Lasts reminder of Laframboise’s critique of the IPCC. Now over 1100 visits.

Solutioneering is a term invented to describe the standard practice of ideologues and bureaucrats empowered by Big Government. James Gordon described the process thus: 1 The Solutioneer (S) identifies a Problem (practically any problem will do). 2 It is designated as a Very Big Problem. 3 The Solution is announced. 4 the Solutioneer advises that the rather steep price is not a worry because it is not really a cost, it is an Investment and also it will Cost More to Fix Later. 5 It is a Very Urgent Problem so there can be no delay. 6 Carping critics who claim (a) it is not such a serious problem and (b) there are better and cheaper ways to go are scolded for (a) not knowing anything and (b) being wicked ideologues (and criminally irresponsible).

In a nutshell, solutioneering is a solution in search of a problem.

Think the NBN, Pink Bats and most of the schemes introduced on the run by the Rudd and Gillard governments.

Consider the IPCC and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

At a speech celebrating the 20th birthday of the IPCC the chairman stated “The UNFCCC is our main customer, if I could label them as such, and our interaction with them enriches the relevance of our work” (Laframboise p 79).

The UNFCCC convened in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and it turns out that they are the Arch Solutioneers behind the whole climate scam. Nearly 30 years ago they decided that greenhouse gasses are The Problem and 154 nations signed up in principle, followed in due course by the Kyoto Protocol which is a key component of the UNFCCC process.

So for 20 years the UNFCCC had a brief to reduce human emissions and failing to do so would be “nothing less than criminal irresponsibility”. The IPCC is the device to recruit scientists to support the agenda. Observe the steps:

Step one was the political decision that a greenhouse gas treaty was a worthy and achievable goal.

Step two was the recognition that before such a treaty could be negotiated, certain documents – representing a common understanding – were required.

Step three involved enlisting scientists to help produce such documents. (p.80)

Laframboise’s point is that the UN did not wait for climate science to mature, 19 years ago political operators in the organization decided on the solution to a problem that legitimate climate scientists never depicted in alarming terms.

She notes that the shortest version of the Climate Bible appeared in 1990. Its findings were tentative. Yet by June 1992, aided by environmental activists, the UN had successfully convinced a majority of the world’s governments to sign a framework document that declared greenhouse gases to be arch villains. ( p 81).

And now in 2018 as the game is increasingly obviously lost on the field of genuine science the response of the IPCC is to emulate the Europeans in dealing with natives in the colonies who don’t understand what they are saying. SHOUT AT THEM!

Climate realists/skeptics often encounter the argument that most skeptics are not actually “climate scientists” because they mostly come from a range of other disciplines. The clear assumption is that there is something special about climate science that only properly authenticated climate scientists can understand. And so when the serious head counters like John Cook and colleagues do their count they draw their sample from the people who publish in official climate science journals and/or do their work in designated climate science units.

I think that assumption reflects a fundamental failure to appreciate the nature of the weather and climate science. It helps to come from a background in Agricultural Science because that has some of the same characteristics as climate science. It is not a pure discipline, it is inevitably a mixed discipline where the most rudimentary understanding calls for a sound basis in all the sciences, chemistry, physics, botany, zoology, geology with more depth in selected areas like animal production, agronomy, soil science and other specialised areas like plant pathology and entomology.

You could say the same for political economy, or simply economics the way it is practiced by the masters like von Mises, Hayek and Davidson.

The point is that a person with a background in the relevant disciplines, whether or not they have spent years in “climate science”, is well placed to form an opinion the issues if they have taken the trouble to engage with the literature for some time with the necessary scientific (critical) attitude. Bear in mind that this type of appreciation is very different from advancing the field that indeed takes years of intense application.

As for advancing the field, how far has climate science advanced in the several decades since it became a burning issue, for all the tens of billions of dollars spent on it?

Climate modelling is arguably the heart and soul of the enterprise, certainly all the things that are being done to save the planet are justified by the alarming projections of massive General Circulation Models. This appears to be a highly specialized field and it depends entirely on government funding because no private agency has ventured to spend the amount of money required to do the work.

I wrote that it appears to be highly specialised but in fact multivariate regression modelling is a common practice, especially in the service of Keynesian econometrics (how is that going these days?) It really helps to have some hands-on experience in this area and from my experience there are three things that you really need to know.

1. Running regression models is just about as much fun as you can have with clothes on.
2. Garbage in, garbage out.
3. You have to be very clever or very lucky to find out anything that you didn’t know before you started.

To conclude, can someone explain what climate modelling has contributed to our understanding of the weather. Do we have any reason to expect the projections from more advanced models to be any better than the old ones that have almost all been falsified?

An interesting comment has turned up on a previous thread listing 200 academies that appear to support the climate fraud. They range from Academia Chilena de Ciencias (Chile) to Zimbabwe Academy of Sciences.

Who knewth there were so many socialist fools in the world? And the American science bodies that agree, via NASA.
Fools all, according to Dear Rafe?

