Have you every wondered why the debate on global warming is so polarised? I certainly have. I think Steve Mosher has come up with an explanation (which I hope you’ll read in our book titled ‘Climategate’ and coming soon to a retailer near you).
When big tobacco finally gave up the ghost (and their documents) in the fight to preserve their profits, we all discovered that one of their principal strategies for more than 25 years was to game the scientific publishing system to sow doubt and uncertainty about the harm caused by cigarettes. Although they ultimately lost, they protected their business models long enough to keep their share prices high, at the expense of millions of lives lost or ruined.
When global warming became an issue, the people who were first concerned about it included many who had watched the tobacco wars and were intimately familiar with the tactics used by tobacco companies. They feared that big oil interests would adopt the same tactics to preserve their profits, by casting doubt on global warming.
Some of this actually happened. There are some think tanks and institutions that received money from energy companies and published papers seeking to cast doubt on global warming–and some of them still do so. But those leading the skeptical charge against the activists are not among them. The biggest sites attracting skeptics are Watt’s Up With That and Climate Audit, both independent of any funding at all, let alone money from Big Oil. The think tanks seem slow and sluggish by comparison, and they are following the news, not making it. Perhaps because of this, energy companies have reduced or stopped their funding of these think tanks on climate issues. Instead, they are embracing cap and trade (which will actually benefit them hugely–although why will take another column, sadly), and funding environmental NGOs. So the enemy they feared has been quickly and effectively neutralized. But environmental activists didn’t realise it. They think critics are still selling doubt as a deliberate strategy.
But the fear of tobacco-like strategies led environmental activists to decisions that have had two really unfortunate consequences. Fearing that any sign of uncertainty would be seized upon by their opponents, they were fierce in their declarations of their rightness and the virtue of their cause. They could show no doubt at all. This led to their inability to distinguish between friends and enemies, unquestionably. Anybody who didn’t agree completely with the agenda was dangerous–they could corrode the certainty that was their first line of defence. Most of the people who are called climate change ‘deniers’ (including your humble author) are not at all deniers of climate change, or even human contributions to it. This has led to alienation of potential allies, and some strange bedfellows emerging as skeptics, lukewarmers and those agnostic on the issue find that they are being attacked by the Joe Romms of the world and end up making common cause with each other. Horribly mistaken strategy.
But far worse, they adopted a party line that called an infant science infallible, which has led them to protecting arguments that grow ever more tenuous–almost indefensible. To do this, we see in the Climategate scandal (did I, um, mention that Steven Mosher and I are writing a book about this?) that scientists had to resort to ever shadier practices to preserve the illusion of infallibility, suppressing dissent and dissenters, refusing to make their data and metadata available for inspection, and hiding evidence of less than perfect sources of data.
In effect, their fear of being gamed by tactics stolen from Big Tobacco has led almost inexorably to their adoption of tactics last used by, you guessed it, Big Tobacco.
Climate science is new, even if the physics and calculations behind it are not. Satellite coverage of this planet is 30 years old. When we see Arctic ice melt, we don’t know if it did the same thing 31 years ago–because we weren’t measuring it. I’m concerned about Arctic ice–but we just don’t know. The Argo buoys that accurately measure ocean heat were put out there in 2003 (I think–corrections?). The thermocouples used to measure land temperatures in the United States were installed in the 80s. We are only now measuring glaciers at the same time. We are only now looking globally at storms and measuring frequency and intensity with any accuracy at all.
And yet, despite the newness of it all, you hear no trace of uncertainty in the media and political discussions about climate change–and those who express uncertainty are too often excommunicated from the hip and cool clique of kids saving the planet from Big Oil. And their enemies list is growing daily.
There is scope for debate – and innumerable newspaper quizzes – about who was the most influential public figure of the year, or which the most significant event. But there can be little doubt which word won the prize for most important adjective. 2009 was the year in which “global” swept the rest of the political lexicon into obscurity. There were “global crises” and “global challenges”, the only possible resolution to which lay in “global solutions” necessitating “global agreements”. Gordon Brown actually suggested something called a “global alliance” in response to climate change. (Would this be an alliance against the Axis of Extra-Terrestrials?)
Some of this was sheer hokum: when uttered by Gordon Brown, the word “global”, as in “global economic crisis”, meant: “It’s not my fault”. To the extent that the word had intelligible meaning, it also had political ramifications that were scarcely examined by those who bandied it about with such ponderous self-importance. The mere utterance of it was assumed to sweep away any consideration of what was once assumed to be the most basic principle of modern democracy: that elected national governments are responsible to their own people – that the right to govern derives from the consent of the electorate.
