Bishop Hill Sheer heart attack
Jul 14, 2011 Climate: Sceptics Climate: other Reader John sent this - a comment on the "Philosopher on Climategate" thread at the NYT. I thought it was an interesting point.
Is a consensus of scientists in a field enough for society to accept what they say unreservedly, and act upon that knowledge?
The consensus of scientists was wrong on plate tectonics for a long time -- the "experts" said there was no such thing, until the "go to" experts were dead. (I don't know if humankind was harmed by that erroneous consensus.)
More recently, the US government, in the late 1980s, advised women that they should take estrogen after menopause to lessen the risk of heart attacks. 15 or so years later, the double blind studies finally got done. These "gold standard" studies contradicted the observational studies which had been the basis for the estrogen recommendation. In the meantime, perhaps 50,000 to 100,000 women had heart attacks BECAUSE they took the estrogen. The government's advice killed. (Yes, the issue is more complex than this summary paragraph states, in particular with regard to opposed vs. unopposed estrogens, but the basic facts are as stated.)
In addition, when women stopped taking the form of estrogen commonly taken in the US, within months breast cancer incidence dropped. Once again, the government's advice killed, but for a different disease.
In this case -- taking estrogen post-menopause -- there wasn't much scientific opposition to the government's advice. But the consensus was very wrong indeed.
In contrast, with global warming, there is a huge amount of scientific opposition. The opposition isn't to the notion that CO2 warms the atmosphere, but rather to the amount and the effects. All of us understand that if a doubling of CO2 causes an increase of 1 degree C, there are far different policy prescriptions than if it causes an increase of 3 degrees. The IPCC is on shaky ground here.
So please, give it a rest on this appeal to authority.
Reader Comments (41)
Indeed. Climate sensitivity to CO2 emissions is the key issue. Current understanding is a less than adequate justification for panic responses.
Policy makers are in a difficult position. If a policy maker is being advised that, on the basis of excellent research, there is a consensus amongst scientists that taking estrogen post-menopause is really the way to go, what is that policy maker meant to do?
In the case of climate change, perhaps a policy maker (call him Chris Huhne) is advised that a larger (more mainstream?) group of scientists saying the most likely climate sensitivity is around 3C and that a smaller (less mainstream?) group say that the most likely value is around 1C. One possible response is for the policy maker to wait to take action until a consensus emerges. But of course a consensus may never emerge or it may, after a long time, emerge in favour of 3C by which time it's too late to prevent the worst excesses of dangerous climate change. (Of course, instead, it may, after a long time, emerge in favour of 1C or it may meet in the middle at 2C!)
I guess it's just not clear to me what's the rational way for the policy maker to proceed.
The 'consensus' in science has been repeatedly show to be wrong in reality , plate tectonics is just one instance of this . Therefore 'the consensus' as a value showed always be up for honest debate.
RichieRich
And what do you do if, as a policy maker, you are already minded towards the more extreme scenario anyway?
You ought to disqualify yourself on the grounds of conflict of interest but, rather like resigning because you, or one of your underlings, has got something wrong, this is now a moral stance which is considered passé.
Even if trusting some narrowly defined set of experts on a subject was an empirically justified strategy at one point, that it will work indefinitely is not logically justified. It is especially not justified once the trust extended to experts includes the power to strongly influence global or national governmental policy. Such trust is just waiting to be exploited, whether with good or bad intentions.
If I were a policy-maker and advised that one group of scientists was saying the most likely climate sensitivity is around 3C and that a smaller group was saying that the most likely value is around 1C, I should want to examine what other recommendations the two groups were making and I should ask whether the people making claims were real scientists and not pseudo-scientists with political motives. If the first group were claiming a climate sensitivity of around 3C based on no empirical evidence but on a consensus among themselves, in addition to promoting schemes to spend billions on enriching themselves and their associates, I should think “the rational way ... to proceed” would be to seek more information and verifiable proof before acting.
Excellent point.
