Climate of Fear (pt. 2)
Some may think that stating absolute rebuttal of science as a path to truth is outrageous. Most, at this early moment in it’s not yet transparent decline, probably would. But it is, as we shall see, something that will become more and more obvious in the future.
(part 1)

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Much ado ‘bout nothing The idea that “world system” is endangered by human existence in the way that the very conditions of life on Earth are diametrically opposed to the “greatest good of the greatest number”, has reached it’s most perfect explication in a hypothesis that man-made greenhouse gases are significantly altering the “greatest good” of the planet itself. The irony of the fundamental Enlightenment idea, epistemologically rooted in extreme empiricism, that material well being of the greatest number of people is quantifiable principle of ethics and, paradoxically, the basis of politics striving to curb either the quantity of the “greatest good” or the quantity of the “greatest number” – preferably both – is usually lost to it’s contemporary proponents, although it was recognized in good, gentlemanly – and quite a bit deranged – humor by it’s inventors, from Helvetius to Bentham. Now, however, we are witnessing it’s to date greatest bid to epistemological and political dominance, having supposed “97%” of scientific community unconsciously or consciously pushing it by action or omission of counteraction. The COP21 is veritable example of the complete, utter and methodical lunacy of policy makers biding for overt – and this means: popularly recognized – global governance. This is transparent from the claim that both Post 2015 Development Agenda or Agenda 2030 – the latest iteration of the sustainable development doctrine – and COP21 Paris Summit are expressions of the collective will of the people – they are here “of the people, for the people and by the people”.
No one in his right mind could make such inference knowing that only tiny percentage of people in the world ever heard of, let alone read and approve of, blueprint for implementation of sustainable development until 2030, and that “climate change” is not widely recognized as a most pressing problem of humanity. Yet both statements have been made by leaders of COP21 and UN 70th summit in New York, the whole shebang being blessed by the Pope of Rome. It is also quite certain that people making those statements, be it Ban-Ki-Moon, Obama or Figueres, know that they are not true, yet they are holding them as self-evident truths. If we take, for instance, the UN polls on popular concerns about world problems, the “climate change” firmly stands it’s ground at the very bottom of the scale, indicating clearly that no one either believes in or gives a damn about it anymore.

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Yet, in the aftermath of COP21, we witness an eruption of self-congratulations over highly unsuccessful – at least from the standpoint of alarmists – agreement that failed to meet it’s real purpose, i.e. to finally bully the UN members into signing something legally binding. While the aim was to legally bind the governments in their obligations towards jettisoning CO2 producing energy sources, and keeping the “world temperature” under 2 C until the end of the century, it all ended up with “strongly urging” the “parties” to keep to the promises given by their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC), i.e. member states’ pledges on decrease in national emissions of green house gases, which will be reviewed every five years; the agreement is non-binding and can be coped out, as “at any time after three years from the date on which this Agreement has entered into force for a Party, that Party may withdraw from this Agreement by giving a written notification – -. 2. Any such withdrawal shall take effect upon expiry of one year from the date of receipt – – of the notification of withdrawal.“ (PA, ibid.). The novelty of COP21 should have also been a certain leveling of obligations between rich and developing countries, aptly symbolized by Gambia taking the lead with the heroic pledge for “absolute and unconditional emissions reduction.” However, apparently nothing new came out of it: the intended 300 billion dollars green fund is reduced to 100 and governments are “strongly urged to scale up their level of financial support, with a concrete roadmap to achieve the goal of jointly providing USD 100 billion annually by 2020 for mitigation and adaptation.” (PA IV, 54). COP21 was advertised as a turning point in UN policy which will bring about shall instead of strong urging but world is, alas, not united as of yet and, we’ll venture a guess: it will never be. The climate change as a designated bogeyman is slowly on the way out. According to some independent sources, this is mainly due to series of scandals summed up under the name “Climategate” and demolition of the credibility of so-called “hockey stick graph”.
