Global Warming Fraud and the Future of Science

American Thinker ^ | November 29, 2009 | J.R. Dunn

[neverdem]

The East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) revelations come as no real surprise to anyone who has closely followed the global-warming saga. The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) thesis, to give it its semi-official name, is no stranger to fraud. It would be no real exaggeration to state that it was fertilized with fraud, marinated in fraud, stewed in fraud, and at last served up to the world as prime grade-A fraud with nice side orders of fakery and disingenuousness. Damning as they may be, the CRU e-mails are merely the climactic element in an exhaustively long line.

A short tour of previous AGW highlights would include:

The Y2K Glitch.  This episode involved the NASA/GISS team led by James Hansen, possibly the most fanatical and unrelenting of all warmists, a man who makes Al Gore look like a skeptic. (Among other things, Hansen has demanded that warming "deniers" be tried for "crimes against humanity".)  While examining a series of NASA temperature graphs, Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, himself not so much a skeptic as an anti-warming Van Helsing, uncovered a discontinuity occurring in January 2000 that raised temperatures gathered over widespread areas by 1-2 degrees Fahrenheit. McIntyre had no easy time of it, since Hansen refused to reveal what algorithm he'd used to process the data, forcing McIntyre to perform some very abstruse calculations to figure it out.

Once notified, Hansen's team promised to correct the error, stating that it was an "oversight". When the corrected figures were at last released, they rocked the church of warming from bingo hall to steeple. Vanished was the claim that the past few years were "the warmest on record". Now 1934 now took precedence. A full half of the top ten warmest years occurred before WW II, well prior to any massive CO2 buildup.

No explanation has ever been offered. We have a Y2K glitch that behaves like no other computer glitch ever encountered, uniformly affecting a large number of sources distributed almost nationwide. Although the incident trashed all recent data and raised uncomfortable questions about the warming thesis as a whole, NASA itself made no effort at an investigation or inquiry. All that we're ever going to hear is "oversight". I guess that's how they do things at NASA/GISS.

The Arctic Ice Melt. We've been informed for the better part of a decade that Arctic ice was melting at an unprecedented rate, and that the North Pole would be ice-free in twenty, thirty, or forty years, depending in the hysteria level of the media platform in question. In truth, ice thinning was due to a cyclical weather pattern in which winds blow ice floes south into warmer water. Everybody involved knew that this cycle occurred, everyone had seen it happen previously time out of mind. But it was too good an opportunity to pass up. Worse yet, when the weather returned to its normal pattern two years ago, large numbers of scientists put in considerable effort to suggest that the "new" ice was thinner than usual and would vanish in a flash as soon as the temperatures went back up. The media went along with the joke. The Germans have a phrase to cover such eventualities: this crew should be stripped of their trade. (Several expeditions setting out for the Pole to "call attention" to the coming Arctic catastrophe had to stop short due to icy conditions. In one case, both women involved suffered serious frostbite.)   

The Poor Polar Bears. Closely related is the saga of the polar bears, staring extinction in the face due to warming while, somewhere beyond the aurora, Gaia weeps bitter tears. This was evidently inspired by a single photograph (you've seen it -- the entire world has at this point) of a woebegone polar bear crouched on a melting iceberg. That bear had to be sulking over allowing a nice juicy seal to escape, because it was in no danger. Out of the twenty major polar bear populations only two are known to be decreasing. Estimates of bear population (there are no exact figures) have increased over the past forty years, from 17,000 to19,000 to the current number of 22,000 to 27,000. The bears are becoming pests in municipalities such as Churchill and Point Barrow. (As clearly shown here.)  Despite all this, last year the bear was put on the U.S. "endangered" list.

The Hockey Stick That Wasn't. The "hockey stick" is a nickname for a chart prepared by Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania professor and leading warmist. The chart purports to show temperature levels for the past millennium, and consists of a straight line until it reaches the late 20^th century, when it suddenly shoots upward, creating the "hockey stick" profile. This chart was a major feature of International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports on global warming and is a commonly-used media graphic.

This chart creates immediate doubt in anyone knowledgeable about the climate of the past millennium, which more resembles a roller coaster than a straight line. It developed -- in yet another impressive McIntyre takedown, this time with an assist from Ross McKitrick -- that Mann was utilizing an algorithm that would produce hockey sticks if you fed it telephone numbers. (Mann is the "Mike" mentioned in the CRU e-mails, and this is one of his "tricks".) Despite this disclosure, Mann has never withdrawn the chart, offered an explanation, or made a correction. The chart remains an accepted piece of evidence among warmists.

