See also: Lindzen 2008: Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?Today, in his Wall Street Journal article, he describes not only the reasons why the public should not believe the statements that the carbon dioxide emissions are bringing us closer to the armageddon but especially the intense intimidation campaign that the scientists who reach politically incorrect conclusions have to face.
One of the topics that Lindzen talks about are the double standards in the journals where non-alarmist articles about the climate are commonly refused without review as being without interest. I have already learned how it works which is why I recommended Steve McIntyre not to spend too much time trying to get his articles published in "mainstream" journals. But the main focus of Lindzen's discussions seems to be funding. Funding is something that is cut for all of those who indicate the obvious - namely that science offers no justification for bizarre policies such as the Kyoto protocol.
On the other hand, the funding of climate science as such has grown nearly by one order of magnitude since 1988. Have you ever seen $1.7 billion, the amount that the climate science swallows annually? Or one point seven billion dollars a year worth of mostly junk science? It's not just the overall macroscopic number we are familiar with. I also know some of the microscopic mechanisms that generate it.
Harvard energy initiative
On Monday, we had a faculty lunch meeting at the Faculty Club and one of the topics was the so-called "Harvard energy initiative". A short story is that a large amount of money was given to something described by these three words - and up to 10 new faculty positions are expected to be created - except that no one knows what "Harvard energy initiative" means and what people should be hired.
So one of the rather well-known Earth and Planetary Scientists at Harvard decided to meet with the physics department and to ask for ideas what "Harvard energy initiative" could mean. I know what "high energy physics" means - we study physics of high-energy particles to determine the architecture of matter at very short distances - but what is "energy science"? When Feynman was reviewing the physics textbook that had the answer "Energy makes it go" to all questions "What makes it go?", he noticed that if the book had said "Wakalixes make it go", the children would have learned exactly the same amount of science, namely zero.
Energy is the quantity that is conserved whenever the physical laws enjoy the time-translational symmetry, as explained by Emmy Noether, and it is the popular term for a more accurate notion of a Hamiltonian that generates the evolution in time.
Obviously, our colleague has a different energy in mind. Energy whose main feature is that it is not conserved. Energy that does not commute with momentum because whenever energy has to commute, we lose energy. ;-) It's more about the energy industry except that the initiative will quite obviously be anti-industry because of the very basic philosophical preconceptions of those who are trying to kickstart the project. If you think for a while, you know exactly what will most likely happen.
They will probably hire a couple of not-so-intelligent people and promote them to climate scientists and energy initiative professors who will strengthen the "scientific consensus" that the "climate change is real" and the humankind is approaching a catastrophe. They won't be developing any new energy technologies because this is what either the greedy corporations or MIT are doing. Harvard's image is different and its energy initiative will be doing something else except that no one knows what it is.
The proposed energy initiative should include the Physics Department, Earth and Planetary Sciences, the Kennedy School of Government, the Harvard Law School, and virtually any other Harvard school you can think of. Great. So what kind of science will you do by combining these people?
Note that the university in this story, namely Harvard University, is not such a bad school after all. In fact, it is the most prestigious school in the world. Once you see what mechanisms determine how the new money is spent at Harvard, you may guess how good an investment are the billions of new dollars that are currently flowing to the U.S. climate science every year. Most of this amount is wasted money paid to the people who don't want to make progress in science.
Instead, they have already decided that they already know the most important insights about the world - that it is approaching a climate apocalypse - and by being paid, they do what is really important, namely to increase the political power of the "true believers" who are going to "save the world". Yes, indeed, I am talking about $1.7 billion worth of religious bigots, and I apologize to the few exceptions for this generalization.
It is completely clear that the only interdisciplinary project that can be created along these lines will be based on alarmists with a strong interest in politicization of science. The project will provide us with new, more efficient and more straightforward mechanisms how to start with junk science (climate science departments), directly translate them to political decisions (Kennedy School of Government), and give this whole process credibility (Physics Department). In fact, I forgot the Law School. When you realize that the Law School is also a part of the game, you learn that the goal is nothing else than to officially create the LSM complex, as Michael Crichton calls it.
If you ask a reasonable person, also known as a climate skeptic, of course that she would never spend billions of dollars for energy initiatives that have actually nothing to do with the technology. Only the alarmists and politicized thinkers have the desire to create this "new kind of [interdisciplinary] science" which is why more or less every million spent for the climate science or energy initiatives will be used to increase the already gigantic amount of the climate change and anti-corporate stupidities that surround all of us and to increase the intensity with which the last reasonable people in their field are being intimidated and threatened.
Every responsible politician and policymaker should try to find effective ways to slash the funding of "global climate science" and various non-technological "energy initiatives" at least by a factor of two.
Some extra frequently read climate articles on this blog