Climategate This process began in November 2009. when a collection of 4000 emails was stolen and leaked to the public from servers of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, institution whose scientific staff was tasked with “analyzing and collating the various measurements of temperature from around the globe and that, going back for many years, collectively underpinned the central scientific argument that mankind’s liberation of “greenhouse” gases—particularly carbon dioxide—was leading to a relentless, unprecedented and ultimately catastrophic warming of the entire planet.“ (source) For all intents and purposes those are the people who provide the value-basis of world system with it’s empirical justification, i.e. they are in effect the heart of phantom 97% consensus, infusing the life-blood into ‘enemy image’ to unite the world.
Namely, as is obvious from one portion of email correspondence, the scientists at one moment in 1999. faced dire predicament – they ran into methodological contradiction which they then tried to solve by committing, what good number of their colleges called: outright fraud. The result of this is famous hockey stick graph, displaying the sharp increase in global mean temperature throughout the later part of twentieth century. Now, we ask reader to remember something. The meaning of the graph – besides “proving” man-made global warming, as the rise of temperature is exclusively correlated to increase in green house gases emissions – rests upon the fact that it unwittingly displays political purpose of global warming with glaring clarity. Namely, up to 2. IPCC report of 1995., the historical record of climate change recognized the existence of the so called “Medieval warm period”, lasting, roughly, from 1000. to late 1300.’s AD. This period was followed by progressive cooling reaching it’s low point in the “Little ice age” from 1560. – 1830., when there is again warming, gaining constancy in about 1910., and keeping steady pace until now, with much disputed but acknowledged pause of roughly from 1996. to until last year. The hockey stick graph, which was for the first time revealed to the public in April of 1999. edition of Nature (vol. 392), remedied this, rather inconvenient, historically based climate model. The graph, authored by Michael Mann et al., purported to show that 1998. was the warmest year in 1000 years period, effectively trumping Medieval warm period and bringing to attention of world public the fact that they are living out completely novel historical situation, something they cannot collate to any known past historical moment. Furthermore, this situation is obviously escalating towards the future, bearing implications of clear and present danger. Historical record of Medieval warm period was jettisoned by interpreters on the grounds of either being a local phenomena or unreliability of historiography and it’s inferiority to mathematical models gained by so called proxies, i.e. the items through which natural science can infer about past events by examining the various selected, methodically observable, material imprints. In the case of hockey stick, proxies used were tree rings selected from the various locations, displaying the natural temperature records and thus providing scientists with ability to calculate and then model the image of the past.
Nowadays, there’s a lot of talk about virtues of skepticism and rigor of natural sciences; of all those heroes like Newton, Darwin or Einstein who had to endure severe criticism and ruthless – downright darwinian – testing of their findings because they challenged established truths. No such thing happened to Michael Mann and his accomplices. Hockey stick made rounds through scientific publications and media only to be conveniently appropriated by Al Gore for his “global warming” campaign. Those critics who expressed doubts about reliability of proxies like tree-rings were deemed either oil industry mercenaries – a slur maintained to this day on that summit of knowledge, Wikipedia – or basement dwelling non-entities. The thing was peer-reviewed, the science has spoken, the third IPCC report appropriated the colorful image and NGO-media-policy outlets provided the music track with familiar refrain: “We must act now!”. The peculiarity of this leap of faith on behalf of “scientific community” – in fact it’s media image – was appropriately summed up by geologist Don Easterbrook:
„Both Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age have long been well established and documented with strong geologic evidence. Georef lists 485 papers on the Medieval Warm period and 1413 on the Little Ice Age for a total of 1,900 published papers on the two periods. Thus, when Mann et al. (1998) contended that neither event had happened and that climate had not changed in 1000 years (the infamous hockey stick graph), geologists didn’t take them seriously and thought either (1) the trees they used for their climate reconstruction were not climate sensitive, or (2) the data had been inappropriately used. As shown in the 1,900 published papers, the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age most certainly happened and the Mann et al. ‘hockey stick’ is nonsense, not supported by any credible evidence.“ (source)
