I am travelling this week.
I had an interesting – if rather depressing – discussion with a fellow traveler (a patent lawyer) at the airport yesterday. The discussion turned to the manner in which science which happened to be “in fashion” became political movements and the manner in which science itself took on politically correct dimensions.
Sometimes – as with eugenics – the political movement came first and the science followed to fit the movement. In fact, his contention was that even where the science had come first, the development of a political movement would always lead to subsequent science being constrained to support the imperatives of the movement.
I brought up the caase of AGW and how an uncertain science – in my opinion – had been hijacked by a political movement such that one particular hypothesis – which has still to be proven – had become the only politically correct or allowable science. I suggested that real observations might change what was considered politically correct. Since global temperature – if such a thing can be defined – has been declining for the last decade even though carbon dioxide has been increasing, I expected that new science would have to take these real observations into account in their mathematical modelling and that the strength of the dogma would eventually decrease.
My companion however disagreed. He suggested that all political movements had to be fundamentally and economically viable to survive. If the movement was lucrative – as AGW had become – then there would be a vested interest in maintaining the science it was based on even if the facts said otherwise. This would be achieved, he argued, by the “Science” allowing or accounting for some deviations – as for example with explanations made up for why a decade or two of cooling could occur without disturbing the central thesis of the “Science”. He cited medical science and examples of purported treatments which were continued for long periods after they were discredited because of the revenues that they were generating. He suggested that the chemical industry was the prime driver for the banning of some refrigerants (based on now outdated ozone depletion science) just so that they could shift production to newer refrigerants having much higher margins. Similarly he felt that the environmental benefits of switching to low energy lamps was minuscule but the lighting industry much preferred the margins and revenues generated by these to those generated by incandescent light bulbs which were suffering from intense competition.
His conclusion was that since the AGW “industry” was generating large revenues whether through carbon trading schemes or by the extraction of subsidies from taxpayer money for so-called “green” energy or “green” fuels, then the vested interest in showing that any conflicting measurements were a temporary aberration would be very strong. Since the timescales of climate change were in the order of hundreds of years, he felt that a mere 20 or 30 years of inconvenient measurements would do little to dent the momentum of a successful revenue generating “science”!!!
He made some good points. I am afraid that even 3 decades of cooling or the start of a mini-ice age will probably not suffice to dampen the ardour of the global warming enthusiast as long as the revenues from growing bio-fuels or getting subsidies for “green” energy keep rolling in. The AGW religion and its corresponding “science” will stop only if the revenues stop.
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