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HOW DID THE GLOBAL WARMING SCAM SURVIVE “CLIMATEGATE”?

By Cap Allon | ELECTROVERSE | June 16, 2021

In 2009, a whistleblower released emails showing how climate academia was manipulating/destroying data, and blocking publication of articles which didn’t support their anthropogenic global warming agenda.

“Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash,” wrote reporter Christopher Booker for the Telegraph.co.uk back in November, 2009.

Even The Guardian’s George Monbiot expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the hacked emails, as their authors are not just any old bunch of academics.

“Their importance cannot be overestimated,” continued Brooker.

“What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

Professor Philip Jones was the director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) from 1998 to 2016 — during this time, Jones was in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports.

Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, Jones’ global temperature record was, and remains, the most important on which the IPCC and governments rely when making policy decisions — not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph, which turned climate history on its head by claiming that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history:

Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick graph.

Mann’s “hockey stick” was the basis for the IPCC’s conclusion that “there is discernible human impact on climate.” However, and in a first step toward restoring the rigor of science in the global climate debate, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences back in 2006 presented the results of its directed study of the science behind the infamous graph.

The Academy’s report identified the failure of the hockey stick to model climate beyond the past 400 years, as evidenced by its inability to reflect the medieval climate optimum (MCO).

The optimum has been extensively documented by recorded human history and proxies, but cannot be explained by computer models based on equations that assume that greenhouse gases dominate climate change. These same models predict massive increases in Earth’s atmospheric temperature because of the additions of a small percentage of human-derived carbon dioxide.

The IPCC needed to remove the MCO from the historical record books because the period blew apart their global warming theory: any forcing other than CO2 able to cause terrestrial warming is an inconvenient spanner in the works, and so, with the help of Mann, the panel completely erased every one of them from history in one clean swipe.

This was a brazen plan, particularly given the extensive data, records and proxies out there demonstrating that the MCO did indeed occur. These same natural records also prove the existence of the cyclic and preceding Roman-era warm event, and the very same data, records and proxies are on show again today during our modern warming event.

Climate, it turns out, is driven mainly by the Sun and the impact solar activity has on the oceans: ironically, it is the IPCC that are the true climate deniers.

Dr. Tim Ball’s temperature graph for the past 1,000 years is generally considered much closer to the actual reality

Below are a few of the ‘hacked’ exchanges between Philip Jones and Michael Mann between 1999 and 2008 (courtesy of The Guardian ):

1) CONFLICT OF INTEREST

From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: “Michael E. Mann” <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Date: Wed Mar 31 09:09:04 2004
Mike,
… Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.
Cheers
Phil

Jones did not specify which papers he had rejected. But one appears to have been by Lars Kamel, which claimed to have found much less warming in Siberia than Jones.

It was a rare example of someone trying to replicate Jones’ analysis — one of the key ways in which science validates itself. So on the face of it, there was good reason to publish, even if flaws needed correcting. But the paper was rejected by Geophysical Research Letters, partly it seems because Jones “went to town”.

This raises important questions about conflict of interest in scientific peer review, and how Jones wielded his power as a reviewer.

2) BIASING THE IPCC ASSESSMENT

From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: “Michael E. Mann” <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL
Date: Thu Jul 8 16:30:16 2004
Mike,
… I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !
Cheers
Phil

Jones is writing about two new papers. One, from two known skeptics Ross McKitrick and Pat Michaels, claimed to show a correlation between the geographical patterns of warming and of industrialization, suggesting that local urbanization rather than the global influence of greenhouse gases were often key in warming on land.

Jones evidently wanted to use his position as a lead author to keep the paper out of the IPCC report. In the event, the paper was not mentioned in early chapter drafts, but was added to a final version, where its findings were dismissed as “not statistically significant”.

Critics say that by keeping it out of early drafts, Jones prevented reviewers scrutinizing his conclusion.

3) REWRITING THE RULES OF FREEDOM OF INFORMATION

From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: santer1@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, Tom Wigley <wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Date: Wed Dec 3 13:57:09 2008
Ben,
When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA [ClimateAudit] was all about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school – the head of school and a few others) became very supportive. I’ve got to know the FOI person quite well and the Chief Librarian – who deals with appeals…
Cheers
Phil

Climate Audit is the web site run by Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician peppering Jones with requests for his data. There is no legal basis for rejecting FOI requests on the basis of the “types of people” they are.

