Cooking climate data

One of the ways in which modern science obtains a semblance of objectivity is by testing its hypotheses through repeatable experiment.  To make valid prognostications about the future, the circumstances must remain constant, and outside influences must be constrained.

That is impossible when predicting the weather.

Given the overwhelming influence of significant variable factors ranging from solar flares to volcanic eruptions on the weather, and the comparatively minor influence of people, expressions of certainty about the imminent doom posed by using fossil fuels ought to have been avoided.

Now the doomsayers have lost their credibility.

That is the buried headline.

No one debates that human beings have an influence upon their environment.

The ground of the contention in the ‘climate change debate’ has always been whether the policies proposed are warranted (e.g. given its harmful economic impact), whether these policies are mere pretexts for ulterior motives (such as wealth redistribution, or the expansion of universal government), and whether the scientific community is even operating in a manner worthy of science.

This latter is of greatest concern for me insofar as international trust and co-operation is dependent on trust in people’s integrity.  Forecasting the future is always a sketchy business.  Politicizing science, as men such as Al Gore has done, growing rich and famous in the process, ought to have been strenuously resisted by his political allies because of the consequences of failure.

Far from resisting, it has been made an article of faith, a morality play in which climate change advocacy has served as a test of both rationality and virtue.

When the international community is as invested in doomsday prognostications as it has become, the stakes for its own credibility are similarly stratospheric.

The devastating loss of credibility is belied by the muted admissions of the scientists, who are now sounding a lot like politicians.

Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of a recent study undermining the claims of imminent disaster, told The Times: “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.”

The spin on the story in The Independent is that the now-evident exaggerations of the past will “allow the goals of the Paris Accord to be realized.”

This is called having your cake and eating it.

It is the narrative spin of a public media outlet that has lost its own credibility by engaging in advocacy rather than scrutinizing the politics.

Unlike the planet, their goose has been cooked.

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