The ultimate miracle

29 Dec 2014 The Australian ERIC METAXASTHE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Science turns to God as universe appears to be ultimate miracle

We may have to accept that our existence cannot be explained by random forces

The odds … are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all ‘just happened’ defies common sense

From page 1 IN 1966, Time magazine ran a cover story asking: Is God Dead?
Many have accepted the cultural narrative that he’s obsolete — that as science progresses there is less need for a “God” to explain the universe.
Yet it turns out the rumours of God’s death were premature. More amazing is that the relatively recent case for his existence comes from a surprising place — science itself.
Here’s the story: the same year Time featured the famous headline, astronomer Carl Sagan announced there were two important criteria for a planet to support life: — the right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star.
Given the roughly octillion — 1 followed by 24 zeros — planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion — 1 followed by 21 zeros — planets capable of supporting life.
With such spectacular odds, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a large, expensive collection of private and publicly funded projects launched in the 1960s, was sure to turn up something soon.
Scientists listened with a vast radio telescopic network for signals that resembled coded intelligence and were not merely random. But, as years passed, the silence from the rest of the universe was deafening.
US congress defunded SETI in 1993, but the search continues with private funds.
Researchers have discovered precisely bupkis — 0 followed by nothing.
What happened? As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed.
His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting.
Even SETI proponents acknowledged the problem. Peter Schenkel wrote in
Sceptical Inquirer in 2006: “In light of new findings and insights, it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest … We should quietly admit that the early estimates … may no longer be tenable.”
As factors continued to be discovered, the number of possible planets hit zero, and kept going. In other words, the odds turned against any planet in the universe supporting life, including this one.
Probability said even we shouldn’t be here.
Today, there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life — every single one of which must be perfectly met or the whole thing falls apart. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth’s surface. The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing.
Yet here we are, not only existing, but talking about it.
Can every one of those many parameters have been perfect by accident? At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests we cannot be the result of random forces?
Doesn’t assuming an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?
There’s more. The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all.
For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces — gravity, the electromagnetic force and the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces — were determined less than a millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction — even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000 — then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp.
Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion it all “just happened” defies common sense.
It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?
Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term “big bang”, said his atheism was “greatly shaken” at these developments.
He later wrote that “a commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology … The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”
Theoretical physicist Paul Davies has said “the appearance of design is overwhelming” and Oxford professor John Lennox that “the more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator … gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.”
The greatest miracle of all time, without any close seconds, is the universe. It is the miracle of all miracles, one that ineluctably points with the combined brightness of every star to something — or Someone — beyond itself.

Marriage

MARRIAGE
The love that brings new life into the world

by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

News Weekly, December 20, 2014
Three hundred faith leaders and scholars from around the world gave former Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth, Lord Jonathan Sacks, a standing ovation for a speech in defence of marriage that he delivered at a recent Vatican-convened colloquium in Rome.


Rabbi Lord
Jonathan Sacks
The three-day international colloquium on “The Complementarity of Man and Woman” (November 17-19, 2014) was attended by 300 faith leaders and scholars from across religions and 23 countries around the world. Among those present were three prominent Australian Catholic identities: the recently-appointed Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher; the Auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne, Peter Elliott; and Dr Conor Sweeney, lecturer at Melbourne’s John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family.

Following the opening address by Pope Francis, Rabbi Sacks delivered one of the colloquium’s keynote presentations in which he praised the institution of marriage and “the most beautiful idea in the history of civilisation: the idea of the love that brings new life into the world”. He warned of the peril of allowing the dismantling of what he called “the single most humanising institution in history”.

His speech is reproduced here in its entirety.

I want this morning to begin our conversation by one way of telling the story of the most beautiful idea in the history of civilisation: the idea of the love that brings new life into the world. There are of course many ways of telling the story, and this is just one. But to me it is a story of seven key moments, each of them surprising and unexpected.

The first, according to a report in the press on October 20 of this year, took place in a lake in Scotland 385 million years ago. It was then, according to this new discovery, that two fish came together to perform the first instance of sexual reproduction known to science. Until then all life had propagated itself asexually, by cell division, budding, fragmentation or parthenogenesis, all of which are far simpler and more economical than the division of life into male and female, each with a different role in creating and sustaining life.

When we consider, even in the animal kingdom, how much effort and energy the coming together of male and female takes, in terms of displays, courtship rituals, rivalries and violence, it is astonishing that sexual reproduction ever happened at all. Biologists are still not quite sure why it did. Some say to offer protection against parasites, or immunities against disease. Others say it’s simply that the meeting of opposites generates diversity. But one way or another, the fish in Scotland discovered something new and beautiful that’s been copied ever since by virtually all advanced forms of life. Life begins when male and female meet and embrace.

The second unexpected development was the unique challenge posed to Homo sapiens by two factors: we stood upright, which constricted the female pelvis, and we had bigger brains — a 300 per cent increase — which meant larger heads. The result was that human babies had to be born more prematurely than any other species, and so needed parental protection for much longer. This made parenting more demanding among humans than any other species, the work of two people rather than one.

Hence the very rare phenomenon among mammals, of pair bonding, unlike other species where the male contribution tends to end with the act of impregnation. Among most primates, fathers don’t even recognise their children let alone care for them. Elsewhere in the animal kingdom motherhood is almost universal but fatherhood is rare. So what emerged along with the human person was the union of the biological mother and father to care for their child. Thus far nature, but then came culture, and the third surprise.

It seems that among hunter gatherers, pair bonding was the norm. Then came agriculture, and economic surplus, and cities and civilisation, and for the first time sharp inequalities began to emerge between rich and poor, powerful and powerless. The great ziggurats of Mesopotamia and pyramids of ancient Egypt, with their broad base and narrow top, were monumental statements in stone of a hierarchical society in which the few had power over the many. And the most obvious expression of power among alpha males whether human or primate, is to dominate access to fertile women and thus maximise the handing on of your genes to the next generation. Hence polygamy, which exists in 95 per cent of mammal species and 75 per cent of cultures known to anthropology. Polygamy is the ultimate expression of inequality because it means that many males never get the chance to have a wife and child. And sexual envy has been, throughout history, among animals as well as humans, a prime driver of violence.

That is what makes the first chapter of Genesis so revolutionary with its statement that every human being, regardless of class, colour, culture or creed, is in the image and likeness of God himself. We know that in the ancient world it was rulers, kings, emperors and pharaohs who were held to be in the image of God. So what Genesis was saying was that we are all royalty. We each have equal dignity in the kingdom of faith under the sovereignty of God.

From this it follows that we each have an equal right to form a marriage and have children, which is why, regardless of how we read the story of Adam and Eve — and there are differences between Jewish and Christian readings — the norm presupposed by that story is: one woman, one man. Or as the Bible itself says: “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.”

Monogamy did not immediately become the norm, even within the world of the Bible. But many of its most famous stories, about the tension between Sarah and Hagar, or Leah and Rachel and their children, or David and Bathsheba, or Solomon’s many wives, are all critiques that point the way to monogamy.

And there is a deep connection between monotheism and monogamy, just as there is, in the opposite direction, between idolatry and adultery. Monotheism and monogamy are about the all-embracing relationship between I and Thou, myself and one other, be it a human, or the divine, Other.

What makes the emergence of monogamy unusual is that it is normally the case that the values of a society are those imposed on it by the ruling class. And the ruling class in any hierarchical society stands to gain from promiscuity and polygamy, both of which multiply the chances of my genes being handed on to the next generation. From monogamy the rich and powerful lose and the poor and powerless gain. So the return of monogamy goes against the normal grain of social change and was a real triumph for the equal dignity of all. Every bride and every groom are royalty; every home a palace when furnished with love.

The fourth remarkable development was the way this transformed the moral life. We’ve all become familiar with the work of evolutionary biologists using computer simulations and the iterated prisoners’ dilemma to explain why reciprocal altruism exists among all social animals. We behave to others as we would wish them to behave to us, and we respond to them as they respond to us. As C.S. Lewis pointed out in his book The Abolition of Man, reciprocity is the Golden Rule shared by all the great civilisations.

What was new and remarkable in the Hebrew Bible was the idea that love, not just fairness, is the driving principle of the moral life. Three loves. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might.” “Love your neighbour as yourself.” And, repeated no less than 36 times in the Mosaic books, “Love the stranger because you know what it feels like to be a stranger.” Or to put it another way: just as God created the natural world in love and forgiveness, so we are charged with creating the social world in love and forgiveness. And that love is a flame lit in marriage and the family. Morality is the love between husband and wife, parent and child, extended outward to the world.

The fifth development shaped the entire structure of Jewish experience. In ancient Israel an originally secular form of agreement, called a covenant, was taken and transformed into a new way of thinking about the relationship between God and humanity, in the case of Noah, and between God and a people in the case of Abraham and later the Israelites at Mount Sinai. A covenant is like a marriage. It is a mutual pledge of loyalty and trust between two or more people, each respecting the dignity and integrity of the other, to work together to achieve together what neither can achieve alone. And there is one thing even God cannot achieve alone, which is to live within the human heart. That needs us.

