Tag Archives: Scientific consensus

The Government’s Boilerplate Reply to Net Zero Criticism

From The Daily Sceptic

BY BEN PILE

When more than 10,000 signatures are received on a petition on the Government’s petition website, the Government automatically replies. When that petition reaches 100,000 signatures, it triggers a debate in Parliament. A recent response from the Government to a petition calling for the repeal of the Climate Act 2008 and the Net Zero targets reveals the bankruptcy of Westminster’s favourite policy agenda. But sceptics need to step it up a couple of gears if they want to expose the green agenda for what it is, and to topple green policy madness. 

The petition rightly argued that allowing only “one side only of a two-sided scientific debate is not an acceptable basis for significant legislation that could have major impacts on the U.K.’s economy and citizens”. The Government’s reply is a boilerplate reassertion of green political dogma of the kind that got us to where we are. The problem with this response, however, is that unpacking and fisking such concatenations of ideological presuppositions, appeals to authority (“the Science”) and hopelessly vague claims is hard work, and invariably produces 10 words for each of theirs. Challenging the notion that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represents the work of “thousands of the world’s top climate scientists”, for instance, requires hundreds of words of rebuttal because the IPCC is a complex organisation and its work is a complex process, which is routinely misunderstood, but always presented as a ‘consensus’. In fact, it as often as not shows the opposite: a lack of agreement between scientists. 

For those who prefer a longer-form debunking, I have attempted to address the Government’s reply on my Substack. Here I reproduce a handful of those rebuttals. I don’t say this merely to drive more traffic and subs – welcome though those would be – but to anticipate some green wag telling me that I’ve forgotten some key point, to devastating effect. That is how they roll. I haven’t forgotten… All of us, except climate trolls, have limited bandwidth.

If there is a theme to the Government’s reply, it is that, contrary to the petitioners’ claim, the IPCC and other scientific institutions and state agencies have settled any debate about climate change and its consequences. This is epitomised in the statement that “the Government’s policy to support ambitious action on climate change reflects the mainstream scientific consensus, and delaying action will only put future generations at risk”.

The main mistake here is that “future generations” are not an object of the “scientific consensus”. Science has nothing to say about “future generations” because (proper) science does not deal with things that do not exist, and things which are not material objects as such, such as society. If human society is a thing that can be understood as an object, then the problem for the green argument is that no metric of human welfare shows any sensitivity to climate change in the era of global warming, despite 2023 being the “warmest year on record” at “1.46°C above the pre-industrial baseline”. Put simply, far from making life more precarious, the industrial revolution, powered by the combustion of fossil fuels, has vastly increased human welfare, not least by reducing the life-threatening risks we’re exposed to. This diminishing of risks is quantifiable: reductions in infant mortality, increases in wealth and longevity, and a significant reduction in loss of life due to extreme weather and exposure to the elements.

Some climate researchers, who are categorically not on the climate sceptic side, such as Bjørn Lomborg and Ted Nordhaus, have tried to understand what the future will look like, given certain assumptions about economic, technological and social development, and under different future emissions and policy scenarios. Their simple argument is that if the past is prologue and society continues to enjoy economic growth, then human welfare will increase. The extent to which climate change is likely to limit this welfare can be estimated, and subtracted from the total. According to this analysis, a world which continues to power economic growth by using fossil fuels until the end of this century will be many times wealthier than today’s world – perhaps by 1,000% – but climate change in the form of nearly 4.86°C of warming will negate 5.7% of that growth. Similarly, a policy agenda in which growth is (we can hope) powered by a more ‘sustainable’ form of energy and resource use grows by a more modest 500% or so, will cause only 3.24°C of warming, and negate just 2.5% of that growth. In other words, policy has a far more devastating effect on the welfare of future generations than climate change can or will. 

With or without climate change, future generations are going to be vastly better off than we are, according to this analysis. They will be healthier, wealthier and safer. So, governments and scientists who claim to speak on their behalf, to put policies in place to protect them, at our expense, must, at the very least, face public scrutiny and answer this criticism. It doesn’t come from ‘deniers’. It doesn’t take issue with global warming or climate change ‘science’. It isn’t funded by oil and gas companies. The Government is wrong: there is a debate.

The Government’s reply goes on to boast about the success of climate and energy policy: “The U.K. is the first major economy to halve its emissions – having cut them by around 53% between 1990 and 2023, while also growing its economy by around 80%.” But these figures are dodgy. 

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) records three metrics for emissions data. If we count our emissions based on what we consume, then U.K. emissions have fallen by just a third, and not since 1990, but since 2007. (See the top line in the graph below.)

Second, though it’s true that U.K. GDP has grown by 80% since 1990, the population has increased, and U.K. GDP per capita shows far more modest growth. 

2007 is significant because it was the year before the financial crash and the year before the passing of the U.K.’s Climate Change Act. The reductions in emissions, therefore, beyond merely demolishing reliable forms of power generation, may well reflect little more than rising prices and economic stagnation. The climate policy agenda, far from creating a ‘green industrial revolution’, powering ‘green economic growth’ and ‘green jobs’ may have in fact prevented a recovery from the 2008 financial crash. On this claim from the Government, too, there is clearly a need for debate. 