The dangerous idea that the democratic accountability of national governments should simply be dispensed with in favour of “global agreements” reached after closed negotiations between world leaders never, so far as I recall, entered into the arena of public discussion. Except in the United States, where it became a very contentious talking point, the US still holding firmly to the 18th-century idea that power should lie with the will of the people.
Nor was much consideration given to the logical conclusion of all this grandiose talk of global consensus as unquestionably desirable: if there was no popular choice about approving supranational “legally binding agreements”, what would happen to dissenters who did not accept their premises (on climate change, for example) when there was no possibility of fleeing to another country in protest? Was this to be regarded as the emergence of world government? And would it have powers of policing and enforcement that would supersede the authority of elected national governments? In effect, this was the infamous “democratic deficit” of the European Union elevated on to a planetary scale. And if the EU model is anything to go by, then the agencies of global authority will involve vast tracts of power being handed to unelected officials. Forget the relatively petty irritations of Euro?bureaucracy: welcome to the era of Earth-bureaucracy, when there will be literally nowhere to run.
But, you may say, however dire the political consequences, surely there is something in this obsession with global dilemmas. Economics is now based on a world market, and if the planet really is facing some sort of man-made climate crisis, then that too is a problem that transcends national boundaries. Surely, if our problems are universal the solutions must be as well.
I’m going to sketch a chronology and analysis that draw on the history of several centuries of science and on many volumes written about that. In being concise, I’ll make some very sweeping generalizations without acknowledging necessary exceptions or nuances. But the basic story is solidly in the mainstream of history of science, philosophy of science,sociology of science, and the like, what’s nowadays called “science & technology studies” (STS).
It never was really true, of course, as the conventional wisdom tends even now to imagine, that “the scientific method” guarantees objectivity, that scientists work impersonally to discover truth, that scientists are notably smarter, more trustworthy, more honest, so tied up in their work that they neglect everything else, don’t care about making money . . . But it is true that for centuries scientists weren’t subject to multiple and powerful conflicts of interest. There is no “scientific method.” Science is done by people; people aren’t objective. Scientists are just like other professionals – to use a telling contemporary parallel, scientists are professionals just like the wheelers and dealers on Wall Street: not exactly dishonest, but looking out first and foremost for Number One.
“Modern” science dates roughly from the 17th century. It was driven by the sheer curiosity of lay amateurs and the God-worshipping curiosity of churchmen; there was little or no conflict of interest with plain truth-seeking. The truth-seekers formed voluntary associations: academies like the Royal Society of London. Those began to publish what happened at their meetings, and some of those Proceedings and Transactions have continued publication to the present day. These meetings and publications were the first informal steps to contemporary “peer review.”
During the 19th century, “scientist” became a profession, one could make a living at it. Research universities were founded, and with that came the inevitable conflict of interest between truth-seeking and career-making, especially since science gained a very high status and one could become famous through success in science. (An excellent account is by David Knight in The Age of Science.)
Still it was pretty much an intellectual free market, in which the entrepreneurs could be highly independent because almost all science was quite inexpensive and there were a multitude of potential patrons and sponsors, circumstances that made for genuine intellectual competition.
The portentous change to ”Big Science” really got going in mid-20th century. Iconic of the new circumstances remains the Manhattan Project to produce atomic bombs. Its dramatic success strengthened the popular faith that “science” can do anything, and very quickly, given enough resources. More than half a century later, people still talk about having a “Manhattan Project” to stop global warming, eradicate cancer, whatever.
So shortly after World War II, the National Science Foundation (NSF) was established, and researchers could get grants for almost anything they wanted to do, not only from NSF but also from the Atomic Energy Commission, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of the Interior, the Agriculture Department . . . as well as from a number of private foundations. I experienced the tail end of this bonanza after I came to the United States in the mid-1960s. Everyone was getting grants. Teachers colleges were climbing the prestige ladder to become research universities, funded by grant-getting faculty “stars”: colleges just had to appoint some researchers, those would bring in the moolah, that would pay for graduate students to do the actual work, and the “overhead” or “indirect costs” associated with the grants – often on the order of 25%, with private universities sometimes even double that – allowed the institutions to establish all sorts of infrastructure and administrative structures. In the 1940s, there had been 107 PhD-granting universities in the United States; by 1978 there were more than 300.
