Christopher Booker in the London Telegraph has the best summary of the fundamental errors in the IPCC's 2007 report.
A perfect storm is brewing for the IPCC
The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC's last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other "extreme weather events" were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The "science is settled", the "consensus" is intact.
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Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.
All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC's 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.
Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate
These scare stories have so frightened people we read this news: Baby girl survives after being shot in the chest in parents' 'global warming suicide pact'.
Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels
In a statement the authors of the paper said: "Since publication of our paper we have become aware of two mistakes which impact the detailed estimation of future sea level rise. This means that we can no longer draw firm conclusions regarding 21st century sea level rise from this study without further work.
"One mistake was a miscalculation; the other was not to allow fully for temperature change over the past 2,000 years. Because of these issues we have retracted the paper and will now invest in the further work needed to correct these mistakes."
We need more money. And more jobs. Who can argue with that? So why is the Administration and Congress not looking at expanded offshore drilling?
Especially given the recent report that Oil and gas drilling bans will cut GDP by $2.36 trillion which measures the lost opportunity we are letting slip through our fingers.
Jim Hoff is right when he calls these no zones "vast areas of opportunity." Democrats would do well to undo the permanent ban on drilling in ANWR, the 2009 scrapping of oil and gas leases in Utah and the nixing of offshore drilling
Ed Morrissey adds
There are obviously some opportunity costs lost in the refusal to use our own resources for energy production. Instead of sending billions to Brazil to boost oil production off of their coast, the private sector could invest its own money into leases and extraction. This would create hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs here in the US, as well as reduce our trade deficit. It would provide a more stable bridge towards our shift to replacement energy sources in renewables, while boosting access to cheaper energy in the short run to make the American economy more dynamic. Without it, energy prices will rise much faster than inflation, making our economy more sluggish than necessary.
Then:
In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”. It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife.
Now:
Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
There has been no global warming since 1995
Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes
London Times World may not be warming, say scientist
“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.
Why can't the temperature records be relied on?
in a damning report entitled Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception? by Joseph D’Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology and co-founder of the Weather Channel, and Anthony Watts, a meteorologist and founder of SurfaceStations.org., we learn that beginning in 1990 NOAA began systematically eliminating climate measuring stations in cooler locations around the globe....The drop in the number of weather stations was dramatic, declining from more than 6,000 stations to fewer than 1,500
Their report provides examples of how the systematic elimination of stations and unexplained adjustments in temperature data caused measured temperatures to rise for Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Norway, Sweden, and the United States. Many adjustments change what would have been a drop in temperatures into an increase. Take New Zealand, where D’Aleo and Watts note: “About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming.”
Is there a conspiracy?
According to one climatology expert in Canada who was threatened for his views, the answer is yes
“If people knew just how deep and dark this conspiracy is — yes, conspiracy — they’d be amazed,” he explains. “More and more academics are standing up to refute climate-change theories, but it’s still dangerous to do so. It can mean the end of a career, the targeting of someone by well-organized fanatics.”
I rather doubted this man who is arguably Canada’s leading scientific opponent of climate-change fundamentalism until the e-mails poured in after his television appearance. People wrote that he was in the pay of big oil, was a simple high-school geography teacher, was insane and worse. In fact, he is a university academic with impressive graduate degrees and doctorates and, unlike so many global warming advocates, is not in the pay of anybody.
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“I’ve rather got used to it by now,” he says. “At first it was shocking that a climatologist with different ideas was treated like a Holocaust denier. Now I just move on and speak the truth.”
Such aggression has become typical of climate-change fanatics. When they lose arguments or are exposed as frauds, they attack their critics’ reputations or, in the case of the UN climate chief last week, shout that opponents should have their faces rubbed in carcinogenic material. It’s a grander, better financed version of pushing someone off a stage and is as crass and nasty as any anti-Communist witch-hunt
After far too long, the American press is beginning to cover the debacle that is the IPCC.
Walter Russell Mead on the AP Story Breaks US Media Wall of Denial on IPCC Mess; Al Gore Still Silent
It had to happen and today the Associated Press has given the American public at large its first good look at a story that has been old news for weeks in countries where the media is more alert.
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For those worried about global warming, the much delayed eruption of this story into the mainstream US press is the best thing that could happen. Denial is the enemy; the more you care about global warming the more you need to insist that the leaders of national and international scientific organizations charged with assessing the evidence and explaining it to the public stick to the highest, most rigorous standards of analysis. Increasing numbers of climate scientists are bringing themselves to say what is now more and more obvious: the leadership of the IPCC has failed this test.
As he wrote earlier the Global Warming movement is dead from two causes: bad science and bad politics.