Third, the Government claims that it “understands the importance of affordable energy bills for households and businesses and is focussed on delivering for energy consumers”. It adds that it is “taking a comprehensive approach to bring down future bills”, which “includes reforming retail markets to be more effective for consumers through the Review of Electricity Market Arrangements (REMA) Programme” and “investing across the energy system and supporting the progress of new technologies”. But these claims are false. 

Power prices in the U.K. are not expensive merely because of the shortcoming of the design of market regulations. Power prices are high because the Renewables Obligation and the successor Contracts for Difference subsidy schemes pumped (and continue to pump) vast amounts of cash from the consumer to green generators, and because emissions-reduction mandates closed existing and much cheaper forms of generation. Moreover, in terms of energy delivered, electricity is the smallest market compared to gas for heat and transport fuels. The “electrification of everything” required by Net Zero will thus increase the cost of heating homes and transport. And successive U.K. governments, with their European counterparts, have restricted exploitation of conventional energy resources and fracking, increasing dependence on imports, and thereby pushed prices up. 

“Affordable energy bills” are manifestly not a priority for the Government because such concerns have been put second to the climate agenda. The green agenda requires the creation of scarcity, necessarily, and for consumption to be prohibited by price. That is the point of the smart meter rollout, which the Government claims will produce a “smarter energy system”, and that such “energy efficiency” will “reduce costs for all consumers”. That is false. “Energy efficiency” is not equivalent to lower cost. Efficiency with respect to use of a resource may mean that you use less of that resource. But if the capital cost of obtaining that resource per unit of energy is higher – as is manifestly the case with renewables – then the costs of using that resource will rise. The Government conflates ‘efficiency’ and ‘cost’ because there has been no debate about costs in Parliament to confront such mythology, and MPs and ministers have been resistant to people making such observations, who have been denigrated as ‘deniers’. 

The Government and MPs, all political parties, and the agencies on which they depend, need to be told that there is a debate. They are not going to work it out for themselves without significant pressure. 

Petitions work. The Welsh Government’s blanket speed limit has been rolled back thanks to 441,288 Welsh signatures – nearly 20% of the electorate – on a petition that demanded it “rescind and remove the disastrous 20mph law”. But not all petitions attract so many signatures. At the time of writing this, just 11,801 people have signed the Net Zero petition. Yet Net Zero will mean an effective 0mph ban on roads throughout the country for millions of people, who will be confined to homes they cannot afford to heat, even if they have a job, and even if their smart meter hasn’t disconnected them. 

It is up to critics of the climate agenda – sceptics – to close that gap, and to put the case to the wider population. And there has never been, since the Climate Change Act became law in 2008, such an opportunity. The democratic torpor is lifting. In both houses of Parliament, a small number of peers and MPs, including former ministers, have begun challenging the Government on Net Zero costs. And ahead of a looming Labour Government, even unions are starting to find their voice. But it is not enough and not fast enough to stop the Net Zero agenda before it causes more harm. Sceptics should embrace the few remaining instruments of democracy left at our disposal. Meet your MPs at their surgeries. Send them letters. Sign petitions. And organise and support challenges to them when they fail to represent your views. 

You can sign the Net Zero petition here.

Subscribe to Ben Pile’s The Net Zero Scandal Substack here.

‘Alternative Facts’: Ted Nordhaus explains how extreme events came to represent climate change contrary to an overwhelming scientific consensus

From Climate Depot

By Marc Morano

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/alternative-facts

BY ROGER PIELKE JR.

Excerpt: …[A]n excellent new essay by Ted Nordhaus of The Breakthrough Institute2 published today by The New Atlantis, titled — Did Exxon Make it Rain Today?. Nordhaus does a nice job explaining that disasters occur at the confluence of an extreme event and an exposed and vulnerable society, but most attention these days is paid to extreme events, and climate change in particular:

What determines whether hurricanes, floods, heat waves, and wildfires amount to natural disasters or minor nuisances, though, is mostly not the relative intensity or frequency of the natural hazard but rather how many people are in harm’s way and how well protected they are against the climate’s extremes.

Infrastructure, institutions, and technology mediate the relationship between extreme climate and weather phenomena, and the costs that human societies bear as a result of them. . .

The implications of this point will be counterintuitive for many. Yes, there are many types of disasters, like hurricanes and floods, that are causing greater economic costs in many places than they used to. But this is almost entirely because the places that are most exposed to weather disasters have far more people and far more wealth in harm’s way than they used to. Even if there were no global warming, in other words, these areas would be much more at risk simply because they have much more to lose.

However, what I find really interesting about Nordhaus’ essay is his discussion of how we got to a point where leading journalists and scientists are seeking to deny these rather obvious conditions and instead, to focus obsessively on human-caused climate change, and specifically on the fossil fuel industry as bearing responsibility for increasing disaster costs, contrary to an overwhelming scientific consensus.

Nordhaus explains that climate advocates have a long history of trying to tie disasters to climate change, dating back decades:

Those efforts intensified after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, with Al Gore using it as a centerpiece in An Inconvenient Truth.3 A few years later, in 2012, the Union of Concerned Scientists convened a gathering of environmental advocates, litigators, climate scientists, and opinion researchers in La Jolla, California. Their explicit purpose was to develop a public narrative connecting extreme weather events that were already happening, and the damages they were causing, with climate change and the fossil fuel industry.

The proceedings from that gathering, which were subsequently published in a report titled “Establishing Accountability for Climate Change Damages: Lessons from Tobacco Control,” are revealing.

