It seems more and more these days that when you add politics to just about anything, the issue gets about as clear as mud.
Take the classic favorite, religion. Religion and politics–a coupling so hotly controversial, and so rarely understood–has made millionaires out of lawyers, pastors, and disgruntled atheists everywhere. The issue of “separation of church and state” most often tends to really become an issue of separating people from policy; the more we talk about what we should be doing, it seems, the less we care about the people who need to be doing it.
Poltics has a way of doing that. It always has, and only idealistic naivete’ would suggest it won’t always do so.
But sometimes the game needs to be paused, and real, serious, and dangerous ideas need to be pointed out. It’s come to that in the marriage of politics and science.
Yes, I know; it seems like every time we say “science” nowadays we’re talking about global warming. This time is no different, I’m afraid. But for the average Joe on the street, this little bit of info makes a very important issue a little clearer.
I’m talking about a recent Senate Committee report on global warming. The report documents the views of over 400 well qualified scientists who severely question the views about human causation of global warming most popularly espoused Nobel prize winner Al Gore. The report lists scientists from many top tier and government organizations, including Harvard University and NASA.
In a disturbing paragraph, the report reveals that such global warming “skeptics” are often fearful to disclose their opinons:
Many of the scientists featured in this report consistently stated that numerous colleagues shared their views, but they will not speak out publicly for fear of retribution. Atmospheric scientist Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of almost 70 peer-reviewed studies, explains how many of his fellow scientists have been intimidated.
“Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media,” Paldor wrote.
That’s scary. It’s difficult for me to ponder a world where facts are being intentionally withheld from the public in order to foster a desired public advocacy. It’s petrifying to think that those facts are in science.
I was under the impression that science welcomed dissent and discussion? If so, why aren’t these 400 scientists being given a voice? Even more, why is there even the slightest hint of fear when it comes to disclosing dissenting opinions about global warming? What’s so bad about saying, “I’m not so sure”?
Answer: Politics. Global warming has become where the left is right and right is wrong. Period. Sides were taken on the issue of doomsday environmentalism, and the backwards, religiously fascist party of George W. took a side. They have to be wrong. More than just a movie or Nobel prize is the issue, folks. Global warming has ceased to be about science and is now about Washington. Bad news.
The bottom line is that science is divided over the issue, and the fact that one side of the debate is being intimidated by the other leads me to believe that perhaps it is not really “science” that disagrees with itself at all. Perhaps the disparity is between thoughtful scientists and EPA lobbyists.
One other point. It seems that educational establishments across the world are being particularly aggressive when it comes to preaching Mr. Gore’s opinion as ineffable fact. It may surprise you to hear that children in Norway and Sweeden are required to view Al Gore’s controversial (yes, it’s controversial) global warming manifesto An Inconvenient Truth.
Here’s a link to that information. Oh, it’s the Washington Post. Well, observe also that the paper equates American teacher’s hesitance to distribute the film in schools with big oil “propaganda.” Don’t agree with Gore? You must be an Exxon Mobil henchmen.
Filed under: News, Politics, Science | Tagged: Al Gore, Global Warming
Oh…..
Yasmeen
http://www.ywrites.wordpress.com
Thanks for the link to the report — good stuff.
@OP said:
“Oh, it’s the Washington Post. Well, observe also that the paper equates American teacher’s hesitance to distribute the film in schools with big oil “propaganda.””
Well, no, the author Laurie David in her *opinion* piece states that. She’s was a producer on “An Inconvenient Truth” so I’m guessing she’s just a tad biased. Just a bit. Not that WaPo isn’t biased of course….
@OP said:
“That’s scary. It’s difficult for me to ponder a world where facts are being intentionally withheld from the public in order to foster a desired public advocacy. ”
I assume you’re being sarcastic here and not displaying some of that “idealistic naiveté” you mention earlier.
