The Angry Outbursts of Climate Alarmists Show a Scientific Establishment in Crisis
Events over the last week or so have included a number of episodes in which climate alarmism has intensified in the face of criticism. For at least two decades now, we have become used to hypersensitive reactions from greens: explosive reactions to being challenged. But whereas that routine of confected outrage may have served the political agenda well in the past, climate scientists’ amateur dramatics today signal something rotten, and not just about the actors. The tired script and empty theatre, too – institutional science – is revealed to be bent and rotten to the core.
“We are in a climate crisis, and we don’t necessarily need people who suggest otherwise,” stated Dr Paul Dorfman from Sussex University, in his closing words during a short debate with me on Talk TV. It was a sinister rejoinder from an expert who seemed to have risen through academic ranks without ever having been challenged, but who completely unravelled during the 12-minute discussion. I don’t take credit for it – the frankly staggering performance was all his own work. He couldn’t make a coherent argument, and meandered from talking point to talking point; he made empty claims, hidden behind ‘complexity’ and the authority of institutional prestige; and he could only respond to the counter-argument by insult.
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Completely agree. You describe the same lack of scientific method that brought us the Great Scamdemic and has also brought Britain to its knees.
The Scamdemic was planned, organised and those promoting it knew it was a Scam. Scientific method played no part in the pantomime
I agree it was somewhat coordinated, but I don’t think that many people were in on it, otherwise it would have fallen apart too quickly.
These ‘few’ had ample willing help from a horde of overly credulous, self-righteous assholes who happened to be in positions of power.
But where exactly to point the finger? I see Fauci and his Wuhan links, abetted by the US establishment somewhere in the centre.
Greed, arrogance, self-preservation and opportunism can explain a lot of what we experienced.
The Scientific Method was used, but not for Good.
Can’t wait for this entire house of cards to fall
I get similar comments when I challenge people who are taking Big Pharma drugs like statins. Oh you’re a DOCTOR are you? You’re an EXPERT are you? Well yes I am as I’ve refused almost all prescription drugs for 50 years and done my own research
It is the argument from authority, and the tyranny of experts (mostly all funded by government)——The used car salesman knows more than me about cars but I don’t always buy one from him. —WHY? Because I use my own judgement as well, and when something doesn’t sound quite right, it probably isn’t. ——The Green Scam isn’t quite right and infact is the greatest pseudo scientific fraud ever perpetrated.
Appeal to authority: only credentialed people have anything valid to say.
But anyone with intellectual curiosity, capable of intelligent thought, critical analysis, can acquire knowledge and teach themselves about a particular subject.
Any “expert” certain of the veracity of what they promote would willingly engage with a challenger just for the satisfaction of putting them in their place by proving them wrong – that’s Human nature.
People who won’t engage know they have a weak argument and risk exposure.
Most of our science and technology is the work of people prior to the 20th Century who had no university degrees, weren’t “scientists” (hobbyists more like), some without formal education like Michael Faraday who started his interest in science age 14 as a book-binder’s apprentice.
My only caveat would be when the same question, often delivered with aggression and condescension, is asked every week, or even more frequently.
The problem is that without some basic knowledge, usually no greater than A level, any explanation is just gobbledegook, and can be taken as grounded as what colour would you like your front door to be.
I thoroughly recommend reading Dr Malcolm Kendrick on these subjects. “Doctoring Data” and “The Great Cholesterol Con” are excellent.
He won his libel case when the ‘captured’ press tried to paint him a charlatan. He strikes me as a man with integrity.
Big Pharma are only fixing the problems of their customer, the NHS.
Yes, doctors need to recognise their responsibility to their patients, and not follow the advice of a politician, the Secretary of State for Health.
$cientism. Climate theology is far beyond stupid. As a cult with dual-membership with the Rona plandemic, the underlying assumption is that the mass are stupid and will believe anything. Indeed most will so this professional criminal-mafia are certainly not wrong.
Given their billions the quackery will persist.
Unfortunately the masses of sheep are indeed stupid and too lazy and too hard of thinking to make sensible decisions. They advertise themselves with their persistence in mask wearing and obeying their GPs calls to get yet another useless and, in many cases, harmful jab
El Gato Malo links this to the explosion of midwits getting degrees and believing themselves educated.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/overeducating-the-midwits
I find his writing unreadable.