The IPCC, over decades of reports, has not concluded with high confidence that a signal of human caused climate change can be detected for most types of extreme weather, and especially those that result in the greatest impacts. That remains the case today.

For those wanting to promote climate action using contemporary disasters as a reason to act, the IPCC’s consistent conclusions — no matter how deeply buried in its reports — present a problem.

In a 2018 survey of environmental journalists … Seventy-one percent reported that they never or rarely included opposing viewpoints in their coverage of climate change.

So alternative facts needed to be created. Nordhaus explains:

Myles Allen, the climate scientist who is credited with creating the field of “extreme event attribution,” is described in the report as lamenting that “the scientific community has frequently been guilty of talking about the climate of the twenty-second century rather than what’s happening now.” Yet, he and other scientists at the gathering also acknowledged how difficult it is to identify the contributions of climate change to current extreme weather events. “If you want to have statistically significant results about what has already happened,” another scientist, Claudia Tebaldi, noted, “we are far from being able to say anything definitive because the signal is so often overwhelmed by noise.”

While much of the convening was ostensibly focused on litigation strategies, modeled on campaigns against the tobacco industry, the subtext of the entire conversation was how to raise the public salience of a risk that is diffuse, perceived to be far off in time and space, and associated with activities — the combustion of fossil fuels — that bring significant social benefits.

Nordhaus explains that a three-pronged strategy emerged from the 2012 meeting — lowering scientific standards (from those of the IPCC) to enable stronger claims, redefining the attribution of causality differently than the IPCC, and emphasizing the villainous nature of fossil fuel companies to give people an enemy:

During the meeting, Naomi Oreskes, the Harvard historian of science who popularized the connection between climate and tobacco, argued that scientists should use a different standard of proof for the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events. “When we take these things to the public,” she argued, “we take a standard of evidence applied internally to science and use it externally.” But, she continued, the 95-percent confidence standard that scientists use “is not the Eleventh Commandment. There is nothing in nature that taught us that 95 percent is needed. That is a social convention.”

Others suggested that reframing the attribution of extreme weather to climate change could allow for stronger claims: rather than looking at whether there was any long-term detectable trend in extreme weather, scientists might instead focus on the degree to which climate change increased the likelihood of a given extreme event. And others believed that focusing legal strategies on a villain — fossil fuel companies conspiring to mislead the public about the danger of their product — would result in greater public acceptance of the claims that climate change was the cause of extreme weather.

As it happened, environmental advocates would pursue all of these strategies.

Nordhaus further explains that broader changes in the media occurred at a perfect time to boost these strategies aimed at creating a new narrative:

Not so long ago, news coverage needed to be credible to multiple audiences whose politics and values spanned a relatively broad spectrum of worldviews and values. But the proliferation of media outlets and platforms in recent decades, first with the rise of cable news and then the Internet, has increasingly fragmented media audiences.

Today, media outlets large and small compete in a far more crowded marketplace to reach much narrower segments of the population. This incentivizes them to tailor their content to the social and political values of their audiences and serve up spectacles that comport with the ideological preferences of the audiences they are trying to reach. For the audiences that elite legacy outlets such as the New York Times now almost exclusively cater to, that means producing a continual stream of catastrophic climate news.

I suspect that the only place that most of you reading this will encounter Nordhaus’ essay is right here at THB.4 Reporters on the “climate beat” know very well that acknowledging the existence of Nordhaus’ essay or the arguments he makes might offend the politics of their employers, readers, and colleagues.

Nordhaus explains that a large majority of environmental journalists refuse to engage narrative-challenging viewpoints (emphasis added):

Reporters and editors at these outlets are also well-aligned ideologically with their audiences. A national survey of political journalists and editors working for newspapers at the state and national level conducted in 2022 found that those identifying as Democrats outnumbered those identifying as Republicans by 10 to 1. A 2018 survey of environmental journalists by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, meanwhile, found that 70 percent reported trusting information from environmental advocacy organizations versus fewer than 10 percent from business groups. Seventy-one percent reported that they never or rarely included opposing viewpoints in their coverage of climate change.

Judith Curry: There’s A Climate Change Industry Set Up To Reward Alarmism

Judith Curry: How Climate “Science” Got Hijacked by Alarmists.

From the RealClearPolitics

By Tim Hains

John Stossel interviews “Climate Forecast Applications Network” president Judith Curry about why she changed her mind about climate change:

JOHN STOSSEL: Climate change is a crisis we’re told. Anyone who’s skeptical or raises any questions about the alarm is dismissed.

The consensus is so strong, there shouldn’t even be a debate.

Climate alarmists claim there’s an overwhelming scientific consensus but researcher Judith Curry says climate scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk.

JOHN STOSSEL: Why, what’s in it for them?

JUDITH CURRY: Fame and fortune.

She knows about that because she once spread alarm about climate change. The media loved her when she published this study saying there was an increase in hurricane intensity.

JUDITH CURRY: We found that the percent of category four and five hurricanes had doubled, so this was picked up by the media. Alarmists said, “Oh, here’s the way to do it.” Tie extreme weather events to global warming.

JOHN STOSSEL: So this hysteria is your fault?

JUDITH CURRY: Well, sort of, not really, they would have picked up on it anyway.

But Curry’s more intense hurricanes gave them fuel.

