I just read a very detailed–and way too long for me to recount fully here–expose` in Der Spiegel, about Climategate and the bar room brawl between climate warming alarmist scientists (and I don’t meant that pejoratively) and skeptics. It is a very important article and anyone interested in global warming should read the whole thing (linked below).
It is clear throughout where the sympathies of the writer and magazine lie–and it ain’t with skeptics. For example, it excoriates much of the push back as an industry propaganda blitz and accuses the skeptics of starting the rumble by attacking the work and integrity of the alarmists.
And that is precisely why its reporting on Climategate is so damning–and indeed, reads like Nixon in full paranoia attack mode–with efforts made to fudge the science for PR and political effect. For example, the (in)famous “hockey stick” graph was intentionally made the face of global warming–even though the scientists responsible knew it didn’t take the Medieval warming period into account–which could not have been our fault.
Most disturbing is the major effort made by a small group of very powerful scientists to prevent skeptics from being published in peer reviewed journals and attacks on editors that published opposing views–sometimes costing the editors their jobs. Talk about making sure you have no competition!
The point of keeping skeptics out of peer reviewed journals–and the same tactic has been employed in the stem cell and Darwin debates–is to then mock them for not having published peer reviewed studies–when the taunters’ own ruthless actions ensured the heterodox articles had little chance of being accepted. Very insidious and a total corruption of science and the scientific method. From the article, “How the Science of Global Warming Was Compromised:”
The two sides became increasingly hostile toward one another. They debated about whom they could trust, who was a part of their “team” — and who among them might secretly be a skeptic. All those who were between the two extremes or even tried to maintain links with both sides soon found themselves under suspicion. This distrust helped foster a system of favoritism, as the hacked e-mails show. According to these, Jones and Mann had a huge influence over what was published in the trade press. Those who controlled the journals also controlled what entered the public arena — and therefore what was perceived as scientific reality…It’s well-known that renowned scientists can gain influence within journals. But it’s a risky business. “The danger that deserved reputations become illegitimate power is the greatest risk that science faces,” Weingart says.
In one described example, “the hockey team,” as the alarmist faction called themselves, may have stifled two articles critical of tree data from Siberia–but the critics later proved to be right. Even worse than preventing critical studies from being published was the attack on journal editors who published heterodox articles:
A study published in Climate Research in 2003 looked into findings on the current warm period and the medieval one, concluding that the 20th century was “probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climactic period of the last millennium.” Although climate skeptics were thrilled, most experts thought the study was methodologically flawed. But if the pro-climate-change camp controlled the peer review process, then why was it ever published?
In an e-mail dated March 11, 2003, Michael Mann said there was only one possibility: Skeptics had taken over the journal. He therefore demanded that the enemy be stopped in its tracks. The “hockey team” launched a powerful counterattack that shook Climate Research magazine to its foundations. Several of its editors resigned…
Yet there were also limits to the influence had by Mann and Jones, as became apparent in 2005, when relentless hockey stick critics Ross McKitrick and Stephen McIntyre were able to publish studies in the most important geophysical journal, Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). “Apparently, the contrarians now have an ‘in’ with GRL,” Mann wrote to his colleagues in a leaked e-mail. “We can’t afford to lose GRL.” Mann discovered that one of the editors of GRL had once worked at the same university as the feared climate skeptic Patrick Michaels. He therefore put two and two together: “I think we now know how various papers have gotten published in GRL,” he wrote on January 20, 2005. At the same time, the scientists discussed how to get rid of GRL editor James Saiers, himself a climate researcher. Saiers quit his post a year later — allegedly of his own accord. “The GRL leak may have been plugged up now,” a relieved Mann wrote in an e-mail to the “hockey team.”
That is a direct assault on the scientific method, and as such, is a scandal of the highest order–especially considering the kind of Draconian compromise of national sovereignty, the economy destroying policies, and redistribution of the wealth schemes that hysterics tried to pull off at Copenhagen.
The article finishes with some wisdom–the science of global warming will always be uncertain:
However, it seems all but impossible to provide conclusive proof in climate research. Scientific philosopher Silvio Funtovicz foresaw this dilemma as early as 1990. He described climate research as a “postnormal science.” On account of its high complexity, he said it was subject to great uncertainty while, at the same time, harboring huge risks.
In other words, catastrophic, human-caused global warming is not–contrary to repeated assertions by hysterics–a “fact.”