That’s a shame, I enjoy his writing
Maybe The Daily Sceptic could ask if Prof Dorfman could write a reply that, ignoring the supposed necessity for net zero, explained the economic case. The case that supposedly the British consumer will pay less for electricity generated by wind & solar & how it will make our businesses more competitive.
He’ll tell you he’s not an economist.
Here’s a thought experiment. You open a supermarket with 100 staff, but staff come into work intermittently. Some days they are all there, all day. Other days none turn up. Then there are days when 20 show up but leave after four hours, but 30 show up later for an hour. This is a consistent pattern.
There are periods of days when no staff show up, and in Winter it can be two weeks or more with no staff.
Is this a viable business?
You just described the civil service…
It’s even worse when the customers exhibit similar behaviour and, of course, it won’t match the behaviour of the staff.
Don’t forget the days when all your staff have turned up, but there are fewer customers, and you have to pay some of your staff to go home because they’re doing more work than you need.
Toys.
Pram.
Get nanny. Time for bed… no supper.
If it’s “all down to the price of gas, case closed”, answer this. Gas, like oil, exists in a global market. Gas is burned to provide energy – heat, power, electricity, whatever. Why are energy prices in the USA about a third of what they are here? If it was “all down to the price of gas” then global energy prices would be roughly similar, which of course they are not.
If it was a global market, Gas would be being produced from the Bowland Shale.
That’s about it , The ROPeace summed succinctly !
And the sciences of climate, vaccines and some others.
A further absurdity of their rigorous science is that the claim of ‘average temperature’ is scientifically illiterate.
Temperature is an intensive property, like density. It does not matter how much of it there is, it does not change. Ie if you add 10°C to 10°C you still get 10°C, not 20°C.
Because an intensive property cannot be added, it cannot be averaged.
Any derived figure is merely a statistic. This is because a measurement of temperature is not a measurement of quantity. Ie if you have a bath of water at 25°C, and a cup of water at 5°C, their ‘average’ temperature would be some amalgam between the two, and entirely different if their temperatures were swapped.
Frightening to think that a scientific absurdity is the basis for nearly all the models they use to alarm us.
Many people will not understand what you are saying. But yes, there are some things that lose their meaning when you average them, and temperature is one of those things, mainly because it isn’t an amount of anything. It is just a condition.
Averages are derivations and are not tangible or observable so cannot be measured and compared.
Ever seen “the average man” or “average woman”?
Climate is an average. It does not exist. Ever seen “bad climate”, has a flight ever been delayed or cancelled due to bad climate?
Climate change, as portrayed by the Cult, is an illusion. A trick.
Most people are unaware that “average” when it comes to something like temperature is just a mathematical construct. If you take a temperature in Australia and another in Iceland and calculate some average of the two, the number you get is not actually the temperature of anything. It is just a statistic. Most people will not realise that when they hear on their TV news that “Global Average Temperature” has risen by 1 C that there is no such thing . All temperature is local
When the average temperature rises, is the Summer hotter, or the Winter warmer? Or is it a bit of both?
To continue the bath analogy, if you pull the plug out the temperature of the water in the bath remains the same even down to the last drop (you can float an insulating layer on the surface if you are a pedant and insist on taking into account heat losses to the local environment).
Are there other analogies you could share to help me understand this please? I think what people are saying is if location a is 10c and location b is 20c, then halfway between the is calculated as 15c… and this is incorrect?
Mathematically it is not incorrect, it is meaningless.
Because London is 20C and Edinburgh is 10C, that won’t mean Leeds is 15C because it’s in the middle.
Averages create fractions not present in the data used. 25C + 12C / 2 = 18.5C. Where did 0.5C come from?
The average temperature where you live will change between breakfast and lunch, between noon and midnight. So?
The problem stems from conflating temperature with heat.
Changes in temperature – as per your 25C water + cup of 5C water – do not mean heat content has changed.
Changes in average global surface temperatures – leaving aside the absurdity – does not give any information about change in heat within the Earth’s climate system, not least because of continuous interchange of heat between atmosphere and oceans.
At present there is a (cooling) La Niña event which will change global temperatures,,, but that won’t change the heat content of the whole system.
