Labour’s new climate change minister has demanded a ban on fracking.
Danielle Rowley, who has been appointed as shadow climate justice and green jobs minister, also wants to see more onshore wind turbines and free bus travel for under-25s.
The Midlothian MP plans to meet climate change activists, including the climate school strikers, to formulate Labour policy.
I don’t do many climate change posts – lack of time, public interest
has waned and there are many good sources out there. However the madness has long been mainstream so it is perhaps
worth a few simple standpoints in a series of occasional mostly non-technical
posts, this being the first.
The climate change story is unscientific.
It is unscientific because it is not falsifiable and so violates
Karl Popper’s dictum that scientific theories must in principle be falsifiable.
Popper’s dictum is about as close as we get to defining good science. Move away
from it and we encounter the killer question - if even in principle a theory cannot
be falsified then what difference does it make whether it is valid or invalid?
The key words here are in
principle. In principle it is possible to imagine how the climate change
story could be falsified. Unambiguous global cooling would falsify it. In which
case the climate faithful should be delighted that we have made a major
breakthrough in understanding our climate and corrected a scientific error. We
can forget the wind turbines and solar panels, discard all the climate baggage
and focus on staying warm in winter. Sack the climate scientists and the environmental
journalists, laugh at the politicians, sack the Climate Justice Minister and close down the BBC –
It isn’t likely is it? Would the climate faithful admit they
had been wrong all along? Or would they claim that the cooling would have been
worse if it wasn’t for the warming we cause? To my mind falsification is not
part of the official narrative and this is where we spot the unscientific
nature of it - there is absolutely no interest in falsification.
This is a social and political judgement though, not a
scientific question. Judge the people and the institutions. Judge the politics.
It’s a matter of opinion. Your choice.
Yet in spite of this key weakness, the climate change story
attracts scientific support as well as political opportunism. Maybe we should not surprised and we should
remember that scientists are human. In real life an abstract principle such as
falsifiability is not as important as a career, paying the mortgage, getting
papers published, attracting students, virtue signalling or attracting funding.
The falsifiable nature of good science may be crucially important in the long
term, but it still an abstract principle and in climate science long term is somewhere over the horizon.
Ignoring the principle when convenient to do so – that is just how we are.
We cannot prove that the climate change story is not
falsifiable, but anyone with any kind of background can judge the point for
themselves. That’s the attraction of this approach. The basis of the whole
climate debate is nothing more than a matter of opinion because the scientific
nature of the official story is a matter of opinion. Is it falsifiable?
In my judgement the climate change narrative is not intended
to be falsifiable and is therefore a pseudoscientific fraud. It is pseudoscientific
because it is not falsifiable and fraud because this crucial defect has been
obvious for years. But we should not be surprised at its success and we should
not be surprised if the success continues until a more rewarding fraud comes
along. Consensus is more rewarding than principle. Distant horizons keep things
that way.
8 comments:
But ... but ... it says so in the Washington Post, no less, and all sorts of other newspapers in the USA! Melting icebergs, seals finding the water too hot, well known glaciers disappearing and in a few years the ice-melt will make coastal cities uninhabitable!
Oh, wait a minute, I've just noticed this was published in, er, 1922 actually!
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/does_this_settled_science_look_familiar.html
What I find strange about this undoubted unfalsifiability of AGW predictions is this. Most Humanities and arts graduates - like me - are familiar with Popper. We can't do the actual hard bits of science (no maths!) and we don't know about the actual daily grind of doing the job. But lots of us have an understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of science. Often, we know more about it than those working in scientific fields, who just get on with it and think that such questions are a bit airy-fairy.
So why are the Guardian-reading woke crowd ignoring this elephant in the room? Why can't they see that it falls foul off the falsifiability principle?
Maybe the pleasure of riding the bandwagon outweighs any principles they have.
"as well as political opportunism." ah yes and the fact that something that may 'save the world' is not something they will rebuff despite the facts, as it would weaken their supposed credentials however nonsensical they are.
As with immigration no politician wants to be branded a racist for daring to speak about it, so with climate change, they would have people die of cold rather than admit they are wrong.
But a child has said it recently, so it must be so.
Mark Wadsworth has splendid example of climate porn on his blog:
"Ms Hickman has been a psychotherapist for more than 20 years and before last year she had two or three patients at any one time with eco-anxiety."
If it’s of any interest I remember when the climate experts were quite sure that the soot and smoke from factory chimneys was actually causing GLOBAL COOLING. That was “ settled science”,sufficiently respectable to command a consensus.
For a brief while it seemed true. The high ( that is low) temperature point was the winter of 1972/73 when severe frosts with low snow cover killed the Autumn-sown Russian wheat crop. The Soviets managed a very sophisticated buying operation on the Chicago market and the price of wheat more than doubled. However, it was not the expected climate “ tipping point”. The polar glaciers did not extend as rapidly as foretold, so it was not necessary to strew soot over the Northern regions. Canada, Northern Russia and Northern China were not buried under hundreds of feet of snow and ice - although the CIA believed that might happen on the advice of the “climate community”.
The next few years were much hotter than average. I particularly recall the Summer of 1976 when the Derbyshire hills were burned brown. I also got married that year.
So in 1975 the scientists called a conference under the title “ The atmosphere, endangered and endangering”. They agreed to coordinate their reports around the theme of GLOBAL WARMING caused by CO2 and to publicise it consistently. Some of those who had been keenest to freeze us before 1975 were the keenest to fry us afterwards and still going strong in positions of great influence as late as the Copenhagen IPCC conference of 2009.
I wrote it up, as the sequence of doctored reports and dishonesty was sufficiently outrageous to have killed the racket in any rational world. The indoctrination in schools is now intense and has lasted longer than the pro EU story. So it is very difficult to have a rational conversation on the topic with many younger people.
David - oh no! In a few years we'll be flooded and Steinbeck won't be able to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Sam - you are right, those working in scientific fields do just get on with it and think that such questions are a bit airy-fairy. I think many do sense that the science is dodgy but not for this most basic reason which doesn't occur to them. Yes it is strange.
Wiggia - and that is partly a problem with voters who never vote against their adopted party. Also a problem with the party system of course.
Sackers - that's the strangest thing of all. An abdication of adulthood.
Graeme - yes Mark has written some good climate posts recently.
Edward - I recall the summer of 1976 too. Great cracks in our newly-turfed lawn and using washing up water to keep the garden going.
Although dishonesty certainly is sufficiently outrageous to have killed the racket in any rational world that does leave us with a problem - ours can't be a rational world. If we leave reason behind we are doomed because our entire civilisation depends on it. Or maybe only a relatively small number of people have to be rational.
I read somewhere that the first fracked well was in the North Sea around 1955. Is she going to ban that and the Wytch Farm well in Dorset? The lack of knowledge of those who want to rule is not much of an enticement to vote for them
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