Top Climatologist Admits it’s Post-normal Science
In an extract below from his latest article, Dr. E. Calvin Beisner shows that people right at the top of the pecking order of alarmist climate-change “scientists” know exactly what they’re doing—post-normal science, not real science.
Consider self-professed socialist Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre and Professor of Climate Change (note that title—not of climate, but of climate change) at the University of East Anglia, home of the Climatic Research Unit, of Climategate infamy. (Climategate was the release of thousands of emails, computer codes, and other documents among leading climate alarmist scientists that revealed that they were fabricating, exaggerating, cherry picking, and suppressing data, intimidating dissenting scientists, blackballing journal editors willing to publish the dissenters, corrupting the peer review process, refusing to share data and code with fellow scientists on request even when required to by the journals in which they published, and violating American and British Freedom of Information Acts.
Climategate has contributed considerably to the decline in public belief in dangerous manmade global warming.) The author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction, and Opportunity, Hulme prepared climate-change scenarios and reports for the British government, the European Commission, the United Nations Environment Program, the United Nations Population Division, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (as a ead author for the chapter on “Climate scenario development” for the 2001 Assessment Report and a contributing author on several other chapters), and the World Wildlife Fund. Says Hulme of “postnormal” science:
“Climate change seems to fall in this category. . . . The IPCC is a classic example of a post-normal scientific activity. Within a capitalist world order [which Hulme wants to replace with socialism], climate change is actually a convenient phenomenon to come along. The danger of a “normal” reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow. . . . exchanges often reduce to ones about scientific truth rather than about values, perspectives and political preferences.
. . . “self-evidently” dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth-seeking. . . . [S]cientists—and politicians—must trade truth for influence.
What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy. . . .the function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved. . . . It really is not about stopping climate chaos.
Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change—the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and materials flows that climate change reveals—to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come.
Climate change also teaches us to rethink what we really want for ourselves. . . . [M]ythical ways of thinking about climate change reflect back to us truths about the human condition.The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identifies and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us. . . .
Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs.
. . . climate change has become an idea that now travels well beyond its origins in the natural sciences. . . . climate change takes on new meanings and serves new purposes. . . . climate change has become “the mother of all issues,” the key narrative within which all environmental politics—from global to local—is now framed. . . . Rather than asking “how do we solve climate change?” we need to turn the question around and ask: “how does the idea of climate change alter the way we arrive at and achieve our personal aspirations . . . ?”
In other words, “post-normal science,” shorn of the commitments of “normal science” to transparency, disinterestedness, falsifiability, and skepticism, is the guise under which climate change and any other issue can become the vehicle for promoting predetermined social and political goals. The warfare between post-normal science and real science is important not just in the debate over “climate change,” but in all kinds of issues in which science interfaces with policy.
Like the pseudo-Christian cults that borrow vocabulary from Christianity but redefine all the terms, post-normal science is simply the application of rhetoric borrowed from the sciences to policy debates, cloaking one particular policy preference with the authority of “science,” and successful at doing so only to the extent that policy makers and the public are ignorant of the fact that post-normal science isn’t science at all. In the final analysis it is no different from what physicist Richard Feynman in 1974 called “cargo cult science,” that is, “work that has the semblance of being scientific, but is missing ‘a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty.’”
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