The records show that the university turned down most FOI requests, from McIntyre and others, for CRU data. Of 105 requests concerning CRU submitted up to December 2009, the university had by late January 2010, acceded in full to only 10.

4) DELETING THE EVIDENCE

Phil Jones wrote to Mike Mann in 2008:

Mike,
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise… Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise…
Cheers
Phil

British skeptic David Holland had recently asked CRU for all emails sent and received by its tree-ring specialist Keith Briffa about the recently published IPCC report, of which Briffa was a lead author.

Briffa had been in correspondence with Mann and two American researchers, Gene Wahl and Caspar Ammann, who had a forthcoming paper defending Mann’s controversial “hockey stick” graph.

This secret correspondence was outside the IPCC’s formal review process and seemed to break its rules.

Clearly, CRU people wanted to hide this correspondence from FOI requests. This email persuaded the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office that the university was “acting so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information”, and thus requests were “not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation”.

‘Climategate’ runs a lot deeper than the four emails and two scientists shown above.

The scale is actually jaw-dropping, and the email hack should have been enough to take the AGW scam down.

Here are two additional emails (images & highlighting courtesy of Tony Heller over at realclimatescience.com):

All this clearly reveals that fraud, lies and cover-ups are the backbone of the ‘global warming theory’.

The fact that the scam is still ongoing, and has actually gained further-traction in recent years, is testament to the agendas and powerful propagandizing at play.

The moronic masses have been duped into thinking the world is actually ending.

Our youth have been completely corrupted, transformed into a parroting mob devoid of ANY understanding of the topic at hand. The boredom of teendom has been given a phony purpose: to fight the threat posed by rising carbon dioxide emissions, and in future years, as these noisy, entitled pricks come of age –and win elected office– I can only imagine the devastating, economy wrecking and fuel poverty-inducing policies they will keenly implement.

Globalization, socialism, population control, and an overall redistribution of power appear to be the end goals here, with –as is always the case– “fear” being used as the driving force.

I can’t picture a better way to thumb-down the masses than making them think world is ending, and moreover, convincing them that it is their modern, comfortable way of life that is the root cause.

This is evil.

This is genuis.

Hats off.

June 22, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | 2 Comments

Why I Am a Climate Realist

By Vijay Jayaraj | Watts Up With That? | February 18, 2021

In 2008, I was in my early 20s and about to complete my undergraduate degree in engineering. Despite being in a remote part of Asia with no Internet facility—except for the Internet cafes—the news surrounding global warming still managed to reach most of us.

Being an ardent lover of the environment and passionate about conservation, I decided to pursue a career in environmental sciences, especially given the “rising problem” of global warming.

Al Gore’s 2006 climate documentary An Inconvenient Truth made global warming an extremely popular topic in those years all over the world.

Like millions of others, I trusted Gore’s predictions. I had no reason to doubt them. The thought of global climate doomsday and the call to avert it struck a chord with my passion for nature and conservation.

Hence, I pursued my graduate studies at one of the world’s leading universities for climate studies, the University of East Anglia in the UK. The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) there is responsible—along with the Hadley Centre—for developing global temperature datasets, known as HadCRUT datasets.

But my perceptions about global warming and the science surrounding it were about to be shaken. As I was attending one of my lectures, we received an email from the University asking us to change our email passwords immediately.

A week later that I understood that the University’s email system had been breached, and email content scientists from the CRU leaked to the public. The event is infamously known as “Climategate.”

It took me a few more years before I completely understood the implications of that email leak. Email exchanges between scientists from the CRU and other universities revealed a deliberate attempt to exaggerate the present warming and make it appear unprecedented.

Ross McKitrick in “Understanding the Climategate Inquiries” showed how the evidence proves that “The scientists involved in the email exchanges manipulated evidence in IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and WMO [World Meteorological Organization] reports with the effect of misleading readers, including policymakers.”