So the Hebrew word emunah, wrongly translated as faith, really means faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, steadfastness, not walking away even when the going gets tough, trusting the other and honouring the other’s trust in us. What covenant did, and we see this in almost all the prophets, was to understand the relationship between us and God in terms of the relationship between bride and groom, wife and husband. Love thus became not only the basis of morality but also of theology. In Judaism faith is a marriage. Rarely was this more beautifully stated than by Hosea when he said in the name of God:

“I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will know the Lord.”

Jewish men say those words every weekday morning as we wind the strap of our tefillin around our finger like a wedding ring. Each morning we renew our marriage with God.

This led to a sixth and quite subtle idea that truth, beauty, goodness and life itself, do not exist in any one person or entity but in the “between,” what Martin Buber called Das Zwischenmenschliche, the interpersonal, the counterpoint of speaking and listening, giving and receiving. Throughout the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic literature, the vehicle of truth is conversation. In revelation God speaks and asks us to listen. In prayer we speak and ask God to listen. There is never only one voice. In the Bible the prophets argue with God. In the Talmud rabbis argue with one another. In fact I sometimes think the reason God chose the Jewish people was because He loves a good argument. Judaism is a conversation scored for many voices, never more passionately than in the Song of Songs, a duet between a woman and a man, the beloved and her lover, that Rabbi Akiva called the holy of holies of religious literature.

The prophet Malachi calls the male priest the guardian of the law of truth. The book of Proverbs says of the woman of worth that “the law of lovingkindness is on her tongue”. It is that conversation between male and female voices, between truth and love, justice and mercy, law and forgiveness, that frames the spiritual life. In biblical times each Jew had to give a half shekel to the Temple to remind us that we are only half. There are some cultures that teach that we are nothing. There are others that teach that we are everything. The Jewish view is that we are half and we need to open ourselves to another if we are to become whole.

All this led to the seventh outcome, that in Judaism the home and the family became the central setting of the life of faith. In the only verse in the Hebrew Bible to explain why God chose Abraham, He says: “I have known him so that he will instruct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just.” Abraham was chosen not to rule an empire, command an army, perform miracles or deliver prophecies, but simply to be a parent.

In one of the most famous lines in Judaism, which we say every day and night, Moses commands, “You shall teach these things repeatedly to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house or when you walk on the way, when you lie down and when you rise up.” Parents are to be educators, education is the conversation between the generations, and the first school is the home.

So Jews became an intensely family oriented people, and it was this that saved us from tragedy. After the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70, Jews were scattered throughout the world, everywhere a minority, everywhere without rights, suffering some of the worst persecutions ever known by a people and yet Jews survived because they never lost three things: their sense of family, their sense of community and their faith.

And they were renewed every week especially on Shabbat, the day of rest when we give our marriages and families what they most need and are most starved of in the contemporary world, namely time. I once produced a television documentary for the BBC on the state of family life in Britain, and I took the person who was then Britain’s leading expert on child care, Penelope Leach, to a Jewish primary school on a Friday morning.

There she saw the children enacting in advance what they would see that evening around the family table. There were the five year old mother and father blessing the five year old children with the five year old grandparents looking on. She was fascinated by this whole institution, and she asked the children what they most enjoyed about the Sabbath. One five year old boy turned to her and said, “It’s the only night of the week when daddy doesn’t have to rush off.”

As we walked away from the school when the filming was over she turned to me and said, “Chief Rabbi, that Sabbath of yours is saving their parents’ marriages.”

So that is one way of telling the story, a Jewish way, beginning with the birth of sexual reproduction, then the unique demands of human parenting, then the eventual triumph of monogamy as a fundamental statement of human equality, followed by the way marriage shaped our vision of the moral and religious life as based on love and covenant and faithfulness, even to the point of thinking of truth as a conversation between lover and beloved. Marriage and the family are where faith finds its home and where the Divine Presence lives in the love between husband and wife, parent and child.

What then has changed? Here’s one way of putting it. I wrote a book a few years ago about religion and science and I summarised the difference between them in two sentences. “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.” And that’s a way of thinking about culture also. Does it put things together or does it take things apart?

What made the traditional family remarkable, a work of high religious art, is what it brought together: sexual drive, physical desire, friendship, companionship, emotional kinship and love, the begetting of children and their protection and care, their early education and induction into an identity and a history. Seldom has any institution woven together so many different drives and desires, roles and responsibilities. It made sense of the world and gave it a human face, the face of love.

For a whole variety of reasons, some to do with medical developments like birth control, in vitro fertilisation and other genetic interventions, some to do with moral change like the idea that we are free to do whatever we like so long as it does not harm others, some to do with a transfer of responsibilities from the individual to the state, and other and more profound changes in the culture of the West, almost everything that marriage once brought together has now been split apart. Sex has been divorced from love, love from commitment, marriage from having children, and having children from responsibility for their care.

The result is that in Britain in 2012, 47.5 per cent of children were born outside marriage, expected to become a majority in 2016. Fewer people are marrying, those who are, are marrying later, and 42 per cent of marriages end in divorce. Nor is cohabitation a substitute for marriage. The average length of cohabitation in Britain and the United States is less than two years. The result is a sharp increase among young people of eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, stress-related syndromes, depression and actual and attempted suicides. The collapse of marriage has created a new form of poverty concentrated among single-parent families, and, of these, the main burden is born by women, who in 2011 headed 92 per cent of single parent households. In Britain today more than a million children will grow up with no contact whatsoever with their fathers.

This is creating a divide within societies the like of which has not been seen since Disraeli spoke of “two nations” a century and a half ago. Those who are privileged to grow up in stable loving association with the two people who brought them into being will, on average, be healthier physically and emotionally. They will do better at school and at work. They will have more successful relationships, be happier and live longer.

And yes, there are many exceptions. But the injustice of it all cries out to heaven. It will go down in history as one of the tragic instances of what Friedrich Hayek called “the fatal conceit” that somehow we know better than the wisdom of the ages, and can defy the lessons of biology and history.

No one surely wants to go back to the narrow prejudices of the past. This week, in Britain, a new film opens, telling the story of one of the great minds of the twentieth century, Alan Turing, the Cambridge mathematician who laid the philosophical foundations of computing and artificial intelligence, and helped win the war by breaking the German naval code Enigma. After the war, Turing was arrested and tried for homosexual behaviour, underwent chemically-induced castration, and died at the age of 41 by cyanide poisoning, thought by many to have committed suicide. That is a world to which we should never return.

But our compassion for those who choose to live differently should not inhibit us from being advocates for the single most humanising institution in history. The family — man, woman and child — is not one lifestyle choice among many. It is the best means we have yet discovered for nurturing future generations and enabling children to grow in a matrix of stability and love. It is where we learn the delicate choreography of relationship and how to handle the inevitable conflicts within any human group. It is where we first take the risk of giving and receiving love. It is where one generation passes on its values to the next, ensuring the continuity of a civilisation.

For any society, the family is the crucible of its future, and for the sake of our children’s future, we must be its defenders.

Since this is a religious gathering, let me, if I may, end with a piece of biblical exegesis. The story of the first family, the first man and woman in the garden of Eden, is not generally regarded as a success. Whether or not we believe in original sin, it did not end happily. After many years of studying the text I want to suggest a different reading.

The story ends with three verses that seem to have no connection with one another. No sequence. No logic. In Genesis 3: 19 God says to the man: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” Then in the next verse we read: “The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all life.” And in the next, “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.”

What is the connection here? Why did God telling the man that he was mortal lead him to give his wife a new name? And why did that act seem to change God’s attitude to both of them, so that He performed an act of tenderness, by making them clothes, almost as if He had partially forgiven them? Let me also add that the Hebrew word for “skin” is almost indistinguishable from the Hebrew word for “light”, so that Rabbi Meir, the great sage of the early second century, read the text as saying that God made for them “garments of light”. What did he mean?

If we read the text carefully, we see that until now the first man had given his wife a purely generic name. He called her ishah, woman. Recall what he said when he first saw her: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman for she was taken from man.” For him she was a type, not a person. He gave her a noun, not a name. What is more he defines her as a derivative of himself: something taken from man. She is not yet for him someone other, a person in her own right. She is merely a kind of reflection of himself.

As long as the man thought he was immortal, he ultimately needed no one else. But now he knew he was mortal. He would one day die and return to dust. There was only one way in which something of him would live on after his death. That would be if he had a child. But he could not have a child on his own. For that he needed his wife. She alone could give birth. She alone could mitigate his mortality. And not because she was like him but precisely because she was unlike him. At that moment she ceased to be, for him, a type, and became a person in her own right. And a person has a proper name. That is what he gave her: the name Chavah, “Eve”, meaning, “giver of life”.

