Christopher Caldwell seems to think science should be dogma and edict issued by ‘technocracies’
We vehemently disagree, viewing the release of these communications as cathartic and purging the sepsis of corruption, collusion and deception.
Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed. –Thomas H. Huxley
The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. –Huxley
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. –Huxley
The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. –Huxley again
The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment… not authority. –and again (seeing a theme here?)
See what you think of Caldwell’s piece in the Financial Times:
Why climategate is a catastrophe for science
By Christopher CaldwellWith the UN conference on climate change set to open in Durban next week, 5,000 emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, have been uploaded to a Russian server. They seem to show climate scientists acting with a partiality that is alien to the scientific method. One of them worries that climate change “is being manipulated to put a political spin on it”. Another notes, regarding a planned study of tornadoes, that “getting people we know and trust is vital”.
The emails are not new: they come from the same trove as those released on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. That earlier batch included an email in which Professor Phil Jones of UEA suggested to Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania that he delete certain emails, and another in which a professor discussed bullying a journal that had published a dissenting paper. Those sympathetic to the fight against climate change have dismissed the importance of these leaks. They are wrong. The emails weakened public support for the climate change fight. In the US they probably killed it.
Americans are running out of patience with climate change campaigning. The Pew Research Center recently asked Americans about a list of 22 “top policy priorities”. Climate change came almost last, behind such issues as moral decline, purging the political system of lobbyists and simplifying the tax code. The only issue voters considered less worthy of Washington’s attention was obesity – and one can see in any mall how little Americans are bothered by that.
Scepticism about global warming has spiked dramatically in the past two years. Pew also found that, after appearing on the public’s radar screen in 2007, the climate has become less important to voters with each annual survey. There are a number of possible reasons why. High unemployment makes voters hostile to the regulation of business. Scandals at Solyndra and other beneficiaries of Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan have shown an unseemly overlap between those who manage the government’s environmental initiatives and those who stand to make fortunes from them. “Green energy” has become the main avenue of US-style crony capitalism. Still, the emails leaked before the Copenhagen summit were more devastating than any of these things.
Should they have been? Defenders of the professors say no. Reading someone’s correspondence – let alone stealing it and publishing it – is disreputable under any circumstances. While some of the email scientists were partisan, panels have cleared them of practising corrupt science. All the emails have shown is that scientists are no less prone to vanity, rivalries and corner-cutting than people in other walks of life.
But that is everything. Voters in a democracy do not argue about science. They argue about the authority of scientists. And scientists’ claim to authority comes from the perception that, in fact, they do not let their vanities and rivalries influence their work. Where others pursue their grubby little self-interest, scientists pursue only the truth. The emails of 2009, however, showed that some prominent members of the climate-change establishment were not operating in a spirit of openness. Defending a scientist’s furtiveness on the grounds that “his science is good” is like defending a politician’s blunder on the grounds that he “did nothing illegal”. The emails were damaging because they undermined the scientists’ claim to be speaking as scientists rather than as interested parties.
If scientists are shown to be colluding to arrive at a given result, then the halo around science dissipates. Any voter who does not want to be duped must suspend his scepticism. He must listen to scientists with no more deference than he does any other interest group. When Professor Mann tells the Guardian newspaper that the email leaks are “right out of the tried-and-true playbook of climate change denial” he is correct. But he is also open to the retort that he would say that, wouldn’t he?
Until the replacement of the Italian government earlier this month, the climate change establishment was probably the most robust technocracy in the west. But the case for setting up anti-global warming protocols has weakened. Europe “led by example” in passing the Kyoto protocol in the 1990s, but its other great construction of the era, the euro, is not now adding to its prestige. The public has grown weary of being scared into surrendering rights and money – whether through the Troubled Asset Relief Programme in the US or the European Financial Stability Facility. Technocracies are inherently fragile because their legitimacy rests on the denial of a universal truth: everybody makes mistakes.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard (Financial Times)
Alright, this seems like an argument with a discontinuity. I agree with his points one by one, However, I cannot reconcile his opening and his conclusion with his paper. Dr Mann says that the emails, from the mouths of his colleagues are out of the skeptics playbooks. That was actually the point of Climategate, that it showed the conspiracy was real, and that there was a concerted effort to hide all uncertainty in a very uncertain field.
