Some people will do anything to save the Earth… except take a science course.
P.J. O’Rourke
Last Saturday, the Daily Sceptic drew attention to the lack of traditional science qualifications among many of the authors of the latest IPCC climate report. But we missed the point. In the post-normal scientific world, everyone is a scientist, whatever their qualifications and expertise. Everyone has a view on the climate. The hard stuff that hardly anyone liked at school – physics and chemistry – can be safely declared ‘settled’, and any irritating debate likened to Holocaust denial. What is it with this CO2 gas anyway? Temperatures went up a bit in the 1980s and 90s, so did emissions. Quod Erat Demonstrandum. Climate emergency, end of. Send the press release to the BBC.
The arrogance of this view is vividly on show in a recent article written by past IPCC lead author Bruce Glavovic. He is a professor at the School of People, Environment and Planning at Massey University, and his article called for a climate research strike. Governments are said to have agreed since 1972 that the “science is settled” – an interesting take, since that date was actually the start of the once fashionable global cooling scare. He added: “For climate change, the science-society contract is broken. The failure to arrest global warming is an indictment on successive governments and political leaders of all persuasions.”
Global warming has in fact ‘been arrested’, with the trend running out of steam for about two decades and a current 88-month standstill in progress. And, of course, temperatures have risen by just over 1°C since 1800, seemingly without any catastrophic consequences. In fact, many scientists point to numerous beneficial effects. Far fewer people die of heat than cold, and slightly warmer growing conditions, not to mention extra CO2, which helps crops grow, has helped alleviate famine in many parts of the world.
But it is not really about science. Professor Glavovic explains: “Advances in alternative research approaches, such as post-normal science, have similarly sought to identify and reconcile the political and governance issues that may affect the incorporation of science into policy and practice.”
The concept of post-normal science started to be developed from the work of Thomas Kuhn. In his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that the evolution of science was in part socially determined, and was subject to sudden “revolutions” that replaced orthodox theories. Kuhn’s ideas, of course, owe much to postmodernist thought.
These interpretations differed from the views of the great science philosopher Sir Karl Popper, who held that scientific hypotheses must be falsifiable, e.g. it must be possible to prove them wrong with empirical data. Under this rigour, scientists cannot to this day claim to know that humans cause all or most climate change because the hypothesis is unfalsifiable. Neither can they state that any single weather event is caused by human intervention. Blaming ‘extreme’ weather on such interventions cannot be falsified, so it is mere opinion, not scientific fact.
Post-normal science was given a name by Funtowicz and Ravetz in a 1993 paper quoted by Glavovic. It describes areas of science where high cost decisions are at stake, but there is considerable uncertainty over the relevant scientific facts. A “democratisation” of scientific knowledge was sought through the incorporation of “local knowledge, values and interests” in an “extended peer community”. The authors felt that these perspectives, and “other forms of knowledge”, had been unfairly excluded from science.
Under post-normal criteria, science comes to the aid of hypotheses about the natural world initially rooted in value judgements. During the last two years, post-normal scientists helped governments enforce rigid lockdowns by wildly overstating the risks (particularly for anyone under 70) and glossing over the initial paucity of scientific data and disagreements among scientists. The U.K. population was cowed into compliance. This included most journalists, who limited themselves to asking why harsher measures were not brought in sooner. The views of post-normal scientists were supported by epidemiological models that produced constantly inaccurate predictions.
The same modus operandi is at play in the climate business. Glavovic is a clear fan of the Covid experience. “Despite a lack of science or uncertainty about the impacts of action verses inaction, governments acted on the warnings of scientists, even when they could only provide partial answers to the pandemic,” he writes.
Dr. Roy Spencer of Alabama University, who compiles the accurate satellite temperature data that shows the 88-month standstill, notes that climate scientists simply assume that without humans, the climate system has been in perfect, long-term, harmonious balance. “This is a pervasive, quasi-religious assumption of the Earth science community for as long as I can remember,” he wrote. “But this position is largely an anthropocentric statement of faith.”
Genuine scientists are no longer in charge of the science narrative for Net Zero, if they ever were. Across the world, universities are stuffed full of academics calling themselves climate scientists and promoting social, economic and cultural change. If the narrative is inconvenient and doesn’t fit the pre-ordained line, it is ignored and its authors punished, as in many other parts of academia. Countless ‘Save The World’ qualifications in climate change, of little economic value, are sold to the young, who are encouraged to pay for them with massive debt. This money, along with vast private and government grants, helps fund an ever-expanding climate gravy train. Inevitably, the increasingly doom-laden IPCC reports are a product of this world.
Meanwhile, Professor Glavovic says that given the “rupture” of the science-society contract, it would be “wholly irresponsible” for scientists to participate in further IPCC assessments. There should be “moratorium” on future climate research.
