The ‘Holy Grail’ of politicised climate science is the attribution of single weather events to the unproven hypothesis that humans cause all or most climate change. Like the Holy Grail, it is beyond reach – simply put, it is impossible to attribute a sunny, or rainy, day to long-term climate trends. There are countless influences on the Earth’s atmosphere, many beyond current scientific computation. Despite considerable effort, no ‘attribution’ study proves human involvement, and the suggestions remain little more than imaginative opinion.
But with the growing realisation that global warming has been running out of steam for the last couple of decades, extreme weather events, along with associated ‘tipping points’, are a vital weapon in the drive to politicise climate science, and push forward the command-and-control Net Zero agenda. Difficult, nay impossible, to prove. But happily for the Net Zero activists, help is at hand. Last year, professors Elisabeth Lloyd, Naomi Oreskes and others wrote a paper calling for the level of proof when it comes to the wild claims made by climate change activists should be lowered to “more likely than not”. Climate scientists are said to set the bar “too high” when it comes to proving their claims, thereby conceding too much ground to the ‘deniers’. “In our view, the too narrow focus of climate science on extremely stringent levels of proofs is damaging in a legal context, and can lead to confusion when communicating scientific findings more generally,” they wrote.
Without apparent irony, the authors of the paper point out that a much lower standard of proof was required before cities or entire states were locked down to supposedly slow the spread of coronavirus and argue that the same “level of evidence” should apply when it comes to forcing people to reduce their carbon emissions:
Consider our situation with the coronavirus. We often have to make a variety of policy, practical, and legal decisions based on incomplete information, which also depend on judgements about whether the evidence is good enough. What level of evidence do we need, in the case of the coronavirus, to order a stay-at-home command for an entire city or state? What is the level of evidence required to actively prepare for catastrophic needs for intensive care units in hospitals? If there is an immediate and/or grave threat, as we have seen, it may be better to act on a lower level of evidence than we might otherwise expect.
The philosophers don’t appear to have spotted the circularity in this argument: We should apply lower standard of proof when it comes to assessing claims made by climate change activists because climate change poses an immediate and/or grave threat. How do we know it poses such a threat? Because when it comes to assessing such claims we should apply a lower standard of proof.
Elizabeth Lloyd of Indiana University and Naomi Oreskes of Harvard are both philosophers and historians, and both are highly influential in green activist academic circles. But their scientific philosophy runs counter to the principles set out by the legendary Professor Karl Popper who outlined the basis for today’s widely accepted empirical scientific method. He held that scientific knowledge is only ever ‘provisional’ and, to count as a legitimate, it must be ‘falsifiable’, i.e., capable of being proved false. Hard to see how a scientific hypothesis that is “more likely than not” to be true could be falsified. Citing a fact that was at odds with it could just be added to the “not” column without necessarily tipping the scales against it.
Activists have long harboured ambitions to use the courts to further their aims, where civil claims are usually decided on the “preponderance of evidence” rather than conclusive proof for or against. According to Lloyd and Oreskes, “Scientists typically demand too much of themselves in terms of evidence, in comparison with the level of evidence required in a legal, regulatory, or public policy context.” Stringent levels of proof are said by them to be “damaging”, and can lead to “confusion” when communicating scientific findings to the lay public.
This is an odd argument. After all, if tens of millions of people are definitely going to be made poorer by a climate policy – Net Zero, for instance – surely we need to know with a reasonable degree of certainty that not reducing carbon emissions to zero by 2050 would be even more damaging to people’s welfare, not just that it is “more likely than not”? The difficulty is that the harm caused by Net Zero is immediate and tangible, whereas the harm caused by not implementing Net Zero is speculative and notional.
It won’t come as a surprise that Lloyd and Oreskes are both keen on climate models. “Climate models aid in the attribution of extreme events both through the probabilistic and storyline or mechanistic methods; in both cases, extreme events such as heat waves or heavy precipitation events can generally be attributed to climate change with a high degree of confidence”, they write. Such “advances”, they suggest, “have allowed such analyses to be used as evidence in legal cases involving climate change”.
Overall, the writers suggest that “more likely than not” be considered sufficient proof when it comes to any claims made by climate change activists, including attributing one-off events to anthropogenic global warming. “[I]ts use would increase the odds that the audience for IPCC information understands climate evidence as the IPCC intends it to,“ they write. “Indeed, our argument also applies beyond courtrooms, and more generally to the public discourse on climate change.”
How very thoughtful of them. Let’s hope climate activists don’t apply the same standard of ‘proof’ when it comes to imprisoning climate change ‘deniers’ for challenging the prevailing orthodoxy. Two years ago, Exeter University associate geography professor Saffron O’Neill said a “solution” to the dissemination of climate misinformation might be “fines and imprisonment”. Misinformation was defined as casting doubt on “well supported” science. Casting doubt on dodgy climate forecasts that are “more likely than not” to be true? Time for a spell of model re-education in Maximum Security.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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To put it simply: the utterances of these academics proves, not more likely than not, but irrefutably that higher education and higher intelligence do not cure stupidity.
It looks like a cult, behaves like a cult….