I can understand the Journalist’s dislike of using stolen material (though I think that we long ago realized that this was most likely an internal leak), but it seems odd that he goes point by point explaining about why people are distrusting of “scientists” who seem to be simply after our pocketbooks, and then somehow turns around and says this is bad.
In a different subject, I would say for certain that this was satire, especially given the national origin of its writer, but I truly cannot tell anymore.
I see a disconnect between Mr. Milloy’s interpretation of the headline and the thrust of the article. My reading of the article is that the writer (Mr. Caldwell) is actually lamenting the failures of the “climate scientists” (such as Dr. Mann) to adhere to the scientific method, and is lamenting their abuse of the “public trust”. The “catastrophe for science” was the illegitimate path pursued by the “climate scientists” which (in the words of Mr. Caldwell), ” … undermined the scientists’ claim to be speaking as scientists rather than as interested parties.”
My speculation is that Mr. Caldwell would substantially agree with Mr. Milloy that, ” … the release of these communications [is] cathartic and purging the sepsis of corruption, collusion and deception.” Perhaps Mr. Caldwell will comment …?
I’m hoping there will be a Climategate 3.0, and may it come from a whole different direction! Take the bastards Down.
“…. Journalist’s dislike of using stolen material”
Rewrite for Ben:
…. Journalist’s ‘selective’ dislike of using stolen material.
Tom – indeed. News of the World (and the Sun, the Mail, the Mirror, the Guardian) used private detectives to steal material, some directly from the telephones of crime victims.
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I have read and re-read but cannot find where Caldwell makes any statement one way or the other.
The problem is mostly reconciling the title, “Catastrophe for Science” and the pejorative terms used to describe the leak with the main text of the article. The more I look at it, the more I believe the title is meant to be ironic.
Sorry Editor, but I think you need to look below the title line. I actually like this piece. It sums up the problems with the climate change movement very well.
Hi Ben, I actually slept on this response to see if I’d change my mind. My first thought was that you are a PR firm’s dream – I chose your response as representative and I know you are quite familiar with comment discussion/disagreement, so no one should feel I am picking on you here.
The pitch in the above PR fluff boils down to climate scientists are great but human and should be viewed a bit like that kindly old uncle with the flatulence problem at Thanksgiving dinner, a bit of an embarrassment at times but basically harmless. In the case of the climate industry in particular, sure, they made some mistakes but who hasn’t, right? It’s a lovely Kumbaya worldview.
In the real world, however, actions have consequences and consequences count (idiot has too much alcohol, drives unroadworthy vehicle, crashes killing kids on the sidewalk, is charged with vehicular manslaughter, at the very least).
Far from flatulent uncles, our “climate scientists” have perpetrated research fraud (fabricating results, knowingly promoting nonsense papers, hiding/destroying inconvenient data… ) and they have done so with the mission of de-developing the industrialized world and trapping developing nations in poverty. Why they seek such an outcome is unclear to me, perhaps they were raised on a diet of Ehrlich propaganda: “A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.” — Paul Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, “Population, Resources, Environment” (W.H. Freeman, San Francisco, 1970, 323) and/or Strong: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialised civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” — Maurice Strong, head of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and Executive Officer for Reform in the Office of the Secretary General of the United Nations. Regardless of why the “what” is painfully obvious as 5% of the world’s grain supply was redirected to biofuels with the resultant increase in prices taking food away from the poorest populations.
Don’t forget this has always been built on a lie and before Hanson’s dementia and delusions of grandeur took over he admitted: “The forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change.” — James Hansen, “Climate forcings in the Industrial era“, PNAS, Vol. 95, Issue 22, 12753-12758, October 27, 1998. That’s a decade after his infamous Congressional Testimony and nearly a year after much of the world was stampeded into the idiotic Kyoto Protocol.