Tree-Ring Circus. Due to the fact that direct temperature measures for past epochs are lacking, climatologists utilize "proxy measures", such as tree rings, glacial moraines, and lake sediments. Tree rings have played an important part in the warming controversy, as evidence backing the claim that temperatures have been consistently lower worldwide until recently. A crucial series of measurements, utilized by Mann among others, involves trees located on the Yamal peninsula in Siberia. How many trees were measured, you ask? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand?

The answer is twelve. A number perfectly adequate to trigger international panic, overthrow the capitalist system, establish a Green totalitarianism, and completely turn Western culture on its head.

But it turns out that further measurements were in fact made in the area, involving at least thirty-four other trees. And when this data is added to the original twelve, then the warming evidence disappears into the same branch of the Twilight Zone as the blade of Mann's hockey stick. Another "oversight", you understand.

We could go on to mention the automated U.S. weather stations chronicled by the tireless Anthony Watts, which were conscientiously placed next to air-con vents, atop sewage plants, in parking lots, and in one case, in a swamp (as many as 90% may be giving spurious high readings). The glaciers that are vanishing worldwide except where they aren't. The endless papers demonstrating that the coral reefs, along with various birds, animals, insects, and plants, are facing extinction even though no warming whatsoever has occurred for twelve years. (And in the thirty years before that, the total rise was 1.25 degrees Fahrenheit, easily within normal variation.) Powerful stuff, this warming -- it maims and destroys even when it's not happening.  

It's within this context that the East Anglia e-mails must be judged. The vanishingly small number of  legacy media writers who are paying attention behave as if the messages comprise some kind of puzzling anomaly, with no relation to anything that came before. In truth, they stand as the internal memos from the East Anglia branch of the Nigerian National Bank, which can save us from the horrors of global warming after payment of a small up-front fee.

There is always a deeper level to the damage caused by fraud. It strains social relationships, generates cynicism, and debases standing institutions. What has suffered the most damage from AGW is faith in the scientific method, the basic set of procedures -- it could be called an algorithm -- governing scientific investigation. These procedures embody simplicity itself: you examine a phenomenon. You gather data. You construct a hypothesis to explain that phenomenon. And then...

Well, first, let's cover what you don't do.

• You don't manipulate data. (As CRU chief scientist Phil Jones stated he was doing in the now-famous "Mike's trick" e-mail, not to mention throughout the now-famous source code.)

• You don't fabricate data. (As one CRU scientist did while compiling weather-station data. Running into problems, he states, "I can make it up. So I did." He adds an evil smiley face. This e-mail has gone under radar up until now. It can be found in the comments on James Delingpole's blog.

• You don't deny data to other investigators. (As Hansen, Jones, and, it appears, everybody else in the warming community has done at one time or another.)

• You don't destroy evidence. (As the members of the CRU did following a Freedom of Information request.)

• You don't bury contradictory data. (As Jones and several colleagues did in an attempt to undercut the impact of the Medieval Warming Period.)

• You don't secretly manipulate the argument from behind the scenes. (As the CRU staff did with the website Realclimate.org., screening comments to allow only those that supported the warming thesis.)

• You don't secretly undercut your critics. (As Mann advised the CRU to do concerning the scientific journal, Climate Researh: "I think we have to stop considering ‘Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.")

• You don't try to get a journal editor critical of your case fired. (As the CRU staff evidently succeeded in doing with an editor for Geophysical Research Letters.)

What you do, if you are a serious scientist operating according to the established method, is attempt to falsify your hypothesis. Test it to destruction; carry out serious attacks on its weakest points to see if they hold up. If they do -- and the vast majority of hypotheses suffer the indignity embodied in a phrase attributed variously to Thomas Huxley and Lord Kelvin: "a beautiful theory slain by an ugly fact" -- then you have a theory that can be published, and tested, and verified by other scientists. If you don't, you throw it out.

None of this, amidst all the chicanery, fabrications, and manipulations, appears to have been done by anyone active in global warming research, the CRU least of all. From which point we are forced to conclude that AGW is not science, and that any "consensus" that can drawn from it is a consensus of fraud. 

(The late-breaking revelations of temperature manipulations at New Zealand's NiWA institute   -- another one of Mike's tricks? -- merely underlines the lesson of CRU. Now that the dam has busted, we'll be hearing dozens of stories like this over the weeks and months to come.)

The West is a technological society. Science is as responsible for making us what we have become as any other factor, including the democratic system of government. The two are in fact complementary, each supporting and encouraging the other across the decades since this country was established. (And yes, I am aware that Britain and Germany were both centers of scientific progress, both of them nations liberalized by the example of the United States. Even the utterly authoritarian Bismarck was forced to heed the voice of the people despite his inclination to do anything but.)