At that moment, as they were about to leave Eden and face the world as we know it, a place of darkness, Adam gave his wife the first gift of love, a personal name. And at that moment, God responded to them both in love, and made them garments to clothe their nakedness, or as Rabbi Meir put it, “garments of light”.

And so it has been ever since, that when a man and woman turn to one another in a bond of faithfulness, God robes them in garments of light, and we come as close as we will ever get to God himself, bringing new life into being, turning the prose of biology into the poetry of the human spirit, redeeming the darkness of the world by the radiance of love.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is a global religious leader, philosopher, the author of more than 25 books, and moral voice for our time. Until September 1, 2013, he served as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, having held the position for 22 years.

Racism and American Homicide stats

The Australian 5thDec2014

DENOUNCING THE WHITE COP SHOWS LEFTISTS’ ANALYSIS IS ONLY SKIN DEEP

Black-on-black violence is high and gets little coverage and inspires little outrage

AS a well-known figure once put it, “Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?’’ And he went on to denounce those who concerned themselves exclusively with the former but never with the latter. “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.’’
But in the modern world there is a new phenomenon, undreamt of by Jesus: those who see the beam in their own eye but never the mote in their brother’s eye. This is just as blinding, just as inimical to moral clear-sightedness. It is also a manifestation of spiritual pride.
Reporting of recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, by French left-wing newspaper Liberation is an example of this. The newspaper presented the refusal of the grand jury to indict officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson police for having shot dead a young black man, Michael Brown, as racist and nothing else. The possibility that the jury thought, on the evidence presented to it, there was no reasonable prospect that Wilson could be found guilty beyond reasonable doubt of the alleged crime in any subsequent trial simply did not occur to the newspaper. Racism was the only possible explanation for the jury’s verdict; and, since the jury stood for America and America for Western civilisation, we all stand condemned by that verdict. How wonderful we are to acknowledge our sins.
In its own way, then, Liberation, in common with many such publications, is as racist as Der Sturmer. For it, and them, men think not with their brains but with their skins — or at least white men do.
It is true that an arbitrary killing by an agent of the state is more serious than, say, a killing in the midst of a jealous private dispute, in the sense that its social effect is so much more harmful. It destroys the idea there is justice in the world; it provokes a generalised, if subliminal, fear.
But was the killing of Brown entirely arbitrary? His mother said she did not believe Wilson intended to kill her son, but he intended to kill someone: in other words, he had acted from a pure lust for murder.
There is not a shred of evidence for this; and to believe the killing was entirely arbitrary one would have to believe it was entirely a coincidence that Brown had been engaged in a violent robbery only minutes beforehand, and that Wilson’s no doubt panic-stricken and not very professional response had no connection to the victim’s ability to appear menacing.
In all the hand-wringing over the case, by Liberation and others, a few salient facts were lost from sight.
When demonstrators held up placards saying “Black lives matter’’, they did not mean those 5375 blacks murdered last year, overwhelmingly by other blacks (93 per cent of black murder victims between 1980 and 2008 were murdered by blacks, about 180,000 in total); political entrepreneurs did not rush to commemorate any of them or turn them to political advantage. What they meant was that black lives matter when they are ended by whites, especially by policemen.
Here the figures are indeed startling, though also instructive. Between 1980 and 2008, about 12,000 people were killed by the US police (and 2000 policemen were killed). White officers killed twice as many white suspects or felons as they killed black; black officers killed nearly four times as many black suspects or felons as they killed whites.
More than a quarter of blacks killed by police — about 1300 of 4500 — were killed by black officers; and as black officers represent only a sixth of the force, a black man should therefore be warier of a black policeman than a white.
(This might not be quite fair, for there would be more black officers in a black area than in the country as a whole.)
The point is not whether Wilson acted rightly or wrongly but whether the case of Brown is being manipulated for political purposes. And, oddly enough, that manipulation is deeply demeaning to the black population of the US.
By concentrating so extravagantly on the death of Brown to the exclusion of so much else that may be said about the case, an exaggerated significance is ascribed to the actions of Wilson.
By this exaggeration, he is accorded the kind of status young children accord their parents: he should have been all understanding, all good, without fault. Since Brown clearly came nowhere near those standards, as a glance at the video of his conduct in the store he robbed amply demonstrates, the world is thereby divided childishly into those who must be held up to the highest standards (the authorities), and those (the people) to whom no such standards apply.
Nothing could be better designed the keep people in a permanent state of dependence. Thus
Liberation is deeply condescending to the objects of its sympathies, as left-wing liberals usually are, and indeed is outright racist. For if Brown had been shot by a black policeman in similar circumstances, the case would not have merited a line.

Theodore Dalrymple is the author of more than 20 books

AGW and the scientific method

American Thinker

November 25, 2014
Anthropogenic Global Warming and the Scientific Method
By Betsy Gorisch
Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) alarm has been with us for a good while, now. The matter seems to become more contentious, rather than less, over time. Unhappily, as a result of the mediocre quality of science education, many people do not know how to evaluate either a scientific hypothesis in general, or AGW in particular -- and irrespective of whatever anyone might think, because of how it is framed and evaluated, AGW is no more than a hypothesis.

Science is about ruling things out. Any good scientific hypothesis will make predictions about the natural world -- ideally, it will predict at least one natural effect whose existence cannot be caused by anything other than the hypothesis being tested. Observations are then made to acquire evidence, and the evidence is evaluated against the hypothesis’s predictions. Evidence can either rule the hypothesis out or not; if the evidence differs from the hypothesis’s predicted effects, then the hypothesis is wrong and is considered to be ruled out, or falsified. That which has not been ruled out by evidence remains possible. If enough confirmatory evidence is accumulated, the hypothesis is elevated to the status of a theory. Scientific Method is, conceptually, no more complicated than that.

Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, used a simple observational experiment to illustrate the scientific method’s requirement of falsifiability -- the requirement that a hypothesis be stated in such a way as to allow its testing against evidence with a view towards ruling it out. He noted that most people had once assumed that all swans are white. This assumption was based on the observation, over time, of uncounted numbers of white swans -- and each such observation was taken as evidence supporting the assumption. However, there came a time when a black swan was found in Australia, and its discovery served to disprove the assumption that all swans are white. In generalizing from this discovery, Popper understood that you would not test the hypothesis that all swans are white by undertaking a search for white swans -- because no matter how many white swans you found, you would neither have proven, nor even properly tested, the hypothesis. Instead, you must mount an intensive search for a single non-white swan. If you found even one of those, you would have ruled the hypothesis out. Alternatively, and without finding a non-white swan, it remained viable -- but because there remained the possibility of a single undetected non-white swan, it could not be regarded as proven.

Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity provides an excellent real-world scientific example of evaluation by falsifiability. The Special Theory makes unique predictions about gravity's effect on light's behavior in a vacuum that, as far as anyone knows, could be accounted for by no phenomenon other than that assumed in the theory. When specifically tested for during a total eclipse of the sun in 1919, the gravitational effect Einstein's theory predicted was both detected and measured to equal precisely his theory’s prediction. Special Relativity was hence verified -- although, again, it is not regarded as proven. Instead, it remains possible in the absence of having been falsified by evidence. Now, it is true that Special Relativity is, like other theories, commonly accepted, and spoken of, as having been proven. However, that is merely a shorthand way of saying that it currently has no credible competition as an explanation of the phenomenon it addresses.

The AGW hypothesis that so many people claim accounts for what is essentially pretend global warming has never been treated this way. Initially, its proponents engaged in a search for supporting evidence: Elevated average annual temperatures, local glacial retreats, elevated-temperature indicators in proxy systems such as tree-ring records, measurable coincident increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration, and so on -- a search for white swans. But these efforts ignored, and failed even to seek, either any alternative explanations or evidence that would have ruled the hypothesis out. AGW has failed the predictions test again and again; any true scientific hypothesis with so poor an evidence-based evaluation record would have been scrapped by now. Instead, its proponents elevated it to the status of a theory and, ignoring the fact that climate changes continually, renamed it “climate change.”

No other potential causes of AGW have ever been investigated and ruled out. There must be at least one, because evidence shows that there have been times in the pre-human geological past when conditions were warmer and there was no glaciation at all anywhere on Earth. We also know, as a result of ice-core studies, that CO2 has generally been a lagging indicator -- that is, atmospheric CO2 concentrations are documented to have increased after, rather than before, atmospheric temperature increases.

Nevertheless, its believers treat AGW as verified, and simply alter its components and predictions to conform to evidence. When the predicted warming did not occur and snows continued to fall during London winters even though it was predicted that they would fail, for example, or when polar ice sheets expanded even though the theory has predicted that they would melt away, the hypothesis should be considered to have been ruled out by evidence.

However, its proponents still treat AGW as though it were true. Otherwise-reputable scientists employ variations on several approaches to their falsification conundrum. The first of these approaches, the use of models, is a legitimate tool in particular scientific applications. Others amount to attempting to fudge the hypothesis to make it match evidence in an unscientific rearguard action.

Models are essentially used as predictive tools, so they are only as good as the information upon which they are constructed. If there are any unknown components in the modeled system, then the model’s predictions will, almost by definition, be unreliable. In the case of a system both as complex and incompletely understood as Earth’s atmosphere, the model’s construction will essentially be required to include untested, incomplete, and/or unproven function assumptions and data. In such a case, the problems and pitfalls of using these models to construct governing policies quickly become self-evident: People trying to rely on the models essentially cannot know what they are doing. When, for example, their model does not predict their real-world observations, they tweak it until it does -- which introduces errors-by-expectation into both output and the policies based upon it. These errors increase in magnitude, and therefore in effect, in a non-linear fashion directly proportional both to the size of the system and to the modeled outputs.

AGW’s predictions are not being reliably confirmed by observations. When stasis and/or cooling occur rather than warming -- as has been the case over the last decade-and-a-half -- atmospheric scientists fudge interpretations by saying that if it is cool, well, that is just weather; if it is warm, though, that is climate. Alternatively, they claim AGW predicts the cooling -- as, for example, with the recent polar-vortex outbreaks. However, a theory that predicts everything predicts nothing -- because a theory that predicts everything cannot be falsified through testing; nothing will serve to rule it out.

Scientists have also approached the unaccountable stasis and/or cooling by going around and searching for "the missing heat" that their theory assumes exists and claims has already built up. But this is not a search that would test the theory. It is a search that assumes the theory to be true -- it begs the question. Further, if the search detects the sought evidence, no one tries to rule out any possible causes other than AGW, assuming instead that if the evidence exists, there are no other possible causes.

In short, the AGW -- cum -- “climate change” debate is not about a hypothesis -- cum -- theory. Even though no one has investigated it with a view towards falsifying it, evidence has ruled it out repeatedly. It has no useful scientific applications because it has been broadened to predict all possible observations -- thereby predicting nothing at all.

Betsy Gorisch is a professional geologist with an interest in current events.



Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) alarm has been with us for a good while, now. The matter seems to become more contentious, rather than less, over time. Unhappily, as a result of the mediocre quality of science education, many people do not know how to evaluate either a scientific hypothesis in general, or AGW in particular -- and irrespective of whatever anyone might think, because of how it is framed and evaluated, AGW is no more than a hypothesis.

Science is about ruling things out. Any good scientific hypothesis will make predictions about the natural world -- ideally, it will predict at least one natural effect whose existence cannot be caused by anything other than the hypothesis being tested. Observations are then made to acquire evidence, and the evidence is evaluated against the hypothesis’s predictions. Evidence can either rule the hypothesis out or not; if the evidence differs from the hypothesis’s predicted effects, then the hypothesis is wrong and is considered to be ruled out, or falsified. That which has not been ruled out by evidence remains possible. If enough confirmatory evidence is accumulated, the hypothesis is elevated to the status of a theory. Scientific Method is, conceptually, no more complicated than that.

Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, used a simple observational experiment to illustrate the scientific method’s requirement of falsifiability -- the requirement that a hypothesis be stated in such a way as to allow its testing against evidence with a view towards ruling it out. He noted that most people had once assumed that all swans are white. This assumption was based on the observation, over time, of uncounted numbers of white swans -- and each such observation was taken as evidence supporting the assumption. However, there came a time when a black swan was found in Australia, and its discovery served to disprove the assumption that all swans are white. In generalizing from this discovery, Popper understood that you would not test the hypothesis that all swans are white by undertaking a search for white swans -- because no matter how many white swans you found, you would neither have proven, nor even properly tested, the hypothesis. Instead, you must mount an intensive search for a single non-white swan. If you found even one of those, you would have ruled the hypothesis out. Alternatively, and without finding a non-white swan, it remained viable -- but because there remained the possibility of a single undetected non-white swan, it could not be regarded as proven.


Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity provides an excellent real-world scientific example of evaluation by falsifiability. The Special Theory makes unique predictions about gravity's effect on light's behavior in a vacuum that, as far as anyone knows, could be accounted for by no phenomenon other than that assumed in the theory. When specifically tested for during a total eclipse of the sun in 1919, the gravitational effect Einstein's theory predicted was both detected and measured to equal precisely his theory’s prediction. Special Relativity was hence verified -- although, again, it is not regarded as proven. Instead, it remains possible in the absence of having been falsified by evidence. Now, it is true that Special Relativity is, like other theories, commonly accepted, and spoken of, as having been proven. However, that is merely a shorthand way of saying that it currently has no credible competition as an explanation of the phenomenon it addresses.

The AGW hypothesis that so many people claim accounts for what is essentially pretend global warming has never been treated this way. Initially, its proponents engaged in a search for supporting evidence: Elevated average annual temperatures, local glacial retreats, elevated-temperature indicators in proxy systems such as tree-ring records, measurable coincident increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration, and so on -- a search for white swans. But these efforts ignored, and failed even to seek, either any alternative explanations or evidence that would have ruled the hypothesis out. AGW has failed the predictions test again and again; any true scientific hypothesis with so poor an evidence-based evaluation record would have been scrapped by now. Instead, its proponents elevated it to the status of a theory and, ignoring the fact that climate changes continually, renamed it “climate change.”

No other potential causes of AGW have ever been investigated and ruled out. There must be at least one, because evidence shows that there have been times in the pre-human geological past when conditions were warmer and there was no glaciation at all anywhere on Earth. We also know, as a result of ice-core studies, that CO2 has generally been a lagging indicator -- that is, atmospheric CO2 concentrations are documented to have increased after, rather than before, atmospheric temperature increases.

Nevertheless, its believers treat AGW as verified, and simply alter its components and predictions to conform to evidence. When the predicted warming did not occur and snows continued to fall during London winters even though it was predicted that they would fail, for example, or when polar ice sheets expanded even though the theory has predicted that they would melt away, the hypothesis should be considered to have been ruled out by evidence.

However, its proponents still treat AGW as though it were true. Otherwise-reputable scientists employ variations on several approaches to their falsification conundrum. The first of these approaches, the use of models, is a legitimate tool in particular scientific applications. Others amount to attempting to fudge the hypothesis to make it match evidence in an unscientific rearguard action.

Models are essentially used as predictive tools, so they are only as good as the information upon which they are constructed. If there are any unknown components in the modeled system, then the model’s predictions will, almost by definition, be unreliable. In the case of a system both as complex and incompletely understood as Earth’s atmosphere, the model’s construction will essentially be required to include untested, incomplete, and/or unproven function assumptions and data. In such a case, the problems and pitfalls of using these models to construct governing policies quickly become self-evident: People trying to rely on the models essentially cannot know what they are doing. When, for example, their model does not predict their real-world observations, they tweak it until it does -- which introduces errors-by-expectation into both output and the policies based upon it. These errors increase in magnitude, and therefore in effect, in a non-linear fashion directly proportional both to the size of the system and to the modeled outputs.

AGW’s predictions are not being reliably confirmed by observations. When stasis and/or cooling occur rather than warming -- as has been the case over the last decade-and-a-half -- atmospheric scientists fudge interpretations by saying that if it is cool, well, that is just weather; if it is warm, though, that is climate. Alternatively, they claim AGW predicts the cooling -- as, for example, with the recent polar-vortex outbreaks. However, a theory that predicts everything predicts nothing -- because a theory that predicts everything cannot be falsified through testing; nothing will serve to rule it out.

Scientists have also approached the unaccountable stasis and/or cooling by going around and searching for "the missing heat" that their theory assumes exists and claims has already built up. But this is not a search that would test the theory. It is a search that assumes the theory to be true -- it begs the question. Further, if the search detects the sought evidence, no one tries to rule out any possible causes other than AGW, assuming instead that if the evidence exists, there are no other possible causes.

In short, the AGW -- cum -- “climate change” debate is not about a hypothesis -- cum -- theory. Even though no one has investigated it with a view towards falsifying it, evidence has ruled it out repeatedly. It has no useful scientific applications because it has been broadened to predict all possible observations -- thereby predicting nothing at all.

Betsy Gorisch is a professional geologist with an interest in current events.

Marriage

MARRIAGE
Historic U.S. court ruling upholds man-woman marriage

by Patrick J. Byrne

News Weekly, November 22, 2014
After a long string of court victories, the American campaign to redefine marriage has lost a major case in the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. The decision will have far-reaching consequences.


Judge Jeffrey Sutton
At recent referenda in the states of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, clear majorities of voters supported natural marriage. However, activist judges in lower courts subsequently ruled that these referenda decisions were unconstitutional, effectively allowing marriage to be completely redefined to include same-sex couples.

In response to these court decisions, an appeal was made to one America’s most senior courts, the Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. Last week, this court overturned the lower court rulings and upheld the original referenda decisions in favour of man-woman only marriage in the four states under its jurisdiction.

The 6th Circuit decision follows two other Federal Court decisions in Louisiana and Puerto Rico that upheld man-woman only marriage and rejected same-sex marriage.

A few points about the U.S. judicial system help to explain the importance of the 6th Circuit decision.

The U.S. has 10 Circuit Courts of Appeal, each covering a designated cluster of states.

They are considered among the most powerful and influential courts in the U.S., because of their ability to set legal precedents in regions that cover millions of Americans. They have strong policy influence on United States law.

The 6th Circuit’s decision — in favour of natural marriage for Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee — places it in direct conflict with contrary decisions of the 4th, 7th, 9th and 10th Circuit Courts.

These latter courts had ruled in favour of redefining marriage in about two dozen states by overturning state referenda/legislation that had defined marriage as being between one man and one woman only.

It now appears that the conflicting decisions between these powerful courts will be taken to America’s highest court, the U.S. federal Supreme Court.

Until now, the Supreme Court has refused to intervene in decisions by the courts of appeals involving the definition of marriage.

Judge Jeffrey Sutton led the two-to-one decision by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. The 42-page decision is an instructive defence of man-woman only marriage. It is also a critique of, and a caution to, those wanting to redefine marriage.


Dr Ryan T. Anderson
The following is adapted from an analysis of the judgment provided by Ryan T. Anderson, PhD, who conducts research on marriage and religious liberty as the William E. Simon Fellow at the Washington-based think-tank, the Heritage Foundation.

The judgment addresses the issue of why the state is involved in legislating on marriage.

First, while those wanting to redefine marriage argue that marriage is about two people loving each other, the court notes that governments don’t regulate love. Rather, governments “regulate sex, most especially the intended and unintended effects of male-female intercourse”.

The court explains its reasoning in this way: “Imagine a society without marriage. It does not take long to envision problems that might result from an absence of rules about how to handle the natural effects of male-female intercourse: children.”

It goes on to ask: “May men and women follow their procreative urges wherever they take them? Who is responsible for the children that result? How many mates may an individual have? How does one decide which set of mates is responsible for which set of children?

“That we rarely think about these questions nowadays shows only how far we have come and how relatively stable our society is, not that States have no explanation for creating such rules in the first place.”

The court says that people don’t “need the government’s encouragement to have sex” or “to propagate the species”, but people “may well need the government’s encouragement to create and maintain stable relationships within which children may flourish”.

This need for marriage policy is based on human nature: “It is not society’s laws, or for that matter any one religion’s laws, but nature’s laws (that men and women complement each other biologically), that created the policy imperative.”

Marriage policy is necessary as an “incentive for two people who procreate together to stay together for purposes of rearing offspring”.

The court concluded that “one can well appreciate why the citizenry would think that a reasonable first concern of any society is the need to regulate male-female relationships and the unique procreative possibilities of them”.

The court decision cautions against other courts overturning the referenda decision of voters in favour of a radical redefinition of marriage, particularly given the long tradition of rationality undergirding marriage laws.

“How can we say that the voters acted irrationally for sticking with the seen benefits of thousands of years of adherence to the traditional definition of marriage in the face of one year of experience with a new definition of marriage?

“A state still assessing how this has worked … is not showing irrationality, just a sense of stability and an interest in seeing how the new definition has worked elsewhere.

“Even today, the only thing anyone knows for sure about the long-term impact of redefining marriage is that they do not know.”

The court also explained why narrow arguments, like “marriage is all about love”, fail.

“Their definition … fails to account for the reality that no State in the country requires couples, whether gay or straight, to be in love.”

At the same time, a re-definition of marriage being only about “love” would have no limiting principle. It would lead to the redefinition of marriage to include every consenting adult relationship, including polygamy or polyamory.

As the court explains: “Their definition … fails to account for plural marriages, where there is no reason to think that three or four adults, whether gay, bisexual or straight, lack the capacity to share love, affection and commitment, or for that matter lack the capacity to be capable (and more plentiful) parents to boot.”

“If it is constitutionally irrational to stand by the man-woman definition of marriage, it must be constitutionally irrational to stand by the monogamous definition of marriage. Plaintiffs have no answer to the point.”

The court has also ruled that it was reasonable for the voters in these states to define marriage as they have.

When it comes to the actual text of the U.S. Constitution, there is no right to same-sex marriage: “The right to marry in general, and the right to gay marriage in particular, nowhere appear in the Constitution. That route for recognising a fundamental right to same-sex marriage does not exist.”

So what about the right being implicit because of “bedrock assumptions about liberty”? The court’s answer: “This too does not work.”

The court has also answered the argument that banning same-sex couples from marriage is like banning a black person from marrying a white person. This referred to a time in American history when interracial marriage was prohibited in some states.

As the court rightly notes, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down bans on interracial marriage in 1967, it “addressed, and rightly corrected, an unconstitutional eligibility requirement for marriage; it did not create a new definition of marriage”.

The court goes on to acknowledge that same-sex couples have experienced unjust discrimination under some laws, but marriage laws are not a form of discrimination against such couples:

“We also cannot deny that the institution of marriage arose independently of this record of discrimination. The traditional definition of marriage goes back thousands of years and spans almost every society in history.

“By contrast, ‘American laws targeting same-sex couples did not develop until the last third of the 20th century’.”

The court, in its decision, has argued against claims by lower courts that banning gays from marriage was a violation of the U.S. constitution — a violation of the 14th Amendment.

The 14th Amendment of 1868 provides equal protection of citizenship rights under the law, and was proposed in response to issues related to former slaves following the American Civil War.

The 6th Appeals Court, in its ruling, noted that “not a single U.S. Supreme Court Justice in American history has written an opinion maintaining that the traditional definition of marriage violates the 14th Amendment”.

The court has defended the right of U.S. citizens to decide the future of marriage through the political system, and not have courts overrule state referenda on marriage.

The court says that any change to marriage, if it should come, should occur “through the customary political processes, in which the people, gay and straight alike, become the heroes of their own stories by meeting each other not as adversaries in a court system but as fellow citizens seeking to resolve a new social issue in a fair-minded way.

“When the courts do not let the people resolve new social issues like this one, they perpetuate the idea that the heroes in these change events are judges and lawyers.”

Ultimately, the 6th Circuit Court has ruled that it will not usurp the authority of the American people to discuss, debate and make marriage policy.

The ruling argues that change could come in only one of two ways: either through judicial-activist judges usurping the political process, or else through the political process, such as people voting in a state referendum.

And the court has rightly refused to take the former course.

Instead, the court has argued that the political process should be respected, saying that it “is dangerous and demeaning to the citizenry to assume that we, and only we [i.e., the judges], can fairly understand the arguments for and against gay marriage”.

What happens to marriage next in America will depend on what decisions are made by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Patrick J. Byrne is national vice-president of the National Civic Council.

The Fantasy of Peace between Israel and Palestine

Quadrant article October 2014

LESLIE STEIN

The Fantasy of Peace between Israel and Palestine


Conventional wisdom would have it that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is essentially a land dispute over of what was once British-mandated Palestine. Given a modicum of mutual goodwill, it is assumed that the conflict could readily be resolved, with each side settling for somewhat less than its maximum demands. Many observers believe that the contours of such a settlement are already in place. Once Israel concedes almost all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Palestinians, anxious for a state of their own and realising that a viable military option is not available, would fall into line by agreeing to live in peace and harmony with Israel. Historical precedents are frequently cited in support of such a contention. In the wake of the Second World War, after Germany forfeited vast swathes of territory to Czechoslovakia and Poland, relations between Germany and those states were ultimately normalised. Supposedly more to the point, once Nelson Mandela and Frederik de Klerk resolved their differences, South Africa seemingly entered a new era of racial harmony.

Unfortunately, Israeli-Palestinian disagreements are not amenable to standard conflict resolution techniques. For while one side, Israel, has been willing to compromise, the other, the Palestinians, have a long and consistent track record of rejecting any proposed arrangement which would give rise to a stable two-state solution. This was first manifested in July 1937 when a British commission of inquiry chaired by Lord Peel recommended that Palestine be partitioned. The Jews were to receive a narrow strip of coastal land that stretched from Ber Tuvia south of Tel Aviv into virtually all of the Galilee. The British were to retain Jerusalem plus a wide corridor linking that city with the coast, while the Arabs were to be allotted the rest of the country, including all of the Negev. At first the Zionists were inclined to reject the Peel Commission’s recommendations on the grounds that all of Palestine ought to have been awarded to them. After all, far more than half of the original mandated territory of Palestine had already in 1921 been hived off and handed to King Abdullah of Transjordan. As for the Arabs, they dismissed the Peel Commission’s recommendations out of hand.

In May 1939 Britain revoked the 1917 Balfour Declaration by indicating its intention to cede the entire country to the Arabs some ten years later. Within the first five years, no more than 75,000 Jews would be permitted to enter Palestine. Thereafter, the Arabs would be able to veto all further Jewish immigration. Having been issued with an offer of eventual sovereignty over all of Palestine, the Arabs responded by turning it down. They were neither prepared to accept any additional Jewish immigration no matter how attenuated nor were they prepared to bide their time in attaining their independence. Far from appreciating the fact that Britain had effectively jettisoned the Zionist enterprise in their favour, the Palestinian leadership, under the sway of Haj Amin al-Husseini, demonstrated their ingratitude by throwing in their lot with the Nazis. In 1941 Husseini took up residence in Germany where he broadcast Nazi propaganda to the Middle East, visited a concentration camp accompanied by Heinrich Himmler and requested of Hitler that he approve of the Arabs emulating the Nazis in ridding Palestine of Jews.

After the war, Husseini returned to the Middle East to reassume the leadership of the Palestinians as head of the Palestinian High Committee. When in November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted in favour of partitioning Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state, Husseini played an active role in galvanising total Arab opposition to such a scheme. Once again, the Jews accepted partition, this time wholeheartedly, even though they were to be denied Jerusalem. Had the Arabs accepted the UN resolution, the Palestinians would have had a state that encompassed more land than was feasible after Israel’s War of Independence.

For the next nineteen years Israel continued to live within the so-called 1949 or pre-1967 borders. Actually they were merely armistice lines with the final frontiers to be determined in the framework of peace negotiations. The Arabs themselves had never recognised such boundaries for as far they were concerned Israel in its entirety was illegitimate. This at a time when there was not a single Jewish settlement in the West Bank and when East Jerusalem was in Arab hands. In other words, even when the Arabs held all the territory that they are now demanding, they had no intention of suing for peace. The Jews, on the other hand, had no intention of seizing the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

On the morning of June 5, 1967, as Israel locked horns with Egypt in what was to become the Six-Day War, on three separate occasions it assured Jordan that if it did not enter the fray, it would be left unharmed. As a manifestation of Israel’s non-aggressive intentions, only three brigades with a limited number of tanks were stationed along the Jordanian border. King Hussein of Jordan’s response was transmitted through his prime minister, Sa’d Jum’a, who in a radio broadcast announced, “We are engaged in a war of honour against our common enemy. For years we have longed to wipe away the shame of the past.” Shortly thereafter, at 11.15 a.m., the Jordanian Arab Legion rained down 6000 shells on West Jerusalem, injuring a thousand people and killing twenty. Nine hundred buildings were struck including the Hadasah Hospital at Ein Kerem. Israel was left with no choice other than to neutralise the Jordanian forces by removing them from East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Three weeks after the Six-Day War, Ya’akov Herzog, the director general of the Prime Minister’s Office, met secretly in London with King Hussein. On being asked by Herzog whether or not he would now sue for peace, Hussein refused to commit himself. Herzog then approached Palestinian notables, hinting at a possible formation of an independent Palestinian state with its capital in the greater Jerusalem area and with a secure passage between Gaza and the West Bank. Unfortunately, in light of Israel’s full withdrawal after the 1956 Sinai Campaign, the notables wondered if Israel would indeed remain in the newly conquered territories and, fearful of being branded as collaborators, they were unwilling to consider Herzog’s overtures. This left only the PLO, established three years earlier, whose attitude to any prospect of coexisting with Israel was encapsulated by its founding leader Ahmed Shukeiri, who days before the Six-Day War, when asked on French television what plans he had for the Jews of Israel, he simply drew a finger across his throat. The upshot of it all is that even had Israel wanted to vacate all the territory it had taken, there was no responsible Arab body to receive it. Such a state of affairs continued until 1993 when the PLO pretended to recognise Israel under the terms of the Oslo Accords.

To understand why the PLO seemingly had a change of heart, one must bear in mind the changed status of that organisation. At the beginning of the 1990s the PLO was in disarray. Having in 1982 been displaced by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) from Lebanon, it transferred its headquarters to Tunisia, where it languished far from its theatre of war. By 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union and of other communist regimes, the PLO lost its world power sponsors that had furnished it with arms and training and that had furthered its cause in the UN and other international arenas. Then in the 1991 Gulf War it misplayed its hand by throwing in its lot with Saddam Hussein, depriving itself of almost a billion US dollars in revenue from Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states as well as further antagonising the USA. Given such setbacks, the PLO in Efraim Karsh’s words “had become a regional pariah, with Arafat on the brink of political extinction”.[1] Then out of the blue, the Oslo Accords afforded the PLO a second life. With Israel hoodwinked into relating to it as a legitimate negotiating partner and by facilitating the entry of its leadership into the West Bank and Gaza, not to mention permitting it to maintain an armed police force, the opportunity was too good to miss even at the price of formally recognising Israel.

Needless to say, after having attained such a remarkable change of fortune, the PLO never once lived up to any of its contracted obligations, such as amending its charter in the interest of promoting peace, limiting the size of its armed force, bringing all disparate armed groups (such as those of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad) under a single controlling authority, combatting terrorism both by force and by education, and concentrating its energies in furthering the economic and social progress of its people. That did not in the least hinder the PLO from enjoying the support of the international community, which began to regard it as a respectable organisation to which they donated funds copiously, welcomed it into international forums and likened its leaders to responsible statesmen, even going as far as issuing Arafat with a Nobel Peace Prize.

From 1993 onwards, with Arafat ensconced within the frontiers of mandated Palestine, the PLO began undermining Israel. As violent acts of Palestinian terror became commonplace, Arafat went through the motions of both condemning them and reasserting his so-called commitment to the “peace of the brave”. Meanwhile, he quietly commended the perpetrators of such outrages and comforted their families. The worst incident occurred in September 1996 when at an IDF checkpoint outside Ramallah, Palestinian police joined with Palestinian students pelting missiles at Israeli soldiers. For the first time since the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords the Palestinian police fired at the Israelis, killing fifteen. All the while, the Israelis continued to concede additional slices of territory to the newly formed Palestinian Authority (PA) while receiving nothing but empty promises in return.

By the year 2000 Ehud Barak in his capacity as Israel’s prime minister began to fear that if Israel continued to give away the store in stages, it would eventually be bereft of bargaining chips for the purpose of extracting serious Palestinian concessions. Accordingly, he pushed for a round of talks that had the express purpose of settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all. President Clinton, who was very receptive to the idea, offered to participate and host them on July 11 at his Camp David retreat. As the sessions progressed Barak found himself sequentially improving on his offers, given that all his preceding ones continued to fall short of Palestinian demands. The situation became quite farcical. The PA negotiating team referred to him as a lemon to be squeezed over and over again, while Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s deputy, stated that it was his credo not to move one step forward, for Israel “has to come our way on all the issues on which it procrastinates”.[2] Indeed Barak did his best to comply. In the end he offered to hand over all of Gaza, 91 per cent of the West Bank and some sections of East Jerusalem. (By the year’s end he was even prepared to concede 96 per cent of the West Bank.)

To the chagrin of both Clinton and Barak, Arafat insisted that no agreement would be reached unless Israel acceded to his demand to accept the right of all Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to their former homes in Israel. Furthermore Arafat rejected any formula for shared sovereignty of the Temple Mount. As far as he was concerned, the Jews had never built a temple there in the first place. The process of denying that the Jews have an historic bond with their ancestral home is well entrenched within the PLO.

The Palestinian response to an offer of statehood with a capital in East Jerusalem was to unleash an organised orgy of wanton violence against the Jewish State that culminated in the deaths of 1009 Israelis. The uprising, or al-Aqsa Intifada, was ostensibly a reflection of Palestinian frustration in continuing to live under Israeli occupation. But in reality the occupation was perpetuated by the Palestinians themselves, who refused to make even the smallest of compromises which could have led to their independence. The PLO’s charter remained unaltered; Hamas, openly striving for Israel’s elimination, includes a clause in its charter that calls for the slaughter of all Jews.

It is commonly believed, even among some naive Israelis, that because the PLO had formally recognised Israel, sufficient willingness and flexibility on Israel’s part would result in the attainment of a mutually acceptable peace agreement. In truth, the Palestinians are not interested in making peace with Israel under any circumstances. In this regard, Ehud Olmert’s overture to Abbas is apposite. In September 2008, after a series of lengthy deliberations, Olmert presented Abbas with a proposal which is unlikely ever to be surpassed, nor, considering that most Israelis judged it excessive, will it ever be repeated. On offer was the formation of a Palestinian state in all of Gaza and 93.6 per cent of the West Bank. To provide an offset for the 6.4 of the West Bank land that Israel would retain, Israel would forgo parts of its own territory amounting to an area equivalent to 5.8 per cent of the West Bank. A substantial portion of such land would consist of prime agricultural soil adjacent to Gaza currently cultivated by Israeli farming communities such as Be’eri, Kissufim and Nir Oz.[3] As Haaretz editor Aluf Benn noted, “The implementation of the Olmert plan would require the evacuation of tens of thousands of settlers and the removal of hallmarks of the West Bank settlement enterprise such as Ofra, Beit El, Elon Moreh and Kiryat Arba, as well as the Jewish community in Hebron.”[4] Finally, the 6 per cent of West Bank land area left in Israel’s favour would be met by the provision to the Palestinians of a land link between the West Bank and Gaza so that in essence the Palestinians would be fully compensated for any West Bank land still retained by Israel. As for Jerusalem, sovereignty of the Old City was to be vested in an international condominium consisting of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Palestinian state, Israel and the United States.

Abbas promised to get back to Olmert the following day, but Olmert never heard from him again. To account for Abbas’s inexplicable behaviour, in March 2009, on Al Jazeera, Abbas’s offsider Saeb Erekat confected a conversation between Olmert and Abbas in which Abbas declaimed, “I am not in a marketplace or a bazaar. I came to demarcate the borders of Palestine, the June 4, 1967 borders, without detracting a single inch, and without detracting a single stone from Jerusalem, or from the holy Christian and Muslim places.” That, in Erekat’s words, was “why the Palestinian negotiators did not sign”.[5]

The continued refusal of the Palestinians to accept a final and conclusive termination of their dispute with Israel should have come as no surprise. In June 1974, at a Palestine National Council Meeting in Cairo, the PLO conceived of a strategy of initially striving for control over only part of Palestine with the aim of gradually extending that control to cover all of the country. Since then it has never, even for a second, deviated from that path.

On the very day in September 1993 that Arafat, Rabin and Clinton gathered in Washington for the signing ceremony of the Oslo Accords, Arafat, in a pre-recorded television address broadcast in Jordan, informed his Arab audience that he had just accomplished the first step of the PLO’s plan of dismantling Israel by stages.[6] Most leading PLO functionaries have at one time or another articulated similar notions. For example, in May 2001 the late Faisal Husseini, who was slated to succeed Arafat, in an interview given to an Egyptian journal, likened the PLO to a Trojan horse that given a foothold on territory controlled by Israel would eventually overrun the entire Jewish State. In December 2009 Abbas, who actually did succeed Ararat, stated that “there is no disagreement between Fatah and Hamas. About belief? None! About policy? None. About resistance? None.”[7] What Abbas was essentially saying was that like Hamas, his Fatah organisation, of which he is chairman, is committed to the establishment of a Palestinian state from Jordan to the Mediterranean. How otherwise could Hamas and Fatah share a common belief and policy?

Such views are also maintained by the vast majority of the Palestinian population, whose hatred of Israel is bequeathed from one generation to the next. Of late, the intensity of such hatred has increased even at the very time when Israel has been prepared to meet them halfway.

In trying to understand the source of their rancour, one could rule out its stemming from a frustrated Palestinian nationalism. Historically the Arabs in Palestine have never regarded themselves as constituting a distinct national entity. There has never been an independent Palestinian state and at no time since the destruction of the second Temple was Jerusalem a capital city of any non-Jewish state, not even a regional centre in the Ottoman empire. In 1923, the Arab Executive Committee, the umbrella organisation of the Palestinians, in a submission to the League of Nations, claimed that Palestine had been unlawfully severed from its mother country, Syria.[8] When the Arab High Command rejected the 1937 Peel Commission’s partition proposal it did so on the grounds that Palestine belongs to the Arab and Muslim worlds.[9] Ten years later, in once again presenting its case, this time against an imminent UN partition scheme, the Arab High Command advocated the incorporation of Palestine and Transjordan into a “Greater Syria”.[10] In 1977, well after Israel had been established, Zahir Muhsein, a member of the PLO executive committee, formally let the cat out of the bag in an interview with James Dorsey for the Dutch newspaper Trouw. Without mincing his words, Muhsein explained:



the Palestinian people do not exist. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct Palestinian people to oppose Zionism.[11]



As for Hamas, the struggle against the Jewish state derives its inspiration not from any nationalistic feelings but from Islam. The purpose of the struggle is to establish an Islamic state over all of Palestine as part of the Muslim crusade to extend Islam to the world at large.

A toxic brew of Nazi and Islamic anti-Semitism which had been indelibly instilled into the Arab psyche by the founding Palestinian leader Haj Amin al Husseini and maintained to this very day is the root cause of Palestinian intransigence. To the Muslim belief that land once held by Muslims is absolutely inalienable is added a cocktail of egregious racist anti-Semitism that would have won the admiration of Julius Streicher.

An abiding hatred of Israelis within Palestinian society continues to be consciously fomented by the Palestinian leadership. The inculcation of the most extreme of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli sentiments commences in kindergarten and school where children are taught that the entire region from the River Jordan to the sea constitutes Palestinian territory and that Israel within its 1949 borders occupies land illegitimately wrested from them. Israel is whitewashed out of all school maps and Israeli cities are listed in song and poetry as Palestinian ones to which the children are destined to return. Above all, suicide bombers are slavishly adored. Their pictures grace the walls of practically every classroom and the students are encouraged to emulate them. City squares, sports venues and sport teams as well as public landmarks are named after the most bloodthirsty Palestinian murderers, who are regarded as embodying the supreme virtues of the Palestinian people.

Far from being ashamed or distancing themselves from the evil deeds perpetrated by their “freedom fighters”, the PA is more than proud of them, officially according them respect and gratitude. Take for instance the insertion in July 2013 of photographs of five Palestinian terrorists and a summary of their feats in the official Facebook page of Fatah. Accompanying the photograph of one Abdallah Bargouti, currently serving sixty-seven life sentences for organising various acts of murder, is a list of his “accomplishments”. And what are those accomplishments? The list reads as follows:



The Sbarro restaurant operation in Jerusalem which killed 15 Zionists, the Moment Café operation which killed 11 Zionists, the Sheffield Night Club operation which killed 15 Zionists, the Hebrew University operation which killed 9 Zionists, the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall operation which killed 11 Zionists.[12]



The adulation of terrorists emanates from the very pinnacle of the PA leadership. In July 2010, on the occasion of the death of Muhammad Daoud Oudeh, the organiser of the Munich Olympic Games massacre, Mahmoud Abbas sent a telegram of condolences to the deceased’s family. In it he described Oudeh as a prominent Fatah leader and a wonderful brother and companion, who, as a relentless fighter, devoted himself in defence of the Palestinian revolution.[13]

The immediate wish-list of the PA, as repetitively articulated by its leadership and media outlets, includes Israel’s acceptance of the right of return of all Palestinian refugees and Palestinian control of the Old City of Jerusalem in its entirety, forestalling Jewish access to the plaza facing the Western Wall where the establishment of an Arab housing estate has been flagged.[14] Not only would the Old City be Judenrein (Jew-free) but so too would the future Palestinian state. As Abbas declared: “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli—civilian or soldier—on our lands.”[15] Finally, far from being willing to recognise Israel as a Jewish state (which was the explicit intention of the 1947 UN partition resolution) the PA has called upon Israel to acknowledge its exclusive role in the creation of the Palestinian Nakba (tragedy).[16] The effrontery of it all is breathtaking. After failing in their campaign to stifle Israel at birth, the Palestinians expect Israel to apologise for that failure.

Whichever way one looks at it, it ought to be patently obvious that the Palestinians have no desire to make peace with Israel. The sole purpose and function of their organisations—Fatah, the PLO, Hamas, the Muslem Brotherhood—is directed towards the destruction of the Jewish State. Without Israel, nothing would be heard of Palestinian national aspirations. When in 1948 Jordan illegally took possession of the West Bank and Egypt took the Gaza Strip, areas designated by the UN for the establishment of a Palestinian state, no Palestinian leader uttered the slightest complaint. Years later, as the PLO leaders formulated their movement’s objectives, they assured King Hussein that they would not contest his rule over the West Bank. All they sought was the elimination of Israel, an objective which they assumed Hussein also held.[17]

By instilling in their followers an ideology of hatred towards Israel, by inciting them to undertake acts of murder described as wondrous deeds and by insisting that the return to Israel of all Arab refugees and their offspring is a non-negotiable sacred right, the Palestinian leaders have foreclosed all prospects of ever attaining peace. Now, even if Palestinian leaders did indeed want peace, they would be unable to pursue it lest they be assassinated.

Palestinian intransigence had been aided and abetted by the international community. In fact without its support, the Palestinians may well have become somewhat more accommodating. But by playing along with the farce that the Palestinians are victims, that those now living for several generations in areas of mandated Palestine such as Gaza and the West Bank are Palestinian refugees, by the open-ended financing of their organisations without any serious accountability and by rubber-stamping their demands in world forums, the international community has blithely contributed to the continuation of the bloodletting it purports to abhor.

Until a new generation of moderate Palestinian leaders emerges that purges Palestinian society of its dysfunctional genocidal obsession, Israel is destined to continue to live in a state of alternating hot and cold wars. Just as it has done so during the past sixty-six years, managing in the process to develop its economy and society to ever higher levels of attainment, so hopefully will it continue to do so in the future.