Now Michael Barone, the esteemed columnist on How climate change fanatics corrupted science
First came the Climategate e-mails made public in November that showed how top-level climate scientists distorted research, plotted to destroy data and conspired to prevent publication of dissenting views. The British government concluded last week that the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit violated the nation's freedom of information act, although the violations occurred too long ago for prosecution.
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As Christopher Booker writes in the Telegraph of London, "A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC's report which cite similarly non-peer-reviews WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority." Similarly, the Times of London reports that a claim that warming could endanger "up to 40 percent" of the Amazon rainforest came from an anti-smoking activist and had no scientific basis whatever.
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The secular religion of global warming has all the elements of a religious faith: original sin (we are polluting the planet), ritual (separate your waste for recycling), redemption (renounce economic growth) and the sale of indulgences (carbon offsets). We are told that we must have faith (all argument must end, as Al Gore likes to say) and must persecute heretics (global warming skeptics are like Holocaust deniers, we are told).
People in the grip of such a religious frenzy evidently feel justified in lying, concealing good evidence and plucking bad evidence from whatever flimsy source may be at hand.
While the British papers are chock full of stories about the implosion of global warming science and its grand narrative, there is almost nothing in the mainstream press except for the news Osama Bid Ladin has joined Al Gore in the ranks of the global warmists. Global warming science implodes overseas: American media silent.
This is a great story. It has everything a media outlet could desire; scandal, conflict of interest (IPCC head Pauchuri runs companies that benefited from climate scare stories), government cover ups - why then, has this unraveling of the basis of climate science that posited catastrophic man made warming not been making any news at all in the United States?
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As global warming the political movement is losing its scientific justification, the American people - who will be asked to foot the bill to the tune of trillions of dollars if Obama goes ahead with his "green" plans - are grossly uninformed about the state of the debate.
What makes me so mad is that taxpayers as usual are footing the bill for scientists who should be investigated for fraud and, if convicted, jailed. Take, for example, Michael Mann, whose famous hockey stick graph showing runaway global warming, that was later discredited because the data was made up. TARP, the American Recovery Program awarded him $2.4 million. The Wall St Journal called it A case study in one job 'saved'
This scientific scandal is far worse than ENRON ever was. Via James Delingpole, I read Phillip Stott, a British academic, who is foaming with righteous indignation, on the life and imminent death of the AGW scam.
As an independent academic, it has been fascinating to witness the classical collapse of a Grand Narrative, in which social and philosophical theories are being played out before our gaze. It is like watching the Berlin Wall [pictured] being torn down, concrete slab by concrete slab, brick by brick, with cracks appearing and widening daily on every face - political, economic, and scientific.
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And what can one say about ‘the science’? ‘The ‘science’ is already paying dearly for its abuse of freedom of information, for unacceptable cronyism, for unwonted arrogance, and for the disgraceful misuse of data at every level, from temperature measurements to glaciers to the Amazon rain forest. What is worse, the usurping of the scientific method, and of justified scientific scepticism, by political policies and political propaganda could well damage science sensu lato - never mind just climate science - in the public eye for decades
The UN climate panel, the IPCC lied to us about shrinking glaciers, increasing hurricanes, and rising seas and danger to the Amazon rainforest . What are they going to say to the children they terrified with tales of the Amazonian rainforest disappearing by the time they grew up? The UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim reports the London Times. Their claim that global warming would wipe out 40% of the Amazonian rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners with little or no scientific expertise. Shamed indeed.
The Wheels Come Off for the IPCC The IPCC has officially retracted claims that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.The IPCC scientist admits Glaciergate was about influencing governments . He knew the evidence was extremely suspect but wanted to put political pressure on governments to take action
The head of the UN Climate change panel, Rajenda Pachauri, facing calls to resign, has refused. He got grants through bogus claims. Some of the grants were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Times of London reports.
The good news is All the glaciers that aren't shrinking The Himalayan glaciers are growing, not shrinking. Alaska's Hubbard Glacier is growing. Norwegian glaciers are growing as are glaciers in France, Switzerland, Canada, Mt. St Helens, New Zealand, Russia, Iceland and Argentina.
Roger Simon calls it the politicization of science. And he's absolutely right. This is what happens when people don't care about the truth. Thank God for the Internet.
UPDATE. Russell Mead captures it all in one sentence.
The global warming meltdown confirms all the populist suspicions out there about an arrogantly clueless establishment invoking faked ’science’ to impose cockamamie social mandates on the long-suffering American people, backed by a mainstream media that is totally in the tank.
I'd say this is good news because people are finally beginning to realize that we are not on the edge of irreversible catastrophe of runaway global warming.
The mini ice age starts here
The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.
Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in summer by 2013.
According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.
Even a leading member of the USN's intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Professor Mojib Latif , is doing an about-face.
He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.
Last night he told The Mail on Sunday: ‘A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.
'They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.
‘The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.’
It's far more likely that there will be 30 years of global COOLING.
