Socrates Shrugged

“When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the losers.”,  Socrates

“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell”, Carl Sandburg

Socrates apparently did not envision a situation in which the debate was not allowed to occur, but the slander occurred regardless. In this sense, the response of the consensed climate science community and climate alarmists to Socratic skepticism and the existence of non-conforming data has not been particularly Socratic, but rather strongly Sandburgian sophistry. The Socratic “philosophical method of systematic doubt and questioning of another to elicit a clear expression of a truth supposed to be knowable by all rational beings” appears to have been replaced in climate science by a political method of massive indoctrination and repetition to elicit unquestioning belief in scary scenarios produced by unverified climate models.

Climate alarmists have proclaimed climate change to be a “crisis”, an “emergency” and an “existential threat”. These proclamations have been presented without any evidence of events which would justify such descriptions; and, in fact, in contravention of the mass of existing evidence. Observations and data support the assertion that the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as hurricanes and typhoons, excessive precipitation and drought, tornadoes, etc. have remained stable or declined over the decades since organized data and observation collection has been practiced.

Financial damage from severe storms has increased in absolute terms but declined as a percentage of global GDP. The absolute increase has been the result of increased asset values and continued construction of high value infrastructure in areas prone to storm impacts, largely low-lying coastal areas. The loss of human lives, on the other hand, has declined precipitously as the result of early warnings of impending events and mandatory evacuations from areas expected to be impacted.

The actions of the consensed climate science community and the climate alarmists would suggest that the debate has not been allowed to occur because those groups have concluded that the debate could not be won. The consensed climate science community is surely aware of the weakness of the near-surface temperature record, the ongoing falsification of the climate models resulting from their failure to accurately predict observed temperatures, their inability to explain the differences between the near-surface and satellite temperature anomalies, their inability to explain the differences between the tide gauge and satellite sea level rise measurements and the incongruity of the global greening measured by the satellites.

The consensed climate science community is also surely aware of the observational data showing the decline of the frequency and magnitude of severe weather events. They are also clearly aware of the nearly 20 year warming hiatus, for which they provided more than sixty possible explanations before declaring that it did not happen.

Research which suggests lower climate sensitivity, issues with the magnitude of forcings and feedbacks, solar influence on cloud formation, a greater role for natural variation and other alternatives to anthropogenic CO2 emissions as the sole or predominant cause of recent warming continues to be excluded from consideration by the IPCC process, continues to be resisted or rejected for publication in major journals and continues to be ignored or vilified. Skeptical researchers continue to be referred to as “deniers” and “dis-informers” and “anti-science”.