Posted by Tina
Heads up, boys and girls, the legal arm of the thought police are starting to hold special meetings during which they plot new legal ways to silence, dah, dah, dah, daaaaah! … “global warming deniers.” It’s a world “gone completely mental” (Fish Called Wanda) when the so-called smart legal guys are plotting to snuff out the voices of anyone getting in the way of their ambitious, destructive plans.
If these nuts get their way it means that folks like the always informative, John Hinderaker of Powerline could in future be brought up on international charges for simply publishing an article like today’s, “Three Cheers for Carbon Dioxide.” Hmmm…I can only imagine what they might do to Anthony Watts; his entire website and blog are dedicated to debunking flaws in those “settled science” theories.
We live in a strange world when a human being of the modern Western age could conceive of such tyranny…it’s beyond me!
Christopher Booker – Telegraph UK explains in his piece, “Judges plan to outlaw climate change ‘denial.'”
Outlaw? Outlaw alternate scientific findings? Outlaw speech? Outlaw…with a cloth?
Yes, that’s exactly what these pointy-headed elitist bullies of the legal profession are plotting:
Last week I mentioned that the Prince of Wales had sent a message to this conference calling for the UN’s forthcoming climate meeting in Paris to agree on “a Magna Carta for the Earth”. But only a series of startling posts by a sharp-eyed Canadian blogger, Donna Laframboise (on Nofrakkingconsensus), have alerted us to what a bizarre event this judicial gathering turned out to be (the organisers even refused to give her the names of those who attended).
Including senior judges and lawyers from across the world, the three-day conference on “Climate Change and the Law” was staged in London’s Supreme Court. It was funded, inter alia, by the Supreme Court itself, the UK government and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).
As one of the two UN sponsors of its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, UNEP has been one of the main drivers of alarm over global warming for 40 years. …
… “The most important thing the courts could do,” he said, was to hold a top-level “finding of fact”, to settle these “scientific disputes” once and for all: so that it could then be made illegal for any government, corporation (or presumably individual scientist) ever to question the agreed “science” again. Furthermore, he went on, once “the scientific evidence” thus has the force of binding international law, it could be used to compel all governments to make “the emissions reductions that are needed”, including the phasing out of fossil fuels, to halt global warming in its tracks.(emphasis mine)
The speaker was Philippe Sands, “a QC from Cherie Blair’s Matrix Chambers and professor of law at University College, London.” You can catch his unbelievably arrogant performance on You Tube.
As Mr. Booker points out, China and India will just tell them to shove it.
Personally, I don’t care what this guy chooses to believe just don’t try to tell me he and his cadre of lawyers aren’t RADICAL! The thing that galls the most is that there are educated people in positions of power, like he, who would go so far as to bring people up on charges and subject them, under international law, to huge fines or jail for simply disagreeing and voicing their disagreement.
Outrageous!
Somebody needs to whop these so-called legal brains up side the head to remind them that we are free here in the West!
Important Related Side Note: The fabulous Mark Styne is doing battle with Michael Mann over this very thing. Keep up with him at Styne Online! Whop! Whop! Whop!
This is what we are up against folks. A wholesale global assault on the freedom of speech. And you thought ISIS was evil.
Related…
Tina, when the anonymous “Steve” asserted that our societal ills are connected to an over application of the 1st Amendment I was absolutely appalled. I guess us Constitutionalists and basic human rights advocates should just lie down and die.
Like hell!
Welcome to Newspeak, brought to you by the good folks at the Ministry of Truth, located over at Airstrip One.
I notice the part about making it illegal for anyone to question the consensus is paraphrased, not in quotes. Do you have a direct quote where Sands says this should be illegal? That would certainly be a massive violation of free speech.
No Frakking Consensus:
His intent is quite clear to me, Chris, but you go ahead and think whatever you want.
See also related reporting here, here, and here.
NFC posting of the document.
It should be noted that this person lives in Canada where “deniers” are already being sued in their courts…Mark Styne.
