Steve Janke: How zealotry came to pervert climate science
Eric Gisin
November 26, 2009, 08:15:00 | NP Editor
There are many ways to characterize people, and one way is to separate them into idealists and
realists.
The words, as I use them here, mean something somewhat different from their common usage.
An idealist passes judgment on the universe. For the idealist, the universe (or some portion of
it, like his country's politics), ought to behave in a certain way. In other words, there is an
ideal state that ought to be achieved. Of course, no two idealists will agree to what that state
is, and that is why countless millions have died throughout history, caught up in the fight between
competing idealists for whom being right is more important than, well, anything. Putting that
aside, idealists work on the premise that if the universe (or some portion of it) is not behaving
as it should, then the universe (or some portion of it) is broken.
Though not necessarily a characteristic of every idealist, most by far, it seems, also believe that
it is their job to fix the universe (or their portion of it). The cost of fixing it is not an
issue. Trillions of dollars or millions of lives -- it doesn't matter to an idealist. The stakes
are just too high to worry about piddling issues like that. The universe (or their portion of it)
is broken, and they know how it should be, and it is their mission in life to remake things to
reach that ideal.
Contrast that with the realist. For the realist, the universe (including their portion of it) is
neither right nor wrong, it just is. It is in a state reached for any number of reasons, some
apparent and some not, but whatever the route taken, it is what it is and you just have to deal
with it. There is no right answer to the question about how the universe should be, because the
question of how things "should be" is itself meaningless. It is possible to influence conditions
under certain circumstances to improve a local situation, and those opportunities ought to be
considered, but in the end, our ability to influence things is rather limited, and the outcome of
our attempts to alter a situation might not be what we expected or what we hoped. Realists take
that in stride, because, as always, there is no right answer to the question "How should the
universe be?". A realist merely asks what is the state of the universe now, accepts that, and
moves on.
Liberals are invariably idealists of the worst kind. A liberal (in the modern usage of the term)
will spend countless millions on social programs, for example, because he is offended that some
people don't have this benefit or that. Taking someone else's money, and then using it to deliver
that benefit to another person at no cost to that other person, is perfectly acceptable, because
now the universe (or this portion of it) is closer to his ideal. The opinion of the person paying
the tax is barely considered, since the stakes are so high. That giving something of value to
certain people for free might have unintended consequences on the recipients, or on the rest of
society, is also blithely ignored, unless the liberal decides that his universe includes a fix for
that too, in which case, our liberal will impose his own fix on that problem too. Whatever the
cost or consequence.
Conservatives are usually realists. That there are inequities in life is neither acceptable nor
unacceptable. That is a moral judgment on what is merely a fact of life, or so a realist would
say. Perhaps some inequities can be addressed, but a realist recognizes that virtually any attempt
to level out such inequities across broad swathes of the population with massive state intervention
will probably create other inequities. And that too is neither good nor bad, it just is, though a
conservative will likely wonder if substituting one inequity for another is truly achieving
anything, and might opt to leave well enough alone. Indeed, experience shows that large-scale
interference typically exacerbates existing problems while simultaneously creating new ones.
In any case, idealists are, by definition, arrogant. You'd have to be to think the universe ought
to be a particular way, and that you know what that way should be. Their plan to fix things will
always succeed, and if things get worse, then it means their perfect plan wasn't followed
correctly. For them, leaving well enough alone is never an option. Efforts are redoubled, and
more money and more lives are dedicated to the plan.
So what does this have to do with scientists and climate change? Scientists are supposed to be the
purist expression of realists. For them, it is all about the data. The data is never right or
wrong in a moral sense, it simply is. What the data shows can't be denied. An idealist will
gladly ignore or denigrate data that conflicts with his ideal view of the universe, but a scientist
does not have that luxury.
A proper scientist does not believe in man-made global warming. It is a theory that may or may not
be supported by evidence. If not, it is rejected. It is as simple as that.
For believers in man-made global warming, the ideal universe is one in which global warming is
real, and is attributable to Western industrial activity. From that ideal state flows the ideal
solution -- massive de-industrialization of the West and a subsequent reduction of wealth and
influence. From that follows a crash in the standard of living, culminating in dramatic
depopulation.
Don't be naive. This is what global warming idealists want to happen.
