[continued from previous message]   
      
   anyway, and the butterflies have since recovered throughout their   
   range. When Steele asked Parmesan for her data, she refused.   
   Parmesan’s paper continues to be cited as evidence of climate change.   
   Steele meanwhile is derided as a “denier”. No wonder a highly   
   sceptical ecologist I know is very reluctant to break cover.   
      
   Jim Hansen, recently retired as head of the Goddard Institute of Space   
   Studies at NASA, won over a million dollars in lucrative green prizes,   
   regularly joined protests against coal plants and got himself arrested   
   while at the same time he was in charge of adjusting and homogenising   
   one of the supposedly objective data sets on global surface   
   temperature. How would he be likely to react if told of evidence that   
   climate change is not such a big problem?   
      
   Michael Oppenheimer, of Princeton University, who frequently testifies   
   before Congress in favour of urgent action on climate change, was the   
   Environmental Defense Fund’s senior scientist for nineteen years and   
   continues to advise it. The EDF has assets of $209 million and since   
   2008 has had over $540 million from charitable foundations, plus $2.8   
   million in federal grants. In that time it has spent $11.3 million on   
   lobbying, and has fifty-five people on thirty-two federal advisory   
   committees. How likely is it that they or Oppenheimer would turn   
   around and say global warming is not likely to be dangerous?   
      
   Why is it acceptable, asks the blogger Donna Laframboise, for the IPCC   
   to “put a man who has spent his career cashing cheques from both the   
   World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Greenpeace in charge of its latest   
   chapter on the world’s oceans?” She’s referring to the University of   
   Queensland’s Ove Hoegh-Guldberg.   
      
   These scientists and their guardians of the flame repeatedly insist   
   that there are only two ways of thinking about climate change—that   
   it’s real, man-made and dangerous (the right way), or that it’s not   
   happening (the wrong way). But this is a false dichotomy. There is a   
   third possibility: that it’s real, partly man-made and not dangerous.   
   This is the “lukewarmer” school, and I am happy to put myself in this   
   category. Lukewarmers do not think dangerous climate change is   
   impossible; but they think it is unlikely.   
      
   I find that very few people even know of this. Most ordinary people   
   who do not follow climate debates assume that either it’s not   
   happening or it’s dangerous. This suits those with vested interests in   
   renewable energy, since it implies that the only way you would be   
   against their boondoggles is if you “didn’t believe” in climate   
   change.   
      
      
      
   What consensus about the future?   
      
   Sceptics such as Plimer often complain that “consensus” has no place   
   in science. Strictly they are right, but I think it is a red herring.   
   I happily agree that you can have some degree of scientific consensus   
   about the past and the present. The earth is a sphere; evolution is   
   true; carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. The IPCC claims in its most   
   recent report that it is “95 per cent” sure that “more than half” of   
   the (gentle) warming “since 1950” is man-made. I’ll drink to that,   
   though it’s a pretty vague claim. But you really cannot have much of a   
   consensus about the future. Scientists are terrible at making   
   forecasts—indeed as Dan Gardner documents in his book Future Babble   
   they are often worse than laymen. And the climate is a chaotic system   
   with multiple influences of which human emissions are just one, which   
   makes prediction even harder.   
      
   The IPCC actually admits the possibility of lukewarming within its   
   consensus, because it gives a range of possible future temperatures:   
   it thinks the world will be between about 1.5 and four degrees warmer   
   on average by the end of the century. That’s a huge range, from   
   marginally beneficial to terrifyingly harmful, so it is hardly a   
   consensus of danger, and if you look at the “probability density   
   functions” of climate sensitivity, they always cluster towards the   
   lower end.   
      
   What is more, in the small print describing the assumptions of the   
   “representative concentration pathways”, it admits that the top of the   
   range will only be reached if sensitivity to carbon dioxide is high   
   (which is doubtful); if world population growth re-accelerates (which   
   is unlikely); if carbon dioxide absorption by the oceans slows down   
   (which is improbable); and if the world economy goes in a very odd   
   direction, giving up gas but increasing coal use tenfold (which is   
   implausible).   
      
   But the commentators ignore all these caveats and babble on about   
   warming of “up to” four degrees (or even more), then castigate as a   
   “denier” anybody who says, as I do, the lower end of the scale looks   
   much more likely given the actual data. This is a deliberate tactic.   
   Following what the psychologist Philip Tetlock called the “psychology   
   of taboo”, there has been a systematic and thorough campaign to rule   
   out the middle ground as heretical: not just wrong, but mistaken,   
   immoral and beyond the pale. That’s what the word denier with its   
   deliberate connotations of Holocaust denial is intended to do. For   
   reasons I do not fully understand, journalists have been shamefully   
   happy to go along with this fundamentally religious project.   
      
   Politicians love this polarising because it means they can attack a   
   straw man. It’s what they are good at. “Doubt has been eliminated,”   
   said Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway and UN   
   Special Representative on Climate Change, in a speech in 2007: “It is   
   irresponsible, reckless and deeply immoral to question the seriousness   
   of the situation. The time for diagnosis is over. Now it is time to   
   act.” John Kerry says we have no time for a meeting of the flat-earth   
   society. Barack Obama says that 97 per cent of scientists agree that   
   climate change is “real, man-made and dangerous”. That’s just a lie   
   (or a very ignorant remark): as I point out above, there is no   
   consensus that it’s dangerous.   
      
   So where’s the outrage from scientists at this presidential   
   distortion? It’s worse than that, actually. The 97 per cent figure is   
   derived from two pieces of pseudoscience that would have embarrassed a   
   homeopath. The first was a poll that found that 97 per cent of just   
   seventy-nine scientists thought climate change was man-made—not that   
   it was dangerous. A more recent poll of 1854 members of the American   
   Meteorological Society found the true number is 52 per cent.   
      
   The second source of the 97 per cent number was a survey of scientific   
   papers, which has now been comprehensively demolished by Professor   
   Richard Tol of Sussex University, who is probably the world’s leading   
   climate economist. As the Australian blogger Joanne Nova summarised   
   Tol’s findings, John Cook of the University of Queensland and his team   
   used an unrepresentative sample, left out much useful data, used   
   biased observers who disagreed with the authors of the papers they   
   were classifying nearly two-thirds of the time, and collected and   
   analysed the data in such a way as to allow the authors to adjust   
   their preliminary conclusions as they went along, a scientific no-no   
   if ever there was one. The data could not be replicated, and Cook   
   himself threatened legal action to hide them. Yet neither the journal   
   nor the university where Cook works has retracted the paper, and the   
   scientific establishment refuses to stop citing it, let alone blow the   
   whistle on it. Its conclusion is too useful.   
      
   This should be a huge scandal, not fodder for a tweet by the leader of   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)