Institutions competed with one another for faculty stars and to be ranked high among “research universities,” to get their graduate programs into the 20 or so “Top Graduate Departments” – rankings that were being published at intervals for quite a range of disciplines.
Everything was being quantified, and the rankings pretty much reflected quantity, because of course that’s what you can measure “objectively”: How many grants? How much money? How many papers published? How many citations to those papers? How many students? How many graduates placed where?
This quantitative explosion quickly reached the limits of possible growth. That had been predicted early on by Derekde Solla Price, historian of science and pioneer of “scientometrics” and “Science Indicators,” quantitative measures of scientific and technological activity. Price had recognized that science had been growing exponentially with remarkable regularity since roughly the 17th century: doubling about every 15 years had been the numbers of scientific journals being published, the numbers of papers being published in them, the numbers of abstracts journals established to digest the flood of research, the numbers of researchers . . . .
Soon after WWII, Price noted, expenditures on research and development (R&D) had reached about 2.5% of GDP in industrialized countries, which meant quite obviously that continued exponential growth had become literally impossible. And indeed the growth slowed, and quite dramatically by the early 1970s. I saw recently that the Obama administration expressed the ambition to bring R&D to 3% of GDP, so there’s indeed been little relative growth in the last half century.
Now, modern science had developed a culture based on limitless growth. Huge numbers of graduates were being turned out, many with the ambition to do what their mentors had done: become entrepreneurial researchers bringing in grants wholesale and commanding a stable of students and post-docs who could churn out the research and generate a flood of publications. By the late 1960s or early 1970s, for example, to my personal knowledge, one of the leading electrochemists in the United States in one of the better universities was controlling annual expenditures of many hundreds of thousands of dollars (1970s dollars!), with several postdocs each supervising a horde of graduate students and pouring out the paper.
The change from unlimited possibilities to a culture of steady state, to science as zero-sum game, represents a genuine crisis: If one person gets a grant, some number of others don’t. The “success rate” in applications to NSF or the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is no more than 25% on average nowadays, less so among the not-yet-established institutions. So it would make sense for researchers to change their aims, their beliefs about what is possible, to stop counting success in terms of quantities: but they can’t do that because the institutions that employ them still count success in terms of quantity, primarily the quantity of dollars brought in. To draw again on a contemporary analogy, scientific research and the production or training of researchers expanded in bubble-like fashion following World War II; that bubble was pricked in the early 1970s and has been deflating with increasingly obvious consequences ever since.
One consequence of the bubble’s burst is that there are far too many would-be researchers and would-be research institutions chasing grants. Increasing desperation leads to corner-cutting and frank cheating. Senior researchers established in comfortable positions guard their own privileged circumstances jealously, and that means in some part not allowing their favored theories and approaches to be challenged by the Young Turks. Hence knowledge monopolies and research cartels.
A consequence of Big Science is that very few if any researchers can work as independent entrepreneurs. They belong to teams or institutions with inevitably hierarchical structures. Where independent scientists owed loyalty first and foremost to scientific truth, now employee researchers owe loyalty first to employers, grant-givers, sponsors. (For this change in ideals and mores, see John Ziman, Prometheus Bound, 1994.) Science used to be compared to religion, and scientists to monks – in the late 19th century, T. H. Huxley claimed quite seriously to be giving Lay Sermons on behalf of the Church of Scientific; but today’s scientists, as already said, are more like Wall Street professionals than like monks.
Since those who pay the piper call the tune, research projects are chosen increasingly for non-scientific reasons; perhaps political ones, as when President Nixon declared war on cancer at a time when the scientific background knowledge made such a declaration substantively ludicrous and doomed to failure for the foreseeable future. With administrators in control because the enterprises are so large, bureaucrats set the rules and make the decisions. For advice, they naturally listen to the senior well-established figures, so grants go only to “mainstream” projects.
Nowadays there are conflicts of interest everywhere. Researchers benefit from individual consultancies. University faculty establish personal businesses to exploit their specialized knowledge which was gained largely at public expense. Institutional conflicts of interest are everywhere: There are university-industry collaborations; some universities have toyed with establishing their own for-profit enterprises to exploit directly the patents generated by their faculty; research universities have whole bureaucracies devoted to finding ways to make money from the university’s knowledge stock, just as the same or parallel university bureaucracies sell rights to use the university’s athletics logos. It is not at all an exaggeration to talk of an academic-government-industry complex whose prime objective is not the search for abstract scientific truth.
