Is belief in global-warming science another example of the "madness of crowds"?

A quite long article from Times Higher Education by Martin Cohen. "Martin Cohen is editor of The Philosopher, and himself an environmental activist involved in many campaigns. His latest book is Mind Games (in press), which discusses the psychology of societies, and he is actively researching a critique of climate change for Pluto Press provisionally titled Climate, Chaos and Irrationality: How the Green Agenda Was Hijacked by Global Warming Theorists." Full article here Via Greenie Watch A couple excerpts: The Copenhagen summit is in full force, and so too is the idea that man-made global warming is incontrovertible. But Martin Cohen argues that the consensus is less a triumph of science and rationality than of PR and fear-mongering Is belief in global-warming science another example of the "madness of crowds"? That strange but powerful social phenomenon, first described by Charles Mackay in 1841, turns a widely shared prejudice into an irresistible "authority". Could it indeed represent the final triumph of irrationality? After all, how rational is it to pass laws banning one kind of light bulb (and insisting on their replacement by ones filled with poisonous mercury vapour) in order to "save electricity", while ploughing money into schemes to run cars on ... electricity? How rational is it to pay the Russians once for fossil fuels, and a second time for permission (via carbon credits) to burn them (see box page 36)? And how rational is it to suppose that the effects of increased CO2 in the atmosphere take between 200 and 1,000 years to be felt, but that solutions can take effect almost instantaneously? ***************************************************** A paper by Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi, called "On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data", published in July 2009 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, examined the modellers' case for CO2-induced global warming. It offered 12 graphs, 11 of them based on the most sophisticated climate models, all but one of which showed that as the temperature of the surface of the seas increases slightly, the amount of heat then trapped in the atmosphere by water vapour increases - a key element in accelerating the "greenhouse effect". We should be worried. Yet there was that odd graph out, the 12th one. As Lubo? Motl, a sceptical physicist, joked, could it be that this was a tainted model - with its assumptions "tweaked" to fit prejudices by climate-change "deniers" funded by the oil industry? But no - the graph that contradicted all the others was the one based not on a model but on satellite measurements. It showed the Earth's oceans dampening the heating effect. So what sort of factors mess up the models?

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