And that's the bad news. Global warming is pretty benign compared to global cooling.
Matt Drudge is the Poet Laureate of the Headline Stack observes Gerard Vanderleun
Climate fraudsters are on the run writes James Lewis
The good news for 2010 is that the climate fraudsters are on the run. The bad news is that they are hoping against hope that the sheriff’s posse won’t catch ‘em. Because the real reason for “global warming” is now clear beyond any reasonable doubt. The reason is ten trillion dollars in taxpayer dough for politicians, transnational bureaucrats, and phony science types. Put away those old world records for the Great Train Robbery and Bernie Madoff. You can junk Bonnie and Clyde. The climate fraudsters have now set the biggest record for massive fraud in human history.
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ten trillion dollars for climate fraud. That’s an official estimate from the “Stern Review ” authored by distinguished British fraudocrat Lord Nicholas Stern in 2006. The same number also comes from the skeptical side, from the Marshall Institute, which has done careful economic projections about the cost of “global warming” abatement.
I agree with Lewis that the most egregious fraudsters should be prosecuted, especially as a deterrent to others.
As for taxing carbon emissions, why? The University of Bristol which actually looked at the observable data instead of using cockamamie software to predict looming disaster while neglecting to account for the sun, the clouds and the oceans in global climate found there has been No rise in atmospheric carbon in 150 years .
Investors Business Daily calls it the CO2 Lie
A new study shows that Earth's ability to absorb carbon dioxide from all sources, including man, has remained unchanged for 160 years. As it turns out, there may be no carbon to offset.
A major tenet of the global warming religion, straight from the Book of Gore, has been that the ability of the earth to handle increasing CO2 emissions is finite and that once the "tipping point" is reached, the earth will warm uncontrollably. Well, another climate domino has fallen — the myth that man-made CO2 is leading to climate catastrophe.
The Doc is In on experts, Our Gnostic Masters
Our dependence on the guidance of scientists, economists, educators, and technocrats proves especially toxic when their expertise becomes wedded to money and political influence. Under the guise of shielding us from the complexity of their disciplines, they evolve into closed guilds, guardians of a secret knowledge which we, in our harrowed and hectic lives, have no time and little interest in understanding. As our educational system — itself run by a closed guild — produces generations of students tutored in woman’s studies, postmodern deconstructionism, and the evils of the West, yet ignorant of logic, philosophy, and the rigors of the hard sciences, the problem is compounded.
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Nowhere can this process better be seen than the unfolding drama surrounding the East Anglia email scandal. Centered on one of the three major centers for climate research and data in the world, the hacked emails and software code have ripped open the veil to show us the inner sanctum of science utterly corrupted and politicized. At issue is anthropogenic global warming (AGW) — the theory that recent warming trends in global temperatures are caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide from human activity, fostered by industrialization. It has long been a theory which struggled to pass the sniff test, placing undo weight on a trivial component of so-called greenhouse gases, while ignoring the enormous (and obvious) impact of solar activity, water vapor, and cloud cover.
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It has been fascinating to watch this ball of yarn unravel. In what may prove to be the greatest hoax mankind has ever witnessed — most certainly the one with almost unimaginable financial impact globally — we are watching the “settled science” of AGW disintegrate.
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The response of climate scientists to these devastating revelations? Denial and attack. The response of the UN Climate gurus and American and Western policy makers? Denial and attack. The response of the media to this massive global meltdown of AGW “settled science? Silence.
Gaghdad Bob comments
In a very real sense, the hysterical obsession with global warming is a displaced crisis of the soul -- which is the very reason why it so transparently partakes of mythology and is impervious to the light of reason.
Change is coming to the New York Times when science writer Bradley Fikes goes from being a Global Warming Believer to Skeptic
A few years ago, I accepted global warming theory with few doubts. I wrote several columns for this paper condemning what I thought were unfair attacks by skeptics and defending the climate scientists.
Boy, was I naive.
Since the Climategate emails and documents revealed active collusion to thwart skeptics and even outright fraud, I’ve been trying to correct the record of my earlier foolishness.
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My mistake was assuming only the purest of motives of the global warming alarmists, while assuming the worst of the skeptics. In fact, the soi-disant moralists of the global warming movement can also exploit their agenda for profit.
Climategate jolted me into confronting the massive fraud and deception by top global warming scientists, who were in a position to twist the peer-review process in their favor, and did so shamelessly.
The totalitarian impulse of the proponents of climate change, Bret Stephens on The Totalities of Copenhagen
In brief: utopianism, anti-humanism, indifference of evidence, monocausalism and grandiosity.
Bill Whittle reminds us of what President Eisenhower said in his famous "Beware the Military-Industrial Complex" and how prescient it was
“…the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
To see how climate data was falsified, let's look at Australia and what Willis Eschenbach found and called The Smoking Gun at Darwin Zero.
