Natural Law, Moral Imperative, and Public Policy: Copenhagen Looms Near

Inconvenient Truth to be aware of ahead of Copenhagen



Lord Christopher Monckton speaks to the Minnesota Free Market Institute,
October 14, 2009, at Bethel University, St. Paul, MN

Most of us who have been trained in hard science have a cautious and dispassionate regard for the predictions of new theories. An inductive process, the scientific method, by design, cannot be regarded as a source of ultimate answers, but only as a process of iterative questioning in search of successive answers. As a result, true "fact" in science is a rare thing, and only conservatively agreed upon after a sufficiently exhaustive application of the scientific method seems to confirm it. The Laws of Thermodynamics are illustrative. It took nearly a century of testing by physicists across Europe, with nearly unanimous results, before these hypotheses, and later theories, were finally accepted as Laws. Theories are nothing more than an occasion for asking legitimate questions, not for making dire predictions.

As a result of scientific caution, I, along with most of those I know who have bona fide scientific training, have long been suspicious of recent political exploitation of modern "climatology." Such skepticism is warranted whenever politicians are involved anyway -- they have a long-standing reputation for misusing science as it is. After years of study, however, the data is in. The doomsday theories are wrong. The predictions of computer models, based on those theories, are also wrong. Climate variations, whatever their cause, cannot be anthropogenic. There is no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that we are on the brink of climatic disaster, nor has there been any data supporting evidence of "global warming" since 1995.

The video above is the entire presentation of Lord Christopher Monckton given at an event sponsored by the Minnesota Free Market Institute earlier this month. Lord Monckton is a well-known and credible skeptic of climate-change hysteria, and in this presentation documents the clear scientific fraud of politically motivated climatologists, and produces both long-known data regarding climate variations as well as very recent results of careful scientific observation and inquiry weighing the specific questions of global climate variations and their causes. The power-point slides accompanying his presentation can be found here. In addition, his presentation followed the premier of the new documentary, Climate Chains -- an interesting video documenting the political and economic implications of giving-in to these unfounded doomsday hysterics.


Fidelity to Truth
I found Lord Monckton's introductory remarks interesting. He quotes Genesis in support of mankind's stewardship responsibilities, and quotes Christ (in the "original Latin"...) in support of our witness to the truth. Of course, in this quote, Christ was speaking of Himself and the Truth He alone could reveal to mankind, while Monckton applied the substance of this quote as a model for man to emulate with regard to his moral obligation to handle all questions with fidelity toward the truth. Regarding such questions, he states:

We are [here] to bear witness to the truth, we are not [here] to impose any ideology... on the truth. The truth is the truth whether you or I or anyone believe it or not. ...[I]t was all very well for jesting Pilate to ask that question and then not to tarry for an answer, but that question that he asked, What is the truth?, is the question which underlies every other question. It is the only question, in the end, that really matters. When you ask a question, you are really asking, What is the truth regarding the matter about which I am asking?.

He then proceeds to show by example that lack of fidelity to truth is necessarily followed by fundamental immorality -- which reasonably follows given that questions are asked, and answers are sought, for the sake of guidance in our thoughts and deeds. False foundation for thinking and acting naturally results in wrong thinking and acting. Governments and large organizations cannot act ethically by deliberately mis-handling the truth -- immorality on a grand scale is the tragic result.


Climatology is a study in Chaos
Other remarks in the presentation that I found to be interesting are of a more scientific nature. One is the reminder that climate is scientifically chaotic. The mathematical models which describe climate are iterative with countless variables, and many have no mathematical solution. From one iteration to the next, they quickly degrade into seemingly patternless and unpredictable results -- or chaos. Indeed, a recent paper by German scientists Gerlich and Tscheuschner, Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects within the Frame of Physics, describes the serious solvability issues of global climatology models given their mathematically unsolvable nature and the lack of Numerical Methods which can be applied to them, outside of climate questions of strictly short term and local geography ("Numerical Methods," or "Recipes," are iterative mathematical algorithms for approximating solutions to unsolvable equations):

Thus there is simply no physical foundation [for] global climate computer models, for which still the chaos paradigma holds: Even in the case of well-known deterministic dynamics nothing is predictable. That discretization has neither a physical nor a mathematical basis in non-linear systems is a lesson that has been taught in the discussion of the logistic differential equation, whose continuum solutions differ fundamentally from the discrete ones (pg. 90).

