Quote of the day

The populist notion that all climate sceptics are either in the pay of oil barons or are right-wing ideologues, as is suggested for example by studies such as Oreskes and Conway (2011), cannot be sustained.

Mike Hulme, in his new book. An extract of the chapter is at his website.

H/T Tallbloke.

Comments

[Paul Matthews]

I'm with M Courtney here - if someone from UEA is prepared to say that the views of Oreskes are untenable, that climate change concern is decreasing and this may not be a short-term blip, that CRU broke FOI law, and even dared to hint that climategate might have been a good thing, this should be welcomed rather than attacked.

I'm sure we'll all be ordering his new book at the knock-down price of just £87.82.

Judith Curry makes some positive remarks. She says that some people in the UK have learned lessons but most in the US have not.

[Hilary Ostrov]

Maybe in the tried and true tradition of "climatology" he's redefined "populist"! That aside ... of all the public utterances I've seen from Hulme, this one is the closest I've seen/heard from him that even begins to approximate "plain English" - and it is not overburdened with dense and/or arcane neologisms and other foggy turns of phrase!

I rather liked Judith Curry's observations on the excerpt she had posted (in which this QOTW had been highlighted by her):

After Climategate . . . never the same (?)

Mike Hulme describes the lessons that we should have learned from Climategate, and it seems that many in the UK have learned these lessons. I am not at all sure that the IPCC has learned many (or even any) of these lessons, and in the U.S. I don’t see much evidence of scientists having learned anything at all.

Hulme correctly describes a range of reasons for being skeptical about climate change, and identifies four different aspects around which skepticism can emerge. In the U.S. anyway, the Oreskes’ merchant of doubt meme seems to remain predominant. Intolerance for skepticism and overconfidence remains the order of the as evidenced by the recent AGU Statement on Climate Change. The U.S. media seems to be rather ignoring the climate change issue, with the most significant articles coming from the UK.

Finally, is it possible for a Tamsin Edwards to emerge in the U.S.? I suspect not; even senior scientists are intimidated by the ‘consensus police’ and don’t want to be subjected to what I have had to put up with (a number of scientists have told me this).

Here’s hoping that progress can continue to be made, and eventually that things will never be the same.

That being said, it would certainly be interesting to know why Muir Russell's "investigation" decided to exempt Hulme's emails from the scrutiny of their "examination". And even though I give Hulme credit for "shrinking the consensus", his subsequent waffling explanations and clarifications leave much to be desired.

Then of course there's his considerably less than credible claim during a presentation a few years ago, to the effect that he had 'completely forgotten' his own involvement until he saw the emails (at least those from CG1).

I've heard of (and met) many absent-minded professors before; but knowing Hulme's central role in constructing a "consensus" in the run-up to Kyoto in 1997, he must be among the most (conveniently?!) absent-minded of 'em all!

I vote for more Curry (and Edwards) - and less Hulme:-)

[Billy Liar]

Attempting to parse PoMo nonsense is a fool's errand.

[geronimo]

MartinA: "At every stage, I found:

It was worse than I thought."

I had paid little interest in CAGW until I read in the South China Morning Post that 2500 scientists had endorsed it as real and happening. That alone was enough for me to begin my investigations believing it was a crock. After all, even in the Big Bang debate no one thought that by gathering signatures Fred Hoyle's steady state theory would be slain, and "debate" is used instead of "punch up" in this case.

Mike Hulme is an odd character, I remember seeing him on You Tube many years ago with, I believe, von Storch, and he seemed to be remarkably lukewarm to me, telling the audience that there were threats to people if the climate change, but that some people were threatened if it stayed the same.

I'll try and dig it out.

[geronimo]

Here is the Youtube link, he makes sense I believe.

.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuxDkXwhtSo

[SimonW]

Isn't the internet brilliant! (*). You can ask an O/T question and get a fantastic reply from one of the main men within two hours.

but we didn't intend to christen a method, only label a mistake

Very funny!

Oh and Smiffy, you're sounding like an AlecM stuck-record with your one man GWPF = right wing crazy meme. You've had their cross party board pointed out to you several times. Give it a rest mate.

I'm undecided re the Mike Hulme thing. I know we're supposed to feel joy at one sinner repenting and all that but I really want these folk to be shown up as the clowns they are and held accountable for the damage they've helped cause. I can't really stomach them morphing into "we were right all along really, just wrong about minor details" and carrying on as normal.

*( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knYOcaQ-x5o )

[jamspid]

Sorry but very very off topic.

Watching the Wright Stuff Channel Five just now and they were talking about the UK population Explosion.

Prattling on about Baby Boomers and Cutting Child Bennfits and Ray Mears banging on about Nature and wildlife Extinction and the Environment .

What really annoyed me was this Claire somebody women i think she used to be in Coronation Street.And she quoted David Attenborough about Mankind being a Plaque on the Planet.

Mathew Wright and his panel being very Smug Mathusalan ,Robert Erhlichish b--locks basically.

So of course they mentioned the One Baby policy in China.

Back in the 70s post apocolytic Jenny Argurter and Micheal York Sci Fi film called Logans Run.They escape from this hedonistic high tech Domed City where they Euthanasia everyone over 30 prevent overpopulation.They end up in ice cave they strip off for no apparent reason into the remains of Washington DC which has become a Tropical Paradise

Thing is in Logans Run if you kill off everyone over 30 reduced population is easier to control.
In the City of Domes 31 year old might start suggesting elections more personal freedom .Colonizing the outside introduce farming and industry personal choice in birth contraception marriage and lift the Life expectancy

Apply Logans Run to China if the Chinese had not had the one baby policy and unrestricted birth Rate
China would have turned into India and Communism would have collapsed .Differance is that India has Democracy.China has the One Baby policy for political reasons.

[jamesp]

Peter B

"in the particular case of those e-mails, I'm not sure what more should be needed"

The 'taken out of context' excuse is invariably wheeled out in their defence, but I am at loss to imagine what other context might allow a more benign interpretation.

Their actual context was simply that of a conniving, shiftless, snarky clique who knew they were onto a good thing and were determined to keep it that way.

[jamesp]

Martin A

"At first, I just assumed that all this global warming stuff was firmly based in physics"

It sounded plausible to me, too, I have to admit. While it was getting warmer, that is.

[The Leopard In The Basement]

The populist notion that all climate sceptics are either in the pay of oil barons or are right-wing ideologues, as is suggested for example by studies such as Oreskes and Conway (2011), cannot be sustained.

I think no matter what you may think of Hulme that this is good and he has started something that was always inevitable given the amount of frankly cracked default positions taken by the alarmists that have somehow taken the floor in the mainstream. This is only the start I suggest and I think a few others who may be uncomfortable with the alarmist foaming will realise that there is much alarmists say that collapses under the slightest intelligent scrutiny and it would be better to be first to start to say this and come back to normality.

Hulme has taken one of the easier myths and popped it. I'll be interested to see how the alarmist defence rallies - they must say that no, we are *all* under the pay of oil and coal, to defend themselves, or accept they are talking bollox. The sophistry of digging around ancient history in order to claim we are all equivalent "tobacco" conspiracy level participants has run its course I think.

[lurker, passing through laughing]

Calling the disgusting treatment of AGW skeptics in media, politics, academia, etc. "populist" hides more than it reveals.
Hulme is mostly kidding himself and his pals who are clearly walking back from the increasingly obvious clap-trap they have foisted (at great professional and personal profit).
Now he wants to blame the 'mob' for what his pals did in deliberately denigrating skeptics over decades. It has been the AGW community that has relied on ridiculous circular arguments. It has been the AGW community pushing loser policies like wind and solar.
Skeptics have done what skeptics always do: play the role of pointing out the Emperor has no clothes.

[Gareth]

In the context of the quote I think the term 'populist' is meant to define the big-oil conspiracy story as one of the public against the big-oil funded skeptics. Hulme is not saying that notion is popular with the public nor do I think he is saying it has been trying to become popular, just that it is a position that seeks to present skeptics as being against the interests of the public.

The Big-Oil nonsense is always presented as a bog standard 'us versus them' situation where 'us' is supposed to be the majority (with self-appointed, unaccountable activists representing us...) and 'them' is supposed to be a tiny minority of conspirators preventing change. Climategate provided evidence that the climate science community is just as unpleasant and conspiratorial as the worst fictions that skeptics have been painted with.

[johanna]

Gareth, you have a new and innovative definition of 'populist', which uncannily accords with Hulme's new and innovative definition.

The general public never had a clue about debates about "fossil fuel funding of deniers." It was an in-house thing, which very occasionally was mentioned in the MSM. However, in the underworld of advocacy, it was a constant theme.

What it amounts to is that a lot of previously "heavy hitters" in CAGW whom Hulme formerly espoused are being thrown off the sled to the pursuing wolves.

Hulme is tucked up comfortably in his fur coat at the front.

[Mike Jackson]

Martin A
Your assumption that "all this global warming stuff" was based on physics was not unreasonable. As somebody with a scientific background you assumed that scientists had some basis for the claims they were making.
I, on the other hand, do not have a science background but immediately saw a parallel with my own ongoing dealings (politically — as in "parish pump" politics — and journalistically) with the local eco-activists. Oddly enough they were also very keen on turning the clock back to this mythical golden age, mad about recycling just about everything in sight, dead opposed to "excessive" use of energy, travelled by bus or car or on foot, etc., etc.
The trouble was that they were also a bunch of mendacious busybodies and hypocrites to boot! Travel by bus they did to Waitrose rather than walk to the local Tesco. Forever on the phone to me or their local councillor "opposing" things, placing their own quite erroneous interpretation on the outcome of discussions or proposals they had put forward and so on.
The speed with which they leapt on the "CO2 is evil and we need to stop it" bandwagon 90% convinced me it was all bollocks, simply because they were supporting it.
In the intervening 20 years I have seen no evidence to change my mind and even if I hadn't studied the science and, I hope, come to a reasoned view, the similarity between their pronouncements and behaviour and that of the warmist activists would still be enough to keep me sceptical.
Which is why I have said from the beginning: It's all about the politics; the science — to the extent that there is any real science involved — is no more than a smokescreen.

[NW]

MikeJ, I noticed that too, that the same people with the same objectives seamlessly adopted CAGW as the reason why their objectives should be realised, raising the possibility that it might be less than legitimate. It's less obvious these days than it was a few years ago when they were convinced that the battle was won; the complete package including vegetarianism and communal living was being pushed as the solution to CAGW in various venues.

[NW]

Trend scepticism would be disbelieving of evidence that suggested a change in climate was occurring, whereas attribution scepticism would be doubtful that such trends were predominantly caused by human agency. Impact scepticism would question whether the melodrama of the discourse of future climate catastrophe is credible and policy scepticism would query dominant climate change policy frameworks and instruments.

This is one of the parts of the extract referred to by Judith Curry quoted above, and I think it is a useful summary of the sceptical positions as a counter to the simplistic "denier" meme.

[Don Keiller]

@ Jonathan Jones
"I think it's possible to read those emails and believe that CRU was the victim of pressure from Mann: weak rather than wicked.

Jonathan- my long experience with CRU suggests they are both "weak AND wicked".

[Peter B]

Aug 9, 2013 at 1:48 AM | Ross McKitrick

It's like coining a technical-sounding term for stating that 8x7=17. Let's call that "re-centered multiplication" and then watch as 2nd-rate hangers-on and assorted nitwits send article after article to friendly editors of climate journals comparing results from "classical multiplication" and "re-centered multiplication", and arguing that since the former method implies the data yields formless noise while the latter method yields a hockey stick, it must be a valid method.

This reminds me of when I first started reading about this. I had never gone deep enough into statistics to have heard of PCA, but it wasn't too difficult to understand what it was about (and where Mann's error lay). There should never have been any controversy, yet there was and is.

