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Jan. 2011, "Why the left loves the lies of climate "science,"" Right Network by Donald Sensing
"Climate science's only product is political because its only patrons are politicians. It's of no benefit to anyone else. Climate modeling cannot be used to do anything except what is being done with it - promote statist control over ever-expanding slices of national economies to conform to a transnationalist ideology. If climate science could be used to do anything else, it would already be happening.
- But have you ever heard of any report of climate science's findings not used to prop up expanding the power of the state or trans-state organs?
Exhibit A: Ottmar Edenhofer
German economist Ottmar Edenhofer is co-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change. He was the lead author of the IPCC's 2007 report. He told Germany's Neue Zurcher Zeitung in November, as reported by Investors.com:
"The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War."
Edenhofer let the environmental cat out of the bag when he said "climate policy is redistributing the world's wealth" and that "it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the
- major themes of globalization." ...
Edenhofer claims "developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community" and so they must have their wealth expropriated and redistributed to the victims of their alleged crimes, the postage stamp countries of the world. He admits this
- "has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole."
Climate science's only customer is governments, there being no commercial market for forecasts of 50-100 years. When climate scientists found that their only steady funding came from statist bureaucrats, the discipline, very fuzzy with huge margins of error to begin with,
- became subordinated to politicians' goals.
The political class deals in the exercise of power and control of money, not factual testing of hypotheses and theories. In fact, the further leftward you go in politics, the less relevant facts are. If you go far enough, facts as usually conceived
- are irrelevant altogether.
This is the legacy of linguistic deconstructionism, which, with many climate scientists' willing participation,
- has polluted its first scientific discipline.
Linguistic deconstructionism is the chief political tool of the Left
The basic tenet of postmodernist linguistic deconstructionism (which I learned how to do in my graduate studies at Vanderbilt) is that all human expression is inherently biased. Therefore,
- there is no such as thing as objective truth.
Statements of "facts" are only propositional claims. A statement's truth content is never more than opinion. Opinions are tools for power. Hence, the purpose of expression is to exercise power. In academia, this way of analyzing texts began in the fields of literature, political science and history ("written by the winners" as a power play). But now
- even mathematics is claimed to be biased and subjective.
This is a fundamental world view of the Left and is derived directly from Marxism-Leninism. Since Marx held that
- his communist theory was literally scientific,
he claimed that his economic-historical forecasts were not simply likely,
To understand and partner with this inevitability was to be "on the right side of history" (which is where that overused cliche comes from).
As formulated by Lenin et. al., truths are not a statements of objective facts, but assertions that move the communist revolution and its fulfillment closer to reality. "Truth" is therefore pliable, impermanent and conceptually only practical. In practice,
- language itself became subservient to the purposes of the party,
a fact recognized by George Orwell in his novel 1984 and its concept of Newspeak.
- Climate science and "revolutionary truth"
Inherent in Marxist theory is the concept of "revolutionary truth," a term used by Mao Tse-tung in a speech at the opening of the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in early 1942 ("Marxism-Leninism is the most correct,
- scientific and revolutionary truth... .").
Using science to consolidate political power has always been at the heart of Marxism and all its descendants.
(The Soviets were notorious for using psychology to harden their hold on power.) "Revolutionary truth" is
- any expression and deed that enables this consolidation.
Today, dominated by the Left, climate science's purpose is not to determine scientific truth as the West has understood it since Galileo, but
- to use science
- to exercise political power.
A standard Leftist critique of the West's standing values was that they are
- social constructions, not rooted in objective reality
(which does not exist, anyway), but in class struggles. That was the Left's entrée into the sciences, as Richard Rorty explained in AtlanticOnline,
Starting with the claim that homosexuality, the Negro race, and womanliness are social constructions,
- they go on to suggest that quarks and genes probably are too.
"Ideology" and "power," they say, have infiltrated sterile laboratories and lurk between the lines of arcane journals of mathematical physics. The very idea of
- scientific objectivity, they say, is self-deceptive and fraudulent.
If scientific objectivity is a fraudulent concept, it does not mean that Leftism dismisses science as of no value. It simply means that science's real value is as another tool of the class struggle to be used on the right side of history. Like any other expression, scientific expressions are
- therefore concerned not with facts but with power.
- They sincerely believe that scientific argument is just a
- specialized form of power expression.
- of no lesser value
- than scientific pronouncements.
Our task is vigilance
We cannot let the Left set the terms of public debate. We have to keep hammering on how the Left has bent science to political power-play ends, and that
- environmentalism is a political movement, not a scientific discipline.
We need to reject the idea that scientific expression is merely another way of expressing opinion. Although empiricism has its own difficulties, we need to recover a strong sense of a philosophy of science that undergirds science as relating to objective facts about nature. This does not mean that science has no social context, as NYU physicist Alan Sokal pointed out:
Science is a human endeavor, and like any other human endeavor it merits being subjected to rigorous social analysis. Which research problems count as important;
- how research funds are distributed;
- who gets prestige and power;
- what role scientific expertise plays in public-policy debates;
- in what form scientific knowledge becomes embodied in technology, and
- for whose benefit --
all these issues are strongly affected by political, economic and to some extent ideological considerations, as well as by the internal logic of scientific inquiry. They are thus fruitful subjects for empirical study by historians, sociologists, political scientists and economists.
- The problem is that when the externals become dominant, then in a real sense it is not science that gets done,
- but something else dressed in scientific costume.
There is a danger there that Sokal presciently pointed out 13 years ago:
There is nothing wrong with research informed by a political commitment, as long as that commitment
- does not blind the researcher to inconvenient facts.
The real "Inconvenient Truth" about climate science is that it is serving rather than informing
- a political agenda.
We've long known that and now the UN's Ottmar Edenhofer has confirmed it."
via RedState.com
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