The Risk of CAGW Is So Low

Dr. Alan Carlin, one of the Environmental Protection Agency’s senior research analysts, has determined that the low risk of CAGW means “that it is not currently worth doing anything to try to control it”;  see “A Multidisciplinary, Science-Based Approach to the Economics of Climate Change”, in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health:

Economic analyses of environmental mitigation and other interdisciplinary public policy issues can be much more useful if they critically examine what other disciplines have to say, insist on using the most relevant observational data and the scientific method, and examine lower-cost alternatives to the change proposed.  These general principles are illustrated by applying them to the case of climate change mitigation, one of the most interdisciplinary of public policy issues. The analysis shows how use of these principles leads to quite different conclusions than those of most previous such economic analyses [...].

The risk of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming appears to be so low that it is not currently worth doing anything to try to control it, including geo-engineering.  [...]

According to Chapter 9 of the IPCC AR4 report all the IPCC climate models predict that there should be a hot spot in the upper troposphere about 5–12 km above the Earth’s surface in the tropics caused by increased evaporation from warmer oceans leading to the accumulation of higher concentrations of water vapor in the upper troposphere [...].  The feedback creates the hotspot and is responsible for much of the temperature rises predicted by the IPCC models.  If non-water vapour greenhouse gases are significantly warming the Earth, the first signs of it are supposed to appear above the tropics.  Since no such hotspot has been found, the models and therefore the UN’s hypothesis concerning feedback are wrong.  [...]

Although it is not always necessary for environmental economists to understand the physical science aspects of the proposed environmental control measures proposed and to determine whether there may be lower-cost means to achieve the benefits desired from the proposed mitigation, it certainly never does any harm and in most cases involving multidisciplinary issues it is vital if economists are to provide realistic and useful advice to decision makers.  Some may object that in this specialized world economists should leave such matters to physical scientists since it is believed that they will know more about them.  The danger, of course, is that economists may place their trust in physical scientists who are either not sufficiently knowledgeable or have a prior bias towards particular physical science hypotheses or mitigation methods to the exclusion of others.  What is needed on the part of economists is an inquiring and open mind, insistence on use of the most relevant observational data and the scientific method, and technical curiosity so as to determine whether there may be lower cost or more efficient alternative methods to achieve whatever the environmental control measures they are evaluating are supposed to achieve.  Economists do not have to carry out the physical science research involved or invent the lower cost control measures, but they do need to recognize which research and control measures meet their needs in these respects and particularly which have been validated by use of the most relevant observational data and the scientific method.

What Has Happened to Scientific Method?

Available at Quadrant Online is “Science without Method”, by John Nicol:

