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Klimadebatt => Media og politikk => Topic started by: Okular on 01.03.2020, 15:59:58

Title: "The Age of Global Warming - A History" (Rupert Darwall)
Post by: Okular on 01.03.2020, 15:59:58
Driver og leser Rupert Darwalls "The Age of Global Warming - A History" (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17394845-the-age-of-global-warming?from_search=true&qid=yOe50pcGGT&rank=1) for tida. Svært interessant lesning. Det framkommer ganske tydelig gjennom historien hvilken århundregammel arv "Klimakrise"-hysterikerne av i dag bygger sin ideologi og sin agenda på.

Helt siden Thomas Malthus på slutten av 1700-tallet gjorde den ulykksalige (og beviselig feilaktige!) koblingen mellom befolkningsvekst og ressursutarming og slik tegnet det uutslettelige bildet av et forhåndsdømt skjebnefellesskap som for alltid ville ri Menneskeheten og ubønnhørlig drive ethvert samfunn mot stupet og ned i undergangen et sted i (en aldri særlig fjern) framtid, så har den vestlige (opplyste?) delen av verdens store framsynte tenkere alltid, igjen og igjen og igjen, selv etter at alle tidligere dagers dommedagsprediksjoner om framtida har gått fullstendig i dass, og den motsatte utviklingen av den som ble spådd uten unntak har funnet sted, kommet tilbake til, forfektet og propagandert for denne enkle tanken - at vi mennesker (i vår rike, selviske, fråtsende glupskhet) til syvende og sist ødelegger denne verden, våre omgivelser, for våre medskapninger, og oss selv; og at vi derfor rett og slett må tvinges til å stanse vår videre utvikling, snu den rundt og heller finne en helt NY kurs, en "bærekraftig" kurs, mot en samfunnsstruktur vi overhodet ikke kjenner levedyktigheten til (eller konsekvensen av), men som like fullt uvilkårlig forespeiles av 'de opplyste klasser' (teknokratene, de som (som regel på moralsk grunnlag) 'vet bedre') som et veritabelt Utopia, hvor vårt hovedformål simpelthen vil være å leve i 'harmoni' med Moder Jord.

Det slår ikke feil, denne misoppfatningen av hvordan "Moder Jord" og vårt forhold til henne fungerer er så fundamental, så dypt nedfelt i menneskesinnet, at vi ikke klarer å frigjøre oss fra den, selv når historien gjentar og har gjentatt seg i en tilsynelatende evig loop, påfallende (ironisk?) nok med en syklus på bare få år, slik at selv den samme generasjon opplever et vell av tilsvarende feilslåtte forkynnelser om framtida.

Her noen relevante sitater:

Fra Kapittel 2:
Quote"In debates on the environment and global warming from the late 1960s to our own day, biologists and other natural scientists tend to see economic processes through Malthusian spectacles. Most economists follow Ricardo [se under]. Because the Malthusian narrative is about man's relationship with nature, the voices of natural scientists are generally given more weight in these debates."

David Ricardo var Malthus' samtidige (venn og rival), samfunnsøkonom som ham, men fremmet et radikalt forskjellig syn på samfunnsutviklingen og hva som skulle til for å gagne den. Han mente (og han hadde, har historien jo med all tydelighet vist oss, rett) at en stadig spesialisering av arbeidsstokken, med hva dette ville få for betydning for handel (innad i og mellom stater) og teknologiske nyvinninger, ville lede økonomien (og, i forlengelsen av denne, befolkningens velferd) langs en stadig oppadstigende kurve inn i framtida, uavhengig av befolkningsøkning og ressursbruk - faktisk så han på befolkningsøkning som en rikdom, en ressurs i seg selv.

Quote"Natural scientists' thinking about economic issues is also conditioned by the first law of thermodynamics. This states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. How can mankind's numbers grow and consumption increase, like an economic perpetual motion machine, without incurring some equivalent loss somewhere else? Economic activity must therefore have a limit because it consumes what it depends upon, so the argument goes. This leads scientists and environmentalists (often they're the same people) to worry about resource depletion and the planet's carrying capacity.

The analogy with physics does not hold because the driver pushing outwards the boundary of economic potential is the expansion of human knowledge. In this respect, the market economy has always been the 'knowledge economy' [jf. Ricardos ideer over]."

Her er for øvrig Darwall helt på linje med bl.a. Hans (og Ola) Rosling ("Factfulness", 2018) og Steven Pinker ("Enlightenment Now", 2018).

Hans Rosling (kap.2&3):
Quote"We are subjected to never-ending cascades of negative news from across the world: wars, famines, natural disasters, political mistakes, corruption, budget cuts, diseases, mass layoffs, acts of terror. Journalists who reported flights that didn't crash or crops that didn't fail would quickly lose their jobs. Stories about gradual improvements rarely make the front page even when they occur on a dramatic scale and impact millions of people.

And thanks to increasing press freedom and improving technology, we hear more, about more disasters, than ever before. When Europeans slaughtered indigenous peoples across America a few centuries ago, it didn't make the news back in the old world. When central planning resulted in mass famine in rural China, millions starved to death while the youngsters in Europe waving communist red flags knew nothing about it. When in the past whole species or ecosystems were destroyed, no one realized or even cared. Alongside all the other improvements, our surveillance of suffering has improved tremendously. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite.

At the same time, activists and lobbyists skilfully manage to make every dip in a trend appear to be the end of the world, even if the general trend is clearly improving, scaring us with alarmist exaggerations and prophecies."


[og]

"As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.

When people wrongly believe that nothing is improving, they may conclude that nothing we have tried so far is working and lose confidence in measures that actually work. I meet many such people, who tell me they have lost all hope for humanity. Or, they may become radicals, supporting drastic measures that are counter-productive when, in fact, the methods we are already using to improve our world are working just fine."


[og (kap.3)]

"Have you heard people say that humans used to live in balance with nature?

Well, yes, there was a balance. But lets avoid the rose-tinted glasses. Until 1800, women gave birth to six children on average. So the population should have increased with each generation. Instead, it stayed more or less stable. Remember the child skeletons in the graveyards of the past? On average four out of six children died before becoming parents themselves, leaving just two surviving children to parent the next generation. There was a balance. It wasn't because humans lived in balance with nature. Humans died in balance with nature. It was utterly brutal and tragic.

Today, humanity is once again reaching a balance. The number of parents is no longer increasing. But this balance is dramatically different from the old balance. The new balance is nice: the typical parents have two children, and neither of them dies. For the first time in human history, we live in balance."

Steven Pinker (kap.10):
Quote"Starting in the 1970s, the mainstream environmental movement latched onto a quasi-religious ideology, greenism, which can be found in the manifestoes of activists as diverse as Al Gore, the Unabomber, and Pope Francis. Green ideology begins with an image of the Earth as a pristine ingénue which has been defiled by human rapacity. [...] Unless we repent our sins by degrowth, deindustrialization, and a rejection of the false gods of science, technology, and progress, humanity will face a ghastly reckoning in an environmental Judgment Day."

[og]

"[...] the tradeoff that pits human well-being against environmental damage can be renegotiated by technology. How to enjoy more calories, lumens, BTUs, bits, and miles with less pollution and land is itself a technological problem, and one that the world is increasingly solving. [...] As countries first develop, they prioritize growth over environmental purity. But as they get richer, their thoughts turn to the environment. If people can afford electricity only at the cost of some smog, they'll live with the smog, but when they can afford both electricity and clear air, they'll spring for the clean air." [...]

"Ecopessimists commonly dismiss this entire way of thinking as the "faith that technology will save us." In fact it is a skepticism that the status quo will doom us - that knowledge will be frozen in its current state and people will robotically persist in their current behavior regardless of circumstances. Indeed, a naïve faith in stasis has repeatedly led to prophecies of environmental doomsdays that never happened." [...]

"Not only have the disasters prophesied by 1970s greenism failed to take place, but improvements that it deemed impossible have taken place. As the world has gotten richer and crested the environmental curve, nature has begun to rebound."

Videre fra Darwall, Kapittel 9:
Quote"Had [Jimmy] Carter been re-elected in 1980, might it have brought forward the age of global warming to the beginning of the 1980s? More likely, it would have meant a much more problematic launch than the one global warming was to have in 1988, when the stars were in perfect alignment. Environmentalism needs prosperity to thrive. Poor economic performance during the second half of the 1970s, especially in Britain and the US, meant that the economy came first.

Global warming also needs a benign global order. As 'Global 2000' [en amerikansk (Carter-bestilt) miljørapport fra slutten av 70-tallet] recognized: 'An era of unprecedented global cooperation and commitment is essential.' On Christmas Eve 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. In response, Carter stopped further grain exports to the Soviet Union and banned the US from competing in the Moscow Olympics. The Cold War needed to be won first.

There was another factor. The planet wasn't warming, or at least not many people thought it was. The opposite seemed to be happening. According to James Rodger Fleming, one of the leading historians of the science of global warming,

Quote(...) by the mid 1970s global cooling was an observable trend. The US National Science Board pointed out that during the last twenty to thirty years, world temperatures had fallen, 'irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade'.
Global warming needed a warming world - economically, geostrategically and climatically. The world was not ready."