JUDITH CURRY: I was adopted by the environmental advocacy groups and the alarmists, and I was treated like a rock star.

JOHN STOSSEL: What does that mean, treated like a rock star?

JUDITH CURRY: Oh my God, I was flown all over the place to meet with politicians and to give these talks and lots of media attention.

But then some researchers pointed out gaps in her research, years with low levels of hurricanes.

JUDITH CURRY: So like a good scientist, I went in and investigated all that stuff.

She realized her critics were right.

JUDITH CURRY: Part of it was bad data, part of it is natural climate variability.

JOHN STOSSEL: So you’re the unusual researcher who looks at criticism of your paper and actually concluded they had a point.

JUDITH CURRY: They had a point for sure.

Then the Climategate scandal taught Curry that many researchers aren’t so open-minded. Leaked emails showed university climate scientists conspiring to hide data.

JUDITH CURRY: It showed a lot of really ugly things — avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests, trying to get journal editors fired from their jobs.

One email read, “Do you think this Yale professor is in the skeptics camp? Get him ousted.” Seeing emails like that made Curry realize that climate change fanatics had corrupted the science because there’s a climate change industry set up to reward alarmism.

JUDITH CURRY: The origins go back to the 1980 and the UN environmental program.

Some UN officials had a specific agenda.

JUDITH CURRY: Anti-capitalism, they hated the oil companies and they seized on the climate change issue as one to move their policies along.

The UN created what’s called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

JUDITH CURRY: The IPCC wasn’t supposed to focus on any benefits of warming. The IPCC’s mandate was to look for dangerous human-caused climate change.

Obviously, if you’re only looking for risk, that’s what you’ll find.

JUDITH CURRY: Then the national funding agencies directed all the funding in the field.

JOHN STOSSEL: If you say we’re all going to die and we’ve got to spend a ton of money on this, you get funding. If you say we don’t know, you don’t get funding.

JUDITH CURRY: No, it’s more subtle than that. The announcements of opportunity for funding are really tied to assuming that there are dangerous impacts.

JOHN STOSSEL: So the researchers aren’t stupid. They know what they need to say to get funding.

JUDITH CURRY: Exactly.

This is how manufactured consensus happens. Then even if a skeptic does get funding, it’s harder to publish because journal editors are alarmists.

JUDITH CURRY: About 10 years ago, the editor of the journal Science, she wrote this political rant about we need to stop emissions now, that was published in Science. So what kind of message does that give, promote the alarming papers and don’t even send the other ones out for review.

Getting published is crucial to researchers because that’s how they advance in academia.

JUDITH CURRY: If you wanted to advance in your career, like be at a prestigious university, get a big salary, have big laboratory space, get lots of grant funding, be director of an institute. Well, there was clearly one path to go.

So alarmist researchers control the discussion. They publish lots of scary papers and alarmist media jump on those Time Magazine says climate is everything.

JUDITH CURRY: Transportation congestion, the size of frogs, you know everything.

JOHN STOSSEL: Airplane turbulence, childhood obesity. Activists hear the media and freak out.

…

Why don’t other scientists who recognize the nonsense push back?

JUDITH CURRY: If they work in a university, it’s going to be very uncomfortable for them.

JOHN STOSSEL: Universities have become idiots, and they punish people who tell the truth?

JUDITH CURRY: I mean, I felt the hostility.

Curry was a department chair at Georgia Tech until she concluded that fossil fuels aren’t so terrible.

JUDITH CURRY: They want fossil fuels to go away.

When they made life uncomfortable for her.

She looked for other university jobs but was told…

JUDITH CURRY: Nobody will hire you because if you Google “Judith Curry,” you know everything that shows up with Judith Curry Denier, Judith Curry Serial Climate Dis-informer. At that point, I started making my plans to transition 100% to the private sector.

She started this weather forecasting company. Now, climate alarmists smear her as a climate denier “doing it for the money.”

But she made more money at Georgia Tech.

JUDITH CURRY: If I was doing this for the money, I would have stayed at Georgia Tech and sucked up my big salary. But that’s not who I am.

My personal and professional integrity would not allow me to play that game.

It’s unfortunate that many university departments now shut down debate and reward alarmism.

Curry agrees that climate change is a problem, but she says it’s not a crisis.

In a few weeks, I’ll post our full interview with a more complete discussion about climate and what scientists really agree about.

Study: Psychological Interventions Do Not Work on Climate Skeptics

Essay by Eric Worrall

The study authors suggest “top down interventions” will be required.

‘Doom and gloom’ don’t change stubborn climate change denial

By Dan Holmes
Friday February 9, 2024

Climate change denial remains difficult to challenge despite the scientific consensus and availability of information.

A new behavioural science study suggests this means governments need to put more attention to “top-down” approaches to addressing climate change.

…

While some did change behaviour, this varied based on country, initial climate beliefs, and which outcome was being measured. For instance, “doom and gloom” climate communications made people more likely to share climate information, but less likely to plant trees.

“Negative emotion induction intervention appeared to backfire on policy support among participants with low initial climate beliefs,” they said.

“These results suggest that climate scientists should carefully consider the differential effects of the prevalent fear-inducing writing styles on different pro-climate outcomes.”

…

“Top-down change might need to be prioritised to achieve the emissions reduction necessary to stay within safe planetary limits for human civilisation.