Besides, upon foreseeing inquiries coming their way, “The scientists took steps individually or in collusion to block access to data or methodologies in order to prevent external examination of their work.”

McKitrick noted that Phil Jones—one of the scientists from CRU—admitted to deleting emails, in a likely attempt to prevent disclosure of information subject to freedom of information laws, and had asked his colleagues to do the same.

Numerous enquiries and boards investigated the leak and declared the scientists not guilty. In two detailed, assiduously documented book-length analyses, Andrew Montford, author of the climate books Hiding the Decline and The Hockey Stick Illusion, summarized his findings in a shorter paper: “the inquiries into the conduct and integrity of scientists at the Climatic Research Unit were rushed, cursory and largely unpersuasive.”

Commenting on Climategate, Andrew Turnbull, who served as the Permanent Secretary of Environment Department (1994–1998) and Permanent Secretary to the Treasury (1998–2002) in the United Kingdom, said, “Only if the integrity of the science is reestablished and the strengths and weaknesses of the main propositions are acknowledged will there be the basis of trust with the public that policymakers need.”

But that integrity was never reestablished.

For example, the work of the very same scientists involved in climategate is treated as the ultimate standard of climate science. Some of them, like Michael Mann, are among the most influential people in the IPCC and chart the climate blueprint for policymakers, whose policies then are implemented in many nations.

The Climategate episode certainly made me question whether the global warming was as dangerous as it is made up to be.

The answer to my question trickled in slowly over a number of years. Evidence began to emerge that scientists acknowledged a large gap between the actual observed real-world temperature datasets (from satellites) and those temperature predictions from computer climate models.

While these differences may not prove the allegations against the Climategate scientists, they do confirm us about one thing: the computer climate models exaggerate the future warming rate due to their high sensitivity to carbon dioxide emissions. As a result, the models continue to show an excessive and unreal warming rate for future decades.

Despite plenty of evidence, the IPCC continues to use these faulty model predictions to inform the public and policymakers about future changes in temperature.

A steady stream of scientific studies has documented the evidence for lack of dangerous warming—IPCC’s level of warming based on fifth- and sixth-generation (CMIP5 and CMIP6) models and the apparent absence of climate-induced ecological collapse.

In 2020 alone, over 400 peer-reviewed scientific papers took up a skeptical position on climate alarmism. These papers—and hundreds from previous years—address various issues related to climate change, including problems with climate change observation, climate reconstructions, lack of anthropogenic/CO2 signal in sea-level rise, natural mechanisms that drive climate change (solar influence on climate, ocean circulations, cloud climate influence, ice sheet melting in high geothermal heat flux areas), hydrological trends that do not follow modeled expectations, the fact that corals thrive in warm, high-CO2 environments, elevated CO2 and higher crop yields, no increasing trends in intense hurricanes and drought frequency, the myth of mass extinctions due to global cooling, etc.

Academia is filled with scientific literature that contradicts the position of those who believe climate change is unprecedented.

Also, during the course of the last decade, it became apparent that most of Al Gore’s claims in his 2006 documentary were false. Contrary to his claims, polar bear populations remained steady, the Arctic did not become ice free during the summer of 2014, and storms did not get stronger due to global warming.

In simple words, Gore misled the world and promoted falsehood as science, and he continues to do so while profiting from a renewable industry that is sold as the cure for global warming. Yet, he himself generates carbon dioxide emissions and many times higher than an average family’s.

So, not only are the predictions of models are wrong, but also the interpretations of climate data and the propaganda of a climate doomsday were also wrong.

Today, we know the modern warming rate is not unprecedented. Warming of such magnitude has happened twice within the past 2000 years. Further, ice at both poles is at historic highs, even compared with the Little Ice Age of the 17th century.

Besides, there has been no increase in extreme weather events due to climate change and the loss of lives due to environmental disasters has drastically reduced during the last 100 years.

So, I am a climate realist. I acknowledge that there has been a gradual increase in global average temperature since the end of the Little Ice Age in the 17th century. I acknowledge that climate change can happen in both ways—warming and cooling. I do understand that anthropogenic CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases could have positively contributed to the warming from mid-20th century onwards.