Recently, the EU and the UK removed a prescription drug for the treatment of Diabetes from the approved list. The drug, which I will not identify for legal reasons, was heralded originally as a 'wonder drug' in the treatment of Diabetes by a huge majority of the medical profession, but had an unfortunate side effect - it enormously increased risks of users suffering heart failure and also enormously increased the risk of users suffering damaged retinas. Oddly enough, the drug is still prescribed in the US, but with strict cautions applying.
I am a type-2 Diabetic, take diet and exercise very seriously, but suffered damage to the retina in my one 'good' eye from the drug. My retinopathy has been monitored by a specialist since I reported difficulties with my vision and the eye is now almost damage-free, after almost two years of difficulty in which I was forced to stop driving and to cease practising my profession for a considerable period as I could not see sufficiently well,
And my GP wonders why I keep a watching brief on my medication via the internet and do not readily accept concensus views of pharmacology. Nor do I accept them in any other area of science.
There was an old saying among physicians long ago which could help the modern policy-maker: “first, do no harm.”
@ Mike Jackson
OK so the policy maker already (and irrationally?) minded towards the most extreme scenario resigns and is replaced by somone else more open-minded (whatever that means). It's still not clear to me what the rational way is to proceed.
@ Deadman
Do you really think that all those who put most likely value of sensistivity at 3C are "pseudo scientists" who are only in it for the gold?
@ Deadman
Yes, exactly. In the hypothetical case outlined by RichieRich, one way forward is to ask for a cost benefit analysis with the opportunity cost - famines not averted, children not vaccinated, clean water not provided - of the policy properly reckoned.
@ Justice4Rinka
And harking back to the good Bishop's post of yesterday re philosophy, a number of philosophers have (cogently?) argued that cost-benefit analysis is such a deeply flawed method, that it shouldn't be used for policy analysis!
RichieRich,
from my apodosis, “I should ask whether the people making claims were real scientists and not pseudo-scientists with political motives”, you ask whether I “really think that all those who put most likely value of sensistivity at 3C are ‘pseudo scientists’ who are only in it for the gold?” I don’t think that all “who put most likely value of sensistivity at 3C” are lucripetous, though some are, and I’m sure that some may be real scientists. The claims and credentials and motives of people who wish to spend lots of tax-payers’ money should be thoroughly examined before making policies on their recommendations, I say.
But even assuming that the CAGW theory is correct (I know, I know), and Huhne decides to bomb the UK back to the stone age, what impact would unilateral UK action have on world climate? Next to none.
Our politicians have forgotten that they wield power FOR the people, as the Bombardier shambles shows.
>There was an old saying among physicians long ago .. 'first, do no harm'
It's part of the Hippocratic oath, which I only discovered recently is no longer actually taken by qualifying doctors. If I were cynical, I might think that is because it is so rarely observed...
Deadman
"lucripetous"
Great word! I had to look it up (not in my own dictionary) but it fits perfectly. I may have to use it.. :-)
@ RichieRich
Perhaps, but in the case of the CAGW conjecure it seems clear that the diversion of resources towards cooling the atmosphere and lowering the oceans is going to come out of funds that could otherwise be used to increase prosperity and to fund aid programmes.
So the initial hurdle, really, is what's the best way to spend a trillion? On lowering the temperature, or on fighting malaria? On preserving atolls or on reducing infant mortality?
In other words, the threshold of proof should be that this really is the most pressing imaginable need for all this money, and that it is worth untold deaths now and in the future from disease, poverty and what not to postpone the earth's warming by a couple of weeks. If that cannot be proved then we just ignore, like we ignore the prospect of asteroids falling from the sky and obliterating a city.
There's a taxonomy of scepticism and it ranges from, at one end, "the world isn't warming at all" all the way to "it's warming and we're causing it, but nothing proposed or conceivable can possibly make any difference".
The really odious fraud is the pretence that anything we do will make a difference. When you look at what's being proposed, it falls apart in every way. Emissions cannot be significantly reduced (most is caused by home heating, industry, and things we simply cannot do without), if they could be we couldn't measure it because natural variability is not understood, and even if we could it would make no difference because the most aggressive measures proposed will result in tiny changes.
Either the alarmists don't get this, in which case they're thick, or they do but intend to ignore it all, in which case they are totalitarians.
No drugs are "safe", all have side effects many of which are benign but some of which are not. When a drug is first introduced into the patient population it has undergone extensive clinical trials whose objective is to show that the drug is effective against the indication of concern and is "safe" to use. The safety of the drug is always a balance between the benefit to the patient of the alleviation of the current disease vs the potential cots of the known side effects.
As the drug is used by an increasing population, other side effects become aparrent. This is due to their incidence in the population being lower than what can be detected in clinical trials. A side effect affecting 1 in 100,000 is unlikely to be detected in a clinical trial which only involves 5000 patients. As the side effect profile builds up the risk/benefit balance may change enough for the drug to be withdrawn. This is classic scientific method, as the data changes so does the policy and although their can (often) be arguments about statistical significance of side effect occurrence, the policy always changes based on the observed data not on the predicted outcomes.
The issue over medical concensus is also something of a red-herring, in most of the cases cited there was no significan opposing viewpoint to the concensus and when the data became available that the concensus was wrong the policy changed. This is, of course not universal, few things are, and the case of stomach ulcers was a classic case akin to the Wegner plate tectonics issue.
In the case of Climate Science however we have a false concensus exacerbated by political posturing. Indeed it is somewhat akin to the Emperors New Clothes story. There is a small number of scientists who are convinced about the CO2 induced CAGW theory. They have persuaded all (many) other scientists in other disciplines that they are right and these other scientists cannot believe that they would stoop to the practices that are being used. Thus we end up with a faux concensus of "most scientists" the majority of whom have no expertise in climate science all singing from the same hymn sheet.
Occasionally this breaks down when an expert in a particular field sounds the alarm on what is being said by the consensus in his/her area of expertise, this has happened with malaria and hurricaines but by and large no one takes any notice.
In addition, the "concensus" scientists appear to be unwilling to take into account any evidence that does not fit with their theory, "it never matters" usually because the model must be right and the data does not fit the model.
Policy makers are in a dilemma because they find it very difficult to go against the majority opinion especially if that opinion supports their political belief system. I think this is why you are seeing a left/right split on the issue. The left likes the concensus viewpoint because this enables them to pursue policies with which they fundamentally agree. The right dislikes these policies and thus is more inclined to see both sides of the scientific argument.
How do you make a double blind test on CAGW?
@Justice4Rinka
Thanks for your thoughts. I agree, and I think everyone would agree, that any rational policy approach needs to consider the costs and benefits of various possible courses of action. The debate around CBA is simply one as to whether this is a reasonable method for trading off costs and benefits.
It strikes me that your point about the best way to spend a trillion rather assumes there's a fixed amount of money for a state to spend. However, at any given time, states vary massively in the % of GDP taken as tax, and also the amount one state raises over time varies (and, I think, generally increases!)
I agree there is significant uncertainty about the relationship between (1) emissions and temperature increase (2) temperature increase and climate impact and (3) abatement and cost. In a review article on sensitivity, Knutti and Hegerl write
If they're right and it’s at least possible that sensitivity is higher than 3C, that it’s surely at least possible that the resulting harms of a (more than ) doubling in GHG concentration could be (very) great and that the cost of averting those harms would be less than the harms themselves.
Is it really the case that emissions can’t be reduced significantly without society falling apart? A limit on car engine size, regulations/incentives re high vehicle occupancy rates, more people walking or cycling short distances etc etc may well reduce emissions significantly without total collapse. OK it might be (way) too draconian for some tastes, but that's different from total collapse.
The more I think about it, the more it strikes me that climate change policy is a devilishly difficult problem re determining the best course of action under extreme uncertainty in multiple dimensions.
Richie
From the policy point of view, J4R has said all that needs to be said. So far as your discussion with deadman about motivation is concerned, can you reflect on the following:
As I am sure you are aware, the consensus is that global average temperatures have increased by about 0.6C over a period during which CO2 levels are generally believed to have increased by 40%. Since the mainstream view is that the effect is logarithmic, this points to a sensitivity of 1.25C before taking into account other factors, such as the fact that the world was warming as we emerged from the Little Ice Age, on the one hand, and the poorly-understood effects of aerosols and water vapour on the other. Anyone arguing that sensitivity is 3C should therefore have very compelling scientific reasons to support their argument or expect to be treated as politically-motivated, just as you would say that someone saying it is zero is politically-motivated. The idea in the IPCC's Bayesian prior, as exposed by Nic Lewis, that all sensitivites up to 19C should be treated as equally likely, is patently risible.
Richie Rich
There has recently been a discussion at another website concerning sensitivities and forcing. In particular reference is made to some of the statistical methods used in preparation of the IPCC report covering this area including I think by one of the abovementioned authors
Bayesian statisiti - I cant even spell it
Sorry Richie we cross-posted. I think you should park anything Gabi Hegerl says until she has addressed Nic Lewis's criticisms of the Bayesian prior used in her chapter of AR4.
You are right about states varying in the amount of GDP they take in tax, but as you know the UK and the Eurozone are struggling with public and private sector deficits and aggregate debt that are at historically high levels for peacetime, and with the the UK government currently spending about 50% of GDP there is huge pressure on the beleaguered private sector to generate the wealth to pay for it. I would say that we simply don't have the trillion - sadly we wouldn't get as far as choosing to spend it on something else.
From the Ecclesiastical Uncle an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.
Re RichieRich
Morning Perm Sec Have a good week end?
Good enough, Minister, You?
Well – Bloody constituents!
I’m sorry Sir, and I’ve more trouble for you! I’ve got the windmill boys and the coal barons both asking for your help and they both say they will put the boot in…
Oh Gosh! What do I do then?
Well, Sir, its either one or the other, the Treasury won’t ante-up for both. If you think its going to get very hot I suppose you’d better help the windmill boys. If you don’t, then as windmills are a waste, you’d be best advised to give the Treasury’s goodies to the coalies.
Well, I don’t know! Which one do you think then?
Well, both lots persuaded me to listen to their scientists -. I didn’t understand a word they said but I think the windmill boys were sure it was going to get very hot and the coal people said it wasn’t. And both were very sure they were absolutely right. In the end, I just couldn’t make my mind up. Pity, really, I could have spent the time organizing the departmental seminar on the costs and benefits of studying climate change and I suppose that might have given us an answer.
We’d better wait for that then.
Well, if you want to Minister, but the coalies say Rupert will be quick off the blocks if they pass the word and ----
Don’t go on. OK, we’ll have to decide. What on earth do I do?
Minister, let’s ask Sir John – after all it’s his job to advise us on stuff like this.
What a good idea. You seem a bit slow this morning – must have been your weekend!
(Apologies to the estate of Harold Wincott)
w.r.t Richie, Deadman etc:
As I understand it, (and I'm open to correction) the 1 (or 1.2) degree average surface temperature increase per doubling of atmospheric CO2 is a widely accepted theory-based without feedbacks figure. Higher figures all assume or postulate large positive net feedbacks. However there are a number of published workers in the field who, mainly on empirical grounds, come up with figures much lower than 1 degree, thus requiring net negative feedbacks. Such conclusions are downplayed (or more commonly, simply ignored) by the IPCC. But their work still stands in the peer-reviewed literature. An objective assessment (which the IPCC has shown itself unable to provide) would take into acount the whole literature, not just that part which supports climate alarmism.
Bishop
As a daily reader of your blog I am most disappointed to read this post. Can I suggest you read up about the HRT studies you refer to. If you do you will find the studies make those of the “warmist” look positively definitive
At present there are no reliable studies which show long term exposure to any form of HRT causes any long term health effects where as there is clear evidence to the positive benefits of the treatments.
Where this particular health scare does parallel the AGW scare is that following long term usage of the drugs, some vary poor research was published with compelling media headlines. The media picked up the headlines with out any review of the quality of the research and lots of people stopped taking the drugs. This almost certainly led to patient suffering and distress.
If you want more details on why the studies are so poor let me know and I will provide them.