Leslie Stein is the author of Israel Since the Six-Day War, published in July by Polity Press. He was an associate professor at Macquarie University until his recent retirement.

Uncertainty in climate science

The Australian 23rdSep2014

A DEGREE OF UNCERTAINTY STEVEN E. KOONIN

Steven E. Koonin was undersecretary for science in the US Energy Department during President Barack Obama’s first term and is director of the Centre for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. His previous positions include pro



Climate science is not sufficiently settled to confidently predict what the future holds

Rigidly promulgating the idea that climate science is settled (or is a hoax) demeans and chills the scientific enterprise

From page 1 THE idea that “climate science is settled” runs through today’s popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. It has not only distorted our public and policy debates on issues related to energy, greenhouse gas emissions and the environment, it also has inhibited the scientific and policy discussions that we need to have about our climate future.
MICHAEL S. NOLAN
A calving glacier in Alaska; scientific models describe the shrinking of Arctic ice during the past two decades but fail to describe the comparable growth in Antarctic ice
My training as a computational physicist — together with a 40year career of scientific research, advising and management in academe, government and the private sector — has afforded me an extended, up-close perspective on climate science. Detailed technical discussions during the past year with leading climate scientists have given me an even better sense of what we know and don’t know about climate. I have come to appreciate the daunting scientific challenge of answering the questions that policymakers and the public are asking.
The crucial scientific question for policy isn’t whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter: the climate has always changed and always will. Geological and historical records show the occurrence of major climate shifts, sometimes across only a few decades. We know, for instance, that during the 20th century the Earth’s global average surface temperature rose 0.8C.
Nor is the crucial question whether humans are influencing the climate. That is no hoax; there is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate. There is also little doubt that the carbon dioxide will persist in the atmosphere for several centuries. The impact today of human activity appears to be comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself.
Rather, the crucial, unsettled scientific question for policy is: how will the climate change during the next century under both natural and human influences?
Answers to that question at the global and regional levels, as well as to equally complex questions of how ecosystems and human activities will be affected, should inform our choices about energy and infrastructure.
But — here’s the catch — those questions are the hardest ones to answer. They challenge, in a fundamental way, what science can tell us about future climates.
Even though human influences could have serious consequences for the climate, they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole. For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere’s natural greenhouse effect by only 1 per cent to 2 per cent. Since the climate system is highly variable on its own, that smallness sets a very high bar for confidently projecting the consequences of human influences.
A second challenge to knowing future climate is today’s poor understanding of the oceans. The oceans, which change across decades and centuries, hold most of the climate’s heat and strongly influence the atmosphere. Unfortunately, precise, comprehensive observations of the oceans are available only for the past few decades; the reliable record is still far too short to adequately understand how the oceans will change and how that will affect climate.
A third fundamental challenge arises from feedbacks that can dramatically amplify or mute the climate’s response to human and natural influences. One important feedback, which is thought to approximately double the direct heating effect of carbon dioxide, involves water vapour, clouds and temperature.
But feedbacks are uncertain. They depend on the details of processes such as evaporation and the flow of radiation through clouds. They cannot be determined confidently from the basic laws of physics and chemistry, so they must be verified by precise, detailed observations that are, in many cases, not yet available.
Beyond these observational challenges are those posed by the complex computer models used to project future climate. These massive programs attempt to describe the dynamics and interactions of the various components of the Earth system — the atmosphere, the oceans, the land, the ice and the biosphere of living things. While some parts of the models rely on well-tested physical laws, other parts involve technically informed estimation. Computer modelling of complex systems is as much an art as a science.
For instance, global climate models describe the Earth on a grid that is currently limited by computer capabilities to a resolution of no finer than 100km. But processes such as cloud formation, turbulence and rain all happen on much smaller scales. These critical processes then appear in the model only through adjustable assumptions that specify, for example, how the average cloud cover depends on a grid box’s average temperature and humidity. In a given model, dozens of such assumptions must be adjusted (“tuned”, in the jargon of modellers) to reproduce current observations and imperfectly known historical records.
We often hear that there is a “scientific consensus” about climate change. But as far as the computer models go, there isn’t a useful consensus at the level of detail relevant to assessing human influences. Since 1990, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has periodically surveyed the state of climate science. Each successive report from that endeavour, with contributions from thousands of scientists around the world, has come to be seen as the definitive assessment of climate science at the time.
For the latest IPCC report (September last year), its Working Group I, which focuses on physical science, uses an ensemble of about 55 models. Although most of these models are tuned to reproduce the gross features of the Earth’s climate, the marked differences in their details and projections reflect all of the limitations I have described. For example: • The models differ in their descriptions of the past century’s global average surface temperature by more than three times the entire warming recorded during that time. Such mismatches are also present in many other basic climate factors, including rainfall, which is fundamental to the atmosphere’s energy balance. As a result, the models give widely varying descriptions of the climate’s inner workings. Since they disagree so markedly, no more than one of them can be right. • Although the Earth’s average surface temperature rose sharply by 0.5C during the last quarter of the 20th century, it has increased much more slowly for the past 16 years, even as the human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen by 25 per cent.
This surprising fact demonstrates directly that natural influences and variability are powerful enough to counteract the present warming influence exerted by human activity. Yet the models famously fail to capture this slowing in the temperature rise. Several dozen explanations for this failure have been offered, with ocean variability most likely playing a major role. But the whole episode continues to highlight the limits of our modelling. • The models roughly describe the shrinking extent of Arctic sea ice observed across the past two decades, but they fail to describe the comparable growth of Antarctic sea ice, which is now at a record high. • The models predict that the lower atmosphere in the tropics will absorb much of the heat of the warming atmosphere. But that “hot spot” has not been confidently observed, casting doubt on our understanding of the crucial feedback of water vapour on temperature. • Even though human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today — about 30cm a century. • A crucial measure of our knowledge of feedbacks is climate sensitivity — that is, the warming induced by a hypothetical doubling of carbon dioxide concentration. Today’s best estimate of the sensitivity is no different, and no more certain, than it was 30 years ago. And this is despite a heroic research effort costing billions of dollars.
These and many other open questions are in fact described in the IPCC research reports, although a detailed and knowledgeable reading is sometimes required to discern them. They are not “minor” issues to be “cleaned up” by further research. Rather, they are deficiencies that erode confidence in the computer projections. Work to resolve these shortcomings in climate models should be among the top priorities for climate research.
Yet a public official reading only the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers would gain little sense of the extent or implications of these deficiencies. These are fundamental challenges to our understanding of human impacts on the climate, and they should not be dismissed with the mantra that “climate science is settled”.
While the past two decades have seen progress in climate science, the field is not yet mature enough to usefully answer the difficult and important questions being asked of it. This decidedly unsettled state highlights what should be obvious: understanding climate, at the level of detail relevant to human influences, is a very, very difficult problem.
We can and should take steps to make climate projections more useful across time. An international commitment to a sustained global climate observation system would generate an ever-lengthening record of more precise observations. And increasingly powerful computers can allow a better understanding of the uncertainties in our models, finer model grids and more sophisticated descriptions of the processes that occur within them.
The science is urgent, since we could be caught flat-footed if our understanding does not improve more rapidly than the climate itself changes.
A transparent rigour also would be a welcome development, especially given the momentous political and policy decisions at stake. That could be supported by regular, independent, “red team” reviews to stress-test and challenge the projections by focusing on their deficiencies and uncertainties; that would certainly be the best practice of the scientific method.
But because the natural climate changes across decades, it will take many years to get the data needed to confidently isolate and quantify the effects of human influences.
Policymakers and the public may wish for the comfort of certainty in their climate science. But I fear that rigidly promulgating the idea that climate science is settled (or is a hoax) demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, retarding its progress in these important matters. Uncertainty is a prime mover and motivator of science and must be faced head-on. It should not be confined to hushed sidebar conversations at academic conferences.
Society’s choices in the years ahead necessarily will be based on uncertain knowledge of future climates. That uncertainty need not be an excuse for inaction. There is well-justified prudence in accelerating the development of lowemissions technologies and in cost-effective energy-efficiency measures.
But climate strategies beyond such “no regrets” efforts carry costs, risks and questions of effectiveness, so non-scientific factors inevitably enter the decision. These include our tolerance for risk and the priorities that we assign to economic development, poverty reduction, environmental quality, and intergenerational and geographical equity.
Individuals and countries can legitimately disagree about these matters, so the discussion should not be about believing or denying the science. Despite the statements of numerous scientific societies, the scientific community cannot claim any special expertise in addressing issues related to humanity’s deepest goals and values. The political and diplomatic spheres are best suited to debating and resolving such questions, and misrepresenting the current state of climate science does nothing to advance that effort.

Any serious discussion of the changing climate must begin by acknowledging not only the scientific certainties but also the uncertainties, especially in projecting the future. Recognising those limits, rather than ignoring them, will lead to a more sober and ultimately more productive discussion of climate change and climate policies. To do otherwise is a great disservice to climate science.