Still, why not invoke the precautionary principle, and take drastic action–just to be safe? Because, hysteria has led to proposed cures that are worse–or at least as bad and more immediate–than the potential disease. Fudging data, blackjacking the careers of editors in science journals, and engaging in blatant panic mongering will not change that truth.
May 15th, 2010 | 2:26 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Vince Humphreys, Stand In The Gap and Inez Pardue, Wesley J. Smith. Wesley J. Smith said: Global Warming Hysteria: Damning Der Spiegel Expose` of Corruption of Science by Climatagaters » Secondhand Smoke | http://shar.es/m4e06 [...]
May 15th, 2010 | 5:00 am
global warming is a SCAM!!!!
May 15th, 2010 | 9:06 am
[...] First Things (blog) [...]
May 15th, 2010 | 2:03 pm
It is difficult to accept that there is doubt that climate change is a fact. After all the comprehensive studies and evidence that there is changes in our patterns and will eventually spin out of control and be out of hands.
I suppose it is far easier to claim it is a “scam” than do the work in facing and addressing the problem of our own making.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
May 15th, 2010 at 2:55 pm
Jeremy Giles: Not a scam. But not a fact. We have had warming, but the exact causes, extents of those causes, and future course are not like the law of gravity.
May 15th, 2010 | 4:05 pm
Brilliant assessment of the article.
May 15th, 2010 | 5:06 pm
[...] is the original post: Global Warming Hysteria: Damning Der Spiegel Expose` of Corruption … Tags: even-though, Face, fault, Global Warming, hockey-stick, knew-it-didn, made-the-face, [...]
May 15th, 2010 | 7:13 pm
I was raised in academia and spent the first 30 years of my life there. My father was a professor of Latin and Greek who taught me to use a slide rule when I was 11. The chairman of the physics department was a rich baritone in my mother’s madrigal singing group.
I do not claim to be a scientist, but I know the culture and can follow the writings. And the Climategate emails are not within that tradition (yes, I’ve read nearly all of them). In particular, Michael Mann’s notes, from the beginning, are not those of a scientist but of a confidence man desperately rallying his accomplices to avoid exposure. Jones and Briffa start out the correspondence as somewhat reluctant fellow-travelers but become more and more comfortable with the corruption as time progresses.
The “scientific evidence” for the CO2-driven warming theory is nonexistent. In 1988, Hansen’s famous Congressional testimony was based on the fact that his CO2-driven computer model could not account for the last decade of warming without plugging in CO2. Now, after two decades and $100 billion in research, careful reading of the only relevant portion of the UN IPCC’s Fourth Assessment — Working Group 1, Chapter 9 “Attribution” — reveals that the only basis for the CO2 hypothesis is STILL that the computer models cannot generate the warming without plugging in CO2.
These models are all based on Hansen’s code developed in the 1970s when he, an astrophysicist, was studying Venus through a radiotelescope from hundreds of millions of miles away. First, to study the Earth’s climate the first thing you do is look out the window. Second, recent research shows that Venus’ global warming problem is not due to the fact that its atmosphere is 98% CO2 (Earth’s is 0.04% CO2, up from 0.03% a century ago), but simply due to its depth. Hansen’s model is even wrong for Venus.
I’ve been writing computer programs for more than forty years. I could write a program proving that Tasmania will be subjected to a devastating hail of pink stuffed bunnies in 2012 unless everyone in the Southern Hemisphere sends me $10 before Labor Day. Garbage in, garbage out. And anyone with any scientific training at all knows that.
So the ONLY reasonable conclusion from twenty years of evidence is that the CO2 Global Warming hysteria is in fact a conscious deception, a hoax on the population of the entire planet.
Then we come to “renewable energy.” This is from any point of view — engineering, agricultural, or ecological — totally delusional. Wind and solar are neither renewable nor energy; both require total devastation of huge swaths of countryside and wildlife habitat for tiny amounts of output — output that is in any case vacillating and unpredictable. Neither has shown itself able to replace even ONE conventional power plant in the decade they have been promoted in Europe. Hydro is useful, but in most of the world it’s already saturated — there is now, for example, on the Columbia River in the US, one turbine for every 11 feet of drop. Geothermal requires drilling industrial-size holes deeper than has ever been done before in seismically-active areas of the Earth’s crust. A geothermal project in Switzerland was rapidly quashed when preliminary drilling caused earthquakes in nearby villages; this result led to quick cancellation of a similar project in California. And the mad quest for biofuels has raised worldwide food prices and caused thousands of acres of jungle to be converted to an oil palm monoculture. This is responsible stewardship of the environment?
