Therefore, it is very interesting when senior scientists come out and criticize the global warming crowd. Here is an example published in the UK Register:
Top British boffin: Time to ditch the climate consensusThere's more... go read the original article. The above is just a few paragraphs that I picked out. Don't let me tell you what the article's about. Go read it for yourself. All I'm trying to do is tickle your fancy enough so that you will go read the whole thing.
Don't use science to get round politics, says Hulme
By Stuart Blackman
Just two years ago, Mike Hulme would have been about the last person you'd expect to hear criticising conventional climate change wisdom. Back then, he was the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, an organisation so revered by environmentalists that it could be mistaken for the academic wing of the green movement. Since leaving Tyndall - and as we found out in a telephone interview - he has come out of the climate change closet as an outspoken critic of such sacred cows as the UN's IPCC, the "consensus", the over-emphasis on scientific evidence in political debates about climate change, and to defend the rights of so-called "deniers" to contribute to those debates.
As Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, Hulme remains one of the UK's most distinguished and high-profile climate scientists. In his new book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, he explores how the issue of climate change has come to be such a dominant issue in modern politics. He treats climate change not as a problem that we need to solve – indeed, he believes that the complexity of the issue means that it cannot be solved, only lived with – and instead considers it as much of a cultural idea as a physical phenomenon."
Perhaps the most surprising thing to hear from a climate scientist writing about climate change is that climate science has for too long had the monopoly in climate change debates. When we spoke to him on the phone, Hulme cited as evidence the 2007 protests against Heathrow’s third runway, where marchers made their case by waving a research paper at the TV cameras under a banner bearing the slogan “We are armed only with peer reviewed science”. [The paper wasn't actually peer-reviewed science - see Bootnote]
“To me, that's the most dispiriting position,” says Hulme. “For these people who feel so passionately about this, their ultimate authority is a report from a group of scientists, and they’re saying ‘this is where we stand, forget about our moral concerns, forget about our ethical positions, forget about whether we are Right, Left or centre, forget about whether we are Christians or Buddists, no, none of that matters.’ The only thing that matters is that they’re holding a report from peer-reviewed science that in itself justifies their position."
And it’s not just protesters who are hiding behind the authority of science. World leaders are doing it, too.
Hulme despairs over the comments made to the Copenhagen climate conference in March by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, then the Danish Prime Minister. Rasmussen told delegates that "science should be the basis for decision-making in this field", and asked scientists to keep it simple, "not to provide us with too many moving targets...and not too many considerations on uncertainty and risk and things like that.”
“That's just classic,” says Hulme. “Here's this politician telling the scientists ‘we can't do this without you. Give us the numbers. But by the way, make them simple, and make them precise.’”
Hulme believes that this dependence of politics on science expects too much of science’s ability to explain and to predict, and that this is a burden that science cannot carry. Science is exposing its vulnerabilities, he says. And in overselling itself, the risks are very substantial. “It's like the classic case of the dodgy dossier”.
...
He also regards the IPCC as too selective in terms of both the geographical regions from which it draws its knowledge and in its academic scope.
“It is hugely dominated by the natural sciences, economics and engineering. The social sciences hardly get a look in, and the humanities none at all. For example, it does not include anthropological understandings of weather and climate or any historical perspectives on how societies and climates have interacted historically."
"If climate change is the biggest issue facing the future of human civilisation, to use the rhetoric, then surely a body charged to assess what humans know about climate change should actually be assessing all forms of knowledge.”
Moreover, says Hulme, no one is even quite sure what sort of knowledge it is that the IPCC, as a “boundary organisation” – part science, part politics - actually produces. Nor how the world at large interprets that hybrid knowledge. Even more fundamentally, he says, it is far from clear that the IPCC has actually allowed us to do “better science”:
“Or has it actually narrowed the way we frame and ask questions in climate change research?" Hulme wonders.
...
It’s not hard to get labelled a climate change “denier”. You don’t even have to deny that climate change is real, man-made and a problem. As Bjørn Lomborg, climatologist Patrick Michaels and political scientist Professor Roger Pielke Jr have discovered, you merely have to challenge the orthodox political policy responses. Or, like Climate Audit’s Steve McIntyre, dare to scrutinise the statistical workings behind influential climate research papers. If you stray from agreeing with the political prescription, you're an immoral person.
Mike Hulme is giving us a well-needed antidote to the absolutists in the global warming crowd who scream "my way or the highway". I've lived a life where people on the right and the left have made these kind of absolutist claims on all kinds of topics. Sadly they are not held to account when their pet theory fails. Sadly they aren't required to pick up the pieces for people's whose lives are disrupted by their 'certitude'. Too often these though leaders fall in love with their 'leading role' and are willing to sell their soul to the devil to keep 'leading'. One recent example that comes to mind: 2008 US Presidential candidate John Edwards who hid an extramarital affair because he lust for political power was greater than his honesty. Sad.
By the way, if you want to follow up my hobby horse -- the problems with modeling, and modeling climate in particular -- then go read David Orrell's Apollo's Arrow: The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything. He's a mathematician who has worked on climate models. His book will help you understand how dodgy it can be.
If you want to read a book that thoughtfully introduces you to prominent scientists who deny the "party line" of global warming, then read Lawrence Solomon's The Deniers.
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