But one of the proverbial basement dwelling oil industry mercenaries – a climate denier, as the contemporary slur goes – was making inquiries about raw data and program code used to produce the hockey stick. This was Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre who was curios about the graph but was also engaged by IPCC to do the audit on it’s pending draft report. The most interesting part of the Climategate emails consists in correspondence between Mann and his colleges concerning their efforts to deny stubborn Canadian the data he persistently requested. The reason for this was simple: the blade of the hockey stick, i.e. the part purportedly showing sharply increasing temperature was a result of deleting the data from tree ring proxies and substituting it with calculations of temperatures measured conventionally during the period. Why would Mann do something like that if the tree rings were so reliable as to jettison few hundred years of history? Simply: because they weren’t. There were two graphs using different sets of tree rings as proxies, one by Mann and other by his college Briffa. The trouble was that Briffa’s graph displayed a sharp decline in temperature precisely where the corresponding real-time temperature measurements indicated it’s rise. This means that something was wrong with proxies and that the results of both graphs are falsified. The researchers then employed something they called, “Mike’s Nature trick”, i.e. in order to “hide the decline”, Michael Mann simply jettisoned tree rings data and inserted and further smoothed the data of completely different nature to model the bella figura so convenient to serve as an advertisement for selling the “inconvenient truth” of catastrophic global warming to gullible public. Naturally, this conclusion, reached by whole range of scientists, was immediately attacked and refuted, only for refutation to be attacked and refuted back by them, and the polemics still rages on. For our purpose, however, the most important thing is compulsive need of Mann et al. to “hide the decline”. As is clear from leaked emails their motive was pettiness, urge to keep their credibility, almost religious zeal for defending the honor of “global warming”, peer pressure and so on and so forth. All things considered, quite insignificant worries of quite insignificant individuals unwittingly pursuing quite insignificant errand on behalf of preexisting political model, whose creators were seeking value-basis for governable world-system in the hitherto relatively insignificant branch of natural sciences. The foremost public critics of global warming, in view of their balanced stance, credentials and intelligence, are, in undersigned’s opinion, Richard Lindzen, Judith Curry and Steve McIntyre, and anyone who wants to know more would do good to listen to what they have to say on the matter. However, as we shall see in the following lines, perhaps the right, and indeed: quite scientific thing to do, would be to try to do the opposite, i.e. to know less.
Eradication of past As we have seen in part 1 of this analysis, world modeling is an a priori procedure of setting up the model of the system and then observing it’s behavior in relation to it’s purpose. Not one point of this procedure is initially taken from methodical empirical observations – they are introduced later, in order to be, as authors of PM bluntly stated, “penetrated and manipulated”. However, all of this fancy talk hides the real nature of ‘system’, ‘models’, ‘feedbacks’ etc. The real goal, the name of the game, is to artificially incite the revolution, taken as a state of completely novel situation, unlike, and unrelated to, anything that came to pass before it. It is a stated thesis of this analysis that “global warming” or “climate change” is it’s value-basis, i.e. continuous critical problem serving to unite all other disparate problems in one single image, one single face of the enemy. Global warming was appropriated for this task in 1989., shortly after publication of Bruntland Report, and somewhat pushed aside overpopulation, which nevertheless still lingers and is in fact the main worry of political modelers with globalist ambitions. The main advantage of climate catastrophe – and, remember, in the range of potential feindbilds from First Global Revolution it was just one among equals such as pollution, hunger, etc. – is reliance of climate scientists on computer models which emulate the future state of the imagined world-system. Thus, model based science was well disposed to construct the world entirely in virtual space and serve it on a plate – stamped with the label ‘reality’. The successful revolution would be the one that can completely eradicate and remodel the past in order to show that our present moment is continuously novel. Hockey stick graph is in this regard a dream come true – a perfect image to, in a very literal sense, capture imagination of people. It clearly shows that we can disregard