Widely known is that President Eisenhower had warned of the dangers of a military-industrial complex. Much less well known is that Eisenhower was just as insightful and prescient about the dangers from Big Science:
in holding scientific research and discovery in respect . . . we must also be alert to the . . . danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite
That describes in a nutshell today’s knowledge monopolies. A single theory acts as dogma once the senior, established researchers have managed to capture the cooperation of the political powers. The media take their cues also from the powers that be and from the established scientific authorities, so “no one” even knows that alternatives exist to HIV/AIDS theory, to the theory that human activities are contributing to climate change, that the Big Bang might not have happened, that it wasn’t an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, and so on.
The bitter lesson is that the traditionally normal process of science, open argument and unfettered competition, can no longer be relied upon to deliver empirically arrived at, relatively objective understanding of the world’s workings. Political and social activism and public-relations efforts are needed, as public policies are increasingly determined by the actions of lobbyists backed by tremendous resources and pushing a single dogmatic approach. No collection of scientifically impeccable writings can compete against an International Panel on Climate Change and a Nobel Peace Prize awarded for Albert Gore’s activism and “documentary” film – and that is no prophesy, for the evidence is here already, in the thousands of well-qualified environmental scientists who have for years petitioned for an unbiased analysis of the data. No collection of scientifically impeccable writings can compete against the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, innumerable eminent charities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, when it comes to questions of HIV and AIDS – and again that is no prophesy, because the data have been clear for a couple of decades that HIV is not, cannot be the cause of AIDS.
As to HIV and AIDS, maybe the impetus to truth may come from politicians who insist on finding out exactly what the benefits are of the roughly $20 billion we – the United States – are spending annually under the mistaken HIV/AIDS theory. Or maybe the impetus to truth may come from African Americans, who may finally rebel against the calumny that it is their reprehensible behavior that makes them 7 to 20 times more likely to test ”HIV-positive” than their white American compatriots; or perhaps from South African blacks who are alleged to be “infected” at rates as high as 30%, supposedly because they are continually engaged in “concurrent multiple sexual relationships,” having multiple sexual partners at any given time but changing them every few weeks or months. Or from a court case or series of them, because of ill health caused by toxic antiretroviral drugs administered on the basis of misleading “HIV” tests; or perhaps because one or more of the “AIDS denialists” wins libel judgment against one or more of those who call them Holocaust deniers. Maybe the impetus to truth may come from the media finally seizing on any of the above as something “news-worthy.”
At any rate, the science has long been clear, and the need is for action at a political, social, public-relations, level. In this age of knowledge monopolies and research cartels, scientific truth is suppressed by the most powerful forces in society. It used to be that this sort of thing would be experienced only in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, but nowadays it happens in democratic societies as a result of what President Eisenhower warned against: ”public policy . . . become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Despite the brave words Wednesday about holding out until the summer for a better deal, it looks as if the world’s leaders are going all-out for a headline-grabbing agreement at the slugfest, determined not to leave Copenhagen until “the deal is sealed” – in the current vernacular.
Twelve figure numbers were floating around all yesterday, either a hundred billion dollars or euros depending on who you listened to, with increasingly wild emission cut figures proffered.
The reality, however, was broken by the New York Times which “leaked” (no scruples here, unlike certain e-mails) a draft UN document which purported to show that even if all the highest promises on emission cuts were kept, the temperature would still go screaming up to 3°c above the baseline – whatever that is – risking, according to the warmists, “runaway global warming”.
You have to work very hard to find out why the world leaders seem so unconcerned about this prospect, the game being given away by the Zimbabwe Herald whose journalists obviously haven’t sussed the importance of what they are writing.
From this august journal, we learn that the negotiations were “rescued from the brink of collapse” when delegates agreed to compromise on the two contending positions by keeping the Kyoto Protocol and devising another agreement to encompass the United States and its allies who have refused to ratify Kyoto.
This is nothing to do with the headline billions and all the rest. Nope, the deal is that the Kyoto Protocol is saved – which is what all the fuss was really about. That safeguards the carbon market and opens the way for it to expand to the $2-trillion level by the year 2020. Against that, even €100 billion is chump-change – you can buy countries with that sort of money.
Their deal in place, the kleptocrats and the Corporatocracy can go away happy and plan how to spend all their ill-gotten gains, leaving the leaders to grandstand, make their deals, shake hands and strut through their photo-sessions before jetting off in olumes of “carbon” to be greeted as saviours by their underwhelmed peoples.