The technology developed from scientific research has created a world that would be unrecognizable to our forebears of even a century ago. Technology has transformed diet, health, communications, and transportation. It has doubled lifespans in advanced countries. Prior to the modern epoch, few ever caught a glimpse of the world past their own farming fields. India, China, and Africa were wild myths, the Pacific and Antarctica utterly unknown, the planets and stars merely pretty lights in the sky. Technology opened the world, not just for everyday men and women, but for invalids, the disabled, and the subnormal, who once lived lives of almost incomprehensible deprivation. Technology was a crucial factor in the dissolution of the ancient empires, the humbling of the aristocracies.

As Paul Johnson has pointed out, a technological breakout appeared imminent at a number of points in the past millennium. Consider the anonymous Hussite engineer of the 15^th century who left a notebook even more breathtaking than that of Leonardo, or the revolutionary English Levelers of the 17^th century who dreamed of flying machines and factories. If a breakout had occurred at those times, the consequences would have been unimaginable. But the Hussites were destroyed by the German princes, the Levelers by the reestablishment of the English crown. It required the birth of a true democratic republic in the late 18^th century to provide the setting for a serious scientific-technical takeoff, one that after 200 years has brought us to where we stand today, gazing out at the galaxies beyond the galaxies with the secret of life itself within reach.

It is this, and no less, that scientific fraud threatens. This is no trivial matter; it involves one of the basic elements of modern Western life. When scientific figures lie, they lie to all of us. If they foment serious distrust of the scientific endeavor -- as they are doing -- they are creating a schism in the heart of our culture, a wound that in the long run could prove even more deadly than the Jihadi terrorists.

Such failings are not relegated only to climatology. With the apparent success of the climate hustlers, it has infected all areas of research. Over the past decade, stem-cell studies have proven a hotbed of fraud. Recall Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, the South Korean biologist who claimed to have cloned various higher animals and isolated new stem cell lines, to worldwide applause. Suk was discovered to have faked all his research, prompting the South Korean government to ban him from taking part in any further work. Nor was he alone. Researchers throughout the field have been caught fabricating and manipulating data, and at least one large biotech company has developed the habit of announcing grand breakthroughs to goose its stock prices.

A number of factors are responsible, among them the grant-making process, which rewards extravagant claims and demands matching results, and the superstar factor, in which media adulation creates a sense of intellectual arrogance -- as in the case of Dr. Suk -- unmatched since Galileo's heyday. But the major problem lies in politics, specifically as involves ideology.

In both major recent cases of fraud, science had become entwined and infected with ideology to a point where its very nature had been transformed. It was no longer science in the classic mold, boldly asking basic questions without fear or favor. It had become an ideological tool, carrying out only such research as met with the approval of political elites. Stem-cell research had become enmeshed with the abortion question. Embryonic stem cells, obtained by "processing" aborted babies, received the lion's share of funding and attention despite its showing no potential whatsoever. Adult stem cells, obtainable from bone marrow, skin cells, or virtually any other part of the body, were shunted aside despite extraordinarily promising research results. This bias permeated the entire field and distorted all perceptions of it -- one of the reasons Dr. Suk was so wildly overpraised was his willingness to attack Pres. George W. Bush for limiting embryonic stem-cell exploitation.

The climatology story is little different. Environmentalist Greens needed a threat, one that menaced not only technological civilization but life on earth itself. They had promoted an endless parade of such threats since the 1960s -- overpopulation, pollution, runaway nuclear power, and global cooling -- only to see them shrivel like popped balloons. They required a menace that was overwhelming, long-term, and not easily disproven. With warming, the climatologists gave them one. In exchange for sky-high funding, millennial scientists, the heirs of Bacon, Copernicus, and Einstein, men who bled and suffered for the sake of their work, continually inflated the nature and extent of the CO2 threat, using, as we now know, the sleaziest methods available. The result has been complete intellectual degradation. 

Scientists were once among the most trusted figures in Western public life, similar to bankers, priests, and doctors, but in a real sense standing above them all. Scientists were honored as truth-tellers, aware that their reputation for veracity and seriousness was their only real asset. And while exceptions existed (read the story of Blondlot and his N-rays,   for one example), the public took them at their own valuation.

That is ended, one with the scholastic monasteries and the academy at Athens. Scientists today are well on their way to becoming an amalgam of the cheap politician and the three-card monte dealer. They are viewed by the less educated as a privileged class making alarming and impudent claims for their own benefit. The better informed find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being unable to defend something we once admired.