the past and that “the predicament of mankind” requires total reboot of entire system. Unconscious complicity of tiny number of scientists to this megalomaniacal political push is obvious from Climategate emails in which they feverishly endeavor to “get rid of the Medieval warm period”. Why would this period be so perilous for an idea that “the end is at hand”? Because it was warmer than these few dozen years everybody deems so unique, even in their potential for disaster? No. It was warmer and it was by no means catastrophic as we can deduce by simply reading the records from that time, not to mention using whole range of proxies other than the tree rings, but that’s not the point. “Scientific consensus” could push the idea that the trend of anthropogenic warming will skyrocket even higher than this fuzzy, warm past world. But then it could not alter the past, and that is the main and sole purpose of the whole affair. Conspiratorial aspect of this is obvious but compartmentalized in the sense that petty little scientific conspiracy stems only from obliging the political authority that pushed this idea in the first place, mainly through UN Environmental Programme, aiding it’s main trust for model for global governance drafted in 1992. in the form of Agenda 21 document. In little more than decade the whole world encompassing agenda of sustainable development became based on, first, global warming and nowadays climate change, as the value-basis for standardization of social, economic and ecological systems. As we can see from the first days of Club of Rome, this value-basis fluctuated from resources scarcity and peak oil scare – relying on oil prices crises of early nineteen seventies – brief stint with global cooling, which didn’t pick up steam but was advertised remarkably similarly to global warming – to overpopulation, so prominent in Our Common Future from 1987. As one disappointed observer of COP21 noted:
“Peer pressure, and naming and shaming, long the preserve of NGOs and concerned citizenry, are now necessary ingredients that might make the Paris agreement stick with its signatories. It is a tall order, particularly given the political expediency of short-term views based on growth, and the remaining attractiveness of cheap energy such as coal or even oil. Sometimes before the Paris conference met, the notion of peak oil died amidst a flurry of new discoveries. Scarcity of resources had been an engine of change ever since the Club of Rome convened. We can no longer rely on that constraint to induce change, and big energy shifts may now have to face down economic rationality.“ (source)
The bolded passage, frankly, says it all. And here we must make a confession. To be honest to reader, I must confess that this analysis left a lot of work on the cutting floor. What you read about hockey stick, Climatgate and methodology of climate science are but few remarks from the body of opinion formed by reading whole pile of documents, Steve McIntyre’s statistical analysis, dozens of articles from both sides of “climate debate”, a crash course in the basic theory of greenhouse effect, figuring out how the global mean temperature is calculated, weighing the differences stemming from satellite and weather stations surface global temperature data, etc., etc. And all of this I fit in few lines of text saying in effect that people behind 97% are petty, half voluntary, scoundrels.
I did that, dear reader, because I was proven sucker. So, I’ll quote the SOB who proved me such again:
“ (…) the notion of peak oil died amidst a flurry of new discoveries. Scarcity of resources had been an engine of change ever since the Club of Rome convened. We can no longer rely on that constraint to induce change, and big energy shifts may now have to face down economic rationality”
There you have it. Peak oil and scarcity bullshit doesn’t fly anymore, so we’ll have to ditch that constraint and finally induce our global revolution no matter what. By repeating ‘science is settled’ mantra, climate alarmists provoked one consequent dialectical reaction from their opponents, perfectly expressed by Richard Lindzen’s: “science is never settled”. However, from the standpoint of truth, Lindzen’s correct inference not only refutes junk science.
It, in fact, puts in question all modern science.

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Poverty of Science Some may think that stating absolute rebuttal of science as a path to truth is outrageous. Most, at this early moment in its not yet transparent decline, probably would. But it is, as we shall see, something that will become more and more obvious in the future. In that respect, paradoxically, climate alarmists, who will in the future be proven factually wrong, are far more consequent in their methodology than honest scientists like Lindzen. In order to demonstrate this, we’ll turn to Lindzen’s extremely insightful article “Climate Science: is it naturally designed to answer questions?” (source) In advance we can only affirm that our best answer would be to reformulate the title by omitting the qualifier ‘climate’, and then answer:
“No!”