Does that mean fewer doom-mongering prophecies from post-normal scientists? Finally, something on which we can all agree.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic‘s Environment Editor.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
“Hide the decline….”
I note that the author Chris Morrison is a former financial journalist and publisher. No weighty scientific credentials that I can see.
There is nothing wrong with the article, except the content.
So Popper is meaningless to you.
That explains it…….
Instead of typing brief, smart-aleck remarks, why don’t you make an attempt at presenting an argument, perhaps citing evidence in support? If the content of the article is wrong, explain why you think it’s wrong. You can do that leek, can’t you? No, I don’t suppose you can.
Really? I suppose you think that CO2 is ‘pollution’, despite glasshouse crop growers injecting the stuff in to raise levels 3-4x? I suppose you think that CO2 is ‘dangerous’ for earth’s climate, despite all the evidence showing that CO2 *follows* temperature, on all timescales (effect, not cause).. I suppose you think that cold is more beneficial to man than warmth, despite the previous warming periods (Roman, Minoan, Medieval, etc.) having seen human civilisation flourish during them, and suffering between them, e.g. during the Little Ice Age? I suppose you think the significant increase in global vegetation, e.g. food crops, mainly due to the CO2 fertilisation effect is a bad thing? If you believe all these things, and more, show us the *EVIDENCE* (remembering that correlation is not causation, and models, consensus, belief and assertion are *not* evidence).
I think that ‘leek’ follows the Humpty Dumpty school of communication –
“When I use a word”, Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
Absolutely right.
But I doubt leek cares a fig about any of that. It is more likely that he/she/it has grown used to the income stream from Al Gore’s agit-prop organisation.
Any article that allows a word like “science” to do such “heavy lifting” is fit for little else than wiping yer a*se on.
And that’s even before we get to “post-” this or that.
It’s embarrassing – a case of “Will you tell him or shall I?”
In other news, Volodymyr Zelenskyy is addressing the British House of Commons tomorrow. Doesn’t he have anything more important to do? Will the Brits all dress up as characters from “Yes Minister” to make him feel at home?
He won’t be the only out-of-his-depth-in-a-puddle comedian there .
Speaking of out of their depth gangsters did you see that Baby Pierre Castro shaking the Queens hand and running after our own NWO puppet Boris yesterday.
Why is that illegitimate Canadian still at large?
Via zoom or will he be there in person?
He might be a eugenicist, people of this persuasion are regarded by the Cabal as being at least equal to scientists.
Does that make him more or less qualified than Al Gore or Greta Thunberg?
Ad hominem.
Is that something like the lying beeb, whose chief “science” expert on global warming is an ex motoring correspondent from County Tipperary called Matt McGrath (pronounced Magda btw)
Too many over-qualified people in the world, who have never had to climb on their own roof when it’s blowing a gale and brass monkeys.
How would you be an over-qualified scientist?
Did I say you could be?
By teaching rather than doing, in some cases.
Anyone who climbs on their own roof (or anyone else’s) when it’s blowing a gale and icy enough to freeze the balls is unlikely to be around for long!
Well, like everything, it’s all about risk versus reward.
Abso-bloody-lutely! What modern ‘scientist’ has come up with anything remotely useful or practical for us ordinary peasants who pay their bloated salaries?
Even the dodgy references given in the article don’t justify the claims made by the author.
Go on people, be sceptical.. question what you are being told.
Are you trying to tell us something?
Leek is incapable of making a reasoned argument; his forte is childish one-liners.
I do better one liners.
I am, have always been and always will be sceptical. That’s why I don’t read newspapers or watch the news because the word ‘news’ is so badly out of place it should be a case for the trade descriptions act. It’s a narrative, plain and simple. My life is all the better for this. The reason I’m sceptical about CAGW is that despite the eye-watering sums of our money that has been thrown at it, I have yet to read any compelling argument in favour of it. you can’t just start with the premise that human produced CO2 is causing climate change and set about finding proof of that- surely you have to try to work out if it is doing it in the first place and what else might be causing it- and whether anything we can do would stop it, or even if we should try to. Who knows- maybe a slightly warmer planet might be beneficial on balance and we could adapt to our climate? It has been known…Check your premises!
It’s quod erat demonstrandum, not “quad”. But funnily enough, a lot of the scientific religion (including the word “scientist” itself) did come out of a place that has a famous “great” “quad”.
Jacques Attali, adviser to Francois Mitterrand and powerful international banker and unapologetic eugenicist, said this in 1981:
I’ve read this piece a few times over the last couple of years. Its pertinence always astounds me.
How long has this been in the planning?
