This particular realization started by clicking on an article discussing how fact-checking has become irrelevant in today’s politics.
The Limits of Fact-Checking: Calling Trump (and others) out for their lies doesn’t seem to make a difference. What’s going on? (Politico here).

Trump is exhibited as the primary example: the more his comments are rated as lies, even pants-on-fire lies, the more popular he becomes. But other politicians, including Hillary, are also cited for saying false things and refusing to renounce them.

A further analysis by Michael Kinsley ( here) suggests that a candidate or an elected leader and his followers know they are playing a game, and winning depends on having the more compelling narrative, never mind the “truth.” In fact, these falsehoods are not even concerned with any “truth,” they are just making up stuff that sounds good to an audience. In other words, they are not lying, they are bullshitting. Insiders know it and are OK with it, while much of the public is naive and therefore gullible.

As it happens Harry Frankfurt of Princeton gets to the heart of the matter in his provocative essay, On Bullshit, he says:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game.

The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Now the parallel with climatism is obvious. The Paris COP was striking in the sheer volume of claims that were stated as truths without any attempt to provide proof or even admit the need for any. Climatism is now unconnected to facts, evidence or logical argument. It explains why both political and climate fact-checkers are widely ignored.

Frankfurt warns:

The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.
This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar.

I believe Science Matters because actual scientific understanding does inform us about the future and what we need to do to prepare. But in the present environment, bullshitting is the order of the day, and we live in the twilight of Post-Truth discourse.

More from Frankfurt:

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These “anti-realist” doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry.

For more on the degradation of objective truth (AKA the Revenge of the Humanities) see:

https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/11/05/objection-asserting-facts-not-in-evidence/

https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/warmists-and-rococo-marxists/

 

 

 

One thing revealed by the recent US Senate hearing was the importance of the two basic arguments forming the alarmist position:

1. “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” (Obama tweet)

2. “There are multiple lines of evidence that show the climate system is changing.” (Dept. of the Environment, Australia)

These two zingers must be met by equally brief, pointed replies.

97% Agreement

I concede that most climate scientists think there is a problem, but 97% of all scientists is an exaggeration.

The first claim of 97% came from a survey sample of 77 climate scientists who said “Yes” to 2 statements: “It has warmed since 1850.”; “Human activity has contributed to the warming.” That survey questionnaire was deliberately not sent to those known to be skeptical: scientists not employed by government or universities; astronomers; solar scientists; physicists; meteorologists.

More inclusive surveys with more pointed questions show much more diverse opinions. Most scientists agree it has warmed since 1850, the end of the Little Ice Age. Geologists have evidence that the earth was warmer than now during the Medieval Warm Period, more warm during the Roman Warm Period, warmer still in the Minoan period. So the overall trend is a cooling over the last 11,500 years.

Most agree that human land use, such as making dams, farming, building cities, airports and highways, all affect the climate in those locations. The idea that rising CO2 is causing dangerous warming is controversial, with dissenters a large minority.

Multiple Lines of Evidence Climate is Changing

All of the measures are “glass half-empty, glass half-full.” And no one has evidence separating human and natural climate changes.  (Quotes below from Australia Dept. of Environment here)

Example 1: Air Temperatures
Air temperatures have increased globally, by around 0.85 degrees Celsius since 1880, with most of the warming occurring since the 1970s. All three major global surface temperature records show that the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed since 1880.

This is true and unsurprising emerging from the Little Ice Age. Over the last 150 years there has been a steady increase overlaid with a sine wave of 30-year warming and cooling periods.  From 1979 to 1998 the warming coincided with the rising rate of CO2, but the correlation is not seen in the periods before and since those two decades.

Example 2: Sea Levels
Global sea levels have risen at an average rate of 1.8 millimetres per year over 1961 to 2003. This rate risen to around 3.2 millimetres per year from 1993 to 2012.

Sea levels have been rising with the Little Ice Age recovery, and tidal guages show no increase in the rate in recent years. The 3.2 mm comes from the GRACE satellite system which is still being calibrated and not yet reliable, according to researchers.

Example 3: Extreme Weather
Extreme weather events include heatwaves, bushfires, tropical cyclones, cold snaps, extreme rainfall and droughts.  There is increasing evidence that the frequency and intensity of many extreme weather events  are changing.

The number and strength of extreme weather events by any statistical measure have been unusually benign in recent decades. The IPCC concluded that no causal link is proven between warming and extreme weather

Example 4: Rainfall Patterns
Rainfall patterns are changing around the world. Research shows the global water cycle is intensifying with a warming climate, which means wet areas are likely to get wetter and dry regions are likely to be drier in response to climate change.