I also acknowledge that warming and the increased atmospheric carbon dioxide that has contributed to it have actually helped society. The current atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, nearly 50 percent higher than in the 17th century, and the warming—which has occurred chiefly in winter, in higher latitudes and altitudes, and at night, thus raising cold temperatures but with little effect on hot temperatures—have actually resulted in optimal conditions for global plant growth, thus aiding in the flourishing of the agricultural sector.

The Bengal tiger populations have bounced back, and polar bear populations are steady, thanks to conservation efforts. Forest area in Europe is increasing every year, and countries are planting tree saplings at a record rate. Life expectancy has reached all-time highs in many countries, and more people are constantly pulled out of extreme poverty every year (although business lockdowns to fight COVID-19 threaten to reverse that trend). Access to freshwater has improved and human productivity has increased drastically.

So, there is no actual climate emergency. Instead, what we have celebrities, activists, un-elected political bodies like the UN, and even some climate scientists religiously promoting a popular doomsday belief.

The models do not know the future, and neither do the Climategate scientists. But an exaggerated view of future warming provides the ideal background for anti-carbon-based fuels policies that will undermine the economic well-being of every society in the world. We must not allow that.

Be a climate realist.

Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), is a Research Contributor for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and resides in New Delhi, India.

February 18, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Phil Jones Steps Down

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That |December 27, 2016

image

http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/environment/uea_s_climatic_unit_director_steps_down_1_4829565

One down!

Eastern Daily Press | December 27, 2016

Climatologist Prof Phil Jones, who was at the centre of the Climategate row over hacked emails, will be succeeded by Prof Timothy Osborn.

Prof Osborn, who has worked at the UEA since 1990, said: “UEA provides a superb environment for climate research and so it is a privilege for me to become the Climatic Research Unit’s next director of research.

“I’m looking forward to leading our pioneering climate research, establishing with greater certainty the details of how and why the Earth’s climate is changing and the consequences for the future.”

No doubt Phil’s well earned retirement will give ample opportunity to adjust homogenise his golf scores!

December 27, 2016 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

University of East Anglia students back boycott of ‘apartheid’ Israel

MEMO | April 22, 2015

The University of East Anglia’s student body has endorsed the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, in a motion passed last Thursday.

Meeting for the final time this academic year, the Council of the Union of UEA students passed the motion “in support of international law and human rights in Palestine” with 41 in favour and 15 against, with 11 abstentions.

The motion commits the SU to severing ties with companies that “facilitate Israel’s human rights abuses, military capacity, or settlement expansion”, as well as to opposing any university contract with complicit companies.

The SU also resolved to lobby the university “to adopt an academic boycott of Israeli universities” and provide scholarships for Palestinian students.

The motion describes Israel as “an apartheid state” and mentions specific crimes and abuses including illegal settlements, atrocities in Gaza, and “systematic” discrimination in both the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) and inside Israel’s pre-1967 lines.

Israel’s “expansion” in the oPt is described as “a settler-colonial project, predicated on the ethnic cleansing and expulsion of its indigenous people.”

Proposed by a member of the campus Amnesty International group and seconded by the Ethnic Minorities Officer, the motion notes recent pro-BDS resolutions at NUS National Executive Council, NUS Women’s Conference, NUS Postgraduate Conference and NUS Black Students Conference.

In addition, it was recalled that students have voted for boycotts of Israel on campuses across the UK, including “Kent, Goldsmiths, Birkbeck, Kingston, Swansea, Exeter, Brunel, the University of Strathclyde, Edinburgh, Dundee, Essex, Sussex and SOAS.”

The case for BDS, according to the motion, is based on “Israel’s multitude of human rights and international law violations” and its lack of accountability. The motion affirms Palestinian students’ right to education unhindered by discrimination, and the necessity of international solidarity from students in response to the BDS campaign.

The motion asserts that “global boycotts are a non-violent, legitimate and effective tactic”, that “all other methods of pressuring Israel and the ending of the occupation have failed,” and that members of an academic community “have a responsibility to ensure that ethical considerations and social justice are at the heart of research and academia.”

The Union Council rejected a proposed amendment which would have removed BDS from the motion. Procedural motions to delay the vote were also voted down.