The next set of questions in physics cannot be answered without equipment costing billions at the very least, and possibly much more. Will a disbelieving public pay for that? We are facing serious dilemmas concerning breakthroughs in biology, not only in stem-cell technology but also in neurology and synthetic biology, breakthroughs that threaten to distort the very nature of humanity itself. Should we leave the solutions up to people who want us to pick a card, any card?

The collaboration between science and democracy is one of the great achievements of human history. It is now threatened by the behavior of people at the very heart of that collaboration. If it is destroyed, something of unparalleled value will have vanished, something that will be nearly impossible to replace. If the Western world wishes to continue its magnificent upward journey, we will have to save science from itself. An errant and corrupt climatology is the place to start.

[gwilhelm56]

As RUSH (the NON Scientist) was fond of saying...

“IF you NEED Consensus ... IT’S NOT SCIENCE

To all the “Scientists” that told RUSH to SHUT UP Because he was NOT A SCIENTIST..

Guess RUSH was RIGHT ALL ALONG... I’m going to have to believe RUSH before believing a ... “””Scientist”””

[PaleoBob]

Reputation and credibility are fragile things. You can lose either in the blink of an eye and spend a lifetime trying with no luck to ressurect them. Science and scientists better start policing their own lest they all suffer in the end. The need to prostitute themselves to government and academic grant-providers will eventually drive their reputations down to the same gutter where lawyers and the MSM live—if they let it happen.

[Titus-Maximus]

There once were some whores at East Anglia
Who could very well tickle a ganglia
Twas not ass they were selling
But CO2 they were smelling
It was odorless, colorless but could strangl’ya

[jonascord]

Bookmark

[DHSMostWanted]

This is not a scam, it’s a worldwide conspiracy.

[narses]

+

Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:

Add me / Remove me

Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.

Obama Says A Baby Is A Punishment

Obama: “If they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”

[Post Toasties]

This is worse than Stalin era Lysenkoism and Nazi era anti Jewish science, but all of these including AGW and the bias in stem cell research had been and is due to Left Wing corruption of science to meet their political agendas.

[PaleoBob]

“...Such failings are not relegated only to climatology. With the apparent success of the climate hustlers, it has infected all areas of research. Over the past decade, stem-cell studies have proven a hotbed of fraud. Recall Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, the South Korean biologist who claimed to have cloned various higher animals and isolated new stem cell lines, to worldwide applause. Suk was discovered to have faked all his research, prompting the South Korean government to ban him from taking part in any further work. Nor was he alone. Researchers throughout the field have been caught fabricating and manipulating data, and at least one large biotech company has developed the habit of announcing grand breakthroughs to goose its stock prices....”

---

And what we don’t see are the people getting away with- or who have already long since gotten away with similar science scams. How much “settled science” that was bought with liberal grant money can still be trusted? I know that in the pharmaceutical area there have been a lot of scams that ended up getting FDA backing over the years—bogus cures for ADD and including all kinds of charlatan remedies for “what ails ya.”

But how much more “science” is just politically motivated BS. These CRU grifters shared in the Gore Nobel prize, didn’t they? It demonstrates to what extremes worldwide poltical interests will go to to prop up “science” that fits the agenda.

We now have a so-called science czar who believes in forced sterilization (using the water supply!), mass abortions, crazy stuff that makes even cloning and embryonic stem cell research seem tame. At what point will “science” be concocted that advises the removal of, say, the white race? Hitler used science and scientists to exterminate selected groups. The Soviets used psychiatrists to declare individual dissidents “insane” so as to lock them away in Siberia.

Look at Gore and AGW and you see what happens when a direct link between obsessed politicians and grant-needy scientists is created. Could a pipeline carry any more slime than the one down which hundreds of millions of dollars in global warming backing went to universities?

This is reckless and dangerous stuff.

[Publius6961]

Global Warming Fraud and the Future of Science

What kind of premise is that around which to build an entire column?

Waste of time.

Science has a solid grasp in the imagination of society and the expectation of expanding knowledge and general benefits to mankind.

The Global Warming pseudo science does not and has not. Simply because it's not science. Never was and never will be.

Using computer models as "science" is an oxymoron. Any competent person educated in math and science knows that; or should.

The fact that it took a gross in-your-face meltdown of the fraud for the ordinary person to take notice is sad.
As is the sight of fourth-rate actors having canniption fits on TV screaming "Peer reviewed!... peer reviewed..." when he obviously and demonstrably hasn't a clue what "peer reviewed" means.