Coldish,
whether warming were as much as 3º would be irrelevant to me—even if I accepted the supposed AGW conjecture, which I do not—because the “scientists of consensus” have not actually shewn that the supposed warming must be harmful and, when deciding on massive spending, we should surely determine whether any putative global warming would be harmful instead of credulously and precipitously acting on that supposition. History suggests that a little warming would be more beneficial than not. Furthermore, the consensus among those who predict the highest rise seems to be that we must eliminate emissions of carbon dioxide, and spend billions on more expensive power-generation, instead of planning ameliorative and mitigatory schemes. When I hear such a consensus among supposed scientists that we must reduce our use of our most effective technology instead of utilising it, I tend to suspect ideological rather than scientific reasoning.
Strange, isn't it, that we have known for years that many of our power stations are coming to the end of their lives, yet it is only at the eleventh hour that our politicians are waking up and doing something about it, not perhaps in the most sensible way, while their response to AGW/CAGW/etc. has been an immediate knee-jerk reaction committing us to spending billions of pounds to be able to hold our heads up and lead the world, apparently based on the concensus of scientists. I have a vision of all the scientists who have been trying to make the Government concentrate on rebuilding our power stations standing in open fields in a multiple version of Munch's, The Scream.
If this is our attempt at keeping the Great in Great Britain, it is very sad.
Net CO2-AGW climate sensitivity is shown by experiment to be very low. The big mistake made by climate science is to imagine that at equilibrium, all heat from the conversion of incoming solar energy at the surface to molecular vibrations is transferred from the surface to space by radiation. They also forget that nearly half incoming solar energy is infra-red, so is mostly absorbed in the atmosphere.
Most surface energy heat transfer is convection. You can change the convection/radiation balance by altering wind speed and surface emissivity, the origin of urban warming.
The theoretical prediction of a high climate sensitivity comes from the assumption that Prevost exchange energy, a measure of gas temperature, is an energy source. It isn't because at equilibrium it's exactly balanced by radiation in the opposite direction. The theoretical prediction of it by Arthur Milne in 1922 was a mathematical mistake.
AR4 assumes aerosol cooling of 3 times net AGW, Nearly two thirds of that aerosol cooling is imaginary, the product of another mistake, this time by Carl Sagan.
This is why AR4 predicts a median climate sensitivity of 3K when it's more likely to be at most 0.2K.
A reasonable approach would be, figure out what each scenario means, figure out what the best approach to it would be were it to happen, then figure out what you need to do to be ready to take effective action at the point at which it becomes clear which is happening.
It will have costs. But they will be a great deal less than the costs of all out carbon reduction programmes. Also, as one commenter writes above, even if the UK were to turn off totally, it would make no difference to temperatures under the most extreme scenarios. So a rational approach for the UK would be to focus on mitigation, not prevention.
It can do nothing to prevent warming. But it can at fairly modest expense get ready to deal with it, if it seems to be coming.
The ones who can prevent are, if the CO2 link is correct, China and India. Britain is just too small an economy.
David S
Whilst I think it's important not to assume the problem is necessarily one of spending a fixed pot of money, I take your point that there is a limit to how much states can increase their spending. That said, I do sometimes think that when a decedant society such as ours has the money to pay Wayne Rooney 220k per week (and to pay vast sums in banking bonuses etc etc) we could find more to spend on issues of genuine need/concern. But ultimately, one has to prioritize spending and how much one choses to spend on mitagation of and adaptation to climate change depends on, amongst other things, what one thinks climate sensitivity is.
I've been following Nic Lewis' posts on Climate etc with interest and am keen to see how this pans out. Perhaps it will be a genuine game changer. I think Gabi Hegerl has referred the matter to the IPCC and one can only hope that the IPCC deals with the matter thoroughly, fairly and as swiftly as possible.
I guess the aim of quoting Knutti and Hegerl was to flag up the point about "fundamental difficulties" in ruling out high values for sensitivity. I know that Martin Weitzman, a professor of economics at Harvard has argued that it is the small risks of very high sensitivity that justify robust action on climate change. So even if it turns out that the most likely value of sensitivity is 1.5-2C, presumably this doesn't mean that higher values can be ruled out? And if they can't, what part should this play in making policy decisions? I'm genuinely not sure.