…Read more: https://www.themandarin.com.au/239189-doom-and-gloom-dont-change-stubborn-climate-change-denial/

The abstract of the study;

Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries

MADALINA VLASCEANU , KIMBERLY C. DOELL , JOSEPH B. BAK-COLEMAN , BORYANA TODOROVA, MICHAEL M. BERKEBILE-WEINBERG, SAMANTHA J. GRAYSON, YASH PATEL, DANIELLE GOLDWERT, YIFEI PEI, […], AND JAY J. VAN BAVEL  +248 authors Authors Info & Affiliations

SCIENCE ADVANCES

7 Feb 2024
Vol 10, Issue 6

Abstract

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.Read more: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adj5778

I’m surprised it took a study to verify the premise that stepping up the doom and gloom will not persuade people who think the climate crisis is nonsense.

If you don’t believe in the tooth fairy, would stepping up the doomsday rhetoric persuade you to put your teeth under the pillow?

The alternative, “top down interventions”, in my opinion is rather threatening, the velvet being stripped from the steel fist. We’re going to make you put your teeth under the pillow, and if you refuse, you’ll have lots of spare teeth?

A bad recipe for science

From Climate Etc.

by Judith Curry

Politically-motivated manufacture of scientific consensus corrupts the scientific process and leads to poor policy decisions

An essay with excerpts from my new book Climate Uncertainty and Risk.

In the 21st century, humankind is facing a myriad of complex societal problems that are characterized by deep uncertainties, systemic risks and disagreements about values. Climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic are prominent examples of such wicked problems. For such problems, the relevant science has become increasingly like litigation, where truth seeking has become secondary to politics and advocacy on behalf of a preferred policy solution.

How does politics influence the scientific process for societally relevant issues? Political bias influences research funding priorities, the scientific questions that are asked, how the findings are interpreted, what is cited, and what gets canonized.  Factual statements are filtered in assessment reports and by the media with an eye to downstream political use.

How does politics influence the behavior of scientists? There is pressure on scientists to support consensus positions, moral objectives and the relevant policies.  This pressure comes from universities and professional societies, scientists themselves who are activists, journalists and from federal funding agencies in terms of research funding priorities. Because evaluations by one’s colleagues are so central to success in academia, it is easy to induce fear of social sanctions for expressing the ideas that, though not necessarily shown to be factually or scientifically wrong, are widely unpopular.

Activist scientists use their privileged position to advance moral and political agendas. This political activism extends to the professional societies that publish journals and organize conferences. This activism has a gatekeeping effect on what gets published, who gets heard at conferences, and who receives professional recognition. Virtually all professional societies whose membership has any link to climate research have issued policy statements on climate change, urging action to eliminate fossil fuel emissions.

The most pernicious manifestation of the politicization of science is when politicians, advocacy groups, journalists, and activist scientists intimidate or otherwise attempt to silence scientists whose research is judged to interfere with their moral and political agendas.

Speaking consensus to power

A critical strategy in the politicization of science is the manufacture of a scientific consensus on politically important topics, such as climate change and Covid-19.  The UN climate consensus is used as an appeal to authority in the representation of scientific results as the basis for urgent policy making.  In effect, the UN has adopted a “speaking consensus to power” approach that sees uncertainty and dissent as problematic and attempts to mediate these into a consensus. The consensus-to-power strategy reflects a specific vision of how politics deals with scientific uncertainties.

There is a key difference between a “scientific consensus” and a “consensus of scientists.” When there is true scientific certainty, such as the earth orbiting the sun, we don’t need to talk about consensus. By contrast, a “consensus of scientists” represents a deliberate expression of collective judgment by a group of scientists, often at the official request of a government.

Institutionalized consensus building promotes groupthink, acting to confirm the consensus in a self-reinforcing way. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has worked for the past 40 years to establish a scientific consensus on human-caused climate change.  As such, the IPCC consensus is a “manufactured consensus” arising from an intentional consensus building process. The IPCC consensus has become canonized socially through a political process, bypassing the long and complex scientific validation process as to whether the conclusions are actually true.

The flip side of a manufactured consensus is “denial.” Questioning the climate change narrative has become the ultimate form of heresy in the 21st century.  Virtually all academic climate scientists are within the so-called 97 percent consensus regarding the existence of a human impact on warming of the Earth’s climate. Which scientists are ostracized and labeled as deniers? Independent thinkers, who are not supportive of the IPCC consensus, are suspect. Any criticism of the IPCC can lead to ostracism. Failure to advocate for CO2 mitigation policies leads to suspicion. Even a preference for nuclear power over wind and solar power will get you called a denier. The most reliable way to get labeled as a denier is to associate in any way with so-called enemies of the climate consensus and their preferred policies—petroleum companies, conservative think tanks, or even the “wrong” political party.

Covid-19 provides a very interesting example of a manufactured consensus.  The consensus that COVID-19 had an entirely natural origin was established by two op-eds in early 2020—The Lancet in February and Nature Medicine in March. The Lancet op-ed stated, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The pronouncements in these op-eds effectively shut down inquiry into a possible origin as a leak from a laboratory in Wuhan. Articles in the mainstream press repeatedly stated that a consensus of experts had ruled lab escape to be out of the question or extremely unlikely.