There was a cartoon released in the 1980s in Japan and it told the same story of a pandemic and toxic vaccines. It was then released about 20-years later in Canada. It was eerie.
It’s as if the Cabal needs to get our permission to harm us, and this is the way they get it. They can say they gave us plenty of indications that they were going to harm us and we were too blind or stupid to see them.
I also saw a documentary a while ago about cartoons, and the amount of subliminal sexual messages hidden in cartoons aimed at children was astounding.
I’ve learned the world isn’t what I thought it was only a few years ago.
Wow. Never heard of this man. Thanks, Fireweasel.
Interesting to note he was born on 1st November 1943 which, by my arithmetic, makes him 78 years old, well past his own sell by date.
All people over 65 are for the chop, but some are more for the chop than others.
Every time I read that I am minded of the Queens late Consort Phillip.
His most famous quote was to wish to return as a virus to help sort the ‘population problem’
I’ve heard this a few years ago from a fairly respectable journalistic medium. I forget the exact source.
A journalist was chatting with a writer and the talk turned to the Royals and Queen. The writer claimed that in some unofficial circumstances at one time the Queen was asked about her Christianity, something along the lines of were her children following in her footsteps.
The Queen is said to have responded: There are only two Christians in my family, my mother and myself. She didn’t elaborate on this. But it is to be assumed she didn’t mean the non-Christians in her family followed no religion, or were of the Jewish or Muslim faith.
The writer who told this was of the mind that Prince Philip was a Satanist, and if this was the case, what about the sons?
What I know for sure is that there is a particular type of unnatural look about some of the males in the Rockefeller and Rothchild family, and there was also a bit of this look about Prince Philip.
Whether or not Satan exists, what’s for sure is that the Satanic religion is real and is being practised by some of the rich and powerful. This religion promotes the sacrificing of lesser mortals for the practitioner’s benefits.
At 78 has he succumbed to covid or taken his jabs like a good French citizen?
Below are two bigwigs on the world stage. Look at them, they are getting it hard not to French-kiss each other.
One is jailing innocent protesters in Canada and locking down the bank accounts of other innocent citizens. The other is actively trying to draw NATO into a war with Russia. A short while before Putin invaded Ukraine, he announced that he was going to pursue the creation of nuclear weapons as a deterrence against Russia. This statement left Russia no option but to invade – it was blatant and purposeful provocation.
The climate change lie takes up a lot of media space which in turn causes people, both deniers and promoters, to be preoccupied with it. Which in turn keeps a lot of people’s minds off the utter inadequate and morally vacant POS the Cabal deputises to do its dirty work.
Medieval rulers used foreign enemies to keep the peasants preoccupied and therefore distracted from their aristocracy’s insane domestic antics. The Cabal uses climate change as the medieval ruler used the foreign enemy.
How long has Oceania been at war with Eurasia?
Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
Excellent thank you Fireweasel
Ukraine shot down the Malaysian plane to provoke a war between east and west. They are certainly stopping at nothing, and they are exceedingly brazen about it. The real victims are called collatoral damage. Just like with the covid attack. Climate change is just one prong of the devil’s fork to subdue and enslave. They are currently doing a sterling job since all we can do is talk about it and nothing more, and the evil rulers know this well, counting on the majority ignorant to undermine the informed.
“This statement left Russia no option but to invade – it was blatant and purposeful provocation.”
Thus a Putin apologist hoists himself with his own petard?
I’m sure anyone with IQ score bigger than his hat-size could imagine other options. Even if it could be shown that Zelenskyy wasn’t just using silly rhetoric and actually had the ability to so arm himself and any intention to attack Russia with nukes.
Note that, by your “reasoning”, the invasion of Iraq by Bush & Blair was entirely justified. And Saddam had, indubtably gassed the Kurds & Marsh Arabs and, before the first Gulf war, had attempted to acquire yellowcake. No matter. Perhaps you think invading Iraq worked out well?
The “no option” fireweasel words also brings to mind the classic paedophile excuse:- “She made me do it! The seven year old minx was gagging for it!”
Nice, at least, that he is giving his infantile “Neo-Nazi” schtick a rest at last.
Keep at it. I see I’m really dealing with a Master of Wit and Repartee….
I corresponded with Ravetz and wrote ‘Climate Change and the Death of Science’ in 2009 (just before ‘Climategate’) to expose this post-normal science (which is not science).
https://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/climate-change-and-the-death-of-science/
In this post there are some gems by Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre, and (at the time) Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia (UEA) that really blow the gaffe on the whole thing: it’s a political, not a scientific enterprise.
Brilliant link! And some great quotes. I remember discussion on Post-Normal Science on Watts Up With That around that time, but missed this.
Thank you very much.