Or greed
It’s a bit like with previous warm periods, they claim that the Roman or Medieval warming periods where ‘regional events’ and therefore do not show that the climate changed on a global scale – unlike for example, two warm days in July in the UK or a stronger than usual tropical storm in the Caribbean which are, by contrast, indisputably caused by man-made ‘global’ warming.
They “weren’t” global weather events but just so happens everywhere humans existed with accurate historical records it was warmer during the WMP.
And even warmer in earlier warm periods; indeed, each warm period is cooler than the last, and the planet has been cooling for some 7k years…
Long term cooling
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1akI_yGSUlO_qEvrmrIYv9kHknq4&ll=-3.81666561775622e-14%2C38.03818700000005&z=1
Map of where papers have detected the MWP globally.
In short, climate fanatics want to be able to tell us what to do and not have us ask any questions. Like little children.
Anthropogenic Climate Change – Season 36, Episode 15, The Gift That Keeps On Giving
Endless opportunities for signalling virtue and haranguing people by telling them what to do to save the world – without ever risking being held personally responsible for not having done enough.
We’re all in this together! My
face maskhair shirt and freezing cold home protects you!Redefining things and pretending that the activities are scientific appear to be common practice in certain groups, unfortunately.
Climate is defined as the average of 30 years weather. A single data point therefore is of little significance. Please remind yr woke nieces and nephews of this when they spout off.
The CET temperature record is 300 years long. 3% of the Holocene, which is the geological context within which we consider climate.
3% can never be statistically significant. So even a warming trend during the whole of that period is no more than a warming trend, and posits nothing long term.
Here’s what things look like on a really long geological scale…showing NO link between CO2 and temperature; indeed, the Eemian was two or three degrees C warmer than now, with far lower CO2; and CO2 concentrations now are at the low end of what preceded for millions of years.
I spent many years successfully developing mathematical models to study the trajectory paths of moving objects. There were many variables different combinations of which could affect outcome sometimes very significantly. A technique sometimes employed was to measure the difference in end result achieved by changing variables. All too quickly the objectivity of the analysis could be lost so that the result became subjective and variables changed to achieve the desired result. I would not trust a mathematical model of climate for a microsecond. The scientists need dramatic newsworthy results to satisfy their egos.
The hypothesis that C02 directly controls temperature (whilst kicked out of court by fact, in the form of geological history) is a very straightforward one.
Yet there is no proof positive of this to be found anywhere.
And indeed, before one even posits such a hypothesis, the “null” hypothesis (viz. Karl Popper) must be disproved, ille est, that climate is variable by nature.
This has never been disproved
Science it is that shows this nonsense to BE nonsense. And nothing to do with science, rather ideology, the poison of our times. Given the hideous effects of ideology in the 20th century, one can safely say that we NEVER learn from history.
Net Zero has let to Energy Bills with lots of Zeros at the end.
You are being fed absolute balls by Boris Johnson on Ukraine. Try not to swallow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PQud-hYD5o
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The bar is set too high? I’m yet to see any credible evidence, let alone irrefutable “proof” in what we’re experiencing has anything to do with humans at all! I’m open to the suggestion we’re having an impact, we are after all living on this ball of rock & water but our contribution surely pales into comparison to what our sun and orbit are capable of (of which natural variation is “proven” within our historical record throughout the ages before there was any industrialisation). Maybe farting dinosaurs were instrumental and unbeknown to us they set up a climate committee to save their species? Before aliens came along and wiped them out with a meteor for being so corrupt!!!!!!
It is a short detour from the philosophy of Derrida and Foucault to undermining the definition of “truth” in both Covid and climate science.
When the academy, medical colleges, bureaucracy, and media are under the oppressive influence of post-modernists, what chance is there of Popper’s philosophy of the primacy of falsifiability remaining sacrosanct?
We were told that the recent heatwave was definitely due to climate change. This must be different from medical science which knows that one cannot extrapolate any conclusion from one case.
Which heatwave?
NB: There was one in 2018. Since then, there’ve only been headlines about heat waves (paused for two years due to headlines about a pandemic that’s supposedly happening somewhere, although it could never really be located).
Just like the ones in 1976, then…
Heatwaves are by definition, periods of five days or more. The recent ‘heatwave’, it was peeing down and I was in a fleece on day 5…
One of the most amusing things about climate alarmism is that perpetrators of it claim to believe that vast amounts of ice melting will lead to water shortages.
I like the one that sea levels are rising in the Maldives, but nowhere else. Brain dead.
“One science only will one genius fit; so vast is art, so narrow human wit” – Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Watching the chem trails being spread every day, morning, noon and night here in Devon. Travelled to Chicago recently. First thing I noticed at ohare airport, chem trails. Interesting how the aircraft discharging chemicals do not appear on a flight tracker app. Who is funding this tremendous amount of aviation manpower, chemicals and aircraft. The met office says there is no such thing as chem trails. Only contrails.
The whole political movement driven by activists has become a cult. They use the same techniques as all cults, unassailable BELIEFS. Repeat something enough times as loudly as possible from many sources and people will Believe anything. Cl8mate Change is a trillion pound industry all driven with western governments rich treasuries though non profits, fake charities and government funded agencies. This well funded Cult will continue unabated until this funding and abuse of the tax system is stopped.