As for saving the planet, well no-one really believes that greenie shit anyway … except the greenies, and they don’t matter. There is plenty of pepper spray left and no shortage of temporary detention space. Now that the money men have got what they came for, all the rest is theatre.
Lord Christopher Monckton warns that the secretive draft version of the Copenhagen climate change treaty represents a global government power grab on an “unimaginable scale,” and mandates the creation of 700 new bureaucracies as well as a colossal raft of new taxes including 2 percent levies on both GDP and every international financial transaction.
Speaking with The Alex Jones Show, Monckton, who is in Copenhagen attending the UN climate summit, said that when he attempted to obtain a copy of the current draft of the negotiating text agreement, he was initially rebuffed before he threatened an international diplomatic incident unless the document was forthcoming.
“I insisted and it took about 10 minutes and they consulted each other with three or four of them arguing over it – none of them would produce the document….I said I know this treaty exists because this is what the conference is all about,” said Monckton.
Only after Monckton threatened repercussions was he handed the the current draft of the treaty, and the details it contained are perhaps a clue as to why the UN officials were so keen to keep it under wraps.
“Once again they are desperately trying to conceal from everybody here the magnitude of what they’re attempting to do – they really are attempting to set up a world government,” said Monckton, adding that the word “government” was no longer used but the process of further centralization of power into global hands was clearly spelled out in the treaty.
Monckton said that the new world government outlined in the treaty would be handed powers to, “Tax the American economy to the extent of 2 percent GDP, to impose a further tax of 2 percent on every financial transaction….and to close down effectively the economies of the west, transfer your jobs to third world countries – all of that is still in the treaty draft.”
As the leaked document out of Copenhagen reported on by the London Guardian revealed yesterday, this massive new system of global taxation will be paid not to the UN, but directly into the coffers of the World Bank.
“The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol – the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions,”reported the Guardian.
Monckton illustrated the size of the new taxes being proposed by noting they amounted to at least half of the entire US defense budget.
“This is how they are going to fund this vast new government they’re setting up,” said Monckton, adding that he counted around 700 new bureaucracies that would be created as a result of the treaty, which would be bankrolled by taxpayers even outside of the raft of new taxes the treaty would create.
Monckton outlined how the new taxes would be enforced, stating, “They’re going to auction allowances to emit greenhouse gases and if you don’t buy an allowance to emit greenhouse gases, you won’t be allowed to emit them,” adding that the text contained a provision for a “uniform global levy of $2 dollars per ton of CO2 for all fossil fuel emissions,” as well as an additional tax on every commercial plane journey, except ones that go in or out of poorer countries.
There would also be a “global levy on international monetary transactions – that means every transfer of money across borders will be taxed,” said Monckton, adding that this would be on top of the GDP tax.
The treaty outlines, “Penalties or fines for non-compliance,” in developed countries and the creation of an international police force to “enforce its will by imposing unlimited financial penalties on any countries whose performance under this treaty they don’t like,” added Monckton, saying that it amounted to a total global government takeover on an “unimaginable scale”.
“We’re looking at a grab for absolute power and absolute financial control worldwide by the UN and its associated bureaucracies and 700 new bureaucratic bodies,” said Monckton.
Speaking about how such draconian measures were being forced through despite the recent scandal surrounding how key IPCC-affiliated scientists conspired to “hide the decline” in global warming, Monckton emphasized how the climate change establishment were still ludicrously attempting to downplay the significance of the climategate emails by merely repeating their already discredited propaganda about global warming.
“What has happened is that the mainstream media has done themselves terrible damage by signing up to this climate nonsense and then by servilely refusing to admit that climategate was happening, admit how serious it was and simply inform their readers of what was actually in these emails,” said Monckton, “Admissions that while they’re telling us, as the Met Office did just today, that today is the warmest decade since records began 150 years ago, privately what they’re saying in the climategate emails is ‘hey look we’ve got a temperature which has been falling and we can’t explain why and it’s a travesty that we can’t explain why’ – so they’re saying one thing to us publicly to maintain the scare that’s making them rich, and that’s what’s called fraud, it’s criminal fraud, and on the other hand they’re saying privately ‘oh dear oh dear we can’t account for the fact that there’s been no warming for the last 15 years’”.
Monckton said that the Copenhagen treaty meant America was in “immediate peril” of losing its freedom to a “sinister dictatorship” being formed under the contrived pretext of global warming.
the tobacco wars and were intimately familiar with the tactics used by tobacco companies. They feared that big oil interests would adopt the same tactics to preserve their profits, by casting doubt on global warming.
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