In the article intended to show that climate science has lost it’s way due to political pressure of global warming hysteria, Lindzen starts by clearly defining the nature of modern science and how contemporary climate scientists miss their mark on this crucial fact:
„For a variety of inter-related cultural, organizational, and political reasons, progress in climate science and the actual solution of scientific problems in this field have moved at a much slower rate than would normally be possible. Not all these factors are unique to climate science, but the heavy influence of politics has served to amplify the role of the other factors. By cultural factors, I primarily refer to the change in the scientific paradigm from a dialectic opposition between theory and observation to an emphasis on simulation and observational programs. The latter serves to almost eliminate the dialectical focus of the former.“ (Lindzen, 1)
Being a classically educated man, Lindzen is able to use a precise word to define the method of science in general – it is the dialectic of dynamic conceptual framework (theory) and inductive reasoning (observation). He doesn’t, however, emphasize the fact that, at least in principle, these dialectical poles are not of equal value for contemporary scientists. Namely, observation, and by that is meant something very narrow and precise: data gained by sense perception or laboratory tools enhancing it, holds a clear primacy over theory which is a conceptualization of data synthesized in a structured, and logically coherent manner. While testing of theories in the sense of trying to refute them by logical analysis and observation, in order to determine do they stand up to “truth” of experience, is a conditio sine qua non of modern science, the opposite is deemed not only erroneous – and Lindzen will show that climate alarmists do precisely that – but, in a strict sense, impossible. This implies that “facts” of experience, in a narrow sense of “sensual data”, cannot be tested or, indeed, put into question once they are determined. This makes the object of sense perception, taken as an entirety of sensual experience, a metaphysical principle discriminating what is true and what is not. If the theory runs up against the “stubborn fact” as Bertrand Russell would put it, always it’s a theory that breaks apart, while the cocky, and usually quite ugly, “fact” proudly lingers to test the new theory, and so on and so forth. Lindzen sees this, as he would probably put it: essential and intrinsically healthy relationship between subject and object of scientific inquiry, as threatened throughout last 45 to 50 years, with “global warming” scare being the peak of somewhat longer process. Namely, it is the process of exchanging the said dialectical relationship of conceptual model – and ‘scientific theory’ is primarily a ‘model’ – and empirical objects for dialectics of simulation and observational programs. In a nutshell this means that where before there were simple observations of objects of sciences – from nature to society – now there are systems of interconnected empirical data, where connection is provided according to a predetermined model. The other side of dialectical pair is simulation of the behavior of this model in such-and-such circumstances, made possible by the advent of computer. Lindzen rightly argues that such approach tends to reverse the dialectical relationship upside down by putting the model before observation, and if the observation occurs to contradict it, then it is modified or discarded to fit the preexistent model. Of course, this is precisely the approach we have seen at work in context of Club of Rome, so we’ll reiterate a remarkable passage:
“The primary aim of modeling is to give the subject a shape, a structure, a configuration that is determined by an objective which, itself, is external to the subject. Hence the clarifications or insights that might be obtained from a successful modeling effort are never reached in terms of the subject (i.e., a problem or a situation) but in terms of the external objective to satisfy which the modeling was undertaken in the first place. Such an objective always entails a value, and the setting of it must therefore create the particular value-base that gives meaning and direction to the whole endeavor.” (PM, 21)

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Someone could object that this doesn’t apply to climate science, which supposedly deals with measurements and simulations first, but that would mean that someone forgot that every object needs a subject. No object of science is simply a quantum of sensual data, but is by the very nature of cognition – and one could rightly argue: by the very nature of the world itself – always apprehended as some form of unity and, if we assume that we cannot find this unity in the world, then the principle of unity is a subject, imagining non-apparent unity of nature. There’s no such thing as individual fact or, to use a metaphysical, term: pure individuum. Nothing proves this better like a demise of ill fated climate science at the peak of it’s success. Let us turn to Lindzen’s interpretation of hockey stick graph scam to further illustrate the point. Putting this in the context of few examples of overturning the scientific dialectic, here is how he describes the affair:
„The most infamous effort was that due to Mann et al (1998, 1999.) which used primarily a few handfuls of tree ring records to obtain a reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperature going back eventually a thousand years that no longer showed a medieval warm period (…) The study immediately encountered severe questions concerning both the proxy data and its statistical analysis (interestingly, the most penetrating critiques came from outside the field: McIntyre and McKitrick, 2003, 2005a,b). (…) Since the existence of a medieval warm period is amply documented in historical accounts for the North Atlantic region (Soon et al, 2003), Mann et al countered that the warming had to be regional but not characteristic of the whole northern hemisphere. Given that an underlying assumption of their analysis was that the geographic pattern of warming had to have remained constant, this would have invalidated the analysis ab initio without reference to the specifics of the statistics.“ (Lindzen, 12)
So, as we have pointed out earlier, the “scientists” simply rigged the simulation to fit the program or, in classical terms, ditched the observations in favor of theory. But it’s not that simple. Mann et al in fact, we can recall, when faced with contradiction between climate models, ditched the part of the simulation and inserted the facts, i.e. real temperature measurements. So, in the terms of standard scientific dialectics, their world model – because that’s what it really is – is as good as nothing. Lindzen argues that science is not about models but about “quantification” and it is not about being “settled” but being a “process”. The criterion by which the theories come to pass he describes in this way:
“Science has traditionally been held to involve the creative opposition of theory and observation wherein each tests the other in such a manner as to converge on a better understanding of the natural world. Success was rewarded by recognition, though the degree of recognition was weighted according to both the practical consequences of the success and the philosophical and aesthetic power of the success.“ (Lindzen, 2)
At this point, with all due repulsion, I must affirm that Lindzen is wrong and that his alarmist opponents are closer to truth, albeit not through their own merit and good intentions.