Hey, Sam, I was scrounging around the Senate Minority site and found this:
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Pledge
Granted it’s on Fox, but it’s all about “walking the talk.”
good video, scott. thanks
Sam,
This essay was very much to my taste. Thank you. I wish I’d been able to read it when it was fresh, but I suppose in blog format that sort of thing has become irrelevant. Your tone is light but considered, and most inviting. I don’t see these issues as you do, but that doesn’t matter as much as your laying out your way of framing them, for others to consider. I think that you’re missing the monster under the bed, which is the new academic dogmatism. Many of the returning vets-in-the-making already have begun to exercise their collegiate options, and when they return in earnest they will not like what they see. Being seasoned leaders trained to commit when they do commit, they will reach inside the academy and turn it inside out. Watch. The topic of your discussion is not science, it is scientism. The vets and others know very well what science is and is not, even if the academy has managed once again to get drunk on its own wine. Not for nothing is the ancient motto of the West’s oldest university “In Vino Veritas”. You’re really onto something. Hats off to you.
It is naive and ignorant to look at global warming from the perspective of a U.S. citizen who constantly hears two stories about an UNDISPUTABLE fact that the Earth is getting warmer and then choose a side without having any real first hand experience with the side they have chosen.
Frankly, I challenge anyone to read the posts from the scientists in the article and show me ONE that says CO2 is not a factor in global warming.
You won’t, and the reason why is because it is a factor (correlation), but it is not the only factor. This last statement is where ~400 other scientists come in. To do what scientists do best. Argue that some other theory (usually their research) is not getting the adequate attention it deserves or that the un scientific Al Gore’s model is flawed in some way.
Among these are the worst kind of scientists that only seek to discredit and not to actually further the understanding.
There is something many people need to understand about Science and the Scientific Method. Nothing is ever absolute. All Science can do is give the best possible explanation through rigorous testing and sampling to explain an event or condition. When evidence is presented that a theory does not explain, a new theory is needed. Even the force of gravity could be debunked and changed if and when Dark Matter is more fully understood.
C02 traps heat from the sun in the Earths atmosphere. Higher levels of C02 will lead to higher temperature EVERYTHING ELSE BEING EQUAL. Find me any scientist who says this and I will be astounded.
So if you want to dispute how much sea levels will rise, or if other factors come into play in our average temperatures, or even if our Earth is better off with higher temperatures, I have no complaints. But to discredit a reasonable explanation that global temperatures are rising partly because of C02 levels caused by the human involvement of deforestation and releasing trapped carbons I have a problem. I have a problem with this because these ~400 scientists can dispute the scientific methods and computer models and root causes until the world becomes an inhospitable planet and then who will really care if sunspots or elliptical orbits played a larger role than Al Gore said they did?
Me, I think if civilization has not destroyed this planet thousands of years from now we will have to voluntarily release more C02 to manage another ice age. For now, just wake up and realize that the scientists can be right that Gore has flaws in his models and he may not have every detail down but that doesn’t mean Global Warming does not exist and humans are not an attributable reason.
I have a big problem with one statement in the article.
“Global warming has ceased to be about science and is now about Washington. Bad news.”
We have heard enough from the scientists to understand fully one area where humans can play a role in the Earths temperature. We need Washington, and every other nation to ask one question.
Would the Earth be better off cooler or warmer than it is today?
What are the costs, what are the risks, what are the most efficient steps we can take to bring us in that direction.
THAT IS IT! We don’t need any more science to ask this question and start taking action today!
1. It’s a minority report, not a committee report. The full committee expressly does not endorse that report.
2. How the mighty have fallen! That report includes links to Newsmax and many other questionable sources. In the old days, such citations would have been prohibited by honor (don’t mislead the old ladies and grad students who read the reports); they should be rejected today on the grounds of inaccuracy, at least.
3. The majority report, the committee report, lists the vast majority of scientists on the other side. Last count I saw was 15,000 scientists contributing to the IPCC report. You’ve got 400 dissenters? At best that’s 2.6%. If 97.4% of the Senate agreed on a point, we’d call it a “nearly unanimous declaration,” and “veto-proof,” well beyond “consensus.”
[...] under: Congress, Environmentalism, Politics, Science — Dave the Infidel Sage @ 12:01 am Senate reports on over 400 top scientists who question Gore I’m talking about a recent Senate Committee report on global warming. The report documents the [...]
Problem is Mar, Jupiter, Mercury and Pluto are also are warming. Those are ‘facts’ as well. How much of Earth’s increased heating is solar has yet to be determined, but we’ll find out as the solar cycle is going to be moving into a cooling cycle shortly.
Of course, C02 can boost temperature; problem is, this planet- unlike others- has a CO2 fixation system calle ‘plant life’. The oceans are fixing 110 million tons more CO2 than previously measured.
The Artic refroze more rapidly than ever seen before; while the artic lost a bunch of ice this summer, the Antartic gained more than has ever been seen since first measured in 1979.
Complex scientific issues such as the environment are almost never as black and white, nor as clearly understood, as politically expedient.
This so-called report is really a pretty shoddy piece of work. First of all, is it really a “U.S. Senate Report” in any but the narrowest sense? Doesn’t appear to be one. It’s posted on the “Inhofe EPW Press Blog”. I’ve seen no other senatorial signatories (Inhofe’s is implied, of course).
Second, consider the source and his agenda. It was posted by Marc Morano, an Inhofe staffer. He’s known for having lent his considerable hatchetman skills to the Swiftboating of Kerry and the attacks on Murtha, and was Rush Limbaugh’s “Man in Washington”.
Third, and this is nothing against meteorologists, but there are a few dozen meteorologists on this “list”, most of whom can hardly be considered “prominent scientists”, a label I’d think requires more than a meteorology degree.
Fourth, a quick ctrl-f search on the “report” revealed several names appearing more than once. The rather confusing format of this “report” makes it near impossible to actually count the names. Are there really 400?
Finally, I wonder how many scientists on this list will object to being on it. While many have raised legitimate concerns, is it really the case that all 400+ “[dispute] man-made global warming”?
The global warming propaganda has only one goal: to establish a global tax that everybody pays and bring us under the umbrella of a one world government. I think everybody should read Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear” because for a fiction book, it holds more truth than Al Gore and all the other people that jumped on the bandwagon put together.
When davenate speaks of “absolutes” while going out of his way to capitalize “Science”, it creeps me out.
Truth about global warming: It’s a conspiracy. See here:
http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2007/09/17/starbucks-controversy-the-way-i-see-it-289-global-warming/
Environmentalism has become nothing more than a dogmatic religion.
Global warming advocates are preaching “Hell on earth” if we dont repent and change our “evil” ways.
Can it become any more ironic?
I’m in total agreement with Scavenger, and it goes to something in which Ed Darrell is interested, though he sees through the lens of pure science, whereas I see Scavenger’s implications through the compound eye of the social sciences, which are far from eponymous. They are, rather, parasciences that often stray into pseudoscience, and sometimes into Scientism, a kind of secularized idolatry. In the so-called scientific study of religion, which is to say in the departments of religious studies and comparative religions, it is considered middle-brow to study contemporary environmentalism (note suffix) as a secular or else neo-Pagan religion. The reason: “Too obvious”. That’s what Arnie Eisen, Chair of Stanford’s department told me more than 15 years ago, and it’s become ever more so as each ridiculous year surpasses the ridiculousness of the year before. If you take the most canonical definition of religion, the Structuralist one propounded mid-century by Lessa and Vogt, you find that American greenism has (a) a shared mythic picture comprising (b) a set of speculative beliefs; (c) rituals (not to say routine) sustaining the myths; and (d) practices both dependent upon and supportive of the beliefs, practices in which the beliefs reach into every department of our lives. In Platonic terms, a regulating virtue, then, that tells us how to behave and what to believe. A faith.
I could take the Lessa-Vogt Model, as laid out here, and plug in the content of each component of the framework, myth and belief, ritual and practices, but it’s more fun to invite anyone who comes across this post to do so for herself. And Scavenger and Ed, you might want to try it too. It’s easy and fun.
