Gosselin on Germany

Regular commenter P. Gosselin has a new blog reporting on climate change as it felt and experienced in Germany. There is a must-read article up there right now reporting on a major feature in Der Speigel that covers the whole of the climate wars.

Comments

[Peter Czerna]

"A major feature in Der Spiegel". Hardly. Gosselin's paraphrase is misleading.

Here's what I have just sent to Gosselin:

Dear Mr Gosselin

To be frank, if you are so busy why waste your time paraphrasing anything from Spiegel?

The contributors were paranoid lefty lunatics in the 70s, the 80s and the 90s. Nothing has changed.

This 'series' is just a gesture. The tone of their Klimawandel section is set in the banner:

"Alles zur Erderwärmung: Tödliche Hitzewellen, versinkende Küstenstädte, Dürren, Hungersnöte - die Folgen der globalen Erwärmung drohen katastrophal zu werden. Trotz aller Warnungen bläst die Menschheit immer mehr Treibhausgase in die Luft. Kann die Kehrtwende noch gelingen?"

[Everything about global warming: Deadly heatwaves, drowning coastal towns, droughts, famines - the consequences of global warming threaten to become catastrophic. In spite of all the warnings humans continue to emit ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Can a U-turn still be successful?]

Bonkers. The vast majority of what follows in the section is from the same mould. This is not reporting, it's hysterical advocacy.

Your paraphrasing that little bit of the content that might just be interpreted as rational comment is misleading. Please don't try and give the world outside Germany the impression that Spiegel should in any way be taken seriously.

[Chuckles]

It reflects the thinking of the nation on a variety of subjects. If the reflection seems clouded, it may not be the fault of the mirror.

[DRG Andrews]

EM Smith, in his epic analysis of the GHCN data set, revealed that temperatures in Germany have remained remarkably stable since records began to be collected. I included his chart of Germany`s temperature anomalies in my evidence to the Russell e-mail enquiry here:
http://www.cce-review.org/evidence/Andrews.pdf

More generally he has revealed that there were significant changes in thermometer counts and locations around 1990. The essence of my evidence to the Committee, which was submitted late but has now been published, is that the CRU failed to validate the significant process changes that occurred then. This is significant because the CRU uses the period 1961-90 as a baseline using one thermometer set (c6000) and measures anomalies in later years using another thermometer set (c1200). It is not obvious from the CRU evidence to the Committee that this has occurred or that they took the obvious precaution to validate the change bearing in mind that only a small number (c200) are common to both periods.

[SimonH]

Der Spiegel clearly operates on the false premise that CAGW is a certainty, yet concurrently acknowledging that CAGW uncertainties have been suppressed and/or understated by the scientists and that disproportionate alarmism is rife. It's like reading a bi-polar's diary - mutually exclusive representations of circumstance seem to happily co-exist in this article. It's all a bit odd.

I'm not a German:English translator and neither, apparently, is the Google translator. Struggling through an article that so evidently struggles with itself is no mean feat. The article seems vaguely critical of the scientists for allowing themselves to become politicised crusaders of a dogma.

In that sense, I feel the article is beyond being just a little too trusting of the main climate players. There's little acknowledgement that they themselves are perpetrators of sociopolitical manipulation and the article seems implicitly to make Hansen, Mann, Jones at al victims of the politicians rather than identifying the public as victims of the perversions of scientific advocacy.

That's after my first read-through of the article. Whether I'll have a different sense on a second read-through, I don't know. I suspect that a different translation tool might yield significantly different impressions.

[SimonH]

DRG Andrews:

http://www.cce-review.org/evidence/Andrews.pdf

Thanks for drawing attention to your submission. I found EM Smith's phenomenal analysis riveting. I'd never visited his site before, but it's a goldmine of rational analyses.

[Peter B]

I've read the whole article in the original German, and I agree with SimonH.

The article starts from two key assumptions, which it never questions: that CAGW is fundamentally real; and that, from the start, skeptics were - and remain - politically motivated and supported by Big Oil.

Having "settled" that in their own minds, they then try to analyze and explain what actually happened in the context of the e-mails. You can get an idea from the fact that probably the most quoted person in the whole text is guy called Peter Weingart - a sociologist at the University of Bielefeld. The whole take of the article is from a sociological/psychological point of view: the interactions between climatologists and the media, and the influence of both over politicians and policy, and the pressure, resulting from that, to underplay the uncertaintities of their result and present a clear picture of CAGW.

In that sociological analysis, the article does acknowledge errors made by Jones, Mann, etc, in trying to suppress opposing views, manipulate the peer-review process, etc. Somewhat bizarrely, the article mentions McIntyre and McKritick's work as demonstrating that the hockey stick graph was flawed, and the author, surprisingly, does understand what "hide the decline" referred to - ie the divergence problem - but he does not elaborate on its implications - just implying that it was all part of the sociological pressure to present a picture free of uncertainties.

In the end, the author explicilty says that the core issue is that climatology belongs to "post modern science" (they use that term) and that politicians must accept that it has uncertainties (and so - it is implied - not exercise undue pressure on scientists to present more certainty than they feel comfortable with).

Which does not mean that action should not be taken: the article follows the classic "post-modern science" view that the potential risk means that action must be taken despite - or because of - the uncertainties.

[Peter Czerna]

@Peter B:

Finally read the articles myself and said much the same thing about them on Gosselin's site, albeit with less refinement than you showed.

German intellectual onanism, to put it politely.

[Ross]

I presume the 8 part series referred to by P Gosselin are these which appeared in Speigel Online in English

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,686697,00.html

[Peter B]

@Ross: no that's not the same article, the one you're linking to is older, and by different authors.

[Ross]

Thanks Peter

[michel]

The whole concept of the 'post modern' is completely baffling. It may be a self confirming illustration of moral and epistemological relativism. That is, the post modern view of knowledge may be that everything we say is simply an expression of feeling, at best a sort of inarticulate testimony to our class and background.

Talk about post modern science and its implications, being so clearly devoid of any epistemological content, contains no information or assertions that we could test in the traditional way, and is indeed thus an example of the grunts that the theory suggests all discourse must be.

If only we could go back in time and stop Hegel's parents marrying each other, how many lives and how many minds we could save!

[Don Pablo de la Sierra]

michel

You are missing the point. It is not a philosophical movement, it is an emotional movement -- belief not logic. It is, succinctly, BS wrapped up in a pretty name.

I do love your use of words and knowledge of philosophy. It's been fifty years since I studied Hegel and the European philosophical movements. That and Latin are no longer taught in America, sadly. This world needs more people with your education.

[michel]

Russell said, many years ago, all anyone needs to know about Hegel and the famous Dialectic. You remember that this has to do with how movements of thought or history contain their own contradictions, and it underlies the so called 'contradictions of capitalism'. Things are supposed to move in one direction, then back, then in a third, which is called thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Well Russell memorably described this as the art of drawing a conclusion which does not follow, from two false and mutually inconsistent premisses.

Still as true now as it was 100 years ago when he wrote it. Yes, this is 100 year old philosophy! While we are at it, abolishing the IPCC, maybe we can abolish post modernism as well.