Allerede på 70-tallet (Stockholm-konferansen, Brandt-kommisjonen, Nord/Sør-konferansen) ble agendaen om omfordeling av velstand i verden (gjennom bistandsmidler samt overstatlige skatte- og avgiftssystemer på varer og råstoffer, transport og energi) som underliggende for hele det globale ("grønne") prosjektet definert, mye takket være arbeidet til en viss fru Barbara Ward. På dette baserte bl.a. Brundtland-kommisjonen og dennes tunge fokus på "bærekraftig utvikling" seg i 1987.

Fra Kapittel 10, om det nye motekonseptet "bærekraft", som oppstod på 70-tallet, modnet under første halvdel av 80-tallet, før det til sist ble popularisert gjennom Brundtland-kommisjonen i 1987:
Quote"Political success required sustainable development to have something it lacked. The Brundtland Report and its antecedents made big claims about adverse trends harming the poor and the planet, which some day, would end in catastrophe, in some form. Yet these assertions were remarkably free of hard data. While sustainable development implied limits, it couldn't say where they were or what exactly would happen if those thresholds were crossed. It was a doctrine in search of scientific authentification. As a political ideology, Marxism always claimed to be derived from scientific analysis. By contrast, sustainable development was an ideology, developed from a political formula, in search of science." [...]

"Without global warming, sustainable development would not have shifted the world's political axis. With global warming, environmentalism had found its killer app. In turn, global warming became embedded in a pre-existing ideology, built on the belief of imminent planetary catastrophe - which many scientists subscribed to - with a UN infrastructure to support it and a cadre of influential political personages to propagate it.

A butterfly was ready to spread its wings."

Puppestadiet var overstått. Og med det entret vi året 1988, 'global oppvarming'-prosjektets Annus Mirabilis!
Title: Re: "The Age of Global Warming - A History" (Rupert Darwall)
Post by: ConTrari1 on 01.03.2020, 16:18:42
Dersom man vil søke etter et soleklart tegn på et samfunn i vekst og velstand, så skal man se på det samfunnets innslag av dommedagsprofetier og krav om kutt i velstand og endring av levemåte. Slike varsler er omvendt proporsjonal med graden av velstand. Og det er logisk nok. Folk som lever i ekte nød og krise, bryr seg ikke om å høre på slike varsler, de opplever det hver dag. Mens de som har det bra, liker å bli "kose-skremt" og føle seg lite grann skyldige og dermed prektige og moralske.

PS. Takk for bok-tips. Det er blitt endel sånne etterhvert. Kunne det være en ide å samle dem i en egen tråd, som et lite skeptiker-bibliotek?
Title: Re: "The Age of Global Warming - A History" (Rupert Darwall)
Post by: PetterT on 01.03.2020, 20:36:01
Slik er det egentlig i "The Age of Global Warming"

De beste årene i menneskehetens historie er nå.
Det er ingen "klimakrise".

Vi har aldri hatt det så godt som nå i følge offentlige statistikker.  Ide siste årene fra 2007 til nå er:
•   28 % mer av verdens verdier (wealth) produsert (Verdensbanken)
•   Ekstrem fattigdom er halvert (Verdensbanken)
•   Barnedødelighet redusert med en tredjedel (FN IGME)
•   Forventet levetid økt fra 69,5 til 72,6 år (FN)
•   Land med forbud mot homoseksualitet er redusert fra 40 % til 27 % (ILGA)
•   Land med lover som beskytter kvinner er opp fra 53 % til 78 % (Verdensbanken)
•   Dødelighet på grunn av forurensning er ned 19 % (Our World in Data)
•   Vær og klimarelaterte dødsfall er ned 95 % siden 1960 (Our World in Data)
•   Av 72 "truede" ressurser er  forbruket redusert for 66 av dem (McAfee More from less)
•   Ufrie land er ned fra 34 % til 26 % (Freedom House)
•   Matproduksjon holder tritt med befolkningsøking (FN FAO)
•   Økt innhold av den livsviktige pantenæringen CO2 fra 0,03 til 0,04 % i luften siden 1800-tallet gir nå en øking i matproduksjon verdt mer enn 1000 milliarder NOK pr. år (GWPF)
•   Hittil har ingen funnet noe bevis for at øking i CO2 i luften har hatt noen skadelig virkning på klima, enda FNs klimapanel IPCC og mange klimaforskere har forsøkt i mer enn 30 år.
Dette er gode nyheter som ikke blir formidlet av nyhetsmedia, fordi gode nyheter er ikke interessante.  Da er det "bedre" å skremme med klimakriser og spådommer som har vist seg å ikke holde stikk, f.eks. at Arktis skulle vært isfritt i 2013 (Al Gore) eller at Maldivene skulle vært under vann.  Klimahysteriet er verdens største svindel og koster oss mer enn 1500 milliarder USD/år til ingen nytte (Climate Change Business Journal 2015).  Spesielt er fangst og lagring av den livsviktige plantenæringen CO2 (CCS) idiotisk fordi plantene har godt av mer CO2, og CCS vil ikke noen betydning for verken global temperatur eller klima.  Selv om alle mål i IPCC Paris-avtalen skulle bli oppnådd så viser beregninger med IPCC sine egne (uriktige) spådoms-modeller (MAGICC) at global tempertur bare vil bli redusert med mindre enn 0,2 grader C ved år 2100. 
Glem CO2, men invester heller i bedre infrastruktur i samfunnet som kan motstå de naturlige (!) klimaendringene vi alltid vil ha, enten det blir varmere eller kalder, våtere eller tørrere, mer eller mindre vind og uvær etc.
Title: Re: "The Age of Global Warming - A History" (Rupert Darwall)
Post by: Okular on 08.03.2020, 15:55:00
Mer fra Darwall.