The enormous gap between the actual state of knowledge in early 2020 and the confidence displayed in the two op-eds should have been obvious to anyone in the field of virology, or for that matter anyone with critical faculties. There were scientists from adjacent fields who said as much. The consensus wasn’t overturned until May 2021 with the publication of a lengthy article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that identified conflict of interests in the scientists writing the Lancet letter in hiding any links with the Wuhan lab. This article triggered a cascade of defections from scientists – the fake consensus was no longer enforceable.

What is concerning about this episode is not so much that a consensus was overturned, but that a fake consensus was so easily enforced for more than a year. A few scientists spoke up, but they were aggressively cancelled from social media. The vast majority of scientists who understood that there was a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the origins of the virus did not speak up. It was becoming increasingly clear that any virologist who challenged the community’s declared views risked being labeled as a heretic, being canceled on social media, and having their next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.  The ugly politics behind this fake consensus are only now being revealed.

Political and moral biases in a manufactured consensus can lead to widely accepted claims that reflect the scientific community’s blind spots more than they reflect justified scientific conclusions.  A manufactured consensus hampers scientific progress because of the questions that do not get asked and the investigations that are not undertaken.  Further, consensus enforcement interferes with the self-correcting nature of science via skepticism, which is a foundation of the scientific process.

Broken contract between science and policy makers

Speaking consensus to power acts to conceal uncertainties, ambiguities, dissent, and ignorance behind a scientific consensus. Greater openness about scientific uncertainties and ignorance, plus more transparency about dissent and disagreement, is needed provide policymakers with a more complete picture of policy-relevant science and its limitations.

A manufactured consensus arises from oversimplification of the problem, which leads to restricting the policy solution space and mistaken ideas that the problem can be controlled.

A manufactured consensus on a complex, wicked problem such as climate change or Covid-19 leads to the naivete of thinking that these are simple risks, and the hubris of thinking that we can control the risk.  Even beyond the technical issues, greater realism is needed about the uncertainties and politics underpinning the pursuit of control for wicked societal problems.

The pandemic illustrates that our tools for acting on a complex global problem—experts, precise scientific metrics, computer models, enforced restrictions— have resulted in much less than the desired quality of control. The global energy transition and worldwide transformations to sustainability are far more challenging than the global COVID-19 pandemic. The modernist paradigm of mastery, planning, and optimization is not appropriate for the wicked problems of the twenty-first century.

As a consequence of the exaggerated sense of knowledge and control surrounding climate and Covid-19 policies, some highly uncertain issues that should remain open for political debate are ignored in policy making. Premature foreclosure of scientific uncertainties and failure to consider ambiguities associated with wicked problems such as climate change and pandemics results in an invisible form of oppression that forecloses possible futures.

With regards to climate change, what is going on represents more than politically motivated consensus enforcement and cancel culture. Climate change has become a secular religion, rife with dogma, heretics and moral-tribal communities. The secular religion of climate change raises concerns that are far more fundamental than the risks of bad policy.  At risk is the fundamental virtues of the Scientific Revolution and the freedom to question authority.

The road ahead requires moving away from the consensus-enforcing and cancel culture approach of restricting dialogue surrounding complex societal issues such as climate change. We need to open up space for dissent and disagreement.  By acknowledging scientific uncertainties in the context of better risk management and decision- making frameworks, in combination with techno-optimism, there is a broad path forward for humanity to thrive in the twenty-first century and beyond.

This article includes excerpts from my new book, Climate Uncertainty and Risk.

It’s That Man Again

Roger Hallam, founder member of Extinction Rebellion wants the scientists to follow him! Well, when I say scientists, I mean doctors of music, socio-spatial planning, social and cultural anthropology, sociology, clinical psychology and education, etc. 

From Climate Scepticism

BY JOHN RIDGWAY

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was on here pouring scorn upon the efforts of two psychology professors who were claiming to know how hapless folk such as you and I could fall into the trap of disbelieving the scientists. Theirs was a counsel that supposedly had two major benefits: By following their advice others could avoid the same ‘anti-science’ trap and, even better, they would be ready and prepared to deal with those who had. Like bedbugs, the anti-scientific are deemed a growing problem, but these two psychologists also have a serious pesticide. Or so they say.

Such academics can only think that way because they presume for themselves an understanding of the science that is superior to the sceptic. As far as they are concerned, sceptics had the option of thinking things through carefully, but chose instead to reject scientific authority and replace it with their own sloppy version of thinking. Trust in science is very much seen as the hallmark of the critical thinker; they see no room in the critical thinker’s armoury for re-evaluating the significance of scientific consensus.

And why does all of this matter? It’s because such ‘anti-scientism’ can lead to all sorts of dangerous perspectives, such as those held by people who insist on vaccines being properly tested, or that the risks of net zero should be properly thought through. Or maybe you are one of those people who even doubt the need for a precipitous transition to net zero. Perhaps you can’t see the urgency. How anti-scientist is that?

Not very, according to Roger Hallam, founder member of Extinction Rebellion. In a recent proclamation he explained that failing to see the urgency has nothing at all to do with anti-scientism – in fact it is quite the opposite. If you want to be a critical thinker, like he is, he says the very last thing you should be doing is listening to the scientists. ‘But how come?’, I hear you ask. Surely organisations such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil have been claiming scientific endorsement for their eschatology from the very outset. So Hallam, of all people, must surely be the first to condemn anyone who disbelieves a scientist. Well he might have done in bygone days, but no longer. This is how he puts it now:

Some of us have attempted over the years to responsibly communicate the extreme and cascading risks, and the severe consequences of not taking emergency action. Despite founding the movement on the precautionary principle we found ourselves being ground down. For years we were moderated, and moodsplained by experts from narrow disciplines who demanded we change our press releases, our lectures, and play down the reality and potential speed of catastrophic consequences.

