Menu directory status & updates copyrights help

Kyoto Premise: anthropogenic Green-House Gas emissions & climate change

www.BillHowell.ca

Something is rotten in the state of scientists (not science), and the "Kyoto Premise on anthropogenic Green-House Gas emissions & climate change" is an excellent example of this. Or has it always been this way, with Kyoto only being the "biggest and baddest" example?...

There are many fantastic scientists and engineers doing fun and brilliant work - certainly beyond whatever I can ever hope to do. And the level of education, access to huge amounts of information and funding, powerful new instrumentation, mathematical and statistical tools, computers, and the internet give scientists far more power to their jobs. Scientists must also "explore" ideas and a great diversity of perspectives and opinions is essential.

I certainly don't think that I am anywhere close to the top level of scientists. Not at all. So how can I (and other scientists) criticize scientists? Actually, this web section is a critique of the "scientific consensus", or "science cult" that seems to infect a majority of the scientific population. "Blowing in the wind" (politically correct winds) is how we seem to behave, rather than using the mental tools scientists and engineers pride themselves for. And that's why I single out scientists as a group, not because they are different in this manner from doctors, lawyers, pipefitters, etc; but because they, MORE than others, should be relatively immune to it. But they may not even be much better than any other group of people.

So what about intensely brilliant scientists, the ones who can reason their way infallibly through complex subjects? What do they say? First of all, I'm not one of them, and based on past controversies in science, most of us can't pick them out reliably (otherwise scientists wouldn't chase "false gods" like the rest of the population). Furthermore, even if scientists are extremely good at one area certainly doesn't guarantee that you will get sensible responses for other areas (markets, politics, religion, whatever). Still, I prefer to believe that there are "super-scientists" who really do think far more rigorously than the vast majority of scientists. Most of the ones that I know and trust who work on climate change aren't "towing the Kyoto line".

This document is being prepared as of mid January 2007.... (soon). Obviously, I'm lacking definitions, background, and content. Hopefully it will be out before the UN-IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, and we can see if I have made a fool of myself, ...to come soon...

Here are some of my documents: Note that there are MANY books and articles by other scientists and commentators on this theme, an this appears to have been a constant throughout history. Several references are provided below. Probably the best for the whole area of environmentalism was written by Bjorn Lomberg in the Netherlands. He covers Climate Change in one of his chapters. The book by Essex and McKitrick was one of the early books to really lambaste the science of the Kyoto Premise, and McIntyre was instrumental in the rejection of the fraudulent "hockey stick" graph of temperatures over the last thousand years, which was psychologically the most influential illustration used to convince the public about the importance of the Kyoto Premise.

The Financial Post, part of Canada's National Post newwspaper, has been the only major Canadian media source brave enough to challenge many of the politically-correct nonsense in this country. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but always ready to think critically. So perhaps it is natural that they have posted an awesome series of articles blasting the Kyoto Premise over the last 3 to 6 years. In 2007, Lawrence Solomon has put together a concentrated series on the views of scientists who take apart the Kyoto Premise. Only a few of the articles are listed below. Lawrence Solomon publish a book compilation of his work, "The Deniers : The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud."

The scientists aren't wearing any clothes!

The pulic has been persistently misled for almost two decades (perhaps more) about climate change, global warming, the principal drivers of climate, and the role of man-made Green-House Gases (GHGs). It's not so much a problem of ideas that don't pan out (that's science!), but the "manufacturing of consensus" (here I'm stealing and perverting one of Noam Chomsky's titles, I think) and the D-cubed misportrayal of certainty, consensus, and the invisibility of tremendous flaws and gaps in theories that really should be profiled.