We are looking at a long-term fraud knowingly perpetrated, not a few mistakes and human vanities exhibited by well-meaning and harmless academics. Worse, for financial gain and academic glory these guys are launching (or at least enabling) genocide against the impoverished and the confiscation of middle-class wealth by the privileged elite.
Given that we incarcerate idiots for vehicular manslaughter we should not be excusing these guys like flatulent uncles but rather hitching up the tumbrils and going after these frauds for their crimes against the impoverished and the industrialized societies.
Granted, the media has a huge case to answer for creating the public illusion of scientific technocracy but the above article does nothing to dispel that illusion.
By falling for PR firm’s wordsmithing of the narrative you are already maneuvered into a default position of basically honest researchers subject to human frailties: “everybody makes mistakes“. No, they didn’t “make mistakes” but knowingly and deliberately perpetrated fraud for material gain while visiting great harm on the bulk of the world’s human population, especially the poor who are most vulnerable.
You like the above article but I think it stinks of a well-crafted trap to defuse the righteous anger of a defrauded population, one which appears to be having some influence already
What in the above extract suggests that Caldwell is not taking a partisan position? No one in business is entitled to privacy of correspondence when using the company email servers but academics gorging at the public trough should be? Did anyone ‘steal’ the correspondence or was this a whistleblower release? And no, no panels cleared the perpetrators of practicing corrupt science for the simple reason none ever actually looked at the science, nor even interviewed anyone actually raising issues with it.
Caldwell does admit this is a disaster for the CAGW industry although he does so with apparent regret as he calls “the climate change establishment … probably the most robust technocracy in the west“.
To me Caldwell conflates ‘science’ and CAGW advocacy and he considers climategate [X.x] disastrous.
‘Science’ was built to run on peer review – a process that may be bloody at times, but inevitably leads to empirically defensible conclusions.
Any work that will not stand up to the scrutiny of empirical validation and critical peer-review “ain’t science.”
Whatever it is, it is also inevitable. CAGW is not science. Claiming it is puts the C in sCience.
Start with the misattribution of changes in tree rings of selective trees, build your own inevitable decline, and try to hide that.
Do any of you guys know who Christopher Caldwell is? He is a prominent American conservative commentator, a senior editor of the Weekly Standard. One of his main writing gigs is for the FT, where he generally tries to write above the political divide.
My understanding is that (i) he does not claim to be an expert or a judge of the science, but since CRU he has been critical of the scientists, (ii) this article is about the wider authority of science and its role in public debate, and (iii) he’s not making a narrowly partisan point here.
This is a really excellent article, and should be read with brain switched on.
Thanks Charles, as an Aussie I’m not the least familiar with who Caldwell is and happily accept your description of him.
That changes my impression of the article from a PR fluff piece to a very poor depiction of the facts, one that in no way reflects the malfeasance of the climategate players. Deliberate fraud should be called so, not depicted as good academics displaying normal human traits and frailties. The following was not presented as quotes from defenders but as part of the text:
Really? Publishing other people’s correspondence didn’t seem to trouble the mainstream media when it came to publishing wikileaks, did it? That panels cleared them “of practising corrupt science” is still a misstatement as I noted earlier.
I also worry about his apparent faith in technocracies read in conjunction with passages like:
Along with:
“Suspend his skepticism”? Possibly that’s a result of editing because it seems to be contradicted by:
Although just why interest groups should be listened to with any deference at all is doubtful.
It has been suggested to me by e-mail (from a correspondent who doesn’t care to engage in open fora) that this might have been the best that could be placed in such a CAGW advocacy publication as the Financial Times, which may be true but still suffers from the problem of presenting climategaters as flatulent uncles rather than the egregiously bad actors they really are.
Caldwell does state: “Technocracies are inherently fragile because their legitimacy rests on the denial of a universal truth:” but then offers the platitudinous excuse: “everybody makes mistakes“. Maybe, but climategate isn’t about mistakes, it’s about deliberate fraud.
Is it any better or worse that this should be under the byline of “a prominent American conservative commentator“?