Denne gangen om hvordan den ideologisk motiverte 'global oppvarming'-kampanjen har klart å omkalfatre hele verdens tilnærming til konseptet 'vitenskap', hva det egentlig er for noe, hvordan det fungerer og hva dets endelige formål er. Vitenskapen er ikke lenger sett på som en objektiv, teknisk metode for oppnåelse av kunnskap om verden, men snarere som et redskap som fritt kan formes etter - og samtidig brukes som alibi for - samfunnets til enhver tid rådende ideologiske strømninger og mål. "Vitenskap" nå for tida er blitt ensbetydende i folks bevissthet med 'eksperters uttrykte meninger' rundt et gitt tema, især etter at disse meningene gjennom diverse politiske prosesser har kommet sammen i en overordnet - og derpå utad sterkt og høylytt proklamert - enighet; den berømte "konsensus" ...

Grunnlag - vitenskapsteori/den vitenskapelige metode:
Quote(...) the criterion for assessing the scientific status of a theory should be its capacity to generate predictions that could, in principle, be refuted by empirical evidence, what [Karl] Popper called its 'falsifiability', or 'refutability', or 'testability'. Every 'good' scientific theory is a prohibition. The more a theory forbids, the better it is. Scientists should therefore devise tests designed to yield evidence that the theory prohibits, rather than search for what the theory confirms. If we look for them, Popper argued, it is easy to find confirmations for nearly every theory. "Only a theory which asserts or implies that certain conceivable events will not, in fact, happen is testable," Popper explained in a lecture in 1963. "The test consists in trying to bring about, with all the means we can muster, precisely these events which the theory tells us cannot occur."

Og hvordan står seg 'ideen om en antropogent forsterket drivhuseffekt som årsak til global oppvarming' mot en slik tilnærming, mot en slik metode? Ikke i det hele tatt. Den hopper rett og slett bukk over hele problemstillingen.

Ingen forkjempere av denne ideen har noen gang, i noen offentlig sammenheng, fremført - langt mindre faktisk gjennomført - en slik test, hvor en konkret og entydig prediksjon om noe som ikke skal kunne observeres dersom 'teorien' er korrekt settes på prøve. (Vi vet at en slik test finnes, at den er lett gjennomførbar, og at den er gjennomført (http://klimadebatt.com/forum/index.php?topic=913.msg11358#msg11358) - og som følge, på basis av nettopp resultatet av denne testen, vet vi hvorfor de aldri har framført den i noen offentlige fora.) Alt som observeres proklameres simpelthen, og uten unntak, som "consistent with" 'teorien' - og det uansett i hvilken retning observasjonen går. Alt går, alt er innenfor. Sa man på et tidspunkt at noe spesifikt ikke skulle kunne skje, og det like fullt skjer, så finner man rett og slett opp bortforklaringer - det er liksom andre faktorer som er årsaken til feilprediksjonen, andre ting som forvirrer. (Men så lenge alt går riktig vei for 'Den store fortellingen om CO2 og klimaet', da glimrer selvsagt alle slike 'forvirrende' faktorer med sitt fravær.)