For perhaps half a million years, mankind depended on “renewable energy” — and life was nasty, brutish, and short, as it still is in parts of the Third World where mothers cook meals in the choking smoke of dried dung because the local forests were denuded generations ago to provide fuel. The Earth has more than 500 years’ worth of coal and perhaps 100 of oil, even allowing for an exponential increase in world demand. Greens babble about energy independence and point to the recent Gulf spill, while preventing oil drilling in the Beaufort Sea, where a spill wouldn’t even bother polar bears. Greens complain about coal mining, without mentioning what $100 billion in research could have done for mine safety and environmental restoration if it hadn’t been wasted chasing the Global Warming Fairy. “Renewable energy” is a fraud within a fraud.
It is long past time for those of us who believe in responsible stewardship to start working to save the environment from the “environmentalists.”
May 16th, 2010 | 8:08 am
Environmentalism is a religion. It justifies the fact that it demonizes those who ask questions by an appeal to the global warming apocalypse. I was in Washington several years ago as a local conservation representative for a national garden club. The meeting turned out to be primarily a time for lobbying Congress for cap and trade and environmentalist regulations. No discussion; the precautionary principle was invoked for everything. It was like a revival meeting for a cult. Members flew in for this meeting from all over the country, some on private planes– yet it was advertised proudly as ‘carbon free.’ Members who asked questions or attempted another view were ignored, laughed at, or censured. Most local members of this national garden club have no idea their dues are being used to push a particular leftist agenda.
May 16th, 2010 | 10:09 pm
“We have had warming, but the exact causes, extents of those causes, and future course are not like the law of gravity.”
Gravity is a theory, not a law. The “exact causes” and the “extents of those causes” are not understood. Based on past experience, the “future course” of gravity, while by no means certain, can be reasonably predicted.
Most credible climate scientists state that global warming over the past couple of centuries has been caused by increased atmospheric greenhouse gases. Based on basic physical and chemical principles it is likely that as we add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere we will cause further warming. This is a theory based on facts and supported by overwhelming evidence.
May 17th, 2010 | 1:35 am
Dear Editor
Recent research by Henrik Svensmark and his group at the Danish National
Space Center points to the real cause of the recent warming trend. In a
series of experiments on the formation of clouds, these scientists have
shown that fluctuations in the Sun’s output cause the observed changes in the
Earth’s temperature.
In the past, scientists believed the fluctuations in the Sun’s output were
too small to cause the observed amount of temperature change, hence the need
to look for other causes like carbon dioxide. However, these new
experiments show that fluctuations in the Sun’s output are in fact large
enough, so there is no longer a need to resort to carbon dioxide as the
cause of the recent warming trend.
The discovery of the real cause of the recent increase in the Earth’s
temperature is indeed a convenient truth. It means humans are not to blame
for the increase. It also means there is absolutely nothing we can, much
less do, to correct the situation.
Thomas Laprade
http://beforeitsnews.com/news/44/692/Astonishing_Science:_Sun_May_Cause_Global_Warming.html
May 17th, 2010 | 8:03 am
Wesley typed: “…hysteria has led to proposed cures that are worse–or at least as bad and more immediate–than the potential disease.”
You type this repeatedly, but only talk of the “cures” as crippling the economy. Do you really think limiting greenhouse gas emissions will be more disruptive to civilization than CO2 at 1000 ppm?
May 17th, 2010 | 12:46 pm
There are plenty of published papers challenging various models, measurements, and predictions within climate research – I’ve indicated some in previous posts.
Since the evidence suggests Smith never reads, or understands, published science papers, he continues his endless parade of fables about science.
For example, Smith misinterprests and twists a reported 20 year old opinion by a philosopher as evidence that anthropogenic global warming isn’t a fact. Talk about fitting something to “support” your a priori conclusions, yikes. It simply speaks to his comprehension of science, which, as we have seen before, leaves much to be desired.
Folks,
Read the science for yourself – go to Nature, Science, PNAS, Geophysical Research Letters, etc to get the scoop. You’ll be far better informed than Smith, who appears to get all his climate science second-hand from journalists.
