Professor Ray Bates Urges Prudence on Climate Change
Ray Bates, once head of research at Met Eireann and a former senior scientist at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre, has urged the Government to pursue a prudent climate change mitigation strategy "consistent with safeguarding our economy" and has warned that "we could go seriously wrong if we continue with measures that may do incalculable damage to Ireland's economy and the well-being of its people". He has criticized the Citizen's Assembly body, whose primary recommendation is that climate change be placed at the centre of policy making in Ireland, for "lacking in scientific impartiality".
The Bill under discussion and the recommendation of the Citizen's Assembly are based on a view that we are indeed in a climate emergency . They will involve costly unilateral actions by Ireland going far beyond anything we are required to do under our EU obligations. Given this, it is astonishing that more public debate has not taken place regarding the underlying assumptions.
Having attended the Assembly as an observer he found "the scientific talks given, to varying degrees, to be lacking in scientific impartiality. Rather they appeared to me to be tailored to promote the political goal embodied in the wording of the Assembly's assigned topic. Some examples :"
• Global warming predictions from the climate models were presented without the appropriate caveats regarding the models' reliability and their tuning to give a climate sensitivity lying in an anticipated acceptable range.
• One researcher spoke of the dangers of increased flooding without making any reference to a 2017 article on which he himself was a co-author, which found that over the past 80 years, "the number of significant trends in major flood occurrence across North America and Europe was approximately the number expected due to chance alone. Changes over time in the occurance of major floods were dominated by multidecadal variability rather than by long term trends.
• Another researcher stated that El Nino causes a change of only 0.1C in global average temperature, thereby denying the fact that it was El Nino, not greenhouse gases, that caused the 0.5C spike in global warming peaking in February 2016.
He also believes that recent media headlines suggesting that climate change was the cause of more weather extremes was "misleading, but feeding into recent developments in climate politics."
While acknowledging that climate change is happening and that greenhouse gases do indeed have a warming effect, Bates makes the point that the available evidence does not indicate that a climate emergency is looming :
Does the observed record of global warming indicate a climate emergency ? The most important index to examine in this regard is the global sea surface temperature. Ocean temperatures are free from the effects of urbanisation and land use changes that limit the reliability of land temperatures. The increase in the global average sea surface temperature from it's temporary peak around the middle of the last century to its present value is quite small: the difference between the 1936-1950 average and the 2000-2014 average is only 0.36C.
Neither our recent unusual weather events nor the general progress of global warming provide sufficient evidence of a climate emergency to justify the costly unilateral climate measures that are now under way in this country.
The full article was published in the Sunday Business Post and can be found here.
One thing I have noticed with the Citizen's Assembly is that there is zero recognition of the fact that we have already installed 3,000MW of wind energy, roughly the equivalent of the capacity of seven or eight power stations, yet the Irish climate continues to be extreme i.e. wind energy has had zero impact on the climate yet they insist on more such measures to be introduced immediately rather than exercising prudence and basing policy on robust analysis as Professor Bates advocates.
The Citizen's Assembly was only ever a vehicle for kicking contentious issues down the road, allowing the Government to triumphantly showcase those findings that matched its agenda. It suffered from the same defects that affect the national coverage of global warming, namely that the experts addressing it are largely dependent on their tenure which in turn is dependent on how closely their conclusions support their patrons' policies.
ReplyDeleteOnce a policy is promulgated, any dissenting voices have to be discredited or silenced for fear that the originators of the policy may seen to have been ill advised. The political consequence of this is that the data must be fitted to the conclusion; the Citizen's Assembly was, by definition, a political creation, and as such the imperative was to steer it to reach the required conclusions.
Of course we could only afford the twin luxuries of the Citizen's Assembly and our misguided ideological beliefs from the comfort of our high-income and consumption-driven protected lifestyles. These are not on offer for people at the other end of the food chain living in repressive jurisdictions. And past performance tells us that they are not guaranteed in this jurisdiction either.
We should indeed pay attention to Ray Bates when he points out that the current programme will "involve costly unilateral actions by Ireland going far beyond anything we are required to do under our EU obligations". Politicians crave international acclaim and what better way than to boast having pioneered the highest penetration of wind-generated electricity in the world?