Science has to be crazy and fun - at least some scientists have to be wandering around in conceptual never-never land in order to find new things, and to break the chains of our current beliefs and knowledge. And people can be right for all of the wrong reasons. So the message here is definitely NOT to somehow clamp down on science, to audit and manage it into irrelevance, or worse, to be another tool for justifying yet another decision, wacko or prescient. The issue is to address our lemming-like desire to jump onto a belief, a cult, a religion of the politically-correct science of the day. Because once huge decisions and actions are misled by science that does not admit its own shortcomings and uncertainties, it then becomes bad science. And policy that seeks to turn science into bad science is bad policy, whether by intent or by a desperation to seek divine or scientific support for what is the necessity of making decisions in the absence of complete or reliable information.

So what's the answer to climate change? I don't know, but if you look at the data, credible analysis, and especially the regular flaws in much of the analysis, it points in many directions, but not particularly strongly in the direction that the Kyotoists are promoting! The Precautionary Principle won't help you here as much as many believe. Few scientists seem to realize that the principle requires us to plan for a plethora of possibilities at a given level of "unknown or unproven" risk - which rapidly escalates into contradictory action plans and an essentially infinite demand on resources. For example, this means preparing for global cooling as well as global warming. Surprise, surprise - and I know the vast majority of scientists don't want to hear that!!! If, like most, you are a beleiver rather than a critical thinker, then your unwavering belief in the Kyoto Prmemise absolves you of the necessity of attention and consciousness being diverted to anything else.

Re-Prioritize, Re-Structure, and Re-Process: Climate Change Science and Policy

It's clear to me that the massive sums put into Climate Change science and policy have produced some wonderful results, and some catastrophically bad results, perhaps best illustrated by the policy side. I still have to put together a string of documents on this issue, but in a sense some general issues are that scientists have to be able to play around to get good results, and that turning science into a means of pushing propaganda and belief systems is a really bad idea. I'm certain that wasn't the stated goal of science and policy leadership, but it has been the result. That in no way resolves the scientists and policy analysts for personal failures to ensure honest, diligent, and competent work before hyping catastrophe scenarios to the public, or more importantly, not to "shut out, shut up, and shut down" other scientists and policy analysts. When analysing the activity of neuron cultures, regular synchronous firing is an indication of dysfunctional behaviour, excessive climate stability is a scary thing (maybe), and "scientific consensus" should be regarded as an oxymoron and a danger signal, especially when that happens with complex systems and new areas of research, and most importantly, when we are dealing with "politically correct" issues.

Canada should dramatically cut the excesses of climate research funding by one-third to one-half as a means of: The majority of the remaining Climate Change budget (yes, billions and billions) should go towards real climate change drivers, intermediates and models, i.e.:
This implies massive cuts to, or elimination of (in Canada only), the following areas: Clearly you should take all of this with a grain of salt, and it is of course very limited in scope (just look at the teams working on the UN-IPCC reviews!). But we need to recognize the huge failures of the current philosophies, processes, institutions, and participants. The above re-prioritizations won't solve the basic problem of how did we get into this mess to begin with (that's another theme in development), but if all that happens is that the next 20 years of research and policy makes another mess, then at least that's a change if not a progress, and other scientists and policy analysts will get a chance to produce real results for society and for scientific curiosity. They could hardly do worse than the current "politically correct crowd".

My interest in the area of climate change springs from having being involved in the initial stages of science program definition for Canada's Action Plan 2000 on Climate Change. Even before that I was sceptical about the "Kyoto Premise" (KP defined later), but the more I looked into the various areas of science the worse it looked – and solar physics was an obvious huge gap. Furthermore, really great scientists who dared to either question the KP, or whose results were perhaps seen to be a threat, were really trashed by many other scientists. Add to that what looked to be a sick peer review process in Science, Nature, and several other high-profile scientific journals, and the contrarian in me really came out. (At some point in the future I'll put together a short note on "The real issue behind the Kyoto Premise", something brought out by many if not all past scientific breakthroughs and the reactions of the supposedly rational scientific community.)

Here are some initial documents that address this issue. (some of this is listed on my "Climate and sun" webpage as well:

Amazon.com lists a number of related books, which I have not read yet:
Directory of available files for this webpage: