Moderates United

I go out of my way to find places where contentious topics are being discussed, and there to stake out a clear position, which I then defend. This makes me stronger as a thinker, and VERY often leads me in new directions in my thinking. I highly encourage it, and anyone who isn’t doing this often is not reaching their potential; not even close.

A common pattern I see is the argument that I am wrong because I am not in the middle. This is offered with no substantive comment on my own views, or a demonstrated understanding of the opposing position. One can offer this comment without even reading or understanding anything of the issues involved.

This argument itself–the fabled “the truth lies somewhere in the middle”–is an argument that can be used on itself. Upon what basis can I not argue that the middle of THAT argument would necessarily lead us to conclude that sometimes the truth does NOT lie in the middle?

Or take this statement: “All valid truths admit exceptions.” If this is true, then sometimes there ARE truths which do NOT admit exceptions.

The point of discourse is to examine individual, discrete situations and problems. Always, always, always philosophy has to have to do with solving concrete problems. That is how I define it, so that truth–my truth, obviously–admits of no exceptions; it is tautological.

But this claim can, itself, be criticized, do you see? So often, I see the argument that my opponents do not need to take a position, since the position “the truth lies in the middle” is sufficient. But that, itself, is a position, which they DON’T defend. If you are talking, you can’t not take a position. You can say “I have no position”, which is fine and honest, and if that is true, genuine learning, communication, and progress can happen. That is still a position, though.

What is taught in our supposedly higher centers of education is that tolerance is a universal necessity–it is the only virtue beyond question–and the “truth in the middle” position is integral to that. Yet, if you are merely parroting it, you are not thinking.

The essence of a genuinely liberal society, one in which both ideological and cultural diversity are valued, is negotiation. It is where the parties themselves come into a parley, each with a position, and each of whom walks away having offered up some compromise, but without giving up who they are and what they value completely. Practically, the truth DOES often lie in the middle, but to reject a priori the possibility of truths which are absolute in their context–given the evaluational criteria in place–is to reject rationality altogether.

I will add that there is a reductio ad absurdum here. If I sit at a table–say in Petrograd in 1919 or so–and argue that 10 million class criminals should be murdered, and someone else says that none should die, the truth is not that 5 million should die. And in point of fact, setting out radical positions is a common negotiating technique among people whose chief aim is getting as much of their way as possible, while pretending to be reasonable. You simply ask for 2-3 times whatever it is you want, then settle for what you want, and maybe a bit more.

People without moral compass, or organizing principles are virtually defenseless against this tactic. Indeed, if your only belief is that the truth is in the middle, you will get screwed every time.

I would like to make a brief comment on what I view as the principle purpose of life.

Many have heard of Friedrich Nietzche’s “Will to Power”. Structurally, what this notion did for him is create the possibility of motion outside of the morass of materialistically inspired nihilism he saw around him. If God didn’t exist, so the argument went, then everything was meaningless.

Meaning is a qualitative structure. It is a sense within a person or group of purpose grounded in a sacred belief. It is meaningful to give your life to Jesus, or to your country, or to your family.

The motion of materialism is to equate all apparent sentience, activity, and what would have formerly been viewed as moral decision based on free will, with biology. Within this ideology, we are effectively animals with instincts that don’t differ, qualitatively, with those of ants. None of us have souls, and our apparent freedom is an illusion.

On this reading, the only way to be honest, is to admit the ethical imperative given in your biology, which is the preservation of your genes, through being the fittest, most powerful person on your block. An uebermensch (lit: “Above-man”).

Self evidently, morality in this regard is a mistake, and mercy something for lesser mortals. Only the truly great man will be able to rise above the pedestrian, bourgeois distinction of Good/Evil. Since it promotes weakness, and womanish–read non-Darwinian–virtues like compassion, Christianity is held in contempt.

The Will to Power was in effect a heuristic by which those who wanted to be free, who wanted to follow Nietzche’s reasoning into places he never went himself (spending much of his time crying on his sister’s couch), could judge their actions. Power was to act according to one’s own wishes, without regard to tradition, normal understandings of morality, or petty sentiments like mercy and compassion.

Logically, the end of the aspiring “Superman” was to rule the world. This is the summit. Once you are there, you never need to apologize to, kowtow to, or even acknowledge in any way ever again anyone who does not advance your immediate aims.

Yet let us zoom in on this World Emperor, sitting on his thrown. He is sad. Why? Because he is alone. Why is he alone? Because he subordinated the desires of everyone else to his own, and because he disabled his ability to interact with his fellow humans on an honest level, which would have enabled him to find other souls that could touch his own. To be superior, is to be alone. You can find people to surround you, but their ability to touch you are directly proportional to your capacity for vulnerability, and to giving in to the purportedly womanish virtues like tenderness. Once you do that, you have effectively renounced the Will to Power.

Hitler never loved Eva Braun.

The limit case of this is described by the Marquis de Sade, whose work should be burned in its entirety–but which hasn’t– and whose remaining value is to give us an inside look at the mind of evil.

Sade, who spent most of his life in jail both for real and imaginary crimes, dedicated himself to the destruction of traditional notions of morality. He shared with Richard Dawkins not just an atheistic stance, but an open, flagrant, and aggressive hatred of God, and every human institution and relic that flowed from conceptions of God. He described God as the most horrific invention ever to flow from the mind of man.

Like Nietzche, he found in power his salvation. Since he was precluded by lack of money and freedom from committing the crimes he imagined–and its not clear he would have had the stomach to do so anyway–he focussed his drive to power not on actual physical crimes, but on writing books intended to corrupt people. Napoleon understood this, and jailed him for that reason. He also banned his books, some of the most famous of which were not published until well after his death.

If we return to our sad Emperor–who in his solititude is not altogether emotionally different than Sade in his cell–he can do two things. He can renounce power, and again value connection, harmony, love, compassion, kindness, mercy, tenderness, and all the other virtues which seemingly oppose the doctrine of Power. Or, he can take his actual power to its limits, and begin to use it to destroy others.

He can find solace in the visceral sensations occasioned by sexual activity, and even more so by gratuitous cruelty. He can live his life, in effect, getting high. Since there is nothing he cannot do, everything is permitted. In effect, this is the life lived by Uday and Qusay Hussein, who had rape rooms, who murdered people and tortured them with impunity, and who took whatever they wanted.

What, though, we might ask is the point of this? Is this the best possible life? By what criterion do we decide that power alone is worth pursuing? What is wrong with the tender virtues?

My contention is that neither Nietzche or Sade (or their many fellow travellers; I am using what amount to Ideal Types in my argument, since I can cover more ground) thought through what they were doing. They were superficial, and cowardly.

The reality is that all of us crave innocence in some form or fashion. Those who live normal childhoods think back with fondness and nostalgia at the joy and pleasure of simple things like playing tag, or snowball fights, or playing house, or just walking outside on a beautiful Fall or Spring day. In our daydreams, all of us want to be innocent.

But we aren’t. None of us are perfect. There is likely not a Christian on the planet who can be found who is perfect in their love, compassion, faith, and mercy. Some people see this and reject Christianity as a whole for this reason.

Morever, once you adopt Science as your ethical system, you slowly lose all ability to use traditional standards of morality–particularly those anchored specifically in religion–and justifying doing the right thing becomes harder and harder. Your criterion for the purpose of life is Truth, but you ignore the fact that within the Philosophy of Science Truth is unknowable except provisionally. You can speak functionally about what is true experimentally, but this does not permit blanket ontological statements of Truth with a T.

For this reason, I view the doctrine of Scientism–that all answers about everything come from Science and only from Science–to be a form of power mongering. It is a cultural landgrab that is allied to that of Sade, and I think it no coincidence that the language of prominent Scientistic apostles like Richard Dawkins so often approaches that of Sade in venom.

The net fact is that our experience preceded our understandings. To invert this, I can say that the doctrine of Darwinism (my understanding) dictates what emotions I can feel (my subjective experience). For example, I can choose to believe that compassion is a relic of the need for group cohesion to survive. This means that compassion is in some respects “unnatural”, in that its expression is a function of biology, and not individual will. For all intents and purposes, this is the take that the Nazis had on biology, and used it to justify their actions to coerce evolution to the next stage through the mass slaughter of inferior peoples.

Darwinism for this reason, as an ethical system, leads immediately down the Nietzchean pipeline into the Will to Power.

Here is the crux of the matter: I believe there is equally a Will to Joy, or Goodness. This is the Will to Innocence, beauty, love and all the emotions that have, deep, lasting effects, and which actually do work to mitigate our solitude. It is a sense that can and has been expressed differently in various peoples, times, and places.

When we fail to do what is good, this is a form of repression. It is Qualitative Repression. Failing to meet our own duties with respect to what we consider to be the Sacred causes us pain. Some people don’t want to meet that pain–neither Sade nor Nietzche or any other evil human being does–so they fly away from it, and justify their cowardice by making cowardice a virtue. This is Qualitative Repression. They push back the noble feelings they cannot keep from their minds by constantly contemplating or committing crimes.

If we add to this Freudian notions of repression, we see how the argument comes to be made that NOT indulging yourself is the crime, since self restraint is somehow artificial, and licentiousness of various forms what constitutes “virtue.”

Qualitative Repression, then, is to be opposed to Quantatitive Repression. We understand readily the sex instinct, and believe we understand the effects of that. However, since there is no place holder for the notion of Quality in a universally leveling materialistic Scientism, the notion of Qualitative Repression–or of the need to express noble ideals in action, has not caught hold yet.

But I do share with Abigail and John Adams the basic idea that we are meant to be Good, to do Good, and to rejoice in everything. When I use the word Meant, I am not claiming to have unlocked the secrets of the universe. Neither can any scientist. Not one of them can find any piece of matter which is ONLY matter anywhere in the universe, or any linear explanation for the undisputed facts measured by Quantum physicists.

No one can claim that what the human race has always done need be what it always will do.

No one can measure free will, since to do so one would have to be external to the system, and no humans are. Morever, if we are limited in our decision making capacity, there is no reason to limit it further by recourse to scientific theories of unproven merit. There is EVERY reason to use our logical faculties to develop ideas which work to foster our happiness, and joy.

“Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.”

John Adams.

Liberal Arts curriculums, when they were first rolled out, were intended to educate our citizens to run our Constitutional Republic well. Such programs were meant to foster the virtues of their graduates, sharpen their wits, develop the capacity for self expression and rational argumentation, and provide them with a broad base of knowledge by which to better help our nation navigate the stormy seas of growth and coexistence with hostile nations.

This they did splendidly for quite some time. Then approximately in the 1960’s, the whole thing went to hell. A storm front blew in from Europe which rejected virtue, per se, outside of conformity to the collective, and that effectively ended the capacity for rational thought of most of our Humanities professors.

Now liberal arts graduated no longer possess broad general knowledge. Through the intercession of Freudian notions of instinct and repression, they are taught that what formerly passed for virtue–as for example in chastity outside of a loving relationship–was unnatural. They are taught little about history, the process of formal debate and rhetoric, and quite generally graduate with considerably less common sense (which I define as “knowing what you know, and knowing what you don’t know”) than they went in with.

Over time, this has affected our political discourse in such a way that sound bites, 30 second news stories, and conformity dictate a very high percentage of what people believe in this nation.

Manifestly, most conservatives are religious, or pro-business. Very few of those who ought to have widened and deepened both their tolerance and their cosmopolitanism care any more to indulge in non-ironic patriotism, or preach the importance of personal responsibility.

This long term trend will, if not reversed, lead to our eventual complete decline and failure.

I consider the purpose of human life, as it should be protected in our political institutions, to be the cultivation of personal virtue. Certainly, it was to obtain relief from religious oppression that a great many of our forebears came to America. Their intent was not to flee restraint, per se, but to substitute restraints chosen by themselves, for their own perfection, for those imposed by less benevolent governments.

The freedom to choose one’s one manner of virtue–whether it be some form of Protestantism, Deism, atheism, Judaism, Mormonism or something else–is one understanding of freedom. This freedom is consistent with freedom of action and freedom of speech. It leads naturally to freedom of business and economic life, since it implies both some work ethic, and honesty. It lends itself to decentralization, since if people do not abuse one another, they do not need to be protected from one another.

We can in fact posit that the degree of decentralization of government possible is a function of the capacity of individuals to govern themselves and their own passions. Some government will always be needed, since this is not and presumably never will be a world populated entirely by perfectly honest, perfectly rational people. Where this balance should lie is negotiable, and represents the part of the continuum I consider to be political moderation, in which difference of opinion on details are expected, and debate both productive and needed.

To this I contrast Leftism. This doctrine redefines freedom to mean freedom FROM differential moralities, and defines virtue precisely as conformity. Self evidently, the diversity of human genetic material will–absent coercive Huxleyan genetic tampering–always mean that people are different in their innate capacities, and hence likelihood of large scale success. Added to this, in the economic and social spheres, are the relative utilities and drawbacks of different ethical system.

For example, those who love pleasure rather than work will always be outpaced financially by those who value work over pleasure, in a just system. This is an inevitable consequence.

For this reason, absolute human equality is not an attainable goal, without violence.

And violence is of course what we see in the history of efforts to remake man in the image of an obedient happy drone, none of which have succeeded. The 40,000 killed in the French Revolution pale beside the “accomplishments” of the Chinese, Russians, Vietnamese (who killed 65,000 in 1975 alone), and of course Cambodians.

These are the two foundational forms of political life. Freedom FOR virtue, and freedom FROM virtue.

to make an omelet.”

This was the mantra for most 20th Century apologists of Communist atrocities. Yet, as historian Paul Johnson noted, no omelet was ever created. No version of leftist collectivism ever worked, if by “work” we intend to signify an improvement in the lives of the people subjected to diabolical notions of “justice”. People lost rights, got more poor, lost hope, and not infrequently were jailed or murdered. This was the egg breaking part. There was no creative counterbalance to the destructive impulses and actions.

We hear often of past American crimes. Perhaps most blatant is the invasion of sovereign Native American land, followed by what can only rationally be described as colonization. We did in fact create an empire in North America, and did it through the murder and resettlement of many Indians. This part cannot be disputed.

However, this differs not at all from the Communist atrocities, and the great difference is that we did indeed create the omelet. In a history of humanity replete with every sort of horror and violence imaginable, we created an oasis of relative peace, and the possibility of long term growth in standards of living, understood not just economically, but morally and spiritually as well.

If we want to atone for the sins of our forefathers (self evidently, slavery is another such issue), it is pointless do it through self destructive behavior, as many on the Left demand. Rather, let us atone by carrying through the project which succeeded at the cost of so many lives. Let us continue to view ourselves as the City on the Hill, and work for the continuing betterment of humankind as a whole.

If we should choose to fail, there are no nations on this planet with records any better than our own, and both Russia and China have many, many more literal skeletons in their past than we do.

The basic problem most of the people paying attention have with the Anthropogenic Global Warming idea is that it is formatted as a conjecture. In science, you have a formal process for establishing the level of credibility of ideas. You can never claim Truth, with a big T, but you can state that a given equation or prediction has without fail performed flawlessly in all efforts to disprove it.

This last is important. A fundamental notion in science is that of falsification. If you want to compare one understanding of the world relative to another–say the idea that our current temperature alterations are natural, relative to the idea that they are created mainly by human activity–then you need to format your hunch as a hypothesis. You say, “I predict that if my idea is right, then X will happen. If X does not happen, then my hypothesis is not the one that best fits the data”.

Self evidently, nobody likes to be proven wrong, but the reality is that that is how our sum of knowledge increases, so this is an essential component of honest science.

There is in fact a simple prediction made from the AGW conjecture, which made publicly would elevate the idea to that of a hypothesis.

The relative importance of CO2 on temperature goes up as you travel up in the atmosphere:

Given the present composition of the atmosphere, the contribution to the total heating rate in the troposphere (the portion of the atmosphere of most interest — it is the region from the surface to basically the top of the active weather zone) is around 5% from carbon dioxide and around 95% from water vapor.

However, in the stratosphere, the contribution is about 80% from carbon dioxide and about 20% from water vapor, although this makes a relatively small contribution to total greenhouse effect.

Therefore, the prediction can be made that if CO2 is responsible for most of the warming, that we will see disproportionate warming in the upper atmosphere–perhaps 2-3 degrees for every degree of surface temperature increase–which can be easily verified by satellite. Thus far, nothing has shown up, and this fact has been ignored or even suppressed. The models have been invoked as more accurate than actual measurements, which of course is highly unscientific and even unethical.

If the AGW proponents want to ask us to make enormous and economically damaging investments based on their ideas, they need to make them scientific. This has not yet been done.

I should close by saying this formulation is accurate to the best of my understanding, but I am not a climate scientist. I am verifying these ideas with someone who knows more than me.

This word hasn’t been used for a while, so I’m going to recycle it, in the spirit of conservation.

What I mean by it is a renewed dedication to the principles upon which this nation was founded. It presupposes that we are a nation of individuals dedicated to the perfection of our own personal moralities, and needing government only to curb the abuses of those within and external to our nation who are not willing to govern themselves rationally.

I believe that the rights of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and ownership of property are universal principles which work to foster actual freedom and associated felicity. That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men.

I understand that some of our Captains of Industry are sons of bitches, who do need to be regulated. I understand that many of our workers are whiny, and that unions on balance likely hurt most of their members over time more than they help them.

Overall, we are however better off with less regulation than more, more personal responsibility, and less trust in both our elected and unelected representatives.

This is not libertarianism. It is not dogmatic, but fully cognizant of the many advantages of a strong central government for some things, like defense.

This is not conservatism, which has come to be equated with a rejection of most forms of social change and progress. For example, I believe most moral issues should be pushed out to the states, and the Federal Government pulled out entirely. Drug laws, abortion law, gay rights, homosexual civil unions, the Pledge, school prayer, education, prostitution, euthanasia: all of these should be determined by the States. The Federal government has no business in any of these.

Laws passed in Washington, or laws compelled on the nation by overreaching Supreme Courts should have no compelling force with respect to issues that do not intrinsically affect the nation as a whole.

In a perfect world, no government would be necessary. Rational anarchy is the aim of neoliberalism, as it is with Libertarianism. This presumes government of the individual, by the individual. It presumes generalized Goodness. We are far from that point, but can perhaps begin to imagine it.

In this inaugural post, I would like to discuss the issue of what is generally termed Anthropogenic Global Warming. This term is used because the Earth for all of its history has been warming and cooling. The Sahara Desert used to be green. Minnesota used to be covered by a giant glacier, which is why it is so flat and has so many lakes. These facts are well known, and disputed by no one.

Therefore the term Anthropogenic must be used. “Anthropo” means “related to humans”, and “genic” of course is related to “genesis”, meaning “to come from”. The question is: are human beings, through the consumption of carbon based fuel sources like oil products and coal, creating an increase in the so-called “Greenhouse Effect”?

This Greenhouse effect is so called because solar radiation, passing through the windows of a Greenhouse, warms the air inside. Since the air has nowhere to which to reradiate that absorbed heat, it warms up. This is why your car is so hot on sunny days, and why cracking the windows helps. Cracking the windows enables the air to expand, mix with cooler air, and thus lower the overall temperature. This analogy, while not exact, is intended to convey the idea of heat collecting without dissipating.

With respect to the Earth’s atmosphere, there are numerous Greenhouse Gases (you will often see GHG’s as a shorthand), including Carbon Dioxide, Nitrous Dioxide, Methane, and most importantly Water Vapor. In effect each of these acts as one-way filters. Sunlight passes through the atmosphere, and reaches the Earth, where it warms plants, soils, and oceans. Since light is energy, that energy is absorbed by the Earth, and some of it is converted to heat, which in effect changes the frequency profile of that radiation. This new frequency, generally in the infrared portion of the spectrum, is blocked by the identified GHG’s.

Depending on the source you look at, somewhere between 60% on the low side, and 95% on the high side of the Greenhouse Effect results from water vapor. This effect will vary depending on the clarity of the day. Clouds block the sun, and so block the sunlight from getting in. Where there are no cloud, though, water is by far, hands down, by all accounts the single most important GHG.

Carbon Dioxide represents on average about .03% of the atmosphere, as near as we can determine. It is essential for plant photosynthesis, and it is abundantly clear that even apart from its beneficial effect with respect to the Greenhouse Effect that life would be impossible without it.

As far as a frame of reference, it is the source of carbonation in soda drinks, the reason Pop Rocks fizzle, and the reason bread dough rises. It is what you exhale when you breathe out, and the actual reason that you breathe. Our brains, you see, respond not to decreases in oxygen, but to increases in CO2 in our blood stream.

Carbon Dioxide is, in other words, not only not pollution, but exceedingly beneficial.

You have, however, likely heard differently, or at least heard this framed differently, so let us now dig directly into this debate.

In 1988, James Hanson–who is on the government payroll at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Sciences–testified to Congress that the Earth was warming, and that in his view the collective carbon dioxide emissions of industrialized nations were largely to blame. This basic claim has been expanded and amplified in the intervening 20 years or so, and today represents a principle reason for the large scale concern bordering often on hysteria.

Self evidently, Summer and winter represent in almost all climates variations in temperature that are not catastrophic in any sense. The difference between New York City in the summer, on average, and the New York in the middle of winter, on average, might be 60 degrees. This is roughly the temperature difference between having an atmosphere, and having no atmosphere.

Moreover, as you drive south from New York, the temperature gets steadily warmer, and this is true at all times of the year. If temperature per se were the only determinant of well being, then the Caribbean ought to horrific. In fact, it would be paradisical if most islands were not overpopulated (another issue entirely).

The case can in fact be made that for much of the world, longer growing seasons would actually make life better, and shorter winters life less unpleasant.

So why, first of all, the concern about warming?

The one thing we hear over and over is that the seas will rise. In the era of the dinosaurs, the seas were roughly 300 feet higher. What changed was that for unknown reasons much of the water in the oceans was frozen into glaciers at the North and South poles.

Let us take that as a worst case scenario, one which no one predicts. You know what happens? The poles become habitable, and ocean reefs will be able to grow farther north. Plants of all sorts and varieties thrive, and areas which were previously uninhabitable become bread baskets.

Many islands and coastal nations do indeed disappear, unless Dutch-style dikes are built, but the outcome–while highly disruptive–is one which takes place over many dozens of years, and allows for accomodation.

It would be, in short, hardly the end of the world as we know it. All of our social institutions would survive, and it’s far from clear the net effect would not be beneficial.

In none of these scenarios does the Earth become uninhabitable, and frankly in none of even the most overblown, flamboyantly dramatic scenarios do we even return to the state I mentioned, which as I said the Earth has been in before, and in which life thrived.

If our concern is with the poor of the world, then why is so little said about the role of energy in the building of the industries that enable developing countries to develop? It’s unclear the Earth will warm, but it’s abundantly, categorically clear that power plants in hungry nations do a great deal of good, and that such plants would be strongly frowned upon if the UN’s IPCC ruled the world.

Still, in all honesty it must be said that studies have been done showing an enormous economic cost to the projected effects of global warming (one study showing a 20% shrinking of the global economy)–not to mention the large scale displacements of people–so it does matter whether the science is valid or not. To that we will now turn.

I would like to address this basic issue in two ways: first, by a review of relevant facts, and secondly by a more philosophical review of the underpinning thinking.

Anthropogenic Global Warming is a hypothesis. The way this works is you generate an idea, which in this case can be summarized as follows: “the consumption of carbon based fuels for modern industrial economies works to increase atmospheric CO2 levels, which ought in turn to lead to increasing global temperatures, in ways unlikely to be self corrected other natural processes.”

What two data points would be most relevant to this hypothesis? Obviously, historical CO2 levels, and historical temperature levels. What we would expect to see would be CO2 levels steadily increasing since the dawn of the industrial age–when large scale coal burning become common–up to now. We would expect to see temperatures increasing in a similarly linear fashion.

Obviously, the IPCC, in claiming a clear human influence, believes it has such evidence. The single piece which caused a simmering concern to burst into wholesale panic was a proxy study done by Michael Mann and colleagues at the University of Virginia. If you have heard that the 90’s was the hottest decade on record, and that 1998 was the hottest year, then you are familiar with Mann’s work. He has a website, if you want to review it.

His goal was to place 20th Century temperatures in context as best he could, and of course the only way to look back into the past is by proxy data. Data carried by non-human substitutes for thermometers.

He chose tree rings as a principle source, particularly for the periods more than 300 years or so ago. Trees grow more when it is warm, and less when it is cold. The rings are larger when the trees grow more, and smaller when they grow less. We can look at a given species, and compare the actual rings to actually measured temperature records for the last 100 years or so, and extrapolate from there about what the temperature might have been. If, for example, a tree grew X amount in 1945, at an average temperature of Y, then a similar amount of growth in 1545 ought to indicate a similar temperature.

If that sounds dubiously approximate, it is. For example, you might see as much growth with a long mild summer, and long mild winter, as you would see in a short hot summer and long cold winter. It’s impossible to know for sure. For this reason, statistical corrections are used.

Although not a statistician himself, and in my understanding not employing any on his staff of Paleoclimatologists (specialists in past climatic periods), he developed his own algorithmic corrective process, which when developed (you run it through, and something pops out like a picture) showed a graph which has become famous, in which the temperature for roughly the last 1,000 years is roughly steady, then at the latter half of the 20th Century rises rapidly. It looks like a Hockey Stick, and has thus come to be called that.

If you look at this graph, it is difficult not to become alarmed. It seems so obviously to show a major aberration in temperature that it is difficult to explain in any other way than that offered by the AGW proponents. And as Mann himself often points out, he was not the only one to conduct such an analysis. However, in my understanding, all subsequent such analyses were conducted in similar manners, with similar bases of data. That they yielded similar conclusions is unsurprising.

The devil, as they say, is in the details. There are in fact two principle bases of criticism with respect to his work, and the work which followed.

First is methodological. When Mann’s work was subjected to rigorous analysis by two Canadians, Ross McKitrick and Steven McIntyre, they found that the conclusion reached by Mann–the “Hockey Stick” effect–could be erased entirely by eliminating one series of proxy analyses that appeared to have been in effect cherry picked to yield the hockey stick result. The data mining looked for aberrant samples, and then weighted them disproportionately. In my understanding, every professional statistician who has looked at this issue has–regardless of their thoughts on the AGW issue–found flaws. The issue is summarized here.

What you need to know is that if data is discarded which seems to have been mined solely to skew the results, no large scale aberrations in either direction (warming or cooling) remain, and this result has been found consistently by multiple researchers.

As importantly, it was a commonplace prior to the ascendancy of both the AGW hypothesis–and those supporting it–that there has been substantial temperature variations within the last 1,000 years in Europe. This in fact was the consensus when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change first convened in 1990, and was reiterated in 1995. What changed that consensus was Mann’s paper.

Perhaps most importantly, it was well attested that Greenland was in fact warm enough to grow crops on during what was called the Medieval Warming Period. It had far less ice on it, in other words, making the current apparent melting a return to a condition it has been in before, and our current temperatures unexceptional.

This is key: the contextualization of current temperatures. Is this the exceptional period we are being told it is, or has it happened before? According to many, it has been warmer in the last 1,000 years, meaning that CO2 cannot have been the cause of those temperatures. You can look at good reviews of this issue here and here.

The bottom line is that all reconstructions of the past 1,000, much less 10,000 years are subject to large experimental bias, in the sense that we really don’t know how accurate our readings are, and they in any event quite frequently seem to show no exceptional patterns.

The smoking gun that the Hockey Stick appeared to show, in others words, is a dud, at least currently.

But what about what we might term “thermometer time”, the period since widespread measurements could be made with thermometers?

What we have in this regard is more data, but data that is of uncertain reliability. In general, the practice for those taking regular temperatures was to write down daily the high and the low. Would-be temperature historians average the two, and hope thereby to generate a useful average.
However, how many readings do you think we have from the mid-Pacific from 1742? How about from Himalayan mountaintops in 1875? Brazilian jungles in 1902? Some, possibly, but hardly many, and even the two-a-day method is suspect.

In fact, a man who has sat on the Expert Review Panel of the IPCC virtually since its inception, has written a letter to a colleague supporting his call for the abolition of the IPCC, and cites in particular the cavalier nature of the IPCC’s treatment of temperature data:

“To start with the “global warming” claim. It is based on a graph showing that “mean annual global temperature” has been increasing.

This claim fails from two fundamental facts

1. No average temperature of any part of the earth’s surface, over any period, has ever been made. How can you derive a “global average” when you do not even have a single “local” average?

What they actually use is the procedure used from 1850, which is to make one measurement a day at the weather station from a maximum/minimum thermometer. The mean of these two is taken to be the average. No statistician could agree that a plausible average can be obtained this way. The potential bias is more than the claimed “global warming.

2. The sample is grossly unrepresentative of the earth’s surface, mostly near to towns. No statistician could accept an “average” based on such a poor sample.

It cannot possibly be “corrected” It is of interest that frantic efforts to “correct” for these uncorrectable errors have produced mean temperature records for the USA and China which show no overall “warming” at all. If they were able to “correct” the rest, the same result is likely.”

Thus a man intimately familiar with the basis of the discussion is making what appear to me to be common sense points. The Earth is large, our measurements are few, and likely only reasonably accurate since the dawn in the last couple decades of accurate satellite data.

Moreover, what is not generally known is that the existing scenarios actually predict warming that is 2-3 times what is predicted at the surface.

If you read this report–written as he says by a contributor to the IPCC’s 2007 Report, and an eminent scientist in his own right–you will find that the math used by the IPCC to calculate heat radiance and its effect on atmospheric temperatures predicts very large temperature increases in the upper atmosphere, which ought, if their math is correct, to be very substantial, and much larger than any increases on the surface.

But they are not.

I will quote him at length:

“At the very heart of the IPCC’s calculations lurks an error more serious than any of these. The IPCC says: “The CO2 radiative forcing increased by 20 percent during the last 10 years (1995-2005).” Radiative forcing quantifies increases in radiant energy in the atmosphere, and hence in temperature. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 in 1995 was 360 parts per million. In 2005 it was just 5percent higher, at 378 ppm. But each additional molecule of CO2 in the air causes a smaller radiant-energy increase than its predecessor. So the true increase in radiative forcing was 1 percent, not 20 percent. The IPCC has exaggerated the CO2 effect 20-fold.

Why so large and crucial an exaggeration? Answer: the IPCC has repealed the fundamental physicalthe Stefan-Boltzmann equation – that converts radiant energy to temperature. Without this equation, no meaningful calculation of the effect of radiance on temperature can be done. Yet the 1,600 pages of the IPCC’s 2007 report do not mention it once.

The IPCC knows of the equation, of course. But it is inconvenient. It imposes a strict (and very low) limit on how much greenhouse gases can increase temperature. At the Earth’s surface, you can add as much greenhouse gas as you like (the “surface forcing”), and the temperature will scarcely respond.

That is why all of the IPCC’s computer models predict that 10km above Bali, in the tropical upper troposphere, temperature should be rising two or three times as fast as it does at the surface. Without that tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot”, the Stefan-Boltzmann law ensures that surface temperature cannot change much.

For half a century we have been measuring the temperature in the upper atmosphere – and it has been changing no faster than at the surface. The IPCC knows this, too. So it merely declares that its computer predictions are right and the real-world measurements are wrong. Next time you hear some scientifically-illiterate bureaucrat say, “The science is settled”, remember this vital failure of real-world observations to confirm the IPCC’s computer predictions. The IPCC’s entire case is built on a guess that the absent hot-spot might exist. “

Bottom line: what they predict, isn’t happening. And as he points out, the tone of the IPCC’s report from 2007 was markedly scaled down relative to 2001, even though to all non-detail level appearances it was scaled up. He even rebuts Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in detail.

Noteworthy there is that a British judge mandated that British schoolchildren be told of 9 scientific errors before they could be shown the film, lest laws against the “political indoctrination” of school children be violated.

Temperatures, in short, do not appear to be rising significantly, and in any event we can, with reasonable confidence, believe that it has been warmer in the recent past, and that warming now is natural and nothing to be concerned about.

What, then, about CO2 levels? Has the predicted rise happened?

First off, there are enormous methodological problems with CO2 measurements. Look at a picture of the Earth. Do you see clouds? Do you think it likely that CO2, like water, interacts with the atmosphere in fluid ways? For obscure reasons, the IPCC, in my understanding, treats CO2 as “well mixed” for their analytical purposes, meaning that a CO2 measurement at noon at the North Pole is theoretically as good as one taken at midnight at the equator. Yet humidity goes up and down, doesn’t it? Why is CO2 any different?

It is well known that the solubility of gases in liquids is a function of temperature. Our oceans cycle relentlessly from North to South in what is referred to as thermohaline circulation. The thermo of course refers to temperature, and haline to salinity.

Aeronautical Engineer Jeff Glassman has developed, based on his own research, a detailed model showing how CO2 is taken up by cold waters, and released by warm waters. The oceans cannot differentiate between manmade CO2 and natural CO2, and the relative proportions of manmade to natural (estimated at roughly 1 part manmade to 15 natural) CO2 make our own contributions minescule compared to the effectively limitless potential of the oceans to absorb CO2.

He makes the further important point that what the Vostok ice cores show is that CO2 levels rise AFTER temperatures. As mentioned, temperatures have gone up and down continuously as long as life has existed on this planet. What the Vostok samples were initially supposed to have said was that increases in CO2 led to increases in temperature, which is the basic AGW hypothesis. However, later it was determined that CO2 levels lagged temperatures.

AGW supporters then argued that CO2 levels amplified existing warming, and that the same will happen in our era if our current production of CO2 is unchecked.

However, if it were true both that warming causes the release of CO2, AND that CO2 amplifies that warming, why has our climate never run away? Why have we not returned to the era of the dinosaurs, or something even warming? As far as that goes, why do we keep having Ice Ages, which are much, much, much more common than warming episodes?

This basic notion is called feedback, and use of this idea is why we keep hearing that we only have a few years before it’s too late. Supposedly there is a tipping point, beyond which the climate will run out of control. Yet, the basics for such a tipping point are right there in the sedimentary record, and it didn’t happen. We know it is possible, since CO2 levels in the pLE

This is because in the real world there are both positive and negative feedback loops. CO2 levels have always gone up and come down as the ocean temperatures-and corresponding capacity for CO2 absorption–have changed.

Yet what about this claim we hear constantly that CO2 levels are the highest in 420,000 years? First off, the 420,000 years number comes from the estimated age of the Vostok record. Essentially they are comparing data from a single source, to that which can be obtained today. In turn, the bulk of the data in use today comes from a 50 year study done in Hawaii by Charles Keelling.

Any extrapolations made from this data rest on two assumptions: first, that CO2 “clouds” do not exist, and that CO2 somehow behaves different from other gases; and secondly that the Vostok data is sufficiently complete that it can be used as a basis for generalized conclusions.

With respect to the first assumption, simple chemistry tells us that CO2 has a solubility curve, as well described by Jeff Glassman. Simply put, cold water holds more CO2 than warm water. Hawaii is in the middle of a lot of relatively warm water, and it is therefore quite conceivable that the readings taken there are not typical of the entirety of the atmosphere, and are in fact unduly high.

Dr. Vincent Gray–remember, one of the original members of the IPCC Expert Review Panel– has in fact alleged that much of the CO2 data has been fudged:

“The other flagship set of data promoted by the IPCC are the figures showing the increase in atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. They have manipulated the data in such a way to persuade us (including most scientists) that this concentration is constant throughout the atmosphere. In order to do this, they refrain from publishing any results which they do not like, and they have suppressed no less than 90,000 measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide made in the last 150 years. Some of these were made by Nobel Prizewinners and all were published in the best scientific journals. Ernst Beck has published on the net all the actual papers.”

In short, we began with a paucity of data–CO2 being yet harder to measure than temperature–and even that data set has been unjustifiably reduced so as to, apparently, engineer uniform data.

With respect to the second assumption, that Vostok is a fair representation of historical CO2 levels, Jeff Glassman makes a very valid point:

“Check the Vostok data. The CO2 samples number 283, covering 414,085 years. The average spacing is 1463 years. The chances of sampling an epoch like the present 50 year record, if it existed, is about 50/1463 or 3.4%.

That translates into a 3.4% confidence level for the statement that the present CO2 trend was unprecedented in the last 420 Kyears. That confidence level does not begin to rise to an acceptable standard for a scientific conclusion. . .The CO2 growth rate at Mauna Loa is unprecedented because no comparable measurements exist.”

Thus we see that the projections of the hypothesis are at best weakly confirmed, and at worst (for them) falsified outright. There are methodological problems, empirical problems, problems of sloppy math, and most of all a lack of the sort of concrete predictions that would enable them to overcome their otherwise lackluster performance.

The bottom line is that the alleged phenomena of large scale, rapid warming and greatly increased atmospheric CO2 levels do not appear to have come true. In point of fact, even if the earth were warming, there are multiple plausible hypotheses for it, but for now we do not even need to proceed to an explanation of something it is not clear even exists.

It is now time for a more philosophical treatment, which will be shorter.

Or take a look at this piece:

“For decades, environmentalism has been the Left’s best excuse for increasing government control over our actions in ways both large and small.

It’s for Mother Earth! It’s for the children! It’s for the whales! But until now, the doomsday-scenario environmental scares they’ve trumped up haven’t been large enough to give the sinister prize they want most of all: total control of American politics, economic activity, and even individual behavior.

With global warming, however, greenhouse gasbags can argue that auto emissions in Ohio threaten people in Paris, and that only global government can tackle such problems. National sovereignty? Democracy? Forget it: global warming has now brought the Left closer to global government, statism, and the eradication of individual rights than it has ever been before.”