So if one cannot trust ‘experts from narrow disciplines’, who should you trust? Why, Hallam, of course:

The rapid heating and extreme events of the last year demonstrate that overall predictions of institutionalised climate science were less accurate than the conclusions of generalist scholars and leading climate activists, who better saw the frightening signals through the noise produced from siloes, hierarchies, and privilege.

You see, it’s the generalists and activists that we should have been listening to all along, not ‘institutionalised climate science’. But how was it that institutionalised climate science got away with so many years of ‘moodsplaining’?

Because these people carry an identity associated with ‘authority’ they were not challenged enough by journalists, lay people, or activists.

It turns out that there is little difference between a climate change sceptic and your average doomsplaining cult leader. Both dislike the idea of authorised facts and both wish that journalists and laypeople would do more to challenge it. The only difference is that, whereas we are wracked with uncertainty and worry about practicalities, the doomsplainer general is on a moral crusade and lives by a truth known only unto him and his followers. As Hallam puts it:

We committed five years ago in October 2018 to live in truth. Our movements need to look directly at that truth and act according to reality. That means being in resistance, standing for peace, justice and freedom.

I have no reason to believe that Hallam is being insincere here. I suspect that he has created for himself the persona of the repressed messiah who is, nevertheless, only too willing to forgive the blasphemers just as long as they are prepared to repent. Why else would he say this?

Understanding how this repression happened is important. We would welcome any career climatologists, academics and journalists who undermined our communications in public to make amends, especially as they have influenced attitudes amongst those who judge us.

Far from encouraging others to follow the scientists, Hallam wants the scientists to follow him! And before you dismiss his megalomania too readily, you should reflect upon the fact that his amnesty has already resulted in a degree of success. Only seven days after his sermon on the mount, a massive 70 scientists responded by plighting their troth to the activists. Well, when I say scientists, I mean doctors of music, socio-spatial planning, social and cultural anthropology, sociology, clinical psychology and education, etc. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the founding member of the Research Collective for Decolonizing Fashion.

So it was really just another bunch of generalists and laypeople, rather than the mass conversion he must have hoped for.

I may mock, but it’s a start. Hallam is a man in resistence and he stands for peace, justice and freedom. Previous messiahs have achieved a great deal more with far less scientific support, and never forget that there are grandmas prepared to climb gantries for this guy.

Nine Elements Shared by Climate and Covid

From Science Matters

 By Ron Clutz

Two Sides of the Same Coin

Ramesh Thakur writes at Brownstone Institute Beware Catastrophizing Climate Models and Activists.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

All true believers of The Science™ of climate change have taken careful note of the lessons offered by the coronavirus pandemic during 2020–22 for managing the ‘climate emergency.’ The two agendas share nine items in common that should leave us worried, very worried.

1. Elites’ Hypocrisy

The first is the revolting spectacle of the hypocrisy of the exalted elites who preach to the deplorables the proper etiquette of abstinence to deal with the emergency, and their own insouciant exemption from a restrictive lifestyle. Most recently we witnessed the surreal spectacle of Britain’s Parliament interrogating disgraced former Prime Minister Boris Johnson on allegations that he serially broke the lockdown rules he had imposed on everyone else—but not questioning the anti-scientific stupidity of the rules themselves. Possibly the most notorious American example was California Governor Gavin Newsom and his cronies dining maskless in the appropriately named French Laundry restaurant at a time when this was verboten, being served by fully masked staff.

Similarly, Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, Al Gore, and John Kerry have all been widely mocked for jetting around the world to warn people about global warming. I wonder if anyone has done a calculation of the total carbon footprint of each annual Davos gathering where CEOs, prime ministers and presidents, and celebrities fly in on private jets, are driven around in gas-guzzling limousines and preach to us on the critical urgency of reducing emissions? I understand the hookers do quite well during that week, so perhaps there is a silver lining.

2. Data Challenged Models

A second common element between Covid and climate change is the mismatch between models that inform policy and data that contradict the models. The long track record of abysmally wrong catastrophist predictions on infectious diseases from the Pied Piper of Pandemic Porn, Professor Neil Ferguson, is if anything exceeded by the failures of climate change alarmist predictions. The most recent example of the drum roll of “The end is nigh and this is absolutely your last chance to avert the end of the world from climate collapse” is yet another Chicken Little Sixth Assessment Report from the indefatigable Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

At some point the IPCC morphed from a team of scientists into activists.

“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all,” the report warns us. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called it a “survival guide for humanity.” But a one-time climate action journalist-turned-sceptic, Michael Shellenberger, described the UN as a “Climate Disinformation Threat Actor.”