Given the fact that Ireland's indebtedness remains at an unsustainably high level, it is no wonder that Ray Bates is astonished that more public debate has not taken place regarding the underlying assumptions.
Was the Citizens Assembly members subjected to a number of psychological techniques?
ReplyDeleteThe Milgram obedient experiments
The Asch peer pressure conformity studies
The Delphi method as used by policy makers to bring groups to a predetermined outcome.
Or a combination of all three techniques
The Citizens Assembly selected ‘randomly’ (probably those who were available to give up 10 – 12 weekends to a crazy experiment) who had little or no thought or opinions on the topics before them. As a result the selected citizens in the main would have minds capable of being orientated by the ‘EXPERTS’ commissioned by the organisers of the assembly.
The Citizens Assembly deliberations was a social experiment, a government sponsored mini experiment seemingly based to some extent on the Milgram experiments.
The Milgram experiment tested and measured obedience to authority figures. It was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram on random selection of people. So did the government hand-picked their experts to lead the citizens to the desired outcome. The experts assisted by a facilitators and note taker at each table ensured the table was steered in the appropriate direction. Sixteen facilitators and sixteen note takers in total.
[Further Source: “Obedience to authority”, from The Manipulated Mind: Brainwashing, Conditioning, and Indoctrination, by Denise Winn http://theunboundedspirit.com/obedience-to-authority-the-milgram-experiment/ ]
Or was it more the group dynamics combined with the ‘authoritative experts’ and the use of peer pressure as expounded in the “Asch Experiment” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA-gbpt7Ts8
In the early 2000’s the Berns study took the Asch study still further, with the addition of MRI imaging to see what was actually happening in the minds of the subjects. The ground breaking results of the Berns study have powerful implications for propaganda schemes.
The result - on average, about 41% of the subjects went along with the group's decision, even though this decision was obviously wrong.
Even more shocking, conformity to the group's choices lit up the regions of the mind that are associated with perception. As such, the subjects appear to have unconsciously altered their actual perception of the images, so that their answers did not appear obviously wrong to them. In other words, they came to really see the images as the group saw them, and they were never aware that they were choosing social conformity over reality.
Dr. Dan Ariely, a professor of management and decision making at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that this finding ''suggests that information from other people may colour our perception at a very deep level." Dr. Berns puts it this way: '''We like to think that seeing is believing'...but the study's findings...show that seeing is believing what the group tells you to believe."
There is still more. In cases where the subjects chose not to conform to the group, the MRI scan showed activity in areas related to emotion. This suggests that going against the group carries a cost in terms of emotional distress. The implication is that going against the group and sticking to our own beliefs can be very unpleasant.
There is also the Delphi method which is also applied to policy making decisions. It is used to bring groups to a predetermined outcome while giving them the illusion that they actually had a say in the decisions reached. The Delphi method makes use of facilitator they collate the feedback from the group to the panel of EXPERTS; the experts are selected for their opinion or expertise. Facilitators collect and analyse and conflicting viewpoints (troublemakers) are identified. This process continues until consensus is reached.
But reality is reality it does not change because you were conned. As Einstein said "all it needs is for one to be right".
ReplyDeleteTraditionally the people elected their government. That government carried out the people's will as best they could, but placed an adjustment between their will and government decisions. That adjustment was education. When the elementary basics of numeracy and literacy are achieved, it moves on to higher disciplines such as history, economics, behavioral sciences, engineering, accounting, physics and chemistry.
ReplyDeleteHigher education is nothing more than imparting the discoveries of the old onto the heads of the young. This means that the present generation build on previous achievements with a ready source of information.
As an example, a modern car designer who never saw a car, would intuitively fit a solid rubber type to road wheels, but if educated either formally or informally would chose the pneumatic Tyre.
Modern governments appear to be diverging from this principle. They are relying on the citizen's assembly rather than the universities and captains of industry. Its government by intuition, education is parked outside. Who do voters expect to assist government make complex decisions on their behalf, those who are guessing or those who are not?