A sample:
Academia Chilena de Ciencias (Chile)
Australian Medical Association
Cameroon Academy of Sciences
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Islamic World Academy of Sciences
Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Pakistan Academy of Sciences
Palestine Academy for Science and Technology
Zimbabwe Academy of Sciences

I don’t know how much credence to ascribe to support from medical doctors and nurses, teachers and the humanities but there are enough supposedly reputable hard science bodies there to carry conviction to the casual onlooker.

It is important to be more critical than the casual onlooker. First up, there is a paper in the literature that that reported a close examination of the survey of the major scientific bodies to see what kind of response they really gave to a loaded question regarding their position. It seems that some organizations that are claimed to support the fraud actually hedged and qualified their position because they were clearly unwilling to give offence but they were also unwilling to go all the way.

The executive of one the more important bodies (The Institute of Physics? someone will know) had to redraft their position after the membership revolted against the “executive decision” and demanded a proper discussion of the scientific issues.

That points up the disconnect between the boards/administrators of the academies and the world of critical/sceptical scientific investigation. The typical example is the head of the Australian Academy of Science who is a Labor Party hack, pure and simple.

The overwhelming priority of the academies is to keep the money rolling in. They are PR agents and lobbyists and their KPIs are measured in government dollars. What more need to be said? Of course a lot of good work gets done, you can’t have that many bright, hard-working and well resourced people working for years without finding something, at least in medicine, science and engineering where there are tests in practice. Even there you will find serious concerns about a lot of the work. That also goes without saying when you consider the motivation of researchers, as described by Gordon Tullock (1965).

There is more to be said in another post and I welcome an ongoing exchange to explore the issues that arise here in appealing to the authority of the academies.

Just to finish with a comment on the credibility of NASA, about 40 retired astronauts wrote an open letter to deplore the politicisation of the organisation since they were at work.

From the summary of her critique.

Four chapters – 14 “The Stern Review Scandal”, 15 “Cutoff Dates, What Cutoff Dates?”, 16 “This is Called Cheating” and 17 “Cross-examination” report on some of the ways the rules on deadlines, peer review and the like are bent to suit the agenda.

The tone is set from the top and chapter 25 is “Pachauri’s Cause”, specifically “rapid transformation of the economic system” redefining cultural patterns and major lifestyle changes everywhere.

“We have been so drunk with this desire to produce and consume more and more…we are on an environmentally unsustainable course..I am not going to rest until I have articulated in every possible forum the need to bring about major structural changes in economic growth and development. That is the real issue, climate change is just a part of it.”

Chapter 26 “Follow the Leader” describes the way that the cause of climate change and “extreme weather” meant that the leading hurricane expert Chris Landsea had to be sidelined by Kevin Trenbath who was in charge of the relevant chapter in the Climate Bible. The following chapter takes that case further to describe the role of Susan Solomon, the co-chair of that working group, who was named in another chapter for threatening to dismiss Steve McIntyre when he tried to do a proper job as an expert reviewer. Chapter 28 follows the story about pseudo-scientific data on hurricanes that became part of the Climate Bible.

So a dubious finding that originated in a paper written by an insurance company was included in the Climate Bible in 2001. It then made its way into the peer-reviewed scientific literature in 2005. By 2009 it was being regarded as gospel by the US Government.

One of the expert reviewers asked an appropriate question about some papers that were accepted which contradicted the views of a leading expert in the field. What did the expert think about these papers? He was not asked. One of the graphs in a key paper was criticized by an expert reviewer, a different graph appeared in the final report, making the same (alarming) point.

Finally, in Febuary 2010, a contributing author of the chapter admitted he had drawn up the new graph “informally”. [run that past me again!]. In the words of the (excluded) expert “The IPCC created a graph that did not exist in the peer reviewed literature or in the grey literature to suggest a relationship between increasing temperatures and rising disaster costs”.

Nice work if you have enough control over the production to get that kind of result.

Chapters 29 and 30 run through one of the most scandalous beatups on the IPCC record, the malaria scare, suggesting that warming will massively increase the prevalence of malaria. Among other things malaria is not especially a warm climate illness. On top of that we find the domination of non-experts in the field, abuse of non-peer reviewed literature and uncritical channelling of the beat-ups by the obliging press.

Chapter 31 “Extinction Fiction” charts the abuse of pseudo-scientific findings to predict alarming species losses. One of the two key papers was written by Chris Thomas and 14 co-authors. Enter Daniel Botkin, one of the leading figures in the field. He described the Thomas paper as “the worst paper I have ever read in a major scientific journal”.

“Is there any way you can cite the findings of the Thomas paper but not tell your readers about the controversy it generated? Is it honest to neglect to mention that the same journal that published the paper followed up six months later with not one, not two but three critiques? Is it scientific to fail to discuss the fact that another harsh appraisal of some 6000 words in length was authored by a scholar at Oxford [an Oxford scholar!] Yet that is precisely what happened.”