His words are pretty vague, but definitely unsettling. I wish he would say what exactly he wants the courts to do, or why any kind of fact-finding by the court would matter. That’s not what courts are for. Now, certainly the courts can make decisions regarding things like warning labels on tobacco products, but I’m not sure how that would apply to the problem of climate change. It’s possible he is arguing that people shouldn’t even have the right to make arguments against the consensus, and won’t just come out and say it. But I can’t tell.
“It should be noted that this person lives in Canada where “deniers” are already being sued in their courts…Mark Styne.”
As I understand it he’s being sued for defamation. He accused prominent scientists of malpractice without much evidence–that seems like grounds for defamation to me.
Chris: “I wish he would say what exactly he wants the courts to do, or why any kind of fact-finding by the court would matter. ”
He did say, at least in spirit, what he wants the courts to be able to do:
The first victim in the global warming hoax is common sense. Period.
Tina, it’s a specious argument. Those Portland murderers “disagreed” with established law, too. Do they get off because they are allowed to disagree? ‘fraid not.
It’s the substance, basis, backing (or lack thereof) of you disagreement with which we take issue … and will continue to do so. The general consensus is that you poor, distressed deniers cannot be allowed to hold up the show any longer.
Libby you’re a believer in forced compliance and silencing the opposition, of course you’d think this was fine and dandy!
It’s one thing for a court to decide a case based on the law and the facts presented; it is another thing for a court to declare the consensus opinion a fact and then adjudicate based on that specious “fact.”
A reminder to our readers on consensus science….
Yahoo:
“Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory.” -Stephen Hawking
“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.” -Richard Feynman
“Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?” -Galileo Galilei
On many of my posts about climate change, I get comments from believers in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming that take issue with what I have written. That’s fine. But, instead of presenting facts to support their case, many of these commenters resort to invoking the myth alleging that about 98% of climate scientists say human carbon dioxide emissions are the major cause of recent warming. This alleged consensus, they say, must mean it’s true and should end all argument. Some of these commenters also seem to be confused about cause and effect, and so conflate the perceived incidence of warming or cooling with attribution of cause. So let’s look first at where these consensus numbers came from and then I will comment more generally on consensus in science.
One source was from a study by Peter Doran and Maggie Zimmerman at the University of Illinois. (See here and here.) They emailed 10,257 scientists and asked two questions: Question 1: “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?” I would answer that temperatures have risen because in the 20th Century the planet warmed from the depths of the “Little Ice Age.” The answer to this question is verifiable by observation of physical evidence. Question 2 (the controversial question): “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures? The researchers didn’t define “significant.” This question solicits an opinion. The basic premise of the question has not been verified by physical evidence. Of the original 10,257 scientists queried, 3,146 responded. Of those, Doran and Zimmerman whittled the number down to 77 who had been successful in getting more than half of their papers recently accepted by peer-reviewed climate science journals. Of the 77, 75 answered “yes” to question 2,that?s 97.4%. So, in that study the whole 98% claim is based on 75 positive answers out of 3,146 respondents.
The other possible source for the consensus myth is a paper by Anderegg et al, in PNAS. In that study, the researchers didn’t bother to poll scientists, rather they scanned the literature and constructed a “database of 1,372 climate researchers based on authorship of scientific assessment reports and membership on multi-signatory statements about ACC [anthropogenic climate change]” as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The researchers then arbitrarily assigned “expert” status to those who had published at least 20 papers. That cut the number of “experts” to 908. In the supporting material at the end of the paper we find that of the original 1,372 researchers, 619 were contributors to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment report, and 212 were signatories to the UN’s Bali declaration. After culling duplicate names, the paper’s authors wound up with 472 “experts” out of tens of thousands of practicing researchers. We see from the two studies, therefore, that this claim of a 98% consensus comes from carefully culled researchers, most of whom worked on the IPCC reports, are said to believe that humans are the principal cause of climate change. The 98% consensus consists of researchers who have a vested interest in continuing the myth of significant global warming caused by human carbon dioxide emissions. Follow the money.
The 98% consensus is just another manipulated number pulled out of the air.
