Goodbye Science, Hello Night – The American Spectator

Do you remember back when you were in school and your math or science teacher gave a test in class in which you were asked to solve a problem or two and you were explicitly admonished to show your work? The reasons for this admonition are self-evident. First, obviously, to prevent cheating. It might be possible for one student to copy the final answer over the shoulder of another, but if the cheater tried to copy an entire step-by-step process, he was likely to get caught doing so by the wary eye of the teacher. Secondly, by showing her work the student demonstrated that she really understood the problem and how to solve it.

When I was a graduate student in the 1970s, there were many climate scientists who predicted that we were heading into an ice age. Global cooling was the trend back then. One of the other junior members of my senior common room was a graduate student and tutor in physics, and we often talked about our work. As it happened, he was part of a consortium of researchers at Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and Caltech who were trying to model the oceans, in part to determine their effect on climate. His part of that research was his dissertation topic. In the end, however, one day he announced to me that with all of their collective brain power, these scientists concluded that the matter was too complex, that it couldn’t be done.

The world of science was different then. Back then, it was alright for scientists to admit, at least for the time being, that they couldn’t understand something or that they were mistaken about something. It was not uncommon at conferences for a scientist, when making a presentation, to show humility or self-doubt. Back then, it was even alright for a scientist, upon further reflection, to repudiate his original idea, to admit that she had gotten something wrong. In fact, it was necessary; it was part of the scientific method. Young physicists such as my fellow tutor took pride — and intellectual delight, actually — in pointing out that Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate and eminent physicist of the time, loved to declare to his students that whenever he thought he had discovered something, he would promptly try his best to prove himself wrong. And at conferences and in journals, it was considered to be the proper job of other scientists to try to test this new finding or theory or idea to see whether it held up to scrutiny.

The most common way of doing this was achieved by trying to replicate the experiment or process by which the originating scientist had come up with the finding to determine whether it was sound or a fluke or, as in some cases, a fraud. In order for his colleagues to do that, the originating scientist was obliged to describe the experiment in detail and, if he had collected data, to hand it over for reanalysis. Then others would try to go through the same process to see whether they got the same results. If they did, then that would validate the finding and they would conclude that he was on to something. It was mandatory for a scientist who originated an idea to share the data and methodology that had led to his novel conclusion with his colleagues — in other words, to show his work. There was no holding back. In real science, there is no such thing as pleading the Fifth Amendment.

With respect to the so-called science behind climate alarmism, those days have long been over. It is almost universal now for climate warm-mongers to refuse to debate their skeptics. It is also not unusual for them to refuse to show their work. The poster child for a climate scientist refusing to show his work is professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University. In 1998, Mann published a graph, the so-called “hockey stick” graph, that purported to show that global temperatures had taken a dramatic swing upward ever since people started using fossil fuels and, thereby, generating carbon dioxide. This graph, which got its name because of its shape, made a huge splash. It was strongly highlighted in the 2001 UN Climate Report and also included in Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, and Mann has been lavishly dining out on it for 21 years now and counting.

As it turns out, however, the graph does not hold up to scrutiny. But when it was criticized as such, instead of debating his critics and defending his work, Mann decided to sue them instead, lawfare now being commonly used to silence whistleblowers and dissidents of “right thinking.” Mann seems to like suing. He has a suit for libel ongoing for over 10 years against the journalist Mark Steyn, who edited a book of essays by climate-alarm skeptics and wrote a critical article on this subject in National Review. He also sued the climate scientist Tim Ball of the University of Winnipeg in a court in British Columbia, but that suit was concluded with Mann losing. A real court of law is different from the court of public opinion insofar as in the former one is required to produce evidence. Ball’s attorney, with the concurrence of the presiding judge, kept requesting that Mann show the data behind the hockey stick, but he persistently refused to do so. Finally, the judge gave up, ruled that Mann’s suit was frivolous, dismissed it, and, as is the custom in Canada, ordered Mann to pay Ball’s attorney fees. But Mann has refused to do so, possibly thinking that it would be difficult to enforce the court order across the border. Ball died last September almost broke because of the litigation costs, and a GoFundMe page was set up to help pay for his funeral costs. Meanwhile, Mann keeps getting lucrative contracts and awards in promoting his “work.”

For 50 years now, the climate doomsayers have been predicting that all sorts of different climate change disasters would occur by such and such a time. Everyone knows about Gore’s predictions, which have never materialized, but Gore is not a scientist. But James Hansen of NASA, another of the climate alarmists’ favorite prophets of doom, is indeed a scientist, and none of his predictions have come true either. The polar ice caps have not melted; the number of polar bears has increased rather than decreased; the Great Barrier Reef has not disappeared — its size ebbs and flows as it always has, but it’s still there going strong; the West Side Highway in New York is not underwater; and so forth. The false prophets of the climate apocalypse have a perfect record of always getting their dramatic predictions wrong. But the ability to predict natural phenomena is one of the pillars of sound science. As Feynman has written: “It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period.” But the climate scientists always give themselves a pass when their predictions fail to materialize.

Of course, they have also tried other methods to persuade people to come on board with the climate-apocalypse thing. By now, we are well familiar with the fact that all natural disasters, without any hard evidence, are attributed to climate change. Hurricanes, tornados, forest fires, and earthquakes have always been with us, and, if you look at a time frame of 100 years, they have not increased in either frequency or intensity. All of this evidence is supposed to be persuasive but has finally grown old, and increasing numbers of people are no longer persuaded.

Notably, there is one method of persuasion that the climate doomsayers, with all of the billions of dollars at their disposal, have never tried, and it proves that they don’t really believe their own propaganda. If they are so sure that their favored combination of wind and solar, backed up by batteries, is cheaper and just as reliable as fossil fuel–generated energy, then why haven’t they tried to test this claim with a real-life experiment, a demonstration project? Historically, the pilot or demonstration project has often been used to try out a new policy before implementing it full scale on society. When Thomas Edison proposed setting up commercial power stations so that people could run the electric lights and phonographs that he had invented, he set up two demonstration projects, first one in London and then one in New York City, to show the feasibility and practicality of doing so. They were both successful, economically sound, and reliable, and, as the saying goes, the rest is history. Where is the pilot project that demonstrates that a community can live happily, comfortably, and economically using only sustainable wind- and solar-energy generation? Despite all of the resources available to do so, nowhere on the planet is such…