One part of the reason why Scavenger’s observations are not merely “ironic” is that each of the social sciences was founded, at about the same time, as a result of the frightening, Nietschean future that was perceived by brilliant minds as the destiny of the West following the implosion of the Church as the regulating, catholic instrument of institutional organization, which is to say the loss of the “religio” (Lat. for a binding element, or “glue”) that held society together. All the late-19th Century and early 20th Century monster minds we venerate in postcards at Barnes and Noble and Borders and the music stores and campus stores, those folks all saw it, the impending chaos, and it scared the hell out of enough of them to compel them to pursue, each in his own way, the prospect of a new “human science”, to replace moribund religion as the thing that stopped men from devouring each other and structured and prohibitted them, rewarded and punished them, and thoroughly managed them as the statistics they truly are to any social scientist.
So remember that the next time the Nobelist and High Priest in the Temple of Gaia tells you what to wear and how many squares of toilet paper you may use in good “conscience”, lest you be required to purchase indulgences in the form of carbon credits, etc., etc., ad nauseum. At the turn of the last century Gilbert Chesterton put it quite succinctly: in the absence of a belief in God, he said, it does not naturally follow that men will believe nothing, but rather that they will believe anything.
Hugo, I think you’re assuming that all scientists, and anyone who studies science in any way, reject faith. That’s not so.
Al Gore, to pick one of your target types, is a rather devout Southern Baptist. His work on global warming is driven not by scientism, but by his desire to work to have the greatest effect on improving life for people on Earth, following Christian calls to serve other people.
In the presence of belief in truth and accuracy, science is a great service, and humans do great things.
Science is not religion, no matter how much we pretend it is.
Al Gore is mainly trying to serve himself and his own visions of greatness. Jumping on a plane and producing many tons of CO2, just to be there for the Nobel announcement, proves that. (Few actually go for the announcement; especially people involved in real science.)
However, I agree science and faith are far from exclusionary. The more one understands, the more one is impressed with both what one knows about and- even more- the things we don’t. Understanding the mechanics of a miracle should in no way remove the awe of the miracle understood.
Gore made no special trip for the announcement — he was in the U.S. at the time. It’s this sort of “any slander of Gore is justified no matter how absurd” that I object to.
Gore did travel to accept the award — on commercial airlines, even taking the subway from the airport to the awards ceremony. Why did you fail to give Gore credit where credit was due?
Al Gore was one of the most noble and responsible leaders I had the pleasure to work with. His command of technological issues made him an effective legislator; his advocacy for wise and appropriate use of technology today saves thousands of lives — and frankly, the internet hung by a thread until Al Gore saved it.
Part of the motivating force for Gore’s advocacy is his deep faith.
I can’t figure out why people make up fantastic stories to slam a good man doing good work for noble reasons.
Ed, I keep trying to get you, but I keep missing you instead. Once again you “see through the lens of pure science”, though you are yourself a man of faith. I’d predicted in my previous post that you would do so, rather than listening to a different perspective; not the perspective of faith, which as you well know is distinct from religion and also from belief, but rather from the perspective of those who study the PHENOMENON of religion. Why on Al’s Green Earth would you think that I am suggesting that science is religion? I keep trying and failing to cut these distinctions in such a way that you will construe my meaning. Science vs. scientism. Darwinian vs. Darwinism. Environmental vs. Environmentalism. These very suffixes are religious in their classical derivations. Is entymology all “pretend”?
You consistently presume that you know so much about science that there is nothing left for anyone else to know. You assume that I and many others with whom you blog require a dictionary when it comes to understanding what the word “science” means. Well, my 13 year-old nephew knows quite well what science is, and has known for several years. Were he a New Yorker rather than a Georgian, I guess I’d have to conclude that he had learned it from you.
Ed, do you realize that you even, and not infrequently, suppose that there are sentient adults out there unaware that some scientists are people of faith, when I know you to be both and many of my friends, professional associates and coreligionists to answer to the same description. What is your evidence for such widespread obliviousness? If I didn’t know better, I’d say that you are yourself a magical thinker! Or are at least an interloper on the fields of the social sciences, in which fields we do not make such assumptions or claims without stout evidence, as such truth claims are the very stuff of social science.
