MELANIE PHILLIPS SUMS UP CLIMATEGATE
Post-normal science
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5582321/postnormal-science.thtml
The scientific body at the centre of the scandal over the manipulation of climate data to shore up anthropogenic global warming theory, the Climatic Research Centre at the University of East Anglia, has now said it will after all make available the raw data upon which its research was based and which it has been witholding until now.
But guess what: in the Sunday Times Jonathan Leake reports that the centre has actually dumped much of this data:
Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
So now no-one can ever know for certain whether the centre did commit an anti-scientific fraud or not. What kind of scientists destroy the raw data on which they base their research? The dumping was done in the 1980s, well before the tenure at the CRC of the man at the eye of the current storm, Dr Phil Jones. But that only goes to back up the impression that AGW has been based on a series of frauds on the public ever since it burst upon the world two decades ago – as this angry piece by JR Dunn observes:
The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) thesis, to give it its semi-official name, is no stranger to fraud. It is no real exaggeration to state that it was fertilized with fraud, marinated in fraud, stewed in fraud, and at last served up to the world as prime, grade-A fraud with nice side orders of fakery and disingenuousness. Damning as they may be, the CRU e-mails are merely the climactic element in an exhaustively long line.
This affair is likely to cast a significant cloud over the imminent climate summit at Copenhagen. The CRC is one of the key centres behind AGW theory and the ‘science’ on which the IPCC bases its forecasts.
But as the great glacier of AGW zealotry now slides irrecoverably beneath the rising seas of reality, look at this remarkable statement made on the Dot Earth blog by Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change, no less, at UEA, and the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research:
But this episode might signify something more in the unfolding story of climate change. This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.
It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production – just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.
As Philip Stott points out, Hulme’s acknowledgment that the IPCC has politicised the science of ‘climate change’ is a highly significant admission. And Hulme has previously bemoaned the ‘exaggerated rhetoric’ of climate change catastrophe theorists, observing out that
The language of catastrophe is not the language of science.
But it was also Hulme who made the really remarkable admission in 2007 that AGW theory could not be supported by the ‘normal’ rules of scientific inquiry. He wrote:
The danger of a ‘normal’ reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow… Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth-seeking, although science will gain some insights into the question if it recognises the socially contingent dimensions of a post-normal science.
Global warming, he claimed, was an example of ‘post-normal science’ which did not seek to establish the truth through evidence. Instead, truth had to be traded for influence. In areas of uncertainty, scientists had to present their beliefs instead as a basis for policy.
It was an admission that, in the name of science, scientific reason had been junked altogether to promote mere ideological conviction. That is the real message of ‘Climategate’.
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