it hurts: a response to Henninger of WSJ

From: Christopher Essex
To: henninger@wsj.com
Subject: it hurts.
Date: Dec 3, 2009 12:56 PM

Dear Daniel,

My friend Willie Soon passed on your article: Wonderland. It's very good. It is an angle that I have anticipated for a very long time.

Wonderland is certainly where I have been trapped for more than twenty years. But it is not nearly as nice as Alice's version. Thoughts of the inquisition come to mind instead.

Many of we scientists have been ringing the alarm bells from the beginning on this. We have been telling everyone who would listen about who we were dealing with. We have known all along. Climategate is no surprise at all to us. Evidence for this is in my book with Ross McKitrick from 2002, Taken by Storm. It won a $10,000 prize, and is now in a second edition. But few were listening. If my book had a title like "Oh, my God, we are all going to die," I am sure that it would have been on the NYT bestseller list at once.

Even though I understand where you are coming from, but I find it rings flat with me that so many many obstacles were put in our way to get a fair hearing and then now to have to face people asking where the scientists were. The scientists have been tied up and gagged in the back room. I hate that. We were there screaming our lungs out all along. Damn it all, my friends Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre had to have a hearing before US congress to get that ridiculous hockey stick broken! It should have been a simple matter. The thing could hardly hold together under its own weight. Ross and I had a whole chapter on the hockey stick in our book, long before the controversy came to light. We used similar techniques to compute the US GDP with
tree rings back to the year 1000, and we got a lovely hockey stick.

I did not want in on the original hockey stick paper, because of my objections to the merits of the underlying physics, but I did comment on the drafts. In the second edition, there is an account of how the thing got broken by Ross and Steve. That science needed to get settled in congress should have got people's attention right there that there was something seriously wrong.
Science is alive and well in the individual scientists who are not caught up in gaming the system for bigger grants. I call it small science. Many of them are doing very unfashionable things, and happy to get no recognition for it. That is where you can find the real scientists. And that is where the future will be.

A milestone in this mess can be said to be when John Houghton of the IPCC said it was the IPCC's job to "orchestrate" the views of science.

Everything that has happened flows as an inevitable consequence of that. Some important research fields have been "orchestrated" out of existence. Even before climategate, I have been saying that we have set ourselves back a generation by taking the money from governments
with so many strings attached. Governments leaders wanted something where they could absolve themselves of the responsibility for making informed decisions. They would have to read science stuff otherwise.

They ordered up a kind of unnatural scientist that would tell them precisely what they wanted to hear. But they gave the puppeteers clubs to deal with those of us who remained true. And the perps of climategate are what they got. All of my colleagues have had to endure these bullies and criminals for a very long time.

You should understand that (real) scientists have had to pay the heaviest price for the creation of these monsters for decades. And they were not created by us.

Best wishes,

Chris Essex
____________________
Dr. Christopher Essex,
Professor,
and Associate Chair,
Department of Applied Mathematics
the University of Western Ontario
London, Canada N6A 5B7

Climategate: Science Is Dying

Finally! The whole world now knows what I've been saying for years: that global warming scaremongers are NOT scientists at all - they're nothing but money grabbing charlatans worthy of nothing more than our disdain. They should be rode off the planet on a rail. Or worse.

"Hello, we're from the UN - you must give us all your money - no really, all of the "scientists" said so. Trust us."

Yeh - I was born yesterday.

See: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574572091993737848.html

OPINION: WONDER LAND DECEMBER 3, 2009, 12:53 P.M. ET

Climategate: Science Is Dying
Science is on the credibility bubble.
By DANIEL HENNINGER

Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once.

I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. A Nobel Prize was bestowed (on a politician).
　
Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.

What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences-physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering-came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously "unprovable" theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.
　
This has harsh implications for the credibility of science generally. Hard science, alongside medicine, was one of the few things left accorded automatic stature and respect by most untrained lay persons. But the average person reading accounts of the East Anglia emails will conclude that hard science has become just another faction, as politicized and "messy" as, say, gender studies. The New England Journal of Medicine has turned into a weird weekly amalgam of straight medical-research and propaganda for the Obama redesign of U.S. medicine.

The East Anglians' mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming's claims-plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish-evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. The exchanges between Penn State's Michael Mann and East Anglia CRU director Phil Jones sound like Father Firenzuola, the Commissary-General of the Inquisition.

For three centuries Galileo has symbolized dissent in science. In our time, most scientists outside this circle have kept silent as their climatologist fellows, helped by the cardinals of the press, mocked and ostracized scientists who questioned this grand theory of global doom. Even a doubter as eminent as Princeton's Freeman Dyson was dismissed as an aging crank.

Beneath this dispute is a relatively new, very postmodern environmental idea known as "the precautionary principle." As defined by one official version: "When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically." The global-warming establishment says we know "enough" to impose new rules on the world's use of carbon fuels. The dissenters say this demotes science's traditional standards of evidence.

What would Galileo do?

The Environmental Protection Agency's dramatic Endangerment Finding in April that greenhouse gas emissions qualify as an air pollutant-with implications for a vast new regulatory regime-used what the agency called a precautionary approach. The EPA admitted "varying degrees of uncertainty across many of these scientific issues." Again, this puts hard science in the new position of saying, close enough is good enough. One hopes civil engineers never build bridges under this theory.

The Obama administration's new head of policy at EPA, Lisa Heinzerling, is an advocate of turning precaution into standard policy. In a law-review article titled "Law and Economics for a Warming World," Ms. Heinzerling wrote, "Policy formation based on prediction and calculation of expected harm is no longer relevant; the only coherent response to a situation of chaotically worsening outcomes is a precautionary policy. . . ."

If the new ethos is that "close-enough" science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas. Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it.

Write to henninger@wsj.com