Many scientists have somehow been co-opted into this camp. Their goal is not to describe the
universe as it is, but to to achieve the goals of the global warming alarmists. Why this has
happened is hard to explain. I think that climatology itself borders on a fake science, since it
relies too much on modeling (which itself is an idealist view expressed as a computer program)
instead of proper data. And the systems being studied (world climate) is resistant to
reductionism, so it cannot be simulated in a test tube where data can be collected, and theories
rigorously tested.
Perhaps that's why so many global warming skeptics in the scientific community seem to come from
outside the community of climatologists. They can see the inherent problem in treating climatology
as a rigorous science. Climatology seems to have more in common with a soft science like
sociology, which is to say, it is not a science at all.
Climatologists, on the other hand, have in large part abandoned their realist scientific training
and swapped it for the quasi-religious fervour of the idealist. With the revelations made these
past few days from the CRU emails, we see that idealism at work:
Hackers have taken e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at Britain's Hadley Centre and posted
them on the Internet.
The messages appear to reveal (and I emphasize that for now they merely appear to reveal)
collusion among many of the most prominent global warming theorists to doctor the scientific
evidence supporting the theory that man-made emissions are raising the amount of carbon dioxide in
our atmosphere thereby trapping too much of the sun's heat and dangerously warming the planet.
The e-mails also show them expressing glee at the death of a prominent debunker of their
alarmism --the passing of Australian John L. Daly in 2004 was "cheering news" --and strategizing
about how best to keep opponents of the warming theory from getting published in peer-reviewed
journals or being included in the UN's five-year reports on climate science.
At least one e-mail seems to describe how best to destroy e-mails that might become subject to
Access to Information requests: "Can you delete any e-mails you have with Keith...Keith will do
likewise.
"Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same?...We will be getting Caspar to do
likewise."
I am not in the least surprised that there is evidence of collusion and data manipulation and
brutal attacks on those who disagree. These are all defining behaviours of the idealist. An
idealist has a goal, and subverts everything, including honesty, to achieving that goal. Lying
comes easily to an idealist, because the only true thing to an idealist, ironically, is the one
thing that does not truly exist, and that is their ideal universe.
Scientists are not supposed to behave this way, even a little bit. And yet these "scientists" seem
to have abandoned whatever scientific training they've had. Or more accurately, they continue to
use a facsimile of scientific technique, however it is not data driven, but goal driven.
That so many scientists, or more precisely, so many climatologists, have been corrupted this way is
not really a surprise, in that their behaviour in the last few years has strongly hinted that
they've stopped being scientists (inasmuch as they ever were scientists) and had become climate
change purists, donning the mantle of science so that they could derive the benefits of scientific
credibility while at the same time using that veneer of science to mask their conversion to
zealotry.
The revelations contained in these e-mails strongly suggests that this is exactly what has
happened, but even more disturbing, it suggests that these erstwhile scientists knew what had
happened to them. They explicitly discuss how to fake data, how to suppress dissent, and how to
justify ignoring observations that run counter to their idealist view of the world.
Perhaps naively, I thought scientific boosters of man-made global warming had somehow deluded
themselves into thinking that they were still scientists and that they were still respecting the
data (through some convoluted pseudo-scientific argument that justified cherry-picking the data).
But now, it seems, they knew exactly what they were doing, that it all amounted to "tricks", and
that data is expected to respect a foregone conclusion, instead of the conclusion being drawn from
the data.
These former scientists ought to be drummed out of the scientific community, and the body of their
work expunged from scientific databases, with the assumption that it is all fatally compromised by
their zealousness, unless specifically shown to be honestly data-driven work, on a case-by-case
basis.
Of course, that is me being an idealist, in which I define what I think the proper state of the
universe ought to be, and then demand that it achieve that state.
When I revert to my natural realism, I have to admit that there is little likelihood that these
zealots will suffer punishment by their peers within the scientific community, just because I say
that's the way it should be. The best we can hope for, says the realist, is for the truth to be
revealed, as has been with the publication of these e-mails, and that these revelations will
themselves influence others to take action.
It is sad that we have reached this state of affairs. But the fact is that global warming
zealousness is an insidious disease that rots the mind of those afflicted by it. It is just so
much more apparent when we are able to see the effects on scientists in such glaring detail.
National Post
Read more from Steve Janke at his blog, Angry in the Great White North