Global warming, and its euphemistic sibling “climate change”, remain much in the news.  Specialist research groups around the world continue to produce an unending sequence of papers aimed at demonstrating a litany of problems which might arise should global warming resume.  The authors’ prime expertise is often found to be not in atmospheric physics or aeronomy, as one might have anticipated.  However, the topic of climate change itself provides for abundant research funding, from which they feed, more easily than other areas of research of greater interest and practical use.  Most of these papers are, of course, based upon the output from speculative and largely experimental, atmospheric models representing exercises in virtual reality, rather than observed, real-world, measurements and phenomena.  Which leads to the question “What scientific methodology is in operation here?”
Though much has been written concerning the scientific method, and the ill-defined question as to what constitutes a correct scientific approach to a complex problem, comparatively little comment has been made about the strange mix of empirical and virtual reality reasoning that characterises contemporary climate change research.  It is obvious that the many different disciplines described as being scientific, rather than social, economic, or of the arts, may apply somewhat different criteria to determine what fundamental processes should define the “scientific method” as applied for each discipline.  Dismayingly, for many years now there has been a growing tendency for many formerly “pure” scientific disciplines to embody characteristics of many others, and in some cases that includes the adoption of research attitudes and methods that are more appropriately applied in the arts and social sciences.  “Post-modernism”, if you like, has proved to be a contagious disease in academia generally.
Classical scientific method generally follows the simple protocol of first defining an hypothesis concerning the behaviour or cause of some phenomenon in nature, either physical, biological or chemical.  In most well defined areas of research, previous theory and experiment may provide such a wide and complex corpus of knowledge that a new hypothesis is not easily nor singly defined, and may even be left unstated.
This is most commonly the case when a number of diverse disciplines, all important for attaining an understanding of a particular problem, are providing results which lead to contradicting conclusions.  A contemporary example of this is discussions of the greenhouse effect, which is one of the most controversial topics ever to be considered within the scientific community.  Conventional thinking on the greenhouse effect is encapsulated in the IPCC’s statement that “We believe that most of the increase in global temperatures during the second half of the twentieth century, were very likely due to the increases in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide”.
Clearly this statement would be better worded were it to have been framed as a hypothesis rather than a belief, and treating the statement that way allows it to be rigorously tested (“beliefs”, which are unable to be tested, fall outside of the spectrum of science).  In the real scientific world, for such an hypothesis to survive rigorous scrutiny, and thereby to perhaps grow in strength from a hypothesis to a theory, requires that it be examined and re-examined from every possible angle over periods of decades and longer.
In conventional research, the next step—following the formulation of the hypothesis in whatever form it may take—is to select what measurements or analyses need to be done in order to test the hypothesis and thus to advance understanding of the topic.  Most often, theoretical reasoning as to why an hypothesis might be correct or incorrect is followed by the development of experiments in laboratories, or the making of careful observations in nature, which can be organised and classified, and from which measurements can be made and conclusions drawn.  [...]
Out of [a] cut and paste “history” of physics, comes the strongest criticism of the mainstream climate science research as it is carried on today.  The understanding of the climate may appear simple compared to quantum theory, since the computer models that lie at the heart of the IPCC’s warming alarmism don’t need to go beyond Newtonian Mechanics.  [...]  Yet in contemporary research on matters to do with climate change, and despite enormous expenditure, not one serious attempt has been made to check the veracity of the numerous assumptions involved in greenhouse theory by actual experimentation.
The one modern, definitive experiment, the search for the signature of the green house effect has failed totally.  [...]
In addition, the data representing the earth’s effective temperature over the past 150 years, show that a global human contribution to this temperature can not be distinguished or isolated at a measurable level above that induced by clearly observed and understood, natural effects, such as the partially cyclical, redistribution of surface energy in the El Niño.  [...]
So how do our IPCC scientists deal with this?  Do they revise the theory to suit the experimental result, for example by reducing the climate sensitivity assumed in their GCMs?  Do they carry out different experiments (i.e., collect new and different datasets) which might give more or better information?  Do they go back to basics in preparing a new model altogether, or considering statistical models more carefully?  Do they look at possible solar influences instead of carbon dioxide?  Do they allow the likelihood that papers by persons like Svensmark, Spencer, Lindzen, Soon, Shaviv, Scafetta and McLean (to name just a few of the well-credentialed scientists who are currently searching for alternatives to the moribund IPCC global warming hypothesis) might be providing new insights into the causes of contemporary climate change?

Unfortunately, the meretricious Ross Garnaut’s Garnaut Climate Change Review—in order, surely, to reach its premeditated, predetermined conclusion—relies on governmentally-approved, “settled science”, a fetish for peer-reviewed papers (but, of course, from only one sub-set of officially approved papers), and the fallacious argumentum ad vercundiam:

The Review took as its starting point:

... on the balance of probabilities and not as a matter of belief, the majority opinion of the Australian and international scientific communities that human activities resulted in substantial global warming from the mid-20th century (Garnaut 2008).

Also underpinning the Review was the knowledge from the majority science, that continued growth in greenhouse gas concentrations caused by human-induced emissions would generate high risks of dangerous climate change.  [...]

The Review drew extensively on the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published in 2007.  The IPCC Assessment Reports are a consolidation of all the peer-reviewed science on climate change, its impacts, and mitigation.[*]  They represent the research and input of thousands of scientists and are the authoritative point of reference on climate change.

*  The same IPCC reports which derived claims that ice is disappearing from the world’s mountain tops from a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine; which based claims that the Amazonian rainforest is remarkably vulnerable on “anonymous propaganda published on the website of a small Brazilian environmental advocacy group”; which first asserted that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035, but then admitted that the claim was completely unfounded; etc.

Consensus Is Not Science

From “Aliens Cause Global Warming”, a Caltech Michelin Lecture (January 17, 2003), by Michael Crichton:

I want to [...] talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science.  I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks.  Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.  Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let’s be clear:  the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus.  Consensus is the business of politics.  Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.

In science consensus is irrelevant.  What is relevant is reproducible results.  The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.  There is no such thing as consensus science.  If it’s consensus, it isn’t science.   If it’s science, it isn’t consensus.  Period.

In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of.  Let's review a few cases.

In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth.  One woman in six died of this fever.

In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them.  The consensus said no.

In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence.  The consensus said no.

In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management.  The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post.  There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century.  Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty-five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent “skeptics” around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored.  And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.

There is no shortage of other examples.  In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra.  The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the “pellagra germ.”   The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause.  Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor.  The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory.

Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant.  They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called “Goldberger's filth parties.”  Nobody contracted pellagra.

The consensus continued to disagree with him.  There was, in addition, a social factor-southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because it meant that social reform was required.  They continued to deny it until the 1920s.   Result—despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took years to see the light.

Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart.  The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years.  The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology—until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading.  The result:  it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.

And shall we go on?  The examples can be multiplied endlessly.  Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory.  Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy.  The list of consensus errors goes on and on.

Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked.  Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough.

Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc².  Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away.  It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

Environmentalism as Religion

From “Mankind’s Greatest Challenge”, Remarks to the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, September 15, 2003, by Michael Crichton:

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism.  Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion?  Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability.  Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment.  Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures.  They are profoundly conservative beliefs.  They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know.  I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead.  But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them.  These are not facts that can be argued.  These are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism.  Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief.  It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved.  Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom.  Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.  [...]

With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious.  But not if it’s a religion.  Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn’t quit when the world doesn’t end on the day he expects.  He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets.  One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.  [...]

How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline?  There's a simple answer:  we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm.  I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren't true.  It isn't that these “facts” are exaggerations of an underlying truth.  Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way.  Not at all—what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple.  Falsehoods that they know to be false.  [...]

Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics.  And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost.  We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better.  That's not a good future for the human race.  That’s our past.  So it’s time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that.

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From “Environmentalism as Religion”, by John M. Ostrowski:

It should not surprise us that environmentalists demand sacrifices, for any religion demands sacrifices.  And like other religions, environmentalism is a human-centered one.  Yes, in its purest form, it is Earth worship; its reverence is directed at something decidedly non-human.  However, the beliefs and tenets of the faith concern humans and their role in natural history.  Inevitably, in the modern world, this role is an antagonistic one for the environmentalists. Humans are the problem, and the solution will demand some bane to human beings.  It is this simple fact that has led Peter Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace and a man who has become disaffected with the environmental zealots, to call environmentalists “anti-human.”
Whereas most religions seek the betterment of humanity, environmentalism is unique in that it seeks the opposite.  The sacrifices that it demands be made will result in severe harm for those who need help the most.  In the developing world, environmentalists see an excellent area for proselytization and a place to implement their policies – for existing infrastructure is hard to change, but poor countries provide environmentalists with a tabula rasa.  They preach the need for solar and wind power in the developing world.  These two forms of energy, however, are not reliable or powerful enough for a world that is looking to industrialize.  Imagine, for example, a modern factory of any type running completely on solar or wind power.  Difficult to imagine?  Of course.  If the environmentalist vision of the developing world is allowed to take root, billions of people who can benefit greatly from industrialization will be condemned to poverty for the rest of their life.  It’s sad that rich, Western environmentalists are so quick to demand this sacrifice of others.  That the people they demand it of are the ones who will be harmed the most by it is downright reprehensible.
Finally, like many religions, there is a strong emphasis in environmentalism on the end of the world.  Fear mongering and predictions of the apocalypse are the primary evangelizing tools of environmentalists.  In the past we’ve endured warnings about overpopulation, nuclear holocausts, and now a global climate disaster.  And like the apocalyptic predictions of other religions, those of environmentalism have never come to pass.  But luckily for them, people have a short memory, and fear is a powerful persuasive tool.  By the time it is clear that anthropogenic climate chance not only won’t cause the end of the world but also isn’t even happening, no one will remember the hyperbolic claims made by environmental zealots.  Instead, we will be entertaining their latest apocalyptic fantasy.

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From “The Economics of Climate Change:  an Appeal to Reason” (a lecture given to the Centre for Policy Studies, London, on November 1, 2006), by Lord Nigel Lawson:

The new priests are scientists (well rewarded with research grants for their pains) rather than clerics of the established religions, and the new religion is eco-fundamentalism.  But it is a distinction without much of a difference.  And the old religions have not been slow to make common cause.

Does all this matter?  Up to a point, no.  Unbelievers should not be dismissive of the comfort that religion can bring. If people feel better when they buy a hybrid car and see a few windmills dotted about (although perhaps not in their own back yard), then so be it.  And in a democracy, if greenery is what the people want, politicians will understandably provide it, dressed in the most high-flown rhetoric they can muster.

Indeed, if people are happy to pay a carbon tax, provided it is not at too high a level, and the proceeds are used to cut income tax, that would not be a disaster, either.  It would have to be a consumer-based tax, however, since in the globalized world economy industry is highly mobile, whereas individuals are much less so.  But the new religion of eco-fundamentalism does present dangers on at least three levels.  
The first is that the governments of Europe, fired in many cases by anti-Americanism (never underestimate the extent to which distaste for President Bush has fuelled the anti-global warming movement), may get so carried away by their rhetoric as to impose measures which do serious harm to their economies.  That is a particular danger at the present time in this country.  No doubt, when the people come to suffer the results they will insist on a change of policy, or else vote the offending government out of office.  But it would be better to avoid the damage in the first place. 



The second, and more fundamental, danger is that the global salvationist movement is profoundly hostile to capitalism and the market economy. There are already increasing calls for green protectionism – for the imposition of trade restrictions against those countries which fail to agree to curb their carbon dioxide emissions.  Given the fact that the only way in which the world’s poor 
will ever be able to escape from their poverty is by embracing capitalism and the global market economy, this is not good news. 


But the third danger is even more profound.  Today we are very conscious of the threat we face from the supreme intolerance of Islamic fundamentalism.  It could not be a worse time to abandon our own traditions of reason and tolerance, and to embrace instead the irrationality and intolerance of eco-fundamentalism, where reasoned questioning of its mantras is regarded as a form of blasphemy.  There is no greater threat to the people of this planet than the retreat from reason we see all around us today.

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From “Global Warming as Religion and not Science”, by John Brignell:

Faith is a belief held without evidence.  The scientific method, a loose collection of procedures of great variety, is based on precisely the opposite concept, as famously declared by Thomas Henry Huxley:

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such.  For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

Huxley was one of a long tradition of British sceptical philosophers.  From the Bacons, through the likes of Locke, Hume and Russell, to the magnificent climax of Popper’s statement of the principle of falsifiability, the scientific method was painfully established, only to be abandoned in a few short decades.  It is one of the great ironies of modern history that the nation that was the cradle of the scientific method came to lead the process of its abandonment.  The great difference, then, is that religion demands belief, while science requires disbelief.  There is a great variety of faiths.  Atheism is just as much a faith as theism.  There is no evidence either way.  There is no fundamental clash between faith and science – they do not intersect.  The difficulties arise, however, when one pretends to be the other.  [...]

One of the most notorious demagogues of the godless religion is Al Gore.  He is certainly no great orator, but he makes up for it with chutzpah.  His disregard for truth is exemplified by his characteristic and ubiquitous pose in front of a satellite photograph of hurricane Katrina.  Even some of the most vehement climate “scientists” refrain from connecting that particular isolated and monstrously tragic event with global warming.  Likewise his Old Testament style prophecies of further disasters, such as floods due to a rise in sea level, greatly exceed the more modest claims of the “professionals”.  As in the overthrow of the cities of the plain and other biblical prophecies, Gore promises a rain of fire and brimstone on us, unless we change our ways.

Gore also displays all the characteristics of the classical religious hypocrite.  He disregards his own proscriptions with abandonment and ostentation.  By his own measure (carbon footprint) his sins are great; at least twenty times those of the average American.  It is all right though, because he purchases absolution (carbon offsets) through his own company.  As he is a private individual it is not known whether he profits directly, but at a minimum he does not pay out of his taxable income and, worst of all, he demonstrates that the rich are immune from any of the actual privations that attachment to the new religion visits upon its poorer adherents.  This is also not unknown in traditional religions and has been a source of material for satirists throughout the centuries.  [...]

Freedom of speech and publication is at the very heart of science.   Even the most foolish of hypotheses is allowed to be offered for examination.  In much of religion the opposite is true; challenging the established dogma is heresy, for which the punishment has ranged from ostracism to horrific torture and death.   One of the greatest ironies produced by the successful policy of entryism by the eco-theologians is that it is none other than the Royal Society that has been orchestrating the attempt to censor any deviation from establishment beliefs.  Authoritarian politicians, such as Congressman Brad Miller, would give such suppression the force of law.

It is a curious repetition of history that those who advance the hypothesis that the sun is the controlling element in changes of climate are vilified, just as Galileo was, for supporting the Copernican heliocentric description of the solar system.  Yet the sun is clearly the driver for climate – if it stopped shining, the earth’s temperature would drop to near absolute zero.  In the establishment dogma the sun is barely mentioned, while the puny efforts of mankind are gratuitously magnified out of proportion. In a scientific approach to climate, a full understanding of the behaviour of that solitary driver would be the first prerequisite, but this is waived in the interests of piety; so leading solar researchers have been deprived of funding.  [...]

The human spirit is sick.  It soared during the enlightenment of the eighteenth century.  It flowered during the nineteenth.  It beat off the tyrants of the twentieth century.  Now, at an alarming rate, it is surrendering its freedoms to a concocted religion based on fraudulent science.   Of course, it is not only science that has suffered in the overwhelming cultural downturn.  The great artistic tradition has given way to displays of dead animals and soiled beds.   In much of what passes for literature and drama, the expletives remain while the loftier aspirations of humanity are deleted.  Entertainment is debased by displays of banality, cruelty and vacuous, groundless celebrity.  It was science, however, that gave us lives of a length, comfort and healthiness that were unthought-of, even within human memory; a gift that is cold-bloodedly, but covertly, being denied to millions in poorer parts of the world.  Extremists of the new religion regard humanity as an inconvenience or a pestilence that can be disposed of (not including themselves, of course).

Above all, science represented the triumph of humanity over the primitive superstitions that haunted our ancestors, a creation of pure reason, a monument to that evolutionary (or, if you prefer, God-given) miracle of the human brain.  It is too valuable just to be tossed away like a used tissue.  But who will speak for science when the barbarian is already inside the gate?