Catallaxy Files

Ambler has a chapter on the Master Narrative, overwhelmingly in English due to the dominance of some key players, starting with the Central English Temperature, a data base accumulated at four English stations with records starting in 1659. Add the UK Met Office, the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, the Climate Research Unit at the Uni of East Anglia and Margaret Thatcher.

There is a rather fetching photo of the Iron Lady. Her top priority on taking office in 1979 was to get the coal miners under control and put an end to crippling strikes that browned out the nation. Her weapons included stockpiles of coal, converting coal-fired power stations to oil, boosting nuclear power and strategic funding of research that played up the undesirability of burning coal. The UK Met Office, (Met O) was the chief beneficiary and it delivered grim warnings about greenhouse gases. John Houghton was a rising star who took over the Met O in 1983, then the new Hadlee Centre and then he became the lead editor of the IPCC First Assessment Report. During this time BP and Shell became big financial supporters of the Climate Research Unit, rather a blow to the theory that “big oil” is backing the realists.

In the 1990s a new star was born, when Phil Jones moved on from charting flow changes in a single English river to work on a gigantic joint data base “HADCRUT” shared by the Hadlee Centre and the CRU to generate average monthly temperatures from all over the world from the 19th century to produce trends in the global mean temperature over that period. In scientific terms, Lomborg suggested that his makes about as much sense as averaging all the telephone numbers in the world, but what the heck if the trend looks alarming. Ambler reports that the HADCRUT version of this figure became the single most important piece of scientific research ever created when it was adopted by the IPCC in 2001. Perhaps this explains the alarm revealed by the email messages at East Anglia when some doubts and uncertainties arose in the ranks.

Ambler’s point is that the work in those British institutes became the international state of the art when it was picked up by the IPCC and it was soon supported by major US players. The US Department of Energy expanded its budget to fund climatology in the 1980s and it has supported the CRU ever since. Other forces weighed in. Margaret Mead (a scientifically discredited anthropologist) managed to become a major player in the game, along with Stephen Schneider, James Hansen, Michael Mann and Al Gore.

Schneider transferred to the Global Warming team after spending the best part of a decade warning about an impending Ice Age. See his 1976 book TheGenesis Strategy about storing food for survival. He is the guy who wrote in black and white that scientists might have to tell porkies to get people to pay attention!

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth…including all the doubts, the caveats…On the other hand, we are human beings as well. And like most people’ we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts that we might have…Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. (my emphasis, RC)

Schneider died in 2010, having clearly decided to go for effectiveness and funding rather than honesty. Another helper in that team was John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He was a devotee of the discredited doomster Paul Ehrlich.

James Hansen became director of NASA’s Goddard Instsitute for Space Studies in 1981. Of course anything from NASA has tremendous prestige and Hansen has been a keen media player to advance the alarmist cause. In 1988 he was making predictions comparable with our own Flannery and his latest book is about warming-enhanced storms, one of the well-refuted myths promulgated by the IPCC.

to be continued.