Global rainfall varies about 5% from one year to another, so if it is drier in one place, it is wetter somewhere else. The IPCC working group said there is currently no way of predicting which places will get more or less rainfall long term.

The other notions of ocean acidification, Arctic Ice melting, etc. are likewise inconclusive and subject to interpretation, as other posts here and elsewhere point out.

Conclusion:

We simply do not know our climate system well enough to predict what will happen. Our ignorance should not be an excuse for fear and irrational actions.

Future periods are likely to be colder as well as warmer, and cold is the greater threat to human life and prosperity. To prepare for the future we should invest in robust infrastructure and ensuring reliable affordable energy. We should also focus on real and present environmental problems such as actual air pollution which kills thousands of people every day.

 

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a masterpiece of a simple story suggesting so many realities of societies. Among many things, it shows how a basic dichotomy mobilizes people (or creatures) for social or political action. The image above expresses the heart of the story whereby some animals took power over the others out of fear of humans.

Consider another dichotomy:    Producers Good, Parasites Bad.

People who are astounded by Donald Trump’s candidacy are overlooking how widely and deeply felt is this distinction between those who produce and those who take, and not only in the Tea Party but far beyond. The power arises from the emotional investment in the branding, no matter how illogical or mistaken it may be. Those who don’t feel it, don’t “get it.” Add in the envy of someone so rich he can say anything unbounded by Political Correctness, and Trump becomes a force to be reckoned with. It remains to be seen whether his followers are voters beyond being fans.

As for Climate Change, it seems to me at its heart lie two intertwined dichotomies:
                            Carbon Pollution Bad, Clean Air Good
                         Runaway Warming Bad, Stable Climate Good

The first notion is that carbon dioxide is a pollutant making the air dirty. Since CO2 is neither visible nor toxic (plants depend on it), it requires a second assertion that more CO2 causes runaway warming upsetting the stability of our climate system. That is, by adding CO2 from burning fossil fuels, we are destabilizing the climate system and bad things will happen as a result. Interestingly, at demonstrations the negative side is quite explicit, but the affirmative side requires some interpretation.

Some of us are astounded that sentient carbon-based life forms could be so disparaging of their own composition, but there is more than a whiff of anti-humanity in this movement. And the idea that we humans can fix the climate in a favorable state boggles the mind.

How all this plays out can be seen in an excellent interview with Bill Gates. Of course, he is a very lucid person and a genuine philanthropist of the first order. He has educated himself deeply on the history of energy as shown by this:

Share of Fuels in the Global Energy Mix Across Modern History

Gates goes on to say this:

What’s amazing is how our intense energy usage is one and the same as modern civilization. That is, for all the great things that happened in terms of human lifestyle, life span, and growing food before 1800, civilization didn’t change dramatically until we started using coal in the U.K. in the 1800s. Coal replaced wood. But the wave of wood to coal is about a 50- or 60-year wave.

If it was just about economics, if we had no global warming to think about, the slowly-but-surely pace of these transitions would be okay. If you look at one of these forecasts, they all say about the same thing: What you look at is a picture that’s pretty gradual, with natural gas continuing to gain at the expense of both coal and oil. But, you know, 1-percent-a year-type change. If you look at that from a greenhouse-gas point of view—if you look at forecasts—every single year we’ll be emitting more greenhouse gases than the previous year.

The title of the article is We Need an Energy Miracle because Bill Gates is one who worries about global warming. He has accepted at face value the dichotomies of climate change, and so those blinders shape his investment plans and priorities.

He actually has a lot in common with Bjorn Lomborg, who supports the Gates energy innovation initiative. But Lomborg sees things more clearly (here responding to comments by Arnold Swartzenegger):

Power generation, traffic and industry – which is mostly fossil fuel driven and likely what you were thinking about – in total cause 854,000 air pollution deaths. Added to the 560,000 deaths from indoor air pollution caused by coal, this constitute only 20% of total air pollution deaths or about 3,900 deaths each day.

This matters for two reasons. First, it is disingenuous to link the world’s biggest environmental problem of air pollution to climate. It is a question of poverty (most indoor air pollution) and lack of technology (scrubbing pollution from smokestacks and catalytic converters) – not about global warming and CO₂. Second, costs and benefits matter.[vi] Tackling indoor air pollution turns out to be very cheap and effective, whereas tackling outdoor air pollution is more expensive and less effective. Your favorite policy of cutting CO₂ is of course even more costly and has a tiny effect even in a hundred years.

Conclusion
It is likely that future periods will be both colder and warmer than the present. Preparing for that means investing in robust infrastructure and in reliable affordable energy.

I agree with Lomborg. It’s important to make an energy transition and take the time to do it right. So far we are wasting time and money on the illusion that we can ensure favorable weather by reducing fossil fuel emissions.