Climate scare and the end of modern science Namely, traditionally, science is not being held as a mean to converge conceptual models to better understanding of natural world, but as a disciplined way to attain the truth. Lindzen’s use of the word ‘tradition’ without qualification can only apply to a very recent historical period, almost converging with the end of the little ice age, and final dissolution of last attempts at metaphysics in classical German philosophy. Before this time, the Western world still held to dictum, for the last time reiterated by Hegel, that truth is true only if it is whole truth, i.e. an expression of unity which a priori transcends sense experience and it’s epistemological correlate: the individuum. Furthermore, the fact that “degree of recognition was weighted according to both the practical consequences of the success and the philosophical and aesthetic power of the success.”, only goes to show that ultimate value of modern science is first and foremost subjective, i.e. that in the end it is a value-basis, aesthetical or practical, that determines success, and not the truth. The truth, in fact, doesn’t apply at all.
The reason for this lies in the historical process, now reaching it’s reductio ad absurdum, of obfuscating the difference between science and technology, the difference between episteme and tehne. While the proper definition of science is best formulated in Plato and, to be honest: in apocryphal version, Aristotle as epopteia or theoria, i.e. synoptic – and this means: unified, mental intuition of unity of Being, on grounds of which any single genera of being can be recognized in it’s own truth, technique or technology is a knowledge of imitating the nature in order to successfully reach certain ends. It is noteworthy that technology is a process in which the end is always outside of process itself and determines it’s value. So for instance, we can’t say that man is morally more or less honest, but we can certainly say that he is more or less skillful in some kind of art, depending on how he accomplishes his task. Now we venture to affirm that modern “science” is being naturally evaluated like an activity of artisan, not of scientist in truly traditional sense. In this respect, endeavors of climate alarmists are in fact fairly consequent to the extent that they provide subjective gratification of certain people who support and finance them. The fact that those people are neo-malthusians doesn’t in the least change the nature of their work. While men like Lindzen are realistic and honest enough to recognize the limitations of their knowledge, they are essentially in grave error if they consider themselves scientists in the unqualified sense. By rejecting the pre-existing unity of Being, they are at the same time rejecting the possibility of science as such and with it any kind of criterion outside the subjective gratification. Lindzen himself provides us with an apt example of what this means in his exposition of historical change in gratification paradigm inside the American scientific community:
“In the aftermath of the Second World War, the major contributions of science to the war effort (radar, the A-bomb), to health (penicillin), etc. were evident (…)The next 20 years witnessed truly impressive scientific productivity which firmly established the United States as the creative center of the scientific world.(…) However, something changed in the late 60’s.(…) It is my impression that by the end of the 60’s scientists, themselves, came to feel that the real basis for support was not gratitude (and the associated trust that support would bring further benefit) but fear: fear of the Soviet Union, fear of cancer, etc. (…) If one thinks the basis is gratitude, then one obviously will respond by contributions that will elicit more gratitude. The perpetuation of fear, on the other hand, militates against solving problems. However, the end of the cold war, by eliminating a large part of the fear-base forced a reassessment of the situation. Most thinking has been devoted to the emphasis of other sources of fear: competitiveness, health, resource depletion and the environment.“ (Lindzen, 2 -3)
Lindzen’s insights here are remarkable. Further in the text he convincingly depicts how paradigm of fear worked to change the structure of scientific community and put in the forefront people well disposed to it, culminating in 1989. Senate hearing, when global warming scare really kicked off. It was chaired by Tim Wirth who brought the physicists James Hansen to publicly make an allegation that hot summer of 1988. was due to global warming. The noteworthy fact is that Wirth made sure the windows of the venue were open and air condition turned off in order for TV viewers to notice Hansen sweating (Lindzen, 16, f.19). The event incited creation of Climate Action Network, an umbrella NGO representing most of the global warming related NGO’s in the world. Reader interested in the nuts and bolts of how 97 % scientific consensus came about is well advised to consider Lindzen’s analysis, which more or less effortlessly debunks the whole thing.
