. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in Cargo Cult Science.

The idea that the U.S. economy can be run solely with renewable energy — a claim that leftist politicians, environmentalists, and climate activists have endlessly promoted — has always been a fool’s errand. And on Monday, the National Academy of Sciences published a blockbuster paper by an all-star group of American scientists that says exactly that.

The paper, by Chris Clack, formerly with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado Boulder, and 20 other top scientists, appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It decimates the work of Mark Jacobson, the Stanford engineering professor whose wildly exaggerated claims about the economic and technical viability of a 100 percent renewable-energy system has made him a celebrity (he appeared on David Letterman’s show in 2013) and the hero of Sierra Clubbers, Bernie Sanders, and Hollywood movie stars, including Leonardo DiCaprio.

Jacobson became the darling of the green Left even though his work was based on Enron accounting, alternative facts, and technology hopium. Nevertheless, his claims were politically popular, and his academic papers routinely sailed through peer review. In 2015, Jacobson published a paper, co-written with Mark Delucchi, a research engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper, which claimed to offer “a low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem” with 100 percent renewables, went on to win the Cozzarelli Prize, an annual award handed out by the National Academy. A Stanford website said that Jacobson’s paper was one of six chosen by “the editorial board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from the more than 3,000 research articles published in the journal in 2015.” The fact that the National Academy would bestow such a prestigious award on such weak scholarship greatly embarrass the Academy, which gets 85 percent of its funding from the federal government.

In their scathing takedown of Jacobson, Clack and his co-authors — who include Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution, Dan Kammen of the University of California, Berkeley, former EPA Science Advisory Board chairman Granger Morgan, and Jane Long of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — concluded that Jacobson’s 2015 paper contained “numerous shortcomings and errors.” The paper used “invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions.” Those errors “render it unreliable as a guide about the likely cost, technical reliability, or feasibility of a 100 percent wind, solar, and hydroelectric power system.”

Among the biggest errors — and one that should force the Academy to withdraw Jacobson’s 2015 paper — is that Jacobson and Delucchi overstated by roughly a factor of ten the ability of the United States to increase its hydropower output. Furthermore, the paper ignores two key issues: electricity storage and land use. Jacobson claimed that the U.S. can store energy underground or store it in the form of hydrogen. Clack and his co-authors wrote that “there are no electric storage systems available today that can affordably and dependably store the vast amounts of energy needed over weeks to reliably satisfy demand using expanded wind and solar power generation alone.”

But the most obvious flaw in Jacobson’s scheme involves his years-long refusal to admit the massive amount of land his proposal would require; his myriad acolytes have repeated his nonsensical claims. For instance, last year, Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org and one of America’s highest-profile climate activists, wrote an August 2016 cover story for The New Republic in which he lauded Jacobson’s work and repeated Jacobson’s erroneous claim that his all-renewable program would need only “about four-tenths of America’s landmass.”

The money-grubbing hucksters of climate change, global warming, or whatever other catchphrase title is being used to scare the gullible Chicken Littles of the world claim modern “science” has the ability to foretell the future. Their predictions are no more reliable than those of a swami gazing into a crystal ball telling you that if you simply contribute money to his personal lottery for the next five years, he will guarantee a significant return.

There are a few issues that should be seriously considered before throwing tens of billions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars into an international slush fund like the Paris Accords. The leaders of the world’s various governments clamoring for more and more wealth re-distribution are more than happy to sign on to such nonsense, especially if the money is going to come from the United States.

First, the prognostications of climate doom and gloom occurring in the next 100 years ignore human history. The science of today may very well turn out to be as accurate as the science of yore which claimed the Earth was flat or that the sun revolved around the Earth. The modern-day alarmists are direct philosophical descendants of those who claimed that the only way to ever cross oceans was by sailing ship, or that there would never be any form of locomotion and all transport would be powered by animals, or the only way for humans to communicate long-distance was by pen and paper…and choose to ignore the results of the ingenuity and inventiveness of the individual human mind. No one can predict the technological marvels of the future or the impact these innovations will have on our lives.

Second, history has shown that thrusting vast amounts of money into the hands of corrupt politicians (but I repeat myself) and bureaucrats only serves to make those people rich. Has the bloated bureaucracy of the United Nations and the spoiled, pampered, and overpaid bureaucrats living large in Manhattan really made a significant change in the world? Wars are rampant; dictatorships flourish; polio still cripples millions; malaria still ravages third-world countries whose leaders live in palaces and drive around in armored limousines.

What government has ever developed a technology to improve life on the planet? Perhaps atomic energy is the exception that proves the rule, but that was initially developed to destroy. Most if not all advances in technology have been accomplished by the individual inventor, entrepreneur, or risk-taker. The telegraph, the telephone, electricity, the steam engine, all from individuals never from government. Even today, most technological advances come from the private sector. Why would anyone base his hopes on the promises of politicians?

Why are so many willing to cast trillions of dollars into a virtual bottomless pit of government graft, fraud, and waste? One hundred ninety-two nations of the world working toward a common goal? That is truly Alice in Wonderland fantasy.