Deadman
“History suggests that a little warming would be more beneficial than not”
So does pre-history. My understanding is that for the last 600 million years, it has been around 10 degC warmer than now most of the time (including the relatively brief Ice Ages) with no tipping points or thermal runaway, so 3 degrees doesn’t sound so bad. 3 degrees cooler would be a lot worse and, at present, seems at least as likely.
But Richie
Weitzman's analysis depends on the veracity of having a sensitivity probability distribution with genuinely large higher end climate sensitivity values. In other words, he takes the IPCC at their word
Now that we know that the IPCC just made that graph up (see Forster's comments at Climate Etc thread), what is Weitzman to do?
The 'small risks' of 'high sensitivity' come from imaginary data. I'm not sure how much we should be worried about such things.
To Tony Baverstock:
This blog isn't the place for a full debate about hormone replacement therapy, but for Bishop's readership, here is the Abstract from "Hormone Replacement Therapy and Cardiovascular Disease: What Went Wrong and Where Do We Go From Here?", in Hypertension, summarizing the issue.
Abstract—Observational studies in humans and experimental studies in animals and isolated cells supported the widely held belief that hormone replacement therapy protects the cardiovascular system from disease. To nearly everyone’s astonishment, the Women’s Health Initiative Study and the Heart and Estrogen/Progestin Replacement Study overturned the conclusion that hormone replacement therapy protects the cardiovascular system and, in fact, supported the opposite view that such therapy may actually increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. This review addresses 2 questions: what
went wrong and where do we go from here? (Hypertension. 2004;44:789-795.)
Regarding the drop in breast cancer rates, the article linked just below shows that after 75% of the women in Kaiser Permanente's plan stopped taking estrogen replacement, the breast cancer rate was reduced fairly sharply, even though mammography rates stayed the same:
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jul/25/science/sci-breast25
Further, estogen-sensitive breast cancers specifically showed a large drop.
Incidently, Norwegian women did not see a drop in breast cancer rates: this appears to be due to the use in Norway of a different type of estogen replacement than the conjugated equine estrogen used in the US.
Here is a link to Gina Kolata's coverage of the issue in the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/science/hormone-studies-what-went-wrong.html
These articles don't do justice to the full debate, as is no doubt part of your point, but they will serve for now. Note also that hormone replacement therapy of the time used opposed estrogen. Unopposed estrogen, to the best of my knowledge, did not cause the same problems, or at least not to the degree that opposed estrogen therapy did.
Shub
Just had a quick re-glance at a Weitzman paper (not online. But there's a more recent one online here).
He does cite the infamous Table 10.2, pointing out that, for the PDFs mentioned, there is, on average, around a 1% probability of sensitivity being >10C. This doesn't strike me as what you refer to as "genuinely large higher end climate sensitivity values". But it's large enough, according to Weitzman, be to a cause for concern.
If a revised set of PDFs emerge post Nic Lewis where more of the probability is at lower temperatures so that the probability of sensitivity being greater than 10C falls to, say (pulling a number out of the air), 0.3%, would that still be a concern to Weitzman? No idea!
RichieRich
What's large enough for Weitzman is one question - with him being influenced by the likes of Joe Romm. Whether that is real enough is another question. Even those who would want us to not ignore the high sensitivity estimates should want these estimates to be real, one hopes! :)
Entirely agree!
RichieRich
When pondering policy choices I suggest that some consideration of the following might assist (in addition to the more technical points made by other commenters.
OK, let us just assume the warmists are right. I take on board the fact that we don't want to be accused of procrastinating. But can it REALLY be the case that we can't afford to look at the evidence carefully before spending Trillions (which we haven't actually got)?
Even the most hard line alarmist can't pretend that (say) five years delay would make a jot of difference, especially when Chinese coal power stations have given us a breathing space by making the climate cooler (apparently).
The other excuse is that we'll have to stop using fossil fuel at some time so we may as well get on with it. That approach suggests that we developed beyond the stone age after running out of stones.
