From the horse’s mouth — climate change theory has nothing to do with the truth. 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:
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Fast forward to November 2009. The Tyndall center is affiliated with the CRU at the University of East Anglia of climategate fame. While Hulme wasn’t directly involved in Jones’ scientific activities, he was involved in the related policy matters. So here is the original Al-Guardian piece by Hulme. In it we have this:

What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy; it is whether we have sufficient foresight, supported by wisdom, to allow our perspective about the future, and our responsibility for it, to be altered.

This he refers to as “post-normal science”. Without getting in to a long drawn out philosophical discussion, what he’s arguing is that the world has become too dangerous a place to allow science as Galileo understood it to be the way we determine truth. He’s arguing for a “new” science, where political considerations influence what we determine to be the “truth”. He is arguing for a return to the pre-Galilean paradigm, where dogma was truth, and upstarts who disagreed were dangerous.

This shouldn’t be that surprising when you consider that post-modernism in other academic disciplines amounts to essentially the same thing. What intellectual wonders have been done by multiculturalism and radical feminism and race theory and queer theory and so on should not be denied to science. Thus western ethnocentric rationalism must be purged from science, as well. Dead white men and all that.

Phillips was right to sound the alarm bells. Too bad it took another two and a half years before we could all see concretely what this all really meant. That’s what a lot of people are saying about climategate. The signs of something awry have been there for years. It’s also too bad that certain imbeciles at certain blogs support this intellectual travesty, and are so delusional that they think they’re standing up for the values of rationalism by…fighting those pernicious creationists.

Dude. Look who’s under the covers with you once in a while. K?

And God help us if the central idea behind “post-normal science” infects the field of law. In a sense, we already have some of that in the form of judicial activism. But if you’re standing trial for something you didn’t do, do you want the jury to be told that they need to consider the gravity of the crime in determining whether or not you’re guilty? Think about that.