However, let’s get back to his depiction of gratification paradigm. In quoted passage he obviously favors the gratitude principle which incites the science to solve individual problems, meaning: making weather forecast, detonating A bomb, building lunar module and such. Note that inside this paradigm there is no continuous critical problem of Club of Rome. Lindzen is rightly convinced that such thing as universal, systemic, problem does not exist. The fear paradigm, on the other hand, lives and feeds precisely on such problem, therefore it must imagine it. It is notable that change in paradigm occurred precisely at the time the Club of Rome was making it’s baby steps towards doom’n’gloom predictions, which was appropriated by UN only in 1972. to reach the peak-scare in 1989. with global warming value-base coming out of the closet. The problematique of such nature, being imaginary, pushes the science on the path of creating imaginary solutions and detracts from the solving of real problems, wasting money and resources, making it in the end a subject of well deserved public ridicule.

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However, both paradigms are false in a sense that they are not scientific, but technological. The only difference seemingly being that Lindzen has a healthy attitude towards his craft whereas climate scare proponents don’t. But, unfortunately, it goes deeper than that. What is in effect glaringly obvious from climate science is that it endeavors to be a science proper, i.e. metaphysics, but does this in inverted way. While metaphysics is the science of origins which puts it’s practitioner’s mind in the permanent touch (Greek: thigein) with the original unity of Being, disclosed in reflection of mind into itself, the climate science is trying to create this unity in an act of imagination, based on imagined unity of nature, understood as material, perceptible, universe. One is reminded of ancient notion – perfectly reiterated and affirmed by divine Logos of Gospel of John – of cosmic man, i.e. of cosmos as a perfect man, but this time around it is an artificial man, a veritable Frankestein monster, summed up in the term ‘system’. Because ‘system’ as a heuristic principle is completely anthropomorphic. It came about precisely in order to bridge the gap between disparate and ever branching sciences and give them unity, serving as their common object – a unified field of dreams, so to speak.
The inner break down of climate science, it’s blatant claim that no one uninitiated can understand it – even if he is a climate scientist of some special branch – went all down the line, and across the precipice, displaying in fact the inner conviction of modern science that not only there’s no certain object of science, but that there’s no certain knowledge, too. More than that, this goes to show that there’s only chaos expressed in mathematical hieroglyphs, a whirlwind of ever dissolving particles about which there’s in fact no knowledge. Not ‘no certainty’. No ‘knowledge’. One is reminded of relics of the past, failed, civilizations of Latin America which simultaneously performed mass human sacrifices and produced endless sophisticated calculations about the end of the world, only to be blown away by a handful of practically and bloody minded adventurers. What this means for Western civilization is anyone’s guess.
Branko Malić
Fascinating and quite entertaining, Branko; thank you.