Smith and others at the Discovery Institute – a religious organization seeking to remove science from society – are possibly funded by the oil industry. But we will never know as they will never disclose all of their income.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
May 17th, 2010 at 1:57 pm
David: Anybody who calls science a “philosophy” as you did here, has no moral authority to throw stones. Take it up with Der Spiegel. What THAT magazine takes on the corruption of science that has permeated the global warming meme, the hysterics’ day is done.
May 17th, 2010 | 11:30 pm
apparently david and jeffery were rejected for a job with the present administration! Welcome back boys.
May 18th, 2010 | 12:20 pm
Ah, the resort to ad hominem again. Of course, Mr. Smith is not as smart as you, “Please disregard all he says.” Yes AGM has become a religeon with high priests who attempt to quash what they (Mann, et al) claim as heterodoxy. Hey, but it’s a ‘good’ big business unlike those oil companies Smith “may” (we smart people don’t know) be working for. P.S. “Did I mention: ‘disregard what he says’.”
May 18th, 2010 | 2:38 pm
Hey Smith,
Can you explain this?
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100517_globalstats.html
By the way, Smith, gravity is a fundamental force of nature, not a law. We have a theory (or theories, technically) to explain this force and its operation is, roughly, described by a “simple” law in one case.
Smith, there is a big difference among fact, theory, and law. Phenomena can become regarded as fact with sufficient evidence – theories describe/account for facts; laws are those statements of Nature not yet contradicted, extensively verified, and often expressed as analytical statements (like Gauss’s Law or Maxwell’s equations). You are still making mistakes confusing these; I’ve encountered slow learners before, but not to this degree.
Why do you have such poor scientific and medical understanding, Smith, leading to continuous errors?
This question is relevant because its answer might explain your continued botching of science and medicine as you attempt to eliminate science, and thus, progress, as laid out in the Wedge Document, a founding manifesto of the religious organization for which you advance.
“The scientific evidence is clear: global climate
change caused by human activities
is occurring now, and it is a growing
threat to society. ” AAAS Board
http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/mtg_200702/aaas_climate_statement.pdf
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
May 18th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
The “law of gravity” is proper, particularly in a lay blog. http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~soper/Orbits/newtongrav.html You are acting like a religious fundamentalist railing against the apostates. It’s not pretty, nor is your attitude from the safety of anonymity.
May 18th, 2010 | 5:50 pm
It was stated the causes and course of warming – parameters that fit within a THEORY – is not like the law of gravity. Such an analogy compares a theory to a law. This is comparing apples to oranges; yet it is used to “support” Smith’s notions. For illustration, there is no Law of Pharmacology, yet, to fight throat infections, we provide antibiotics to kids all the time. There is no Law of Tire Rotation, yet we rotate them to limit uneven tread wear. Similarly, to imply we need a Law of Anthropogenic Global Warming before we 100% accept it (even with a Law, it would likely not be 100% accepted) to take action to spare future generations is a bit absurd and complete foolishness or selfishness – especially given the overwhelming data and evidence indicating man’s combustion of fossil fuels produces the increasing CO2 levels, a known greenhouse gas causing higher temperatures by absorbing IR.
If one wants to support the contention that man has little/nothing/not significantly contributed to global warming, at the very LEAST, provide a handful of REPUTABLE scientific agencies/organizations* that explicitly state this and they explain why they hold this position. Then, explain how these orgs stack up to those claiming man has significantly contributed to present global warming (is it 1:20?).
*composed of acknowledged experts in climatology research who have a strong track record of scientific excellence – meaning, reported data, evidence, analysis, and experimental findings that have withstood the scrutiny of other experts. A loose collection of fringe PhD/MD (ex)researchers linked by some obscure, unrecognized society does not constitute a reputable organization.
May 19th, 2010 | 6:34 am
Jeffrey asserts, “Based on basic physical and chemical principles it is likely that as we add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere we will cause further warming. This is a theory based on facts and supported by overwhelming evidence.”
Mmmpf. What “evidence”? There is some evidence that there has been an overall warming of perhaps 1 deg F over the last century — not surprising, since there is indeed “overwhelming evidence” that the 17th and 18th centuries were the coldest period in 8000 years, but no evidence whatever that the cause was a rise in a necessary trace gas from 0.03% of the atmosphere to 0.04%. None.
CO2-driven anthropogenic global warming is the phlogiston theory of the 20th century — or more likely, the Piltdown Mann.
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