I wrote nothing here that I haven’t taught in the classroom in the course of explaining the very rudiments of the scientific study of religion, or Religious Studies. Most practitioners in our field are skeptics, though some are themselves religious and there are also a few atheists (and there are institutional schools of atheism in our field, running alongside the seminaries).
I don’t know why you think I “slammed” Mr. Gore, though as it happens I have thought him delusional for a very long time, as he (and his fine wife) seem incapable of stopping him confabulating. For many years he has insisted that he has accomplished things not done, been to places unvisited, created things (other than his autiobiography) he had no hand in creating. As he consistently appears convinced of his own “fantastic stories”, he falls into a category different from that of the exaggerating blowhard politician who pads his resume and tells self-important fictions. I am not the only one who over the years has felt protective in view of the mental stability of our former Vice President; moreover, I and others take such things far too seriously to joke about them or to reduce mental illness to an unscrupulous pundit’s cheap aspersion. No, Ed, we’re serious. Just as we’re serious about the religiosity of the brand of environmentalism into which children are forcibly indoctrinated in the compulsory schools. I am convinced that the entire secondary school curriculum could be integrated quite readily into a four-year course in Environmental Science, but too often Environmental Science is not what is taught; environmentalism is.
I count it very unscientific of you, as well as Christianly presumptuous, to impute motives to Mr. Gore–especially religious ones–of which you have no evidence, unless you know the man by his fruits. For at least a decade I have feared that the man, whom I also respect and care for, would break down in public, and humiliate himself and his family. It seemed to many that he might do so, very publicly, during the absurdly pseudoreligious Nobel ceremony, and in front of the longsuffering Tipper too.
Now Ed, you are a proud scientist. Is the anthropogenic thesis on global warming not arch speculation? Whether it is or not, it does constitute the better part of a complete cosmology in the eyes of a scholar of religion or of metaphysics. So you do the physics and we’ll do the meta, OK? I was only trying to give you some stuff to chew on other than the usual claptrap about science vs. religion. Of course I’m aware of your distaste for that rubbish, and I share it.
Are you familiar with civil religion and how it works? Did you know that German National Socialism was a deliberate civil religion? Do you think these things are less serious than paleontology?
Our job is to keep watch on the world’s religions, its spirituality, both sectarian and secular, and to some extent to study religions aborning. In the main we study the process of secularization, both a byproduct, and the principle cause, of modernization. Those who watch contemporary American church/state confict take not, for example, of Mike Huckabee’s idiosyncratic explications of Christian creed, for example, and of the fact that in his life Al Gore has been a Baptist while in Tennessee and a High Church Episcopalian while in Washington (his de facto hometown). That’s stuff’s not my bag, but there it is, for what it’s worth.
Look, my field and its methods have much to offer here, and we rightly belong on the sidelines as referees in this quintessentially American running debate that you and other conscientious persons (and for that matter also President Ahmadinejad) are having about the respective proper places of science and religion in our State.
Let me give a better example of what I mean by our ability to illuminate this debate a little, to jostle its contestants in the hope of a chance breakthrough. In your post of the 23rd you parody denialists with your witticism and link suggesting that global warming is “a conspiracy”. Indeed it is, but in a sense that is probably immaterial to the debate. The point is sufficiently illustrative, though, so here goes.
The Latinate word “conspiracy” is a profoundly Christian, and especially Roman Catholic, one. The early Christians were hunted animals forced to use clandestine survival techniques. Their version of a “secret handshake” was to embrace each other upon meeting, with a dry kiss in the air beside each cheek. Because they shared one another’s scent and exhilations or breath, the Christian kiss was called the “conspiracio”, the breath-sharing, and the making of a nexus or space betwixt the two in which the Spirit, God’s Ghost, could dwell. So, to con-spire is to in-spire (to summon spirit) by sharing ex-spiration.
Once the three were there, the two believers and the Spirit with them, they were able to “commune”, as we say today, to enjoy communio, or communion, with each other and with their God. The “Internet community” of which we are here a part is a secularized degradation of this ancient concept; nothing more, nothing less.