On a somewhat relevant note, given your polemics against science I wonder what you would make of this argument by a certain fiction writer, R. Scott Bakker (his blog: https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/):
“For centuries now, science has been making the invisible visible, thus revolutionizing our understanding of and power over different traditional domains of knowledge. Fairly all the speculative phantoms have been exorcised from the world, ‘disenchanted,’ and now, at long last, the insatiable institution has begun making the human visible for what it is. Are we the last ancient delusion? Is the great, wheezing heap of humanism more an artifact of ignorance than insight? We have ample reason to think so, and as the cognitive sciences creep ever deeper into our biological convolutions, the ‘worst case scenario’ only looms darker on the horizon. To be a writer in this age is to stand astride this paradox, to trade in communicative modes at once anchored to our deepest notions of authenticity and in the process of being dismantled or worse, simulated. If writing is a process of making visible, communicating some recognizable humanity, how does it proceed in an age where everything is illuminated and inhuman? All revolutions require experimentation, but all too often experimentation devolves into closed circuits of socially inert production and consumption. The present revolution, I will argue, requires cultural tools we do not yet possess (or know how to use), and a sensibility that existing cultural elites can only regard as anathema. Writing in the 21st century requires abandoning our speculative past, and seeing ‘literature’ as praxis in a time of unprecedented crisis, as ‘cultural triage.’ Most importantly, writing after the death of meaning means communicating to what we in fact are, and not to the innumerable conceits of obsolescent tradition.”
coupled with
“Our present juncture is a post-posterity one. This is the big reason I see the intentional tradition as being obscurantist and apologetic rather than obscurantist and critical: we no longer have the luxury of arguing angels on pinheads. The worst case scenario is materializing before our eyes, and yet still only a handful of souls have committed themselves to exploring it in its own terms. Everyone–the vast bulk of scholarship–is devoted to rationalizing why this or that traditional conceit simply has to be the exception.
This is insane.”
Best Regards
“For centuries now, science has been making the invisible visible (…)”
No, it wasn’t.
Otherwise, thank you for your kind words and apologizes I haven’t provided you with an answer on one of the previous articles. As a principle I don’t defend what others have written, and I couldn’t get Philip to answer you (probably he forgot, we all have a lot of things on our minds).
Interesting response, but what exactly do you mean by your rejection? What Bakker means is that science is all the more, from its inception til today, been revealing the causal and actual over the mysterious and fantastic, i.e. when once some might have thought lightning bolts struck out of the arbitrary will of Zeus, now we know exactly the mechanisms that *actually* bring it about, and can therefore properly explain, measure, and predict.
In some other words: Historically, science tends to replace intentional explanations of natural phenomena with functional explanations. Since humans are a natural phenomena we can presume, all things being equal, that science will continue in the same vein, that intentional phenomena and ideas [souls, free will, meaning] are simply the last of the ancient delusions soon to be debunked
Added for extra pessimism (by the same man): “Humans are [ultimately] out and out stupid, that the only thing that makes us seem smart is that our nearest competitors are still sniffing each other’s asses to say hello. In the humanities in particular, we seem to forget that science is an accomplishment, and a slow and painful one at that. The corollary of this, of course, is that humans are chronic bullshitters. I’m still astounded at how after decades of rhetoric regarding critical thinking, despite millennia of suffering our own stupidity, despite pretty much everything you see on the evening news, our culture has managed to suppress the bare fact of our cognitive shortcomings [that religion, cults and fascist manipulators knows how to exploit oh so well], let alone consider it any sustained fashion.”
As for Philip, no worries; I appreciate that academics have a full enough schedule so as not to allow keeping track of servicing random internet commenters 😉
I consider the soul, spirit, purpose and other beings addressed by traditional metaphysics to be quite real. Modern science is unable to address them and henceforth unable to bring about the unified principle o knowledge which it nevertheless craves to establish. As for Zeus and lightnings, the polytheism is more often than not symbolic representation of intelligible reality. This is something Greek philosophers wrote at length about (Proclus, for instance). And this reality implies causal relations that can be depicted only by taking into account man’s higher cognitive faculties, i.e. activity of mind or rational soul, because they are more akin to them than what we perceive in environment. Irony of modern science is that, once rendered unable to make use of these faculties, it proceeded to construct a make-shift copies of them, the ultimate one to date being notion of the system.