New/old science

To: Tea Party Interests

My name is Dick Hoese, I am a marine biologist who has enough background in oceanographic and atmospheric sciences to understand much of the literature on the current “crisis,” man-made global warming. I have looked into some of the original literature, including the IPCC reports that this is mostly based on, and have come to a number of conclusions, all which I can document with details. Much of this is available on the internet. I also responded to the EPA request about their “Carbon Dioxide Endangerment” finding, which does not appear to be consistent with the original purposes of the Clean Air Act.

(1) I have seen no evidence of a consensus of scientists that the “Science is Settled” as the EPA administrator has stated about anthropogenic global warming. This statement is an example of the logical error of an appeal to authority, usually associated with Kings and Popes. If anything, it is the opposite. Not that this matters, because consensus is politics, not science.

(2) The “evidence” for this warming is found in mathematical models, which of necessity have assumptions because empirical evidence is lacking. As a result papers with these models have many caveats, which by themselves cast possible doubt on the finding. The small amount of empirical evidence also has problems, and the earth has been cooling for the last decade. While this is too short of a period of time to tell much, it was not predicted by these models.

(3) This is a part of a “crisis literature” of which I am very familiar with in the ocean disciplines that I have actively researched. I have a list of these, many of which have been discredited. As one recent example a Nature Conservancy document on “Oyster Reefs at Risk” omitted Louisiana which has the largest oyster production in the world. This is not to say that these reefs are not at risk, but simply to point out a bias which should never be found in science. Such bias is not limited to science, but has occurred in history, social science, and other fields.

The foregoing is science, the rest something else. My interest in this comes from two places, problems in my profession and my growing up with a father named Adolf during WWII. These do not make me an expert, but gave me incentive to research the subjects, including my now reading the Federalist Papers.

(4) During the Stalin reign, there was a field now called, Lysenkoism, named after a Russian geneticist, Lysenko, who claimed that acquired characters could be inherited. This set Russia back in biology, perhaps never catching up. Despite the well known abuses, Nazi scientists were allowed more freedom.

(5) Most science in this country is now directly or indirectly funded by the government, a development spanning my career (1950's–20??). Sometimes industry funded research is defamed by such scientists, who do not seem to realize that they can be beholden to their benefactors as well.

(6) Many scientists pushing global warming and other crisis scenarios, rapidly move in their writings, speeches, etc., into advocacy, even activism, such as condemning coal, high mileage cars, etc. It took me many years to understand this, but my main mentor taught me that this is not science. Advocacy is showing up in major scientific journals such as Science in the U. S., Nature in the U. K. and even the U. S. National Academy of Sciences. As an example of the latter a physicist has found evidence of lobbyists influencing decisions about the energy production of wind farms, receiving the equivalent of “the science is settled” from his correspondents in the Academy. I am not surprised as some papers I have read in Academy publications are seriously flawed.

(7) Most of the science I read is good, but even that sometimes fails to recognize their shortcomings, and there are far too many examples of misuse of statistics, outright errors, and unfortunately, sometimes fraud. Possibly a larger problem is that government funding of science is directed, some areas discriminated against.

(8) I have worked with many good scientists, computer modelers, and managers both inside and outside government. Nevertheless, many federal government organizations, like the EPA, do not have a constitutional basis, and some in these organizations used to know this. I was certain that there were scientists in EPA who knew better about global warming, and sure enough one came forward and was censored. I suspect that comparisons with Lysenkoism will someday be made. The problem is that Lysenko was rapidly discredited because the agricultural production he promised failed immediately, while the predictions we face today have much longer periods necessary for confirmation and are otherwise less easy to resolve.

(9) Questions are being increasingly raised about peer-reviewed science. Obviously, some is failing and some think that it favors the status-quo, consensus view.

Finally, the main service I can offer is to supply information with sources about these subjects. There was a now deceased British journalist/philosopher Malcolm Muggeridge, who said something over a generation ago-- “We are now in the darkest of dark ages, not because of a lack of information, but from an excess. ” (Exact wording not found). Also, Mark Twain, I have heard, said that history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. The new poetry does not rhyme!