[continued from previous message]   
      
   Rob Honeycutt and his allies knew what they were doing. Delingpole   
   points out that Honeycutt (on a different website) urged people to   
   “send in the troops to hammer down” anything moderate or sceptical,   
   and to “grow the team of crushers”. Those of us who have been on the   
   end of this sort of stuff know it is exactly like what the blasphemy   
   police do with Islamophobia. We get falsely labelled “deniers” and   
   attacked for heresy in often the most ad-hominem way.   
      
   Even more shocking has been the bullying lynch mob assembled this year   
   by alarmists to prevent the University of Western Australia, erstwhile   
   employers of the serially debunked conspiracy theorist Stephan   
   Lewandowsky, giving a job to the economist Bjorn Lomborg. The grounds   
   were that Lomborg is a “denier”. But he’s not. He does not challenge   
   the science at all. He challenges on economic grounds some climate   
   change policies, and the skewed priorities that lead to the   
   ineffective spending of money on the wrong environmental solutions.   
   His approach has been repeatedly vindicated over many years in many   
   different topics, by many of the world’s leading economists. Yet there   
   was barely a squeak of protest from the academic establishment at the   
   way he was howled down and defamed for having the temerity to try to   
   set up a research group at a university.   
      
   Well, internet trolls are roaming the woods in every subject, so what   
   am I complaining about? The difference is that in the climate debate   
   they have the tacit or explicit support of the scientific   
   establishment. Venerable bodies like the Royal Society almost never   
   criticise journalists for being excessively alarmist, only for being   
   too lukewarm, and increasingly behave like pseudoscientists,   
   explaining away inconvenient facts.   
      
   Making excuses for failed predictions   
      
   For example, scientists predicted a retreat of Antarctic sea ice but   
   it has expanded instead, and nowadays they are claiming, like any   
   astrologer, that this is because of warming after all. “Please,” says   
   Mark Steyn in The Facts:   
      
   No tittering, it’s so puerile—every professor of climatology knows   
   that the thickest ice ever is a clear sign of thin ice, because as the   
   oceans warm, glaciers break off the Himalayas and are carried by the   
   El Ninja down the Gore Stream past the Cape of Good Horn where they   
   merge into the melting ice sheet, named after the awareness-raising   
   rapper Ice Sheet …   
      
   Or consider this example, from the Royal Society’s recent booklet on   
   climate change:   
      
   Does the recent slowdown of warming mean that climate change is no   
   longer happening? No. Since the very warm surface temperatures of 1998   
   which followed the strong 1997-98 El Nin~o, the increase in average   
   surface temperature has slowed relative to the previous decade of   
   rapid temperature increases, with more of the excess heat being stored   
   in the oceans.   
      
   You would never know from this that the “it’s hiding in the oceans”   
   excuse is just one unproven hypothesis—and one that implies that   
   natural variation exaggerated the warming in the 1990s, so reinforcing   
   the lukewarm argument. Nor would you know (as Andrew Bolt recounts in   
   his chapter inThe Facts) that the pause in global warming contradicts   
   specific and explicit predictions such as this, from the UK Met   
   Office: “by 2014 we’re predicting it will be 0.3 degrees warmer than   
   in 2004”. Or that the length of the pause is now past the point where   
   many scientists said it would disprove the hypothesis of rapid   
   man-made warming. Dr Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at   
   the University of East Anglia, said in 2009: “Bottom line: the ‘no   
   upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get   
   worried.” It now has.   
      
   Excusing failed predictions is a staple of astrology; it’s the way   
   pseudoscientists argue. In science, as Karl Popper long ago insisted,   
   if you make predictions and they fail, you don’t just make excuses and   
   insist you’re even more right than before. The Royal Society once used   
   to promise “never to give their opinion, as a body, upon any subject”.   
   Its very motto is “nullius in verba”: take nobody’s word for it. Now   
   it puts out catechisms of what you must believe in. Surely, the   
   handing down of dogmas is for churches, not science academies.   
   Expertise, authority and leadership should count for nothing in   
   science. The great Thomas Henry Huxley put it this way: “The improver   
   of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as   
   such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the   
   one unpardonable sin.” Richard Feynman was even pithier: “Science is   
   the belief in the ignorance of experts.”   
      
   The harm to science   
      
   I dread to think what harm this episode will have done to the   
   reputation of science in general when the dust has settled. Science   
   will need a reformation. Garth Paltridge is a distinguished Australian   
   climate scientist, who, in The Facts, pens a wise paragraph that I   
   fear will be the epitaph of climate science:   
      
   We have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific   
   establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the   
   trap of seriously overstating the climate problem—or, what is much the   
   same thing, of seriously understating the uncertainties associated   
   with the climate problem—in its effort to promote the cause. It is a   
   particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks   
   destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won   
   reputation for honesty which is the basis for society’s respect for   
   scientific endeavour.   
      
   And it’s not working anyway. Despite avalanches of money being spent   
   on research to find evidence of rapid man-made warming, despite even   
   more spent on propaganda and marketing and subsidising renewable   
   energy, the public remains unconvinced. The most recent polling data   
   from Gallup shows the number of Americans who worry “a great deal”   
   about climate change is down slightly on thirty years ago, while the   
   number who worry “not at all” has doubled from 12 per cent to 24 per   
   cent—and now exceeds the number who worry “only a little” or “a fair   
   amount”. All that fear-mongering has achieved less than nothing: if   
   anything it has hardened scepticism.   
      
   None of this would matter if it was just scientific inquiry, though   
   that rarely comes cheap in itself. The big difference is that these   
   scientists who insist that we take their word for it, and who get   
   cross if we don’t, are also asking us to make huge, expensive and   
   risky changes to the world economy and to people’s livelihoods. They   
   want us to spend a fortune getting emissions down as soon as possible.   
   And they want us to do that even if it hurts poor people today,   
   because, they say, their grandchildren (who, as Nigel Lawson points   
   out, in The Facts, and their models assume, are going to be very   
   wealthy) matter more.   
      
   Yet they are not prepared to debate the science behind their concern.   
   That seems wrong to me.   
      
   Matt Ridley is an English science journalist whose books include The   
   Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. A member of the House of   
   Lords, he has a website at www.mattridley.co.uk. He declares an   
   interest in coal through the leasing of land for mining.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)