Calls for urgent climate action based on the language of “edging towards ‘tipping points” have been made over many years. Atmospheric scientists and former IPCC members Richard McNider and John Christy note that climate modeling forecasts have “always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate.” A few examples:

♦  In 1982, UNEP Executive Director Mostafa Tolba warned of an irreversible environmental catastrophe by 2000 without immediate urgent action.
♦  In 2004, a Pentagon report warned that by 2020, major European cities would be submerged by rising seas, Britain would be facing a Siberian climate and the world would be caught up in mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting.
♦  In 2007, IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri declared: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.”
♦  Most hilariously, in Montana the Glacier National Park installed “Goodbye to the glaciers” plaques, warning: “Computer models indicate the glaciers will all be gone by the year 2020.” Come 2020, all 29 glaciers were still there but the signs were gone, taken down by embarrassed park authorities.

3. No Dissent Allowed

Third, the rapidly consolidating Censorship Industrial Complex covered both agendas until Elon Musk began releasing the Twitter Files to expose what was happening. This refers to the extraordinary censorship and suppression of dissenting voices, with extensive and possibly illegal collusion between governments and Big Tech—and, in the case of the pandemic, also Big Pharma and academia.

Even truth was no defence, for example with accounts of vaccine injuries, if their effect was to promote narrative scepticism. The social media Big Tech censored, suppressed, shadow banned and slapped labels of “false,” “misleading,” “lacking context” etc. to content at variance with the single source ministries of truth. “Fact-checking” was weaponized using fresh young graduates—with no training, skills or capacity to sift between authentic and junk science—to put such judgmental stamps on pronouncements from world-leading experts in their field.

4. We Want You to Panic

Fourth, an important explanation for the spread of Covid and climate catastrophism is the promotion of fear and panic in the population as a means to spur drastic political action. Both agendas have been astonishingly successful.

Polls have consistently shown the hugely exaggerated beliefs about the scale of the Covid threat. On climate change, the gap between the stringent actions required, the commitments made and the actual record thus far is used to create panic. The notion that we are already doomed promotes a culture of hopelessness and despair best epitomized by Greta Thunberg’s anguished cry: “How dare you” steal my dreams and childhood with empty words.”

5. Only Trust Science Authorities

A fifth common theme is the appeal to scientific authority. For this to work, scientific consensus is crucial. Yet, driven by intellectual curiosity, questioning existing knowledge is the very essence of the scientific enterprise. For the claim to scientific consensus to be broadly accepted, therefore, supporting evidence must be exaggerated, contrary evidence discredited, sceptical voices stilled and dissenters ridiculed and marginalized. This has happened in both agendas: just ask Jay Bhattacharya on one and Bjorn Lomborg on the other.

6. Government Empowers Itself

A sixth shared element is the enormous expansion of powers for the nanny state that bosses citizens and businesses because governments know best and can pick winners and losers. Growing state control over private activities is justified by being framed as minor and temporary inconveniences in the moral crusade to save Granny and the world.

Yet in both agendas, policy interventions have over-promised and under-delivered. The beneficial effects of interventions are exaggerated, optimistic forecasts are made and potential costs and downsides are discounted. Lockdowns were supposedly required for only 2-3 weeks to flatten the curve and vaccines, we were promised, would help us return to pre-Covid normalcy without being mandatory. Similarly, for decades we have been promised that renewables are getting less expensive and energy will get cheaper and more plentiful.

Yet increased subsidies are still needed, energy prices keep rising,
and energy supply gets less reliable and more intermittent.

7. Self-Inflicted Damage

Seventh, the moral framing has also been used to discount massive economic self-harm. Alongside the substantial and lasting economic damage caused by savage lockdowns to businesses and the long-term consequences of a massive printing of money, the obstinate persistence of excess deaths is painful proof of collective public health self-harm.

Similarly, the world has never been healthier, wealthier, better educated, and more connected than today. Energy intensity played a critical role in driving agricultural and industrial production that underpin the health infrastructure and comfortable living standards for large numbers of people worldwide. High income countries enjoy incomparably better health standards and outcomes because of their national wealth.

8. Elites Thrive at Others’ Expense

Eighth, government policies in both agendas have served to greatly widen economic inequalities within and among nations with fat profits for Big Pharma and rent-seeking Green Energy. A lot of money was said to be required to keep Mahatma Gandhi in the style of poverty he demanded. Similarly, a lot of money is required to support Covid and climate policy magical thinking where governments can solve all problems by throwing more money that must neither be earned nor repaid.

In the triumph of luxury politics, the costs of the rich suffused in the golden glow of virtue are borne by the poor. Should a billion more Chinese and Indians have stayed poor and destitute over the last four decades, so Westerners could feel virtuous-green? Alternatively, for post-industrial societies, climate action will require cutbacks to living standards as subsidies rise, power prices go up, reliability comes down and jobs are lost.

Attempts to assess the balance of costs and benefits of Covid and climate policies are shouted down as immoral and evil, putting profits before lives. But neither health nor climate policy can dictate economic, development, energy and other policies. All governments work to balance multiple competing policy priorities. What is the sweet spot that ensures reliable, affordable and clean energy security without big job losses? Or the sweet spot of affordable, accessible and efficient public health delivery that does not compromise the nation’s ability to educate its young, look after the elderly and vulnerable and ensure decent jobs and life opportunities for families?

9. Global Bureaucrats Gut National Sovereignty

The final common element is the subordination of state-based decision-making to international technocrats. This is best exemplified in the proliferation of the global climate change bureaucracies and the promise—threat?—of a new global pandemic treaty whose custodian will be a mighty World Health Organisation.

In both cases, the dedicated international bureaucracy will have a powerful
vested interest in ongoing climate crises and serially repeating pandemics.