Global-warming skeptics spend much of their time knocking down the fatuous warmist claim that the science is settled. According to the warmists, this singular piece of settled science is attested to by hundreds or thousands of highly credentialed scientists. In truth, virtually the entire warmist edifice is built around a small, tightly knit coterie of persons (one hesitates to refer to folks with so little respect for the scientific method as scientists) willing to falsify data and manipulate findings; or, to put it bluntly, to lie in order to push a political agenda not supported by empirical evidence. This is what made the original release of the Climategate e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia so valuable. They clearly identified the politicized core of climate watchers who were driving the entire warmist agenda. Following in their footsteps are all the other scientists who built their own research on top of the fraudulent data produced by the warmist core.
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Last week over 5,000 new e-mails, already dubbed Climategate 2, were released. Anyone still desiring to contest the assertion that only a few persons controlled the entire warmist agenda will be brought up short by this note from one warmist protesting that his opinions were not getting the hearing they deserved: “It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.” Over the years this core group, led by Phil Jones at East Anglia and Michael Mann at Penn State, became so close that even those inclined toward more honest appraisals of the state of climate science were hesitant to rock the boat. As one warm-monger states: “I am not convinced that the ‘truth’ is always worth reaching if it is at the cost of damaged personal relationships.” Silly me, how many years have I wasted believing that the very point of science was to pursue the truth in the face of all obstacles. On the basis of this evidence the scientific method must be rewritten so as to state: “Science must be as objective as possible, unless it offends your friends.”
Unfortunately, from the very beginning, the core group at the heart of Climategate had no interest in “scientific truth.” As one states: “The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guide what’s included and what is left out.” In other words, let’s decide on a conclusion and then use only evidence that proves that point, discarding everything else. One scientist who seems to have been slightly troubled by these methods wrote: “I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it, which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.” In another note to Phil Jones, this same scientist complained: “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest.”
Of course, nothing of the sort was done. As one e-mail states: “The figure you sent is very deceptive . . . there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change].” Too bad these so-called scientists felt they could tell the truth only to one another and not the public at large. Some of the other truths they shared only with one another are astounding. For instance, one writes: “I find myself in the strange position of being very skeptical of the quality of all present reconstructions, yet sounding like a pro greenhouse zealot here!” So, despite having no confidence in any of the models the IPCC was using in its reports, this scientist was ready to support the IPCC findings to the hilt. And why didn’t he believe the models? Easy: They were designed to tell the big lie. For example, when confronted with the problem that if all the data were included, the warming disappeared, Phil Jones turned to a novel method: He used only “[time] periods that showed warming.”
At one point, Jones admits that the “basic problem is that all of the models are wrong.” Of course, there is a simple reason for this. When the models do not show what the warmists want them to show, they simply apply “some tuning.” One scientist was worried enough about this “tuning” to write that he “doubt[ed] the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer.” In this case, “tuning” means changing the model until it tells you what you want it to. When it became impossible to torture the models any further without making their uselessness apparent to all, the warmists resorted to changing the data.
The most efficient method of corrupting the models was to use data only from time periods when there was warming and discard others, as Jones admits to doing. This method helped one scientist reduce the cooling in the northern hemisphere between 1940 and 1970, so that he did not have to make up an excuse blaming it on sulphates, which could not be proven. Another complains that no matter how much he fiddles with the data, it is “very difficult to make the Medieval Warming Period go away.” Solving this problem in the modern era was much easier: The warmists merely changed the temperature readings for much of the 20th century and threw away the original data.
The world will eventually burn all the oil in the ground. Will the "unavoidable" apocalypse somehow be less if we take 150 years instead of 50 to burn through the world oil reserves? The warmists may be able to persuade the American public with their chicanery, but China and the other developing countries won't have a lick of it.
First off, it will take a lot more than 150 years to burn off all the oil underground, even if we do nothing.
Secondly, after the oil is gone, there are thousands of years worth of coal.
Following MarkW: Third, all of the carbon now sequestered in coal and oil was once in the atmosphere, not all at one time, but certainly more than is now present. The planet still managed to support life, rather well, I would opine, even with all that dirty carbon in the air.
Always, always follow the money, or at least follow the power trail. The warmists are chasing funding and until that funding is eliminated they'll find a way to justify their "work". The politicians are chasing power, and that as we know corrupts absolutely.
I disagree. We will never burn all the oil in the earth. It will become too expensive, and thus open a market for new energy sources far before that happens.
Post-modern "science" with its mostly fascist antiChristian Darwinist bigotry rejecting the absolute truth of modern science for post-modern delusion & lies is largely part of "the oldest profession" (see where you're directed if you enter that phrase in wikipedia), as seen in its pretended demand for "consensus" in denial of the irrefutable reality that most true scientific progress (Newton, Galileo, Pasteur, Lister, etc.) has been contrary to the consensus since the consensus was WRONG, something of no concern to post-moderns who stupidly and hypcritically are absolutely sure of the absolute truth that there's not even the possibility of absolute truth. You just can't make this stuff up! But sadly, as is typical for the antiChristian bigotry of Papist/Jewish NRO, there is no intelligent consideration of the true Christian (i.e. Augustinian-era catholicism and its Protestantism successor, both opposed by today's Marion-Gnostic heretics in power in the Vatican) basis for true modern science that post-modern pseudo-science delusions hate and deny and fight even as they threaten to bring down the whole establishment as did fellows Lenin, Hitler and Stalin (also ardent anticreationist evolutionists, vs creationist Von Braun, NASA head who fled the Nazi regime and got NASA & the US to the moon). Evolutionism is a religion of antiChristian bigotry, not science, as seen in the SCOTUS's irrational, fascist religious bigotry in its opposition to teaching the truth of creation versus the lies of evolution in Edwards v. Aguillard, refusing to bite the hand that feeds it, long ago abandoning its limited constitutional role to become the deranged fascist demagogue of its current evil regime.