Now, let’s turn to a more general discussion of consensus. Dr. Judith Curry, Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has a long paper on consensus in climate science. She begins by saying: “The manufactured consensus of the IPCC has had the unintended consequences of distorting the science, elevating the voices of scientists that dispute the consensus, and motivating actions by the consensus scientists and their supporters that have diminished the public’s trust in the IPCC.” She goes on the write: “With genuinely well-established scientific theories, “consensus” is not discussed and the concept of consensus is arguably irrelevant… While a consensus may arise surrounding a specific scientific hypothesis or theory, the existence of a consensus is not itself the evidence.” And she notes: “If the objective of scientific research is to obtain truth and avoid error, how might a consensus seeking process introduce bias into the science and increase the chances for error? “Confirmation bias” is a well-known psychological principle that connotes the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or an existing hypothesis. Confirmation bias usually refers to unwitting selectivity in the acquisition and interpretation of evidence.”
There are some famous failures of consensus in history. The pre-eminent one was the belief that the Earth was the center of the universe. That was the prevailing consensus 500 years ago. That consensus was shown to be in error, first by Nicolaus Copernicus and later by Galileo, Kepler, and Newton.
In 1912, Alfred Wegener, building on earlier work by Frank Bursley Taylor, proposed that the continents did not have a permanent spacial relationship to each other, i.e., there was continental drift. Wegener could not, however, provide a reasonable mechanism for his hypothesis, therefore the consensus, for 50 years, was that he was wrong. By the 1960s, geological research did provide the mechanism and Wegener?s continental drift became part of the larger theory of plate tectonics.
Those who credulously invoke the ” 98% consensus” as an argument are displaying an ignorance of the facts and of how science works. I refer you to Michael Crichton who said: “I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.
Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.” “Let’s be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.”
Attribution was not given on the Yahoo page. The work, whoever wrote it, speaks to the issue profoundly, IMO.
I should note that I edited the page for clarity taking out question marks where apostrophe’s and quotation marks should have been and by assuming paragraphs. All other emphasis mine.
Re Tina’s quote “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.”
PRECISELY! ^FIVES!
Libby as I have clearly shown radical environmentalists don’t give a rats butt about science or truth, consensus is not truth. They care about power and money and they are willing to crush any person, even an award winning scientists, who disagrees.
The laws they pass are based on rot rather than science and should absolutely be exposed for the cash grab they are and rejected.
An open minded person would acknowledge that unreasonable laws to “save the planet,” especially when it doesn’t need saving, will do more harm than good if the result is that personal and national economies collapse and millions of people are thrown into abject poverty.
Something to chew on: Institute for Energy Research, “Australia’s Carbon Tax Lessons:
Institute for Energy Research
Rises in energy prices will hurt poor people the most
Tina, the buildup of CO2 in the ocean is not a deniable fact. It just isn’t.
But you can continue with the “flat-earther” thing, nobody’s stopping you from holding your opinions, or even speak them (though it is getting a little wearisome). What you will not be allowed to do, is obstruct the rest of us as we try to develop the means to deal with the rather alarming probably consequences of the undeniable fact.
The “build up” of C02 in the oceans is an “undeniable fact.” OK, allow me to concede that dubious “undeniable fact.” So given it was an “undeniable fact” (which it is not), that should bring about the destruction of the ecosphere?
Bullshit Libby.
Libby stupid terms like “flat-earther” are employed when the argument/science ISN’T settled. Your dismissive tone also shows how closed minded and authoritarian you are.
Hmmm…”alarming probably (probable) consequences” of an “undeniable fact?”
Sounds definitive! (NOT)
WUWT:
Those who understand the science will find a link to the original paper at the link.
Woods Hole Oceanographic:
My opinion? The earth is an amazing place of balanced self-healing. Humans that think we can have a huge impact on this natural balance are egotistical or agenda driven (politically). There is so much that we DON”T know it is stupid to enact draconian taxes and regulations that strangle the economy while lining the pockets of the warmer elites!
Pie, you waste you time and breath.
“Bullshit” is not a reasoned response to anything, and convinces nobody of nothing.
It isn’t even particularly entertaining.
Try harder.
If you’ve convinced, or even tried to convince, “nobody of nothing,” does it matter?
So where’s the gripe?