Yet La Niña’s sibling, El Niño which increases surfaces temperatures is “evidence” of Manmade global warming and the Planet “heating up”, whereas it is just moving heat around.
However the “settled” scientists can dupe the general public with their confected numbers showing “warming”.
Their case for a global average temperature would be helped if there was a proper global network of temperature stations, but there isn’t and not just because of the oceans as the global map of where they aren’t is a shocker. Then of course as we know from the Met Office most of those that do exist are junk sites or worse are just made up.
Yes, the interview was revealing of his arrogance and waffle. I imagine they work on the basis that if they keep talking there is no time for others to refute what is said.
PS could the DS (Will Jones?) produce some basis metrics for us hoi polloi to take into the world:
For instance if our electricity prices are high due to gas use is it because we use more gas than anyone else! I doubt it.
Or what price do we pay for imported gas (15-20% sometimes); is that price really contingent on wholesale gas prices?
Is the cheap price they quote for renewables stripped of the subsidy we pay through taxes?
Some basic graphs of these metrics would be great.
Paul Homewood, on his site: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/
Regularly updates such numbers. Kathryn Porter also contributes some really interesting stuff: https://watt-logic.com/about-watt-logic/
Thanks
This guy says “case closed” and all energy experts agree. —–Nope.— Kathryn Porter, does not agree and you can find her on X. Robert Bryce does not agree, Michael Economides does not agree, Vaclav Smil does not agree. If I can come up with energy people who don’t agree off the top of my head why is this person saying everyone agrees? This is the usual Green argument from authority that states if all experts agree then so should you.
“The efforts of a small number of people to undermine the integrity of Met Office observations by obscuring or misrepresenting the facts is an attempt to undermine decades of robust science around the world’s changing climate.“
There is no single climate on Earth but 30 or so, based on the standard Köppen-Geiger climate classification (see below). If there is a single Earth climate then it would be classified as follows?
Tropical, Rainforest, Monsoon, Savanna – dry winter, Savanna – dry summer, Dry, Arid desert, Semi-arid steppe, Hot, Cold, Temperate, Dry winter, No dry season, Dry summer, Hot summer, Warm summer, Cold summer, Continental, Dry winter, No dry season, Dry summer, Hot summer, Warm summer, Cold summer, Very cold winter, Polar, Tundra, Ice cap.
That just about covers all bases which is what climate science tends to do – Heads they win, Tails we lose.
“nine times cheaper than gas”——–But gas is full time energy, and wind is part time. So comparing a full time thing to a part time thing means you are conveniently ignoring the cost of when the part time thing isn’t working ie when the wind isn’t blowing, which is often, and it will often blow at times we don’t need it, but the owners of the turbines still get paid in full. They get this incredible deal of fixed prices for the next 20 years because government are so desperate to comply with Net Zero, and they know that without the guaranteed prices and subsidies, no one would ever build a turbine. Owners of wind farms are basically subsidy farmers.
I haven’t gone back to listen again, and I was walking the dog at the time, so may have misunderstood but, he appeared to be saying that gas has to be used when the wind blows, and gas has to be used when the wind doesn’t blow so get rid of gas?
The logical answer is get rid of wind/solar as the grid clearly manages without them but can’t manage without gas.
Yes – good isn’t it?
I think it’s called cognitive dissonance. If wind/solar were so cheap, there would be no gas or coal generation – market forces.
The old claim of not enough wind/solar to replace coal or gas is gone, since there is now an over production of wind/solar on such a scale it far exceeds demand… only when the wind blows and the sun shines of course.
So they have to square the circle – get rid of gas, but still need gas. This explains the current fantasies about storage batteries, flywheels, carbon capture, green hydrogen.
They know so-called renewables won’t work, but cannot admit it, so they have to tie themselves in knots insisting they can, and fossil fuels will be abandoned.
But everyone knows the sun goes round the earth, you can literally see this with your own eyes, and anyone who disagrees is a heretic and should be burnt at the stake…. How times change, but nothing happens overnight where religion is concerned…..
Yes, it’s a pity the interview didn’t include a discussion of intermittency and the futility of increasing wind capacity.
“… conveniently ignoring the cost of when the part time thing isn’t working…”
And ignoring the cost of the full time thing that has to plug the gaps.