Another consideration for thought is that there must be a nagging doubt that, as well as the well documented 'noble cause corruption' (fiddling figures justified because it will save the planet), it is expecting a lot of human nature to pour literally Billions into research about a supposed 'problem' and expect many 'scientists' to turn round and respond, "no, we looked very carefully at that and it is total nonsense. No, keep the rest of your grant funding. just give me my P45 and I'll go and look for another job".
It is also the case that if a necessary qualification for a post as Government Scientific Advisor is that you are a 100% convinced activist alarmist, then there are no prizes for guessing what kind of advice you will get. And remember, it was Margaret Thatcher who started those appointments, back in the 1980s.
Whilst you are in pondering mode, a little thought might be worthwhile on the secondary scares that have been used to adorn the central warming scare. Ocean acidification? Species extinction? "Weird" weather? Massive increases in sea level? Doomed polar bears? Spreading malaria? More cyclones? More droughts? 50 Million climate refugees? In every case these scares have been shown to be incompetent, fraudulent or both. What does that tell you about how robust the 'warming' theory is? Nothing, actually - but it does tell you a lot about the people who obsessively peddle this stuff.
In the last couple of days, as a result of a campaign spearheaded by the BBC and the Grauniad, we have seen a full scale Judicial Inquiry set up to investigate phone hacking and all the rest of it. Inconveniently, it appears that there is published analysis from the Information Commisioner which indicates that both the Mail group and the Mirror group were recorded as publishing far more pieces based on illegal information gathering than was News International. And, although the hacking was disgusting and must have been distressing (although we still have little evidence that many people were actually hacked), a case could be made that, other than distress, little real harm was done and that the great majority of targets were celebs and politicians whom some might think deserve what they get. And lets not forget that if the public at large wasn't prepared to spend their money on tittle tattle and filth, none of this would have happened.
Now just compare all that with what happened after Climategate and the "inquiries" that followed that leak. Just note the contrast with the attitudes of the Grauniad, the BBC and the politicians.
Now, bearing in mind how much is riding on this Global Warming scam, can anyone, even our favourite trolls, come up with a reason why a full judicial inquiry into the 'science' of global warming might not be at least as useful as the hacking inquiry? Why, I'm sure even Zed'sDeadHead would like to expose in court, under rules of sworn testimony, how much BigOil is actually paying the Bish and myself? No? Wouldn't it be nice to see laid bare what emails Phil Jones actually destroyed? How about some hard facts about how much electricity BigWind produced in December 2010 and how much warming in degrees celsius were averted thereby? And lets look how much the taxpayers and electricity users have already contributed to the Thermageddonist cause? Let's see the evidence, under cross-examination, to show that polar bears are drowning because of coal burning. And much, much more.
How's that for a policy option?
Jul 14, 2011 at 9:08 PM | Martin Brumby
There are two ICO reports from 2006:
(a) WHAT PRICE PRIVACY?
48 pages, 10 May 2006
see http://tinyurl.com/6hddk3y
(b) WHAT PRICE PRIVACY NOW?
32 pages, 13 December 2006
see http://tinyurl.com/6jmxh27
While I agree on the general idea, I also think that HRT is a difficult subject, ranging from relative probability to, to say the least, "appearance". Should you trade a (relatively) higher risk of prematurely dying of cancer to being an unattractive sack of flesh (and mind you, I'm a feminist, but a realistic one). If leading a healthful life would turn me (a man) into a pot-bellied perfectly unattractive man in order ro attain a longer life, should I obey the orders of the health brigade ? I suppose not.
That's my choice. But anyone may disagree, as long as the coice is not forced upon one.
Martin Brumby: I just put up a comment on "Sheer Heart Attack" in which he ends: How's that for a policy option?
Excellent... but isn't that exactly what is being avoided? I do not think there can be any rational dispute of that, Martin... therefore the Berlin-style Wall. Hold the fort!
Thanks for links, Brownedoff.
I've even started to wonder if the Information Commissioner is one of that rare breed - a Civil Servant who actually tries to serve the public! He needs to watch his back.....
Meanwhile, the following link is worth a read:-
http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2011/07/sorry-but-trinity-mirror-group-are-most.html