As odd as it may sound, it is an historical fact that for the past two millennia Roman Catholics have excelled at espionage, a fact much embraced by Ronald Reagan and his CIA Director and commented upon not infrequently by Vatican watchers. (In Italy especially, a minor sport unto itself.) This is neither here nor there to a scholar of the religious phenomenon, except that in the context of ecclesiology, or church history, it can be seen rather clearly as a trace element of the days of the Christian prey.
It may be asserted by serious persons that the anthropogenic hypothesis which already has come to pass itself off as established scientific “consensus” forclosing its very debate, is an unprovable and quasi-metaphysical speculation that serves to bind together disciplines and subcultures and nations in service to a single end, the vague and vaguely sacred notion of “The Environment”, usually spelled, in this context, with just such honorific capitalization. If you would simply suspend presuppositions sufficiently to toy with this concept for a moment–and this has nothing to do with hurling a pejorative at legitimate science–then it quickly becomes apparent why the Democratic Party (of which I am a member), probably the oldest known political party, in the past decade has adopted the bulk of the platform of the European Green Party as its new raison d’etre: it is a powerful glue capable of holding that heterogeneous organization together and binding it to likeminded organizations of human beings in other lands.
In the dictionary this is called religion, derivative of the Latin “religio”, a binding element or glue.
So in this highly specialized but quite serious sense, a portion of the global warming cause celebre is indeed a conspiracy, as those who profess the anthropogenic thesis are aping religious forms quite faithfully, while in so doing also touching the religious impulses of the religious, non-religious and irreligious masses. This is not a phenomen to be mocked as a conspiracist’s fantasy of secretly organized intention, a la mode the early Christians. Rather, it is the working out of ideology, a far subtler yet very real thing indeed.
Also, Ed, an aside. When the undeniably distinguished Senator Gore weighed in on the net with his Superhighway studies and legislating and budgeteering, the technology was not in danger of extinction. Such a scenario would not be recognizable to veterans of the Army Research Board, DARPA or the National Energy Laboratories. At the moment when Senator Gore was heard from, the technology was firmly ensconced within a consortium of university-based defense contractors headed up by the University of California, contractor-operator of the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alimos national laboratories. They weren’t about to let it go. UC shares intellectual property rights in the Internet. How to collect, is the question!
Oops. Make that “etymology”, please. Earlier a blogger (Kafka?) compared me to an insect, so I must’ve been buggy when I wrote the above intro.
Nobel watching is to the Norwegians as Vatican watching is to Italians: a tabloid affair all round. They loved it when Gore travelled PC, a giant custom Chevy Suburban, the heaviest SUV on the road, in tow with his countless pieces of luggage jammed with his papal splendor. The Peace Prize, and to some extent the Prize for Literature, are understood by Scandinavians as sophisticated practical jokes, a dressed up form of adolescent beard pulling, in robes.
When Al Gore stepped up to save DARPA’s funding, to stop Reagan from cutting the budgets of all the labs involved in ARPANET, and to set up the system whereby the University of California had a property interest, the internet was not secure. They didn’t want it to die, but having been on the receiving end of the phone calls from the chancellors of all of the universities involved, I can tell you they were happy Gore acted when he did.
Yes, Ed, I know we were happy, because it was my job at Cal to pull down as much of the Gore money as possible, the others be damned. But I assure you that UC’s contributions preceded Gore’s involvement.
Moreover, the pipe was there. How then could it be shut down? If you know the answer, then please don’t post it here, as the same people who ground former graduate international students from Cal and Stanford and Caltech and UCLA and USC and U-Dub into human pulp in Tiananmen Square may be watching.
Anyway, what in hell was Gore doing repeating the story of his “invention” of the thing? He scared the hell out of people who were counting on him when he went wiggy like that. And it’s only gotten worse. This is not in any way to undermine a scientific debate, as Gore is not a scientist anyway (though he has always been the man of ideas Clinton only pretended to be, which is why Clinton wanted him even without balance to the ticket), but rather is limited to a discussion of his well being and his involvement in telecommunications legislation.