Pretending you need to be an ‘expert’ to understand all the mysterious ‘top shelf’ information people like Paul Dorfman claim to know is how they’ve kept the scam going for so long.
Since when did you need to be an ‘energy expert’ to read graphs and understand how a socialist captured free market economy plunges down the toilet?
People at the top of their professions feel they have “made it” and don’t need to learn any more, just bask in their glory.
It’s trite, but it’s a case of old dogs and new tricks.
They are consulted as “the” experts, but the fact is they are mostly out of date. New discoveries have come along all the time, but they resist them as it would mean their professional juniors know more and are a threat. They will do anything to protect their status, privilege and reputation until retirement.
This is why Government get such bad advice. They consult the top of the professions, but would be better off consulting middle rankers who will be more up to date and less conceited.
Someone remarked, science advances one death at a time.
Dorfman is merely an educated (i.e. indoctrinated) fool who has such poor command of his subject that he must resort to insults when challenged.
Richard Feynman was a scientist:
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says ‘science teaches such and such’, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it” (The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, p.187).
https://philosophynow.org/issues/114/Richard_Feynmans_Philosophy_of_Science.
Richard Feynman would have rejoiced in hearing a valid or interesting counter argument, seeing it as a means of progressing his own understanding.
The days of trusting “the experts” disappeared 5 years ago and will never return.
How patronising that academic was! I don’t know how Ben kept his cool so well. I would have exploded if I had been patronised like that.
I work occasionally as a volunteer and one of the others is a professor (who incidentally incudes “professor” in his email id). He cannot be disagreed with, and if you try he becomes agressive and then refuses to talk. That is possibly fine in his area of speciality, but extends to everything.
He is not worth working with, even for a good cause.
Totally agree about Plato and the same thing struck me when I read “The Republic” many years ago. TLDR “Clever, wise, benevolent people should be in charge – people like me!”
The “we don’t need people who suggest otherwise..” phrase reminds me of something that a BBC “journalist” wrote to me in an email during “Covid”: “We have no obligation to give a platform to erroneous ideas…the speakers were not expressing mainstream views that would benefit from airing and debate.”
“Clever, wise, benevolent people should be in charge – people like me!”
The argument of the liberal left since, well, Plato, probably…
The idea that wind is ‘free’ is, simply, a nonsense. By the same metric, coal, gas, oil and uranium are also free. The problem is getting them from their free state to the socket in your house. The test is whether the product can be utilised to recreate the method of harvesting its energy, which is why the Chinese are opening coal fired stations at a prodigious rate, rather than relying on wind and solar to run their heavy industry base.
Last dance of the desperate. “The efforts of a small number of people to undermine the integrity of Met Office observations by obscuring or misrepresenting the facts…” Echos of small number of “Far Right thugs”. Establishment in trouble, invents some amorphous group to blame to excuse their behaviour and imply it’s a tiny majority and the majority concur. The Climatism Cult were on the rocks five years ago with a lukewarm Trump in the White House, but were saved by Biden who went full steam ahead towards the Net Grifto cliff. Now that a defiant Trump is back, the whole apparatus is being dismantled, the scam being exposed for what it is. Climatism cannot force itself on the World or survive without the USA on board. Canada and the EU are set to introduce green trade tariffs – proving they have learnt nothing – and Trump will just clobber them some more until they back down. Natural gas wholesale prices rose from 25p per therm in August 2020 to a peak of 702p per therm in August 2022, then fell sharply to around 60p per therm in August 2024 and is currently 78p per therm. If natural gas prices were… Read more »
“Undermining… robust science” is how science is done, and how it progresses.
Good point.
Einstein – I think – one thousand experiments do not prove a theory, but it takes just one to disprove it.
I think it was Hundert Autoren Gegen Einstein (One Hundred Authors Against Einstein) a paper authored by Hans Israel appealing to consensus in criticising Einsteins theory of relativity in 1930s. Einsteins retort was “ why a hundred? If one was right that would be enough. Appeal to Consensus is used by the ‘climate science’ charlatans
The UK’s, “Energy Transition,” and the consequent, “Great Grid Upgrade,” are boondoggles in the style of HS2. Only rewarding to Government subsidy grifters. Completely unaffordable piglets on the taxpayer funded teat. Like this lot:
https://www.nationalgrid.com/the-great-grid-upgrade/whats-happening
Just as many shout I am Spartacus, it is time for all of us free thinkers to rise up and cry we are Galileo in the face of the evil climate change scientists. They might as well walk around in red skirts like Italian cardinals threatening us with an inquisition and damnation in the way of the middle ages science deniers. Well, I am Galileo Galilei and I reject the religious ignorance they are trying to enforce on me, but unlike Galileo, I will never recant whatever they threaten me with, safe in the knowledge we will be proved right.