Tre temmelig famøse 'post hoc'-bortforklaringer av denne typen, foreslått og fremmet av "Klimapresteskapet", og nå alle mer eller mindre ansett - uten en kritisk tanke, alle spede forsøk på innvendinger snarere slått hardt til bakken - simpelthen som godt etablerte Sannheter hos menigheten, er:

Videre, Darwall:
Quote[Popper]:
Quote"An open society (that is, a society based on the idea of not merely tolerating dissenting opinions, but respecting them) and a democracy (that is, a form of government devoted to the protection of an open society) cannot flourish if science becomes the exclusive possession of a closed group of specialists."

A further danger with having a closed group is in reinforcing the natural tendency of the human mind to fit facts into preconceived theory. To explain why planets (...) were in positions they shouldn't according to the Ptolemaic system of the Earth being at the centre of the universe, medieval astronomers added geometrically complex and implausible epicycles. Adding 'epicycles' has come to be synonymous with adopting strategems to avoid questioning the basic premise of a scientific proposition. [Jf. eksemplene over.] (...)

[Percy W. Bridgman (am. Nobelpris-vinnende (1946) Harvard-fysiker)]:
Quote"The physicist has, and the rest of us should have, a temperamental aversion to ad hoc constructions in his theorizing. [For the use of ad hoc argument means there is no second method of arriving at a theory's terminus, and therefore] no method of verifying that the construction corresponds to anything "real"."

Instead of seeking to meet Popper's criterion of falsifiability, the activities of climate scientists conform to an earlier injunction pre-dating the Scientific Revolution: 'Seek, and ye shall find.' Climate scientists have followed this teaching from the Sermon on the Mount in their search for confirmatory evidence of global warming in shrinking ice caps, retreating glaciers and inferring past temperatures from tree rings. [The issue is not the capacity of carbon dioxide to absorb radiation in a test tube, which had first been demonstrated by John Tyndall in 1859, but the effect of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other 'greenhouse gases' on the temperature of the atmosphere [og, i forlengelsen av dette, på overflatetemperaturen]. An answer can only be derived from empirical observation.]

The lack of a falsifiability test led scientists and governments into putting their faith in the existence of a 'scientific consensus' as the guide to scientific truth. (...)

(...) consensus-building is at the heart of what the IPCC does. It rests on a highly questionable claim: the subjective opinions of individual scientists can be transmuted into scientific knowledge through the process of being formed into an agreed judgment. (...)

The purpose of consensus is to gain agreement with a view to taking collective action. Here, an altogether larger claim is being made: consensus can transform belief into knowledge. This requires us to accept that there is no fundamental difference between belief and knowledge, so long as there is collective agreement on it by those whose opinions count - the experts who don the mantle of scientific authority. In this way, today's scientists have become modern day alchemists transforming the lead of subjective belief into the gold of objective knowledge.

Such a claim has profound implications for the nature of science itself. It permits scientists to slip the bounds of what had traditionally been understood as science into pseudo-science, to adopt Popper's term, and into the realm of 'futurology'. (...)

The rigorous methodology developed by Popper and the verification standards required by a physicist such as Bridgman were now replaced. This did not happen because of the emergence of a superior epistemological standard; that is to say from the development of a new and sharper theory of knowledge. The explanation is quite different. Far from becoming obsolete, they had become inconvenient. Dependence on consensus made it all the more important to ensure that the consensus continued to prevail, especially as the future of the planet was at stake. [With global warming, environmentalism had found its killer app. In turn, global warming became embedded in a pre-existing ideology, built on the belief of imminent planetary catastrophe - which many scientists subscribed to - with a UN infrastructure to support it and a cadre of influential political personages to propagate it.]

This provided strong incentives to sustain the consensus and maintain the world's interest; otherwise, the action which the consensus required would not be taken. For exactly the same reasons, those who expressed their doubts represented a threat. Dissenters needed to be crushed and dissent de-legitimized. They were stooges of oil companies and fossil fuel interests, free market ideologues, or climate change deniers. (...)

A precondition for the Scientific Revolution was the freedom to question orthodoxy and the rejection of authoritarianism. Scientists based their claim to progress by pointing to the standards later distilled by Karl Popper. Global warming's inability to meet [eller, snarere, direkte uvilje og motstand mot] the verifiability and falsifiability standards set by the Scientific Revolution constitutes a reversion to pre-modern modes of defining what should be accepted as knowledge based on appeals to authority.

The significance of global warming in the history of science is not that it represented a change of paradigm within a branch of science. It was a change in the paradigm of science itself.
Title: Re: "The Age of Global Warming - A History" (Rupert Darwall)
Post by: Telehiv on 08.03.2020, 22:23:10
Dette er en lærerik tråd.