18th April, 2012
The current scientific consensus on Global Warming and Climate Change (or Global Weirding or Global Climactic Disruption, etc.) may be slowly shifting away from the catastrophism of the United Nations IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. True, the shift has been tentative. Carbon-driven global warming was an easy sell, but it will be a hard buyback—too many professional reputations are on the line. Nonetheless, the evidence is piling up to suggest that the human contribution to (earlier) global warming is far less than originally assumed and that a meteorological calamity is highly unlikely. Two-thirds of the scientists attending the 33rd International Geological Congress in Norway in August 2008 were “hostile to, even dismissive of, the UN’s IPCC report” (U.S. Senate Committee & Public Works online, December 10, 2008).
More recently, a coalition of 49 former NASA scientists and seven Apollo astronauts has accused the bureaucracy of both NASA and the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, with which it is affiliated, of diddling with the facts. They write: “We believe that [their] claims that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.” (Watts Up With That, April 10, 2012).
Further, the Interim Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) of August 29, 2011 showed unambiguously that the UN suppressed or ignored much of the countervailing data that challenged its official position. This is hardly surprising since the IPCC, which certified and entrenched the so-called “scientific consensus,” is essentially a political body with an agenda of its own. Mark Hendrickson of the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College points out that the IPCC “does not speak as one voice,” since some of the “leading scientists on the panel contradict its official position.” Others have resigned in protest against its policymakers’ summaries, which are “produced by a committee of 51 government appointees, many of whom are not scientists.” It turns out that those “who compose the summaries are given considerable latitude to modify the scientific reports,” and Hendrickson quotes a U.S. State Department official who informed an IPCC co-chair that “it is essential… chapter authors be prevailed upon to modify their text in an appropriate manner” (Doc’s Talk, May 25, 2009).
Hendrickson cites warmist crusader and suspect guru Al Gore’s ally, former Under-Secretary of State Tim Wirth, who has gone on record justifying the kind of scientific fraud perpetrated by the IPCC. “Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,” he said, “we will be doing the right thing.” Further data casting serious doubt on this railroaded consensus may be found at Inhofe EPW Press Blog, Daily Tech online, and the journal Energy and Environment, whose findings are based on a survey of the Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science database covering almost 9000 scientific publications.
But the fix is still in and soldered tight by all sorts of disreputable means. In her new book The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Scientist, Donna Laframboise shows that “IPCC has been recruiting 20-something graduate students” as lead authors, many of whom had not even earned their degrees and some of whom were majoring in non-climate disciplines. More than a third of the 2007 IPCC report (or Climate Bible) consisted of so-called “grey references,” that is, unaccredited studies. The IPCC has also chosen “to muddy the water by aligning [itself] with lobbyists” and relies heavily on non-peer reviewed material, including newspaper items, press releases, magazine articles, unpublished graduate theses and Green activist sources.
And then there is the taradiddle, emanating from a University of Illinois 2009 survey, that 97.4% of scientists agree that mankind is responsible for global warming. This is easily debunked when one considers its selection methodology. As Rich Trzupek explains (FrontPage Magazine, August 30, 2011), citing Lawrence Solomon’s crushing putdown (FullComment, December 30, 2010), the Illinois researchers decided that of the 10,257 respondents, the 10,180 who demurred from the so-called consensus “weren’t qualified to comment on the issue because they were merely solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists, astronomers and the like. Of the remaining 77 scientists whose votes were counted, 75 agreed with the proposition that mankind was causing catastrophic changes in the climate. And, since 75 is 97.4% of 77, ‘overwhelming consensus’ was demonstrated once again.” The real percentage of concurring scientists in the survey is less than .008%. That these 75 were, as Solomon writes, “scientists of unknown qualifications” adds yet another layer to the boondoggle.
This sort of thing is not a little white lie but a big green one, which has reached the point where it must be maintained by the omission of details, the distortion of data and the suspicious liability to error. The plot had already thickened in 1989 when the late Stephen Schneider, Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University—who twenty years earlier had been warning the world of an advancing ice age—wrote: “So we have to offer scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have” (Detroit News Editorial, November 22, 1989).
Twenty years later, in November 2009, the Hadley Climate Research Unit was hacked, releasing thousands of files suggesting a covert mega-operation to propagate an Anthropogenic Global Warming myth. It had become undeniable that data was tampered with to paint the desired canvas, that counter-evidence was deliberately squelched, that character assassination against climate skeptics was an accepted tactic and that experimental results were falsely replicated. The notorious Wikileaks cable dump made it even clearer that the climate “consensus” was more of a political gambit than a scientific project (guardian.co.uk, December 3, 2010).
A new bundle of “hide the decline” email dumps, known as Climategate 2.0, has confirmed that “climate science” has been cooked and that, in the words of science and technology writer Charlie Martin, “the ‘consensus’ is political, not scientific” (The Tatler, November 22, 2011). Writing in The Weekly Standard for December 12, 2011, Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute is equally if not more emphatic: “the new cache offers ample confirmation of the rank politicization of climate science and rampant cronyism that ought to trouble even firm believers in catastrophic climate change… it’s another case of policy-driven science, and not science-driven policy.”
Even some of the specialists involved in the enterprise have begun to question or object to the findings as, to quote from the emails, “not statistically significant,” as “truly pathetic,” and as “defending something that increasingly cannot be defended.” Nevertheless, “The same science personalities at the top of the United Nations climate research machine,” writes Terence Corcoran, “are back, parading before readers in all their blundering glory” (National Post, November 23, 2011). The lead researcher at the East Anglia CRU, Phil Jones, has gone so far as to recommend deleting all incriminating emails and/or changing the wording of others.
Myron Ebell, director of the nonprofit Competitive Enterprise Institute Center on Energy and the Environment (CEI), has said it definitively. “If there were any doubts remaining…the new batch of E-mails…make it clear” that the IPCC “is an organized conspiracy dedicated to tricking the world into believing that global warming is a crisis that requires a drastic response” (CEI online, November 22, 2011). Of course, as noted, it is not only the IPCC which is tainted, but most of the GW outfits whose theorists, adherents and practitioners are at least as concerned with saving their careers as saving the planet. These frauds and true-believer scientists who have profaned their discipline have clearly become a danger to us all. But to our great good fortune and irrespective of the obstacles raised before them, the mavericks refuse to go away. With luck, diligence and belated good sense, one of the greatest scams of our time may eventually be exposed.
