The ‘post-normal’ science of climate change
- From: Tom_Selleck <Tom_Selleck@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2007 16:38:51 -1000
Melanie Phillips’s Diary - http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary -
The ‘post-normal’ science of climate change
Posted By Melanie On March 14, 2007 @ 1:01 pm In Diary | Comments Disabled
From the horse’s mouth — climate change theory has nothing to do with thetruth. In a remarkable column in today’s Guardian Mike Hulme, professor in
the school of environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia and
the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research — a
key figure in the promulgation of climate change theory but who a short
while ago warned that exaggerated forecasts of global apocalypse were in
danger of destroying the case altogether — writes that scientific truth is
the wrong tool to establish the, er, truth of global warming. Instead, we
need a perspective of what he calls ‘post-normal’ science:
Philosophers and practitioners of science have identified this
particular mode of scientific activity as one that occurs where the stakes
are high, uncertainties large and decisions urgent, and where values are
embedded in the way science is done and spoken. It has been
labelled ‘post-normal’ science…The danger of a ‘normal’ reading of science
is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power,
and that truth-based policy will then follow.
Indeed! Facts first, conclusions afterwards is the very basis of scientific
inquiry. But not any more, it seems, where the religion of global warming
is concerned. Here the facts have to fit the theory. Hulme goes on:
Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal
scientific process of truth seeking, although science will gain some
insights into the question if it recognises the socially contingent
dimensions of a post-normal science. But to proffer such insights,
scientists - and politicians - must trade (normal) truth for influence. If
scientists want to remain listened to, to bear influence on policy, they
must recognise the social limits of their truth seeking and reveal fully
the values and beliefs they bring to their scientific activity.
What an admission! Let’s read that one again. Self-evidently dangerous
climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth
seeking. Of course not. The facts don’t support it. It’s not true. So, says
Hulme, let’s abolish the need to establish the facts and the truth and
impose the theory on the basis of — what’s that again — ‘values and
beliefs’. In other words, climate change science has got to be
anti-science. It’s got to be anti-truth. It’s got to be nothing more than
an ideology.
Post-modernism long ago deconstructed truth. Now in similar
vein, ‘post-normal’ science deconstructs scientific empiricism and
rationalism and detaches science from truth. In other words, where science
fails to support an ideology, the absolute and overriding imperative of
putting that ideology into practice means that science has to suspend its
very essence as a truth-seeking activity and instead perpetrate lies. That
is the inescapable implication of Hulme’s position. To support the bogus
claim that we face the imminent collapse of civilisation from global
warming, science itself has to be reconceptualised as an instrument of
propaganda and justified by mendacious and obfuscatory post-modernist
jargon. Hulme concludes:
Climate change is too important to be left to scientists - least of all
the normal ones.
So the true battleground has now been illuminated for us. The real fight is
between scientists who believe in empirical observation and the truth,
and ‘post-normal’ scientists who believe in ideology and lies. It’s a
battle between Enlightenment values of rationality and those who wish to
return us to a pre-rational era where thought was controlled and truth was
a heresy. The stakes could not have been delineated more clearly.
Article printed from Melanie Phillips’s Diary:
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary
URL to article: http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1469
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