When I was studying chemical engineering in the 1980s, I admit we looked down at those studying "environmental science" as a sort of pretentious, but less tough way of studying chemistry, physics and mathematics. It sounds snobbish and maybe it is, but Richard Lindzen has also made this point. It may be fair to say that this whole charade can be reduced to this: not "revenge of the nerds", but "revenge of the second-raters".

[not banned yet]

"Hulme is tucked up comfortably in his fur coat at the front."

Yep - digesting a working lifetime of free lunches.

btw - anybody remember Hulme protesting about this one?:

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/thinktanks-take-oil-money-and-use-it-to-fund-climate-deniers-1891747.html

[Justice4Rinka]

I have never need a lot of persuading that Jenny Agutter needed to strip off.

[johanna]

not banned yet - you misunderstand. All those years when he bloviated and went along while that was the way the wind was blowing were not signs of a well-tuned weathervane. No, no.

Next, you'll be saying that he lends his marshy prose to whatever looks like the next big thing - and that would be a shocking allegation.

[Jonathan Jones]

Don Keiller,

You're probably right. But you have much more context than most people. What's true and what's reasonable deducible are two different things.

[clipe]

What's this all about?

Professor James Curran
Environmental Futures
Scottish Environment Protection Agency

http://foia2011.org/index.php?id=2999

[John]

Climategate wasn't merely good for science -- needing to clean out the Sygian stables and all that. It was crucial for so many jobs that haven't been lost, because the world (not yet anyway) was kept back from adopting economically mad decsions.

One quibble with Hulme's excellent and very cogent analyis: I don't think Climategate would have had as much of an effect if Steve McIntyre hadn't already demonstrated the rot that lay at the core of the IPCC, the Hockeystick, and Michael Mann. People were very ready to believe that science had been perverted for political ends.

[clipe]

"It's about this global warming malarky"

http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=4449.txt&search=+malarky

[Stacey]

@geronimo

Stacey, I think you'll find that Mike Hulme didn't actually get those names for Alcomo, although the email is powerful evidence of how the climate science community has immersed itself in the politics.

Sorry I have good memory remember the two thousand scientists?

[Gareth]

johanna said:

Gareth, you have a new and innovative definition of 'populist', which uncannily accords with Hulme's new and innovative definition.

The general public never had a clue about debates about "fossil fuel funding of deniers." It was an in-house thing, which very occasionally was mentioned in the MSM. However, in the underworld of advocacy, it was a constant theme.

The notion Hulme is saying is no longer credible *is* a populist one. The claims that there are a tiny number of corrupted opponents to climate change policies is one designed to paint the advocates making those claims as being defenders of the interests of 'the people'. It might not have been successful populism as it did not attract support from the general public as far as I can see, but it was populism all the same.

[johanna]

Gareth

"Populism" which does not attract the support of the general public is not populism. It is, at best, a failed attempt to attract the support of the general public.

[John Shade]

I think 'demagoguery' would be a more meaningful replacement for 'populist notion' in Hulme's sentence. As in:

Demagoguery is polarizing propaganda that motivates members of an ingroup to hate and scapegoat some outgroup(s), largely by promising certainty, stability, and what Erich Fromm famously called “an escape from freedom.” It significantly undermines the quality of public argument for reasons and in ways discussed below. In the most abstract, the reason it is so harmful is that it creates and fosters a situation in which it is actively dangerous to criticize dominant views, cultures, and political groups. It makes discourse a kind of coercion, largely through rousing and appealing to hate. Thus, the very people who make the decisions cannot hear all the information they need. Historically, demagoguery is a precursor to the ending of democracy—that is, when demagogues succeed, their first move is almost always to restrict the power of the people or parliaments in favor of some kind of tyrannical or totalitarian system.

Source

[Canman]

I want to thank Ross McKitrick for his great answer to my O/T question about the term "short centering" and I would like to note that Michael Mann calls it "modern centering" in his book.

[johanna]

Thanks for the quote, John Shade. The Bishop's place is an unending source of education.

As I hinted before, Hulme is doing something similar to what P G Wodehouse described to do with eels and mud.