So it was a conceited effort to subvert global consensus and push forward their specific narrative.
during the 2019 election it felt like Labour where trying to tap into some nonexistent consensus to win that election, I think had brexit not been a thing they would have been more successful.
we all think princess nut nut is calling the shots but maybe someone else is yanking Borris’s chain.
if it wasn’t for the cabinet we’d had been locked down hard over Xmas and likely still now, seems Boris’s cabinet are not under the control of Borris’s masters, for now.
Spot on about the parallel between climate science and Covid. How often we hear talk about the planet having a temperature, that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, that warming affects public health in every way under the sun and that humanity needs to be put on a diet.
One way of looking at post-normal science is that it is medical logic, the reasoning used by physicians to diagnose a condition and prescribe a remedy. Medical logic is superficially similar to falsificationist science, but in reality the two are entirely different endeavours. A general practitioner examining a patient with all the symptoms of diabetes does not really try to falsify every alternative hypothesis by excluding each of the ten thousand diseases known to medicine: they apply practical inductive reasoning and try to verify the diabetic hypothesis, in the vast majority of cases with great success.
Many early examples of post-normal science were medical, for instance the saturated fat theory of heart disease: an endlessly mutating story of dietary fat filling the arteries with one or another biochemical gunk, backed up by apparent correlations, careful selection of the evidence and angry appeals to the authority of the medical profession, with a bountiful source of funding from agricultural interests. Many other instances could be given: see Christopher Booker ad nauseam.
More generally, postnormal science subordinates theoretical investigation to practical reasoning and appeals to the precautionary principle as if it was part of scientific logic. If that is how your mind works, alternative theories of Covid, or warming, or whatever it is now are a danger to life and it is only right to suppress them. Bhattacharya? Svensmark? “He thinks too much, such men are dangerous”.
Ah yes Phillip the ever reliable Precautionary Principle.
That sums up all our ills. It is used to justify much evil.
Post-normal science??? A symptom of a society with too much time on its hands. I was going to say too much money, too, but of course we don’t really have money; we have debt.
Hopefully the war in Ukraine will prompt a profound reality check and this climate change nonsense will be put back in the box. After all, the war has made Covid disappear.
The war was designed specifically to make covid disappear. Now they are rolling out the digital ID and continuing with their V programme to genetically modify as many humans as possible including the children.
“without humans, the climate system has been in perfect, long-term, harmonious balance”!
Really??!!
Don’t these people believe that we are as ‘natural’ as the earth itself? Or do they hate mankind that much?
Don’t these people believe that we can ‘improve’ nature to make life comfortable?
Don’t these people believe that large-scale natural disasters have ever happened? Do they really believe that we can stop them?
Do these people believe that only ‘their way’, i.e. they, can have any beneficial effect on the environment? For example, man in cleaning up the Canadian tar sands, or is that natural surface oil deposit a ‘perfect’ thing?
etc.
etc.
It is clear. We are ruled by reptiles and psychopaths.
“Bruce Glavovic. He is a professor at the School of People, Environment and Planning at Massey University”
A made up name, job title and University. Best we ignore all his bovine faeces then
Good post by Chris Morrison.
Interesting quotes:
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for the, at least, 150 years, since the industrial revolution,”
“I am the daughter of a revolutionary and I feel very comfortable with revolutions,”
Christiana Figueres, then executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, in other words IPCC’s boss.
Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.
Ottmar Edenhofer – scientific director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), From 2008 to 2015 he served as one of the co-chairs of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group III “Mitigation of Climate Change”.
Of course, Mme Figueres is in error. Attempts to “change the economic development model that has been reigning for the, at least, 150 years” have been frequent since 1917. All have miserably failed, but I guess that as a committed Marxist and admirer of China’s political system, she will be confident that yet another attempt (presumably with her as “Great Helmsman / Helmswoman” will lead us, at last, to Utopia.
So, the fact that ‘the science’ got absolutely everything badly wrong about Covid, lockdowns, masks, then refused to even acknowledge that it got it wrong and in fact seems to think it got it right and would do it all again only twice as much doesn’t worry him? If our ancestors had people like him advising them we’d all still be living in caves, too scared to venture out because, you know, something might get us. Pathetic.
Correct.
As has been pointed out, The Precautionary Principle strikes again.
Although, if you want to go, Hell for leather, to a Society dependent on whirligigs and moon beams, no need for any precautions at all.
This is worth a look if you haven’t already… https://www.beautyandthebeastlytruth.com/
This is an excellent publication. Concise and matter of fact, encourages open debate and engenders thought, It should be compulsory reading in all schools.
Anyone with an open mind will enjoy its simple frankness. The “we’re all going to die” brigade won’t enjoy it.