April 22, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , , | 1 Comment

Climate Science Goes Megalomaniacal

Why Geo-Engineering Is Like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY | February 9, 2012

A February 6 report in the Guardian describes budding efforts to displace decarbonizing with geo-engineering as the goal for reducing the predicted catastrophic effects of global warming.  At present, these efforts are being funded by mega-wealthy private citizens like Bill Gates, but some traditional environmentalists as well as some decarbonizers are becoming worried that climate theory is setting off in a new direction.  Perhaps that is why the story appeared in the Guardian of all places.  Instead of its usual uncritical climate gushiness, the Guardian delves into the smarmier side of climate science — its dependence on money.

Their dependence on money is a subject proponents of anthropogenic global warming avoid like the plague, even though they are wont to accuse anyone who disagrees with them as being in the pay of the fossil fuel companies.   The Guardian report is important, because it inadvertently shines a light on how the intersection of money and groupthink among insular cohesive groups sharing a common interest is discrediting climate science in particular, but also science in general. (I am not introducing groupthink as a casual buzz word but in the context the distinguished psychologist Irving Janis used in his classic book Groupthink.  Anyone who believes groupthink is not a problem in the insular self-righteous climate science community, should read the Hockey Stick Illusion or wade through just a few of the infamous emails hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.)

Obviously, geo-engineering the earth’s climate would be a big deal, culturally as well as scientifically.  It would make the pyramids, the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program look puny and intellectually trivial in comparison.  By necessity, indeed by definition, geo-engineering would be forever dependent on analyses of the outputs of computerized global climate models (GCMs), because we can not put anything as complex as the world’s atmosphere on a lab bench or in a wind tunnel for testing.  Computer models, like all scientific theories, are mental constructs of reality — really analogies — to represent and cope with that reality.  The first point to note is that no model can be perfect or exact in its representation of reality.  All models are imperfect and therefore mutable, as the historian Thomas Kuhn, among others, explained in his classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  All scientific models must be continually tested to ensure their predictions match up to external conditions, and as the precision of observations increases, sooner of later, all scientific models become creaky and eventually need to be replaced with a newer construction to better explain a reality that is always receding as one seems to get closer to it by making more precise observations.

The second point to note is that GCMs are complex mathematical constructs made by like-minded or group-thinking minds. They are not the products of individuals.  This requires a consensus-based mentality and the intense communal effort required to build these models reinforces that mentality.  The need to raise money to pay for these models further intensifies the communal outlook. Consensus building, and especially the invocation of consensual authority, shapes the mentality of contemporary climate scientists in a very different way from the conceptions of physics that shaped the individual mental outlooks during the experiments that produced the models of the atom that competed for acceptance during the first half of the twentieth century.  The great physicist who invented the first model of the atom, Niels Bohr, for example, used to introduce his lectures by saying everything he was about to say was wrong. By that he meant no theory is eternal.

You will not hear Bohr’s kind of humility, tolerance, or encouragement of dissent and debate from dogmatic proponents of global warming like Michael Mann or James Hansen, ironically, both physicists, even though the GCMs they are basing their sense of authority on have not been validated with empirical data (or in the case of Mann’s infamous Hockey Stick, have been shown to be statistically flawed).  The dogmatic sense of certainty exhibited by goupthinking climate scientists exists despite the fact that the comprehensive data needed to test the GCM models for matchups to the environment simply do not exist.  Yet, this uncertainty is not at all unlike that which created the far more open-minded debate among the advocates of different atomic models, like Bohr, Schrödinger, or Heisenberg in the early Twentieth Century.  So, the authority of the GCMs needed to justify geo-engineering must be based on unvalidated assumptions about reality — really conjectures which are now stated as dogma, like, for example, the crucial quantification of the sensitivity of the warming response to changes in CO2 levels.

