Jim's Blog

Pajamas media has found an excellent quote from Richard Feynman, which skewers every global warmer:

“The Pleasure of Finding things out” by Richard Feynman, page 187

We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations and they make lists and they do statistics, but they do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science-like the South Sea Islanders making airfields, radio towers out of wood, expecting a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners’ airfields around them, but strangely, they don’t fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are-experts. You teachers who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, maybe you can doubt the experts once in a while. Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

When someone says science teaches such and such, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it. If they say to you science has shown such and such, you might ask, “How does science show it-how did the scientists find out-how, what, where?” Not science has shown, but this experiment, this effect, has shown. And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments (but we must listen to all the evidence), to judge whether a reusable conclusion has been arrived at. . I think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television words, books, and so on are unscientific. That doesn’t mean they are bad, but they are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.

Genuine science is replicable. And “replicable” does not mean two priests recite the same doctrine, it means they explain what they did in such a fashion that anyone else could do it also.

If they refuse to explain, they are not scientists, but priests of Gaea.

Unsupported and unexplained politically correct pseudo science appears all the time in “Science” and “Nature”
For example:

Despite the fact that these papers appeared in top journals like Nature and Science, none of the journal reviewers or editors ever required Briffa to release his Yamal data. Steve McIntyre’s repeated requests for them to uphold their own data disclosure rules were ignored.

This sort of thing (that PC science is in practice exempted from data disclosure, and proudly proclaims results on the basis of secret evidence) has been an ongoing scientific scandal from the very beginning of the global warming movement, and everyone aware of this unscientific practice should have realized that global warming science is not science, but politics and religion, and that global warming scientists are not scientists, but priests of Gaea.

Environmentalism, and several other isms, are state sponsored religions, which because of state backing have the privilege of publishing their holy texts in scientific journals despite conspicuous and infamous failure to comply with the standards and rules of those journals.

Nine years later, Briffa’s Yamal data for twentieth century temperatures turned out to be that one tree of ten selected trees grew unusually rapidly during the twentieth century as compared to fossil trees of the same type from the same area. These ten trees were selected by Bricca after a great many other trees in the same area were measured, but the rest of the measurements were not included.

The larger population of trees, taken as a whole, shows much the same growth pattern as the fossil trees.

Take out one tree from those ten, Yamal06, and most of the evidence for climate change vanishes. Restore the much larger set of tree measurements from which the ten trees were selected, and all of the evidence for climate change vanishes – the population as a whole is has the same growth rates as the fossil trees.

Take out one tree from half a dozen graphs of global warming in near a dozen papers, and suddenly they do not show global warming any more.

Bricca has, at this time, not yet explained why those ten trees, and not other trees in the same area measured in the same survey. And whatever his explanation, ten trees is not enough.

The government likes data that supports more government power, rewards those that tell it what it wants to hear, and punishes those that tell it what it does not want to hear.

Environmentalism is a state sponsored religion, for it is perfectly visible to anyone that wants to look that it is not subject to the same standards as normal science, the story of Briffa and the Yamal data being one example of a great many.

People have lost their jobs for reporting that glaciers are advancing in a particular area, even though they fully agreed that most glaciers are retreating. This makes it hard to tell whether most glaciers are indeed retreating.

Environmentalism generally, and the Global Warming movement in particular, acts like a holy and sectarian religious movement, a religious movement backed by state power, not like science.

Recent events prove that on certain topics, they do not carry science, but are mere megaphones for the holy ranting of the priesthood.

Science is not that which the state decrees to be science. It is that which follows the rules of science, which unwritten rules correspond, more or less, to the written rules of the older and more prestigious journals.

If these journals are reluctant to apply these written rules on certain sensitive topics, then what appears on those sensitive topics will not be science, and hence what appears or fails to appear in such journals is not an indication of truth, but of religion.

In particular if the replacement hockey stick had been genuinely peer reviewed, then, in accordance with the unwritten rules of science, and the written rules of the older and more prestigious science journals, the data and calculations supporting the graph would have been made available. Had the data and graphs been made available, people would have objected nine years ago that ten trees are not enough.

Since not genuinely peer reviewed, since not in conformity with journal rules, therefore not genuine science, therefore mere theology.

As you doubtless know by now, the Institute of Physics gave a wonderfully politically incorrect report on Global Warming.

Predictably the boot came down on them hard.

Academia is indeed like a communist country.  They don’t shoot dissidents in Academia, but communist thought control seldom found it necessary to shoot  people.  It mostly  worked by quietly blighting the lives of troublesome people.  (more…)

The Institute of Physics tells us.