Concerned with the direction of popular scientific trends, they continue:

Modern global climatology has confused and continues to confuse fact with fantasy by introducing the concept of a scenario replacing the concept of a model. ...Evidently, this is a description of a pseudo-scientific (i.e. non-scientific) method by the experts at the IPCC. The next meta-plane beyond physics would be a questionnaire among scientists already performed by von Storch or, finally, a democratic vote about the validity of a physical law. Exact science is going to be replaced by a sociological methodology involving a statistical field analysis and by "democratic" rules of order. This is in harmony with the definition of science advocated by the "scientific" website RealClimate.org that has integrated in ammatory statements, personal attacks and offenses against authors as a part of their "scientific" workflow (pg. 90).

They conclude:

A statistical analysis, no matter how sophisticated it is, heavily relies on underlying models and if the latter are plainly wrong then the analysis leads to nothing. One cannot detect and attribute something that does not exist for reason of principle like the CO2 greenhouse effect. There are so many unsolved and unsolvable problems in non-linearity and the climatologists believe to beat them all by working with crude approximations leading to unphysical results that have been corrected afterwards by mystic methods, flux control in the past, obscure ensemble averages over different climate institutes today, by excluding accidental global cooling results by hand, continuing the greenhouse inspired global climatologic tradition of physically meaningless averages and physically meaningless applications of mathematical statistics.

In conclusion, the derivation of statements on the CO2 induced anthropogenic global warming out of the computer simulations lies outside any science (pp. 90-91).

No, it isn't science. It's ideology. On Oct. 27, American Physicist, Howard Hayden, issued his disproof of climate catastrophe, based on one letter of the alphabet, in this letter to the EPA. The fact is, there is no scientific consensus among the scientists making wild claims of imminent climate disaster, only a scientific cacophony. There is, however, plenty of ideological solidarity, beginning with an inordinate and scientifically unfounded emphasis on the CO2 "Greenhouse Effect," as also pointed out by Gerlich and Tscheuschner (a theory which they have falsified), above, as well as Lord Monckton, and leading to a disturbing solidarity of political ideology and consequent advancement of "political solutions." Indeed, the video Climate Chains, mentioned above, describes a dogged devotion to environmental causes of a peculiarly religious character, suggestive of a Holy War against Western Civilization in the name of distinctly pre-Christian paganistic/pantheistic values and priorities.


Correlation and Causation
More remarks of interest in Lord Monckton's presentation include the reminder that a correlation of independent variables does not at all imply a causal relationship. It was a running joke among us students of hard science that, using correlative statistics, one could prove that the moon was made of green cheese. In fact, I seem to recall that there is a positive correlation between the mosquito population of the Florida Everglades and the rate of traffic accidents in Juneau, Alaska. But to suggest a causal relationship between these variables is ludicrous -- a fact that we had much fun reminding students of Sociology and Psychology, for whom we had little academic respect. Much of the hysteria-inducing propaganda generated by the media, and others with economic and political interest in manufacturing a global crisis, is used to manipulate average folks by exploiting their ignorance of legitimate science, of experimentation, and of statistical analysis.


Other Thoughts
There are many other thought-provoking statements offered by Lord Monckton in this presentation, including the demographic evidence that wealthier nations are, in fact, environmentally cleaner and more efficient than those trapped in squalor, and that reducing the wealth status of such nations does not reduce their negative environmental impact, but increases it. In fact, the free-market solution of capitalistic investment in poorer nations, of providing them wealth generating opportunities, is the true environmentally and morally sound solution. I highly recommend that one take the 90 minutes or so to listen to the entire presentation.


Conclusion
If nothing else, listen to Lord Monckton's concluding statements, regarding the gravity of the Copenhagen Treaty, which our President will sign in December. This treaty will form a new government -- not theoretically, but actually, and in those terms -- the purpose of which is to enforce the global redistribution of wealth. It will supersede our Constitution, and hand over our national sovereignty to foreign interests over a non-issue.

Statistically and scientifically speaking, especially given recent published conclusions of real scientists studying actual data, climate change is a non-issue. Politically and economically speaking, however, fueled by artificially fevered public hysteria, it is very much an issue -- these have really been the only bases all along -- while the name of science continues to be misused by the world's governments as a tool to usurp individual liberty, control wealth and assert broad expansion of power. History shows that's what governments do. It shows that power is their favorite cause in the use of science.

An “Inconvenient Truth:” Climate Change and Scientific Fraud -->