Several things: the Prof from Uni of Sussex always a university with very green/left ideology sits alongside Brighton – the alternative town. Nothing wrong with either of those things in a free society but this interview did not display the intellectual curiousness, courtesy or any form of listening skills that an academic should employ. Dreadful display of closed mind thinking. I thought it was awful! We now have a huge increase of population which our governments both past & present seem unable or unwilling to control. No one knows exactly how many live here, who & where they are (except perhaps the food retailers, the power & water suppliers & the waste disposal industry (including sewage). Like it or not (& I don’t) we have to have a plan to supply these physical demands. Now these dreadful things are built – the windmills, solar & accompanying infrastructure we almost don’t have a choice but to let them be finished & be used till they can be scrapped. Surely the most important thing is to make sure no more damage is done for the future. That means scrapping the next round of energy subsidies – the AR7 & any other energy… Read more »
Having listened to this, the professor is worse than I thought. He starts out with a plausible, Starmer-like, claim and assertion, but after that its just a series of circular arguments, and snide insults.
Richard Feynman explained the scientific method:
“I’m going to discuss how we would look for a new law. In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess, then – well, don’t laugh that’s really true. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what if this is right. If this law that we guessed is right, we see what it would imply. And then we compare those computation results to nature, or we say compared to experiment or experience. Compare it directly with observations to see if it if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong – that’s all there is to it.”
https://youtu.be/EYPapE-3FRw?si=g_alFtXJGUCY9h0R
“Climate Science” is the exact opposite of actual science.
“[I]ncompetence, having been standardized, has now become an essential part of professional excellence. We have no longer incompetent professionals, we have professionalized incompetence.” Paul Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society, p. 183.
That ‘Prof’, what a condescending self important prig.
Well done Ben, you deserve real credit for that TV debate. Worth mentioning next time that gas is also, like wind, effectively free once you have drilled the well and built the pipes. There is just a massive difference between marginal cost and price in almost all areas of market economics!
Any time the met office is brought into a discussion of climate, I have to laugh. For a number of yrs now they insist chem trails are…..contrails. They then give a two page explanation including chem trails are just conspiracy theories. Sadly taxpayers foot the bill for their nonsense. They are gagged. By whom?
Professor Willie Soon, astrophysicist and many other scientists have much to say on weather manipulation. Dane Whittington who publishes GeoengineeringWatch.net is well worth a listen.
This is a masterpiece. It addresses many of the problems that Science has, in general, as a discipline, in failing to be rigourous.
The Green Agenda worse than Fantasy, as Fantasy is credible, but skips over Truths. This article describes untruths, and even worse, for financial gain, and increased influence and prestige.
Hopefully, this article will help in the destruction of a wealth destroying industry that we can do without.
As Richard Feynman said, “it isn’t the questions that can’t be answered that worry me, it is the answers that can’t be questioned” . This is something that should worry everyone.
All true scientists should be prepared to meet criticism. If a published paper appears to have flaws, then these should be documented. If a paper contradicts another (whether the other is “settled science” or not, then there should be a science-based analysis that compares method and results. If new evidence comes to light that causes a conclusion to become doubtful or invalid then this must be acknowledged. Many of those who decry climate change “deniers” simply shout and bluster. If they are to have any credibility they should be able to pick to pieces the hypotheses, arguments and data of those whose conclusions differ – and share that. If they cannot, but refuse to acknowledge their failure, then they are not true scientists, who must always have an open mind and be prepared to change their opinion. I my case I blindly accepted the case for statins until research showed trial design flaws, data manipulation and lack of physiological sense; I had my Covid “vaccine” and boosters until new research outlined the risks; and I believed the official climate change narrative until, likewise, the flaws in data collection and manipulation were laid bare. Steve Kirsch issued a challenge, backed by… Read more »