The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

In plainer words, climate science lacks credibility.  That climate scientists tell us we are doomed unless we repent of our sins against Gaea is not good reason to think we are doomed.

The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions … This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.

Yes, they are condemning the entire field, not just Phil Jones, not just Hadley CRU

… proxy reconstructions are the basis for the conclusion that 20th century warming is unprecedented. Published reconstructions may represent only a part of the raw data available and may be sensitive to the choices made and the statistical techniques used. Different choices, omissions or statistical processes may lead to different conclusions. This possibility was evidently the reason behind some of the (rejected) requests for further information.

In plainer words, evidently the reason that Climate scientists refused to make their data available because if other people looked at the data, they would have concluded the climate scientists were full of $#@%. This is a reference to the alternate climate reconstructions in Steve McIntyre’s report on the CRU emails. (more…)

Nasa, as evidence that we are doomed unless we make sufficient sacrifice to Gaia and tithe to Gaia’s high priesthood, has long had on its web page

Mountain Glaciers and snow cover have declined on average in both hemispheres and may disappear altogether in certain regions of the planet, such as the Himalayas, by 2030

Which web page has silently changed

So was it a lie, or an error?

I knew data hadn’t been verified … we thought if we can highlight it, it will impact policy makers and politicians and encourage them to take concrete action.

In other words, a lie. And if one lie, all lies.

As Patrick Archibald told us of an earlier scandal with the same lesson, the science is scuttled

The “Air Vent” follows the money:

The IPCC makes a hyperbolic claim about retreating glaciers, which claim originates from a for profit company owned by the chairman of the IPCC.  Millions of dollars are then granted to this company to investigate this purported disaster, to the personal profit of the chairman of the IPCC.

Hadcrut temperatures are fraudulent, for the Climategate files reveals that no one knows how they were constructed.

The Air vent attempts an honest reconstruction:

Of course, this reconstruction can only be as good as the data it rests on, which we now know from the Climategate documents directory to be poor.  I argue we should throw out all dubious data – which likely means we should rely on proxy indications of temperature for the early part of the century.

When science becomes a priesthood, it is no longer science.

Reference to authority is unscientific, indeed antiscientific, a rejection of the principles of
science.  One must appeal to evidence, not authority.  What authority says is not scientific evidence.

Independent replication is evidence.

If people all over the world have  made observations for the last 100 years about  temperature, I can’t replicate them; but other people at the time could replicate them.

The date at which Lake Winnipesaukee ice goes out, is the date at which people can go to their properties, and do go to their properties.  If the ice out date was wrong, they would notice and be mighty pissed.  I selected Lake Winnipesaukee, because that is the lake  whose ice outs receive the most attention unrelated to  estimating climate. Of all older climate data, Lake Winnipesaukee ice outs are the best replicated, thus, the most scientific.

And ice out dates on Lake Winnipesaukee indicate no twentieth century warming That I provide the data and method of calculation, and that this data is the most widely replicated data available means that this blog post is far more scientific than anything that could ever be permitted to appear in the journals “Nature” or “Science”.

This is the opposite of the Giss-Hadley-CRU approach, which uses vast piles of data whose validity no one can possibly know, and which there is every reason to doubt, and then capriciously excludes some of that data, includes other of that data, and whimsically adjusts what is included for reasons that are not only not revealed, but which the Climategate files revealed that Hadley-CRU themselves do not record, which large adjustments, even if justified rather than fraudulent, are an admission of the complete worthlessness of the data for the purpose.  No one can possibly know, not even Hadley-CRU, whether their adjustments are justified or fraudulent, not that it would matter since if the large adjustments are justified, the data is worthless for the purpose of estimating past climate.

If you have to estimate the veracity of the reports based on the authority of what you know about those making the reports, that is not science, but religion.  Those with the greatest authority are always the most religious, thus this approach guarantees acceptance of the most holy doctrine of the consensus of the most holy and eminent synod – which approach is anthropogenic global warming in a nutshell.

“The consensus” is not science.

Science is common sense, observation, truthfulness, and impartiality, with social mechanisms to enforce truthfulness and impartiality.  If science becomes a priesthood, if you hear the words “consensus” and “peer reviewed publication”, the mechanisms that enforce truthfulness and impartiality have failed.  “Peer reviewed”is only an indication of some connection to reality when people do not rely on it as evidence of connection to reality.