Wednesday, February 06, 2013

Law v science- fight!


My parents and I are legally qualified, they are barristers while I dropped out after my degree to become a therapist. But the legal training forces you to justify every single point you make and prepare your entire evidence before you proceed.

All three of us independently saw straight through the entire façade of global warming, simply because they put shaky material out before it is certain, and treat it as if it is a given. In law you'd either get disbarred if you did this at that level and frequency, or lose your clients a great deal of money and their freedom in some cases. Each new study or article talking about something 'possibly happening at an unspecified time or after our deaths' makes us cringe equally, while the greatest crime of all which science and scientific method warns against on day one (as it does in law and sociology, my minor subject) is extending from the particular to the general, induction.

Therefore finding a small glacier is melting or the Arctic ice is smaller this year than it was for 20 years is a piece of evidence. Over time (a scale far longer than politicians or the media, who these scientists are working for and feeding, are prepared to wait) you can put these items together until you reach a reasonable conclusion, one in criminal law (for mankind is on trial here) requiring a level of proof 'beyond reasonable doubt', and then can genuinely claim the world is dangerously warming. Till then we have theories, local and short term incidents, and computer models.

Now had the temperature already risen a dangerous amount and caused dangerous weather then of course we would be in trouble. Whether it was our fault would require a different study, directly eliminating every single driver of weather since day one before the 1970 cutoff point when CO2 reached levels high enough claimed to influence the temperature significantly (it still hasn't but don't worry about that) and if entirely dismissed the decadal oscillations and solar changes which have been almost the only drivers of climate in favour of added CO2 as well then the case has been won.

Look at that scenario and compare it with reality:

Temperature has been measured differently, and while the highest hockey stick by Michael Mann used by the UN to legislate shows a massive (OK, infinitesimal) rise of 0.7C in 150 years, while CO2 rose 50%, but others show a lower rise, and most but not all have been adjusted to rise (despite the urban heat island effect where most ground stations are raise the temperature by around the measured amount) and there is no exact consensus of the rise but only 0.7C as the possible maximum.

Studies combining solar activity (cosmic rays and sunspots) and the decadal oscillations caused by the earth's wobble track the temperature line very closely, while the 45' rise of CO2 is fairly linear. This is solid evidence, in the present and clearly measurable in comparison with sampled and averaged world temperatures, post-processed to fill the gaps and altered to within an inch of its life.

It is absolutely clear that if presented genuinely, the 'reasonable man' (the legal test) would not see any solid case for warming, let alone the secondary charge of being 'man made'. The scientists are not paid by results but by quantity produced, if they don't publish a certain amount they don't get paid and may lose their jobs. So produce they do, and let the rest of us deal with what junk or otherwise they do produce. Before global warming and science had not been political since the claim the earth was the centre of the universe the majority of science was decent and useful, with a small rump of the sort of junk studies the papers love and publish people who name their dogs certain things are more likely to be struck by lightning than those who go to Majorca on holiday, but they were the edge of decency and quite separate from curing diseases and making cars go further on a tank of fuel.

But global warming turned the neutral man, that is one neither particularly bad nor good, into a monster. The leaders, who realised the potential and created studies guaranteeing their field would be provided with cash for decades, were the ones who were probably bad to start with, while the majority as always were the colluders who simply rode the wave of dubious science to keep their own jobs and positions. But every single one has at least one degree, usually two or three. They were taught science (not law), and scientific (but not legal) method, and ought to be fully equipped to separate wheat from chaff. But clearly not. When the cards are laid out, lawyers in general can easily see the dog's breakfast of utter nonsense, contradictory claims, alterations, non-sequiturs, incomplete experiments etc, everything which would get a student sent down but once qualified can't lose their degrees so have no reason to hold to such standards if being paid to put them aside.

A lawyer (including an academic one, as we all have to process the same material as students as practitioners) can assess a good and a poor case almost immediately, just as a detective can. It is mainly through training and being exposed to a series of statements from witnesses and defendants, especially in a jury trial where both sides are so convincing if you listen to one you'll usually accept them as correct, until you hear the other and put them together. Global warming has two sides, I have just presented them, and to me the case for the defence is so strong the judge wouldn't even allow it to come to trial but dismiss the case and jury. Now we are well over 20 years down the road of predictions made originally in the 80s and 90s and can see the rise in temperature is nowhere near even the lowest of the predictions, it means the sensitivity to added CO2 in the form of positive feedback from increased humidity cannot exist. If it had we'd have evaporated enough water from the oceans to cause a rise beyond the bare amount for added CO2 with none at all. The one thing which has risen is CO2 (despite phenomenal taxes to attempt to slow it down) and the temperature per year stubbornly ignores all attempts to derail it from its 30 year positive/negative cycle.

On a personal note I hope one by one new people will notice the current state of climate data and gradually realise you can't have global warming without the warming element, something the politicians have as yet failed to grasp, mainly as besides the cashflow element which drives it above and beyond the others, they are still talking way ahead in the future and dismissing the present as if the future is all that will count. Give that to a judge, a jury or a teacher and the result will be the same, a big fat FAIL.

1 comment:

philosopher said...

Very well analysed