But there is more to the speculative analytical pathway leading climate science into the geo-engineering cul de sac, which brings me to my third point.  To justify the huge public expenditures and diversion of resources needed to geo-engineer the world, it will be necessary to perform cost-effectiveness analyses of the predicted benefits in a political context to convince policy makers of the need to undertake such a drastic and costly course of action.   Although the Guardian does not mention it, I have met some global warming alarmists (all card-carrying decarbonizers) who are already advocating that we combine the output of the GCMs with econometric models of the global economy to predict the global relationship between the monetary inputs to the economic benefits of global temperature reduction via solutions like carbon sequestration, etc. If you want to know how accurate econometric models are, just ask Alan Greenspan.  This kind of operation, clearly, would be like piling a house of cards on top of a house of cards.

Yet, the econometric-GCM mansion of cards is probably inevitable.  It is a tiny logical step for advocates of geo-engineering to link their theoretical GCMs to econometric models, and given the money needed (and the sacrifices that would be made elsewhere), cost-benefit analyses will eventually become necessary.  A policy decision to launch a “Manhattan Plus” project to geo-engineer the earth’s climate based on analyses of the output of such poorly understood computer models (GCMs and econometric) would go beyond madness and descend into megalomania.  The Guardian report inadvertently makes the madness quite clear: some climate scientists are calling for a political consensus to geo-engineer the globe, because the world cannot reach a political agreement on the vastly simpler problem of simply reducing carbon emissions.  Such an argument is at once illogical and bizarre.  Perhaps this yawning disconnect is why this report appeared in the Guardian, usually the most rabid pro global-warming mainstream newspaper in the world.

But of course, the megalomania implicit in geo-engineering has nothing to do with madness; it is about a group of like-minded intelligent people trying to feather their nest by creating a cash cow to do what they think is right and good. This is something I saw every day in the Pentagon.

Indeed, creating cash cows in the name of the greater good is the essence of the Pentagon’s game.  My 28 years experience in the Pentagon made me quite familiar with the steps needed to create the financial equivalent of a self-licking ice cream cone: (1) Inflate a threat to scare the bejeezus out of the people and induce politicians to unleash a torrent of publicly-funded money; (2) then, front-load a solution to neutralize that threat by overstating its benefits, understating its costs, and downplaying the uncertainties surrounding what is at best a poorly understood course of action; and then, (3) politically engineer a social safety net by spreading the money (grants and contracts) around the polity to lock in the constituent dependencies needed to keep the money flowing after the inevitable problems begin to surface.

Incidentally, the geo-engineering game, if publicly funded, will be manna from heaven for the US hi-tech weapons industry, which cannot compete commercially, but is in need of diversification, because of marginal cutbacks in the rate of future growth in the Pentagon’s budget.  You can bet what little is left of your IRA that defense mega-giants like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman will be attracted to the cash flow potential of geo-engineering like flies to honey, should a serious geo-engineering effort begin to materialize.

Speaking of the similarities between the advocates of geo-engineering to the inhabitants of the Pentagon and the defense industry — consider, as an example, the resemblance of using computer simulations to cope with the uncertainties of geo-engineering to the use of computer simulations in the now deeply troubled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. Bear in mind, the Pentagon wrote the script for  basing high-cost decisions with long term consequences on highly complex, poorly-understood computer driven simulations, while short-shrifting testing.  It has more experience in modeling than just about any organization in the world.  It began cost-effectiveness modeling on computers in the mid 1960s and has continued with increasing intensity ever since.  Nevertheless, the unfolding debacle of the  F-35 has taken these kinds of simulations to a new level of disaster: No less an authority that Frank Kendall, the acting Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition said recently that the F-35 program was started with the idea of putting it into production before it was fully tested under ”the optimistic prediction that we were good enough at modeling and simulation that we would not find problems in flight test.” …  He characterized this decision as “acquisition malpractice” … that … “was wrong, and now we are paying for that.”  Of course, Kendall’s use of “we” is a wee bit disingenuous, because it is the taxpayer not the Pentagon who is footing the malpractice bill.

It goes without saying that the uncertainties limiting our understanding of our ability to model the future consequences of a decision to design and produce the F-35 are trivial compared to those of geo-engineering the entire climate system.  But humility is not in order, because geo-engineers, like milcrats and defense contractors, will be spending other people’s money.

FRANKLIN “CHUCK” SPINNEY is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com

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February 9, 2012 Posted by | Corruption, Environmentalism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | 7 Comments