These people need to be indicted for fraud, for starters. Maybe they can fake some studies on how prison climates change from year to year-and decade to decade.
Lacey: "In truth, virtually the entire warmist edifice is built around a small, tightly knit coterie of persons "
Not true.
The findings on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) are supported by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences; The Royal Society; the national science academies of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, India, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand. Russia, South Africa, and Sweden; the U.S. National Research Council; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the American Chemical Society; the American Physical Society; the American Geophysical Union; and the World Meteorological Organization.
That represents about 99% of the world's climatologists.
Now of course, science doesn't work by consensus. But Lacey's own claim that only a "small, tightly knit coterie" is pushing the theory of AGW (implying some kind of cabal) is plainly false.
Data are. They are readings taken from instruments. Good data are readings taken timely from properly selected, calibrated, installed and maintained instruments. Other data are either bad data or missing data. Not even Rumplestiltskin could turn bad or missing data into good data. "Corrected" or "adjusted" or "homogenized" or "infilled" data are merely "un-data".
You really should read up on who controls those organizations that you list.
And no, it is not the scientists who are members. Or should I say used to be members, because many of them are quiting said organizations to complain about the politicization of them.
If you read the actual papers that have been produced over the last few decades, you will find how little support there is in the actual scientific community for the apocalyptic scenarios being spun by the IPCC.
As a former member of both the American Chemical Society and American Physical Society, I can tell you first hand that neither one polled their members beliefs before endorsing AGW. The decisions were made by a relative handful of political activists within the societies. Undoubtedly, the other societies positions were arrived at in similar manner. So the endorsements do not necessarily mean that even a majority, much less 99%, of the members are believers in AGW.
I resigned my membership in both ACS and APS two years ago in response to their increasingly frequent adoption of leftist political positions unrelated to their missions as technical societies.
You are misunderstanding/misrepresenting the article. Yes, alot of scientists are publice "warmists." That's not being disputed. The points is that the research (being generous with my language) that formed the foundation of global warming theory was done by a rather small group of ... hmmm ... enthusiastic (again, I'm so generous) individuals. Most of the rest are riding on their coattails.
Lacey did not claim that only a small core of "scientists" was pushing AGW. He claimed that the array of AGW proponents is basing its work on "data" supplied by the small core.
And that claim that the data all comes from a small core of researchers is a lie and easily seen as a lie if you make even a small effort. The recent Berkeley study for example uses much more temperature data than Mann et al. Data by the way collected by thousands of meteorologists all over the world over the past 150 plus years. And that doesn't even include NASA data or ice core data or tree ring data, all of which were collected by different scientists from multiple nations and over many years. Read some actual science instead of the tripe they feed you here at NRO.
To bad the team only uses a small fraction of all that data. They ignore any data that doesn't fit their narative, and that's what they feed the other scientists.
It is very easy for me to look with scorn at these emails and deride their authors. I am an extreme climate skeptic. Thus, arguments that these emails comprise a smoking gun proving climate science is the fraud I believe it to be find fertile ground in my imagination. I know this and must be wary of my own confirmation bias. I therefore scrubbed the AGW sites reading the defenses of Climategate 2.0. As best I could discern, the defenses are as follows:
1. This information is more than 2 years old. Yawn.
2. These emails were stolen!
3. These emails are taken out of context.
To which I respond:
1. So? Have the positions taken been repudiated? Are they not still impacting public policy?
2. So? That they were stolen (if they were) may be a separate crime, but is irrelevant to the genuineness of their content. Indeed, it is most revealing to hear what people say when they do not think anyone is listening.
3. Perhaps they are being taken out of context. Nevertheless, it is difficult for me to even fabricate a context in which these emails are not damning.
The private emails of these scientists reveal the most extreme form of confirmation bias. So blind are they to evidence that they may be wrong that even when looking at such evidence directly, they conclude that it must be wrong.
I believe that AGW will go the way of acid rain, the population explosion and ad infinitum. The world will surely end some day. But I seriously doubt AGW will be the cause.
Is there any better reason to kill the Dept. of Energy? It's stifling real domestic production and promoting free Bubble-Up and Rainbow Stew with billions of tax dollars all in pursuit of its stated goal of energy independence.
The objective is socialist (communist?) global governance, under the auspices of the organization that gave us the Iraq Oil for Palaces, Payloads and Payoffs program. (We all remember what a howling success that was.)
Global governance would lead to global redistribution, to produce an egalitarian global society. Of course, this society would require direction, leading inexorably to Napoleon's message on the side of the barn: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." (Animal Farm, George Orwell)
