Or nonscience passing as science

Science or Nonscience?


Mises Daily: Tuesday, December 01, 2009 by Clifford F. Thies

Hacked or possibly leaked emails appear to indicate that a lot of what passes for climate-change science is propaganda. Data appears to have been filtered, altered, or falsified, in order to deny the obvious: the earth is not continuing to warm up in accordance with climate change models; global temperature has been fluctuating for hundreds of thousands of years due to natural variation; and the earth is no warmer nowadays than it has been at several prior times in history.

The black mark earned by alarmists during the 1970s, for predicting continued global cooling, may be replicated for global-warming alarmists. The real tragedy, however, may be that — one day — scientists will cry wolf to a public that has learned to ignore them.

By now, anybody who is serious about the possibility of global warming knows that the "hockey-stick" theory promulgated by the UN a few years ago is bunk.

"If we could control global temperature, our focus would be more on avoiding global cooling than it would be on avoiding global warming."This theory held that there was no meaningful variation in global temperature during the past several thousand years until recently, when capitalism began to harness industrial power. That this theory was advanced by a scientist who was a socialist might raise a question about its validity.

"Science" is not, as some people imagine, memorizing a list of facts (such as the names of the planets). Nor is the progress of science determined by laboratory experiments. This is because, at the edge of our knowledge, accepted laboratory experiments don't exist and, in certain fields, laboratory experiments might not even be possible. Rather, the progress of science is determined by free inquiry, open discussion, and transparency among those engaged in a discipline.

There should be no pretense that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an unbiased organization. It was formed by the United Nations specifically to study "the risk of human-induced climate change." The guilty party is, thus, pre-identified and all that remains is to collect the evidence. Periodic reports of the IPCC proclaimed, ever more authoritatively, that the trend of global warming that was occurring at the time was due to human activity. The second report, in 1996, said "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate change."

The third, in 2001, presented "new and stronger evidence." This report included the hockey stick and the whacky idea that the trend of rising global temperature over the prior three centuries (or, since the so-called "Little Ice Age") was due to human activity. The fourth, in 2007, which dropped the most embarrassing claims, nevertheless claimed that "most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations."

This all seemed plausible at the time because of the warming trend. But, recently, global temperatures have been moderating and, besides, as the emails show, scientists were altering the evidence all the while.

Now You See It

Below I have a chart with the history of global temperature as it was known at the time of the 2001 report. As the chart makes clear, global temperature began to recover from the Little Ice Age about three hundred years ago. Juxtaposed against the rising trend are several cycles of 30 to 40 years length, including the one I show in red, which caused a lot of alarmists during the 1970s to say that industrial activity was causing global cooling...

Use link to read whole article and see the charts:

http://mises.org/daily/3899