[Publius6961]

Mann was utilizing an algorithm that would produce hockey sticks if you fed it telephone numbers. (Mann is the "Mike" mentioned in the CRU e-mails, and this is one of his "tricks".) Despite this disclosure, Mann has never withdrawn the chart, offered an explanation, or made a correction. The chart remains an accepted piece of evidence among warmists.

There is one thing I expect to happen before Mann goes off into the sunset to take drive-in orders at McDonalds:

A demand from the real scientific community that he answer all those questions. To face his huge "FAIL' like a man and resign before he is fired.

Anything less will guarantee that this series of frauds go down in the history of Science right alongside "Piltdown Man."

[haroldeveryman]

Science, by definition, limits itself to the dispassionate, objective evaluation of data. Subjectivity is not allowed, so “activist science” is a contradiction in terms. Being human, scientists are often wrong in their claims or findings. However, because data and methods are presented for review by other scientists, the process is normally self correcting.

The sleazy practices of an evil, politicized cabal of “scientists” that has dominated the global warming debate involved in the deliberate selective use or exclusion of data to advance preconceived conclusions, and to discredit individual scientists who disagreed with them. They were enabled universities, government organizations, and private companies that would profit by their “findings”.

In the final analysis the whole global warming “debate” amounted to an attack on science that corrupted the peer review process.

[syriacus]

Maybe mankind has advanced.

It took 40 years to thoroughy debunk
the Piltdown Man hoax, which was based on cobbled-together “evidence.”

Thanks to the hackers, it might take only 20 years to thoroughly debunk AGW, which is also based on cobbled-together “evidence.”

[jongaltsr]

I never swallowed the fraud.

I knew the truth from the beginning, just not the specifics, so there was no reason for me to put my two cents into the conversation.

I know many of you are the same way. It is obvious to the “Truly” logical/scientific mind what the truth is and what fraud is.

If it was hotter in the past and it is cyclical there is nothing we humans can do but adapt. Since it never happens overnight that is easy to accomplish.

It has long been known that about every 800 years Britain produces great abundances of grapes as well as high quality wine and was the prime reason Rome took such an interest in the wines that were produced there.

One could go on and on about the cycles that have been known and are completely ignored by pseudo “Climate” experts.

There are some local phenomena that man has screwed up a region by stripping it bare or even by developing irrigation to artificially enhance areas which might not produce food and environments that nature might not. Those are localized and do not affect the complete Eco system.

I R so smart n I didn’t go to no fancy school to learn just how stuped sum a my fellow humans think I r.

[Lancey Howard]

This is an excellent synopsis of the collapse of the “global warming” scam.
People should go to prison.

[Entrepreneur]

The article offers a good summary of the fraud. The author could have included the Ozone Hole fraud as one more example, but one where the hucksters succeeded and continue to succeed with their global governing bodies.

The author makes the presumption that the gig is up on AGW theory. I don't think so. This is a huge industry and they aren't going to give up over something as trivial as facts. Obama's heading to Copenhagen after all. Why? To give added weight to the Luddites' efforts to constrain modern civilization through carbon socialism.

Most people have no clue and the media's not informing them. Ask around. See how many people are remotely aware of climategate. Few are.

Look at the antipathy the public holds towards socialized medicine. And yet, Reid, Pelosi, and Obama are ramming it down out throats despite the opposition. Obama's 52.7% electorial victory is being treated by the press and Obama's permanent campaign as a sweeping mandate.

Truth will out, but truth doesn't matter to these people. It's too early to declare victory.

[mazda77]

So who was the beneficiary of the Ozone Hole Scam? In my opinion it was Dupont whose patent was running out on R12. Companies all over the world were gearing up to produce it once the patent expired and then all of a sudden we get news stories about “scientists” who have discoverd the holes in the ozone.

Then all of a sudden in the nick of time R134a shows up as a solution but it requires some modifications to every thing on the face of the planet to make it work on R12 systems. Look at all the money that was made on just the evacuation and recharging os refrigerant systems, not to mention the new patent for R134a.

The difference is that a certain number of worldwide companies made their killing but it didn’t involve massive worldwide legislation and taxation as the “cure”. The governments knew this as well and saw it as the model to launch what we are now seeing in the AGW debates. This involvement is not lost on the right or the left in regards to beurocrats. They are all in the game and the game this time is not just money, it is ultimate power.

[SunkenCiv]

:’) Thanks neverdem.

[Brugmansian]

Science nerds have the playground of their dreams in the leaked material. Manning and the rest of the hoaxers are in for a very long ride.

[Raycpa]

I have reviewed the R12 thing and agree with you. The fact that Reagan signed the Montreal Protocol is troubling. Perhaps it was the need to have a tax increase that most people did not notice.