Opinion: A Nobel Lie or just a Noble Lie?

The Noble Lie, where elites say something they know to be false but intend for the greater good, has a long history going back to the Ancient Greeks. Socrates argued that the Noble Lie advocated by Plato in his ‘Republic’ was completely appropriate.

That was long before the Evangelical Christians of the 17^th century (Puritans, Calvinists, etc) realized that God looks most favorably upon those who tell the truth and who work hard to better themselves and understand the world around them. Telling the absolute truth, not a politically expedient or religious truth, is crucial. These changes in attitude brought us out of the Dark Ages into the Enlightenment where both Science and Capitalism propelled centuries of human progress.

Perhaps I should say almost five centuries of human progress, but unlikely more, as commitments to the sovereignty of reason and evidence as the primary sources of knowledge are perishing in a tsunami of superstition and propaganda. The ruling oligarchy, that some would call Marxist, is intent on maintaining power by any means of deception and at any cost.

The ‘Information Age,’ or as Michael Crichton called it the ‘Disinformation Age,’ has made propaganda especially potent. Noble Lies have become the way politicians sell their programs and use as an excuse to force people to obey their commands. We have to do what they say to ward off one or more “existential threats.” And these threats never cease, because they are the means by which we are now controlled. Should anyone object, they are silenced, typically by a ‘cancellation’ process that claims they are unworthy. They may be publicly vilified, lose their jobs, or just be banned from social media. The important thing is that their contrarian ideas are silenced.

A new twist on the Noble Lie is the Nobel Lie, where a respectable institution is compromised by the political mob to support their political needs. Such has been the history of the Nobel Peace Prize, which has been awarded to some who were notably unworthy. Both Adolph Hitler and Yasser Arafat, were awarded the prize in hopes that they would choose peace. But they never did. Then along came Al Gore and Barack Obama who received the Peace Prize for their support of Leftist themes. That was another monumental departure from an award for performance to an award for political beliefs.

An acquaintance of mine received the Nobel Peace Prize with colleagues in 1997. He was a Sergeant-Major in the Danish Army who removed landmines from former war zones, an especially dangerous undertaking. When asked about the same award to Al Gore, he emphatically wanted no association with Gore’s climate nonsense.

Now we have the corruption of the Nobel science prizes for similar political purposes, because the Nobel Committee has been infiltrated by those dedicated to political truths over scientific ones. The latest award of the Nobel Prize in Physics to those promoting Global Warming hysteria (Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi ) are sad proof that science is no longer an objective profession. It has finally succumbed to political will. Previous winners, from Marie Curie to Albert Einstein, must be turning over in their graves. They won their prizes based on overwhelming merit.

Einstein was ever mindful of how science really works and insisted that he not receive the prize for his ‘Theory of Relativity’ until there was sufficient hard evidence that it was correct. That came years later.

Now we have an award of the prize for a theory (actually a computer model) that does not stand up to elementary scrutiny, yet suits the needs of the political class. The award is being given to someone who discovered a way to amplify the very slight warming from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide into something much greater, by invoking a strong positive feedback from water vapor. That saved climate alarmism from a certain demise by providing a dubious amplification process. Never mind that feedbacks in nature are usually negative (Le Chatelier’s Principle) and water vapor cannot by itself inflict runaway warming.

Too many scientists are now serving a far different master than the truth and being handsomely rewarded for doing so. No good can come of that.

Meanwhile a few still worthy scientists work in enforced obscurity, because their efforts are not allowed publication by the climate cabal. ‘Peer Review’ has become ‘Pal Review.’ Scientists are encouraged to agree with prevailing paradigms and substantially shut out of the normal scientific discussion process, if they do not.

Two physicists, William van Wijngaarden of York University and William Happer of Princeton University, tried to publish their research on “Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases” and were rejected by several prominent journals, presumably for not bowing to consensus science. What they demonstrate in great detail is that they can calculate how much thermal radiation is absorbed by a model atmosphere, due to the various greenhouse gases from water vapor to carbon dioxide, ozone, nitrous oxide, and methane. And then crucially, they can check their calculations against measurements made by satellites. This is what turns theory into real science, namely confirmation by robust data.

The stunning conclusion from their work, involving 300,000 spectral absorption lines from these gases, is that the individual lines for carbon dioxide are already substantially saturated and will not absorb much additional thermal radiation from the Earth’s surface as the concentration of atmospheric CO2 goes up. In other words, very detailed calculations show what others have realized; increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 will cause no more than trivial warming. Even an unlikely doubling of atmospheric CO2 will cause no more than trivial warming.

Is this the last word on this subject? Far from it. As Happer points out, none of their theoretical work (or that of others like Manabe) takes into account clouds. They are the elephant in the room that vastly influences the Earth’s surface temperature. Everyone who compares temperatures on a sunny day with a cloudy day understands that.

The award of the Nobel Prize to anyone for predicting future climate out a century is premature and arrogant. All we know for certain, from sturdy observational data, is that our climate is going through natural cycles as it always has. Nothing at all unusual is happening. Humans are merely a slight perturbation on a very complex system that we are very far from understanding completely. Despite constant haranguing from the political class and their allies who see nothing but disaster, we have a climate system that is inherently stable against all but large extraterrestrial factors such as orbital cycles and solar variations.

At the recently concluded Heartland International Climate Conference in Las Vegas, Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist, Willie Soon, pointed to advances that he is pursuing on these powerful extraterrestrial factors over which we have no control.

Noble Lies or Nobel Lies merely make the pursuit of objective science more difficult and can halt it altogether, as happened with Galileo. I should not have to use the word “objective” when referring to science. But that emphasis is critically important in a world that no longer values objectivity, only political correctness.

Gordon J. Fulks lives in Corbett and can be reached at gordonfulks@hotmail.com. He is one of the Directors of the CO2 Coalition and holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago’s Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research.