Ed Morrissey lays it out NOAA/GHCN “homogenization” falsified climate declines into increases
Like alchemists of old, it transformed decades-long declines in temperature into rapid upward spikes completely unsupported by any of the underlying data.
the blue is the raw data, the black is the amount of the adjustment, the red is the adjusted data, what was
presented as the truth
With Climategate, Sciencs is on the hook or as Daniel Henniger writes Science is Dying
I don't think most scientists appreciate what has hit them. This isn't only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called "the scientific community" had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry.
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Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost. Not every day does the work of scientists lead to galactic events simply called Kyoto or Copenhagen. At least not since the Manhattan Project.
What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event.
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Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it.
Christopher Booker writes
Just imagine if we learned we were about to be landed with the biggest bill in the history of the world - simply on the say-so of a group of scientists. Would we not want to be absolutely sure that those scientists were 100 per cent dependable in what they were saying?
Should we not then be extremely worried - and even very angry - if it emerged that those scientists had been conspiring among themselves to fiddle the evidence for what they were telling us?
Al Gore canceled his Copenhagen lecture disappointing 3000 Danes who bought tickets
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No one has put this better than Professor Lindzen, one of the world's leading climatologists, when he wrote: 'Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st-century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections contemplated a roll-back of the industrial age.'
Media Research Center reports 12 Days, 3 Networks and No Mention of Climategate Scandal
Climategate or CRUdGate, Why this can't be swept under the carper
Lastly and as a slight aside, why so little from the MSM? That one is easy. You need to have a decent analytical brain just to deal with the chain of events. You need to have a decent analytical brain, a mathematical/scientific mind and a good grasp of some very hard statistics to understand what is being done to massage the numbers and to see how significant it is to the chain of events.
Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you're going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown—in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand—that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact "at it" and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.
I would find that hard to report too.
Gerald Vanderleun mincing no words says the First Lie is the Deepest.
Looking back it is easy to see that the emails, far from being just trivial statements exchanged between pals, partners in deceit, and collegial others, were indeed the window into the entire mind-set that drove and sustained what is looking to be the largest and most far-reaching hoax in the history of science; a hoax perpetuated across decades by dozens if not hundreds of "scientists" for the sake of "saving the planet" and money, and fame, and status, and power. Indeed, this hoax makes Bernard Madoff look like a street-corner three-card-monte hustler. Looking through the window provided by the emails you can discern, with no effort of imagination whatsoever, the much greater real-world environment in which the hoax was born, grew, took on a life of its own, and was fed and sustained until it swept the whole world into its maw.
So what will the EPA do now having proposed to regulate carbon dioxide primarily based on the IPCC reports?
the UN hypothesis that increases in GHGs/CO2 will result in significant increases in global temperatures has not been confirmed by comparisons with real world data. Unless it is, attempts to decrease GHG/CO2 emissions in order to significantly change global temperatures are very likely to fail. This is the primary question that the EPA and climate scientists need to address before any control efforts are undertaken.
Jon Stewart is on the ClimateGate case. "Poor Al Gore: Global Warming completely debunked by the Internet you invented." Plus "Why would you throw out raw data from the eighties - I still have Penthouse magazines from the seventies"
Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal says Follow the Money
Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.
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Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?
Denmark rife with CO2 fraud
Denmark is the centre of a comprehensive tax scam involving CO2 quotas, in which the cheats exploit a so-called ‘VAT carrousel’, reports Ekstra Bladet newspaper.
Police and authorities in several European countries are investigating scams worth billions of kroner, which all originate in the Danish quota register. The CO2 quotas are traded in other EU countries.
James Delingpole reminds me that it was Ken Lay of Enron fame who invented carbon trading, a "license to fleece, cheat and rob."
Still, jolly embarrassing for the Danes to get caught red handed, what with their hosting a conference shortly in which the world’s leaders will try, straight-faced, to persuade us that carbon emissions trading is the only viable way of defeating ManBearPig.
Apart from the fact that fears of climate change are completely unfounded, there's other good news.
Climate change scientist Phil Jones steps down while he is investigated over allegations of professional inquiry
Head of the CGU, Professor Jones is the one who suggested a 'trick' to massage years of temperature data to 'hide the decline'.
Michael Mann the high profile professor who featured prominently in the Climategate emails is being investigated by his own university, Penn State. Here are some of his more damning emails.
In Australia, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wanted an Emissions Trading Scheme to bring to Copenhagen, a scheme that Andrew Bolt described as "Rudd's great tax on everything." The leader of the opposition party, Malcolm Turnbull who was in favor of massive carbon taxes faced a revolt in his own party and was replaced by Tony Abbott who said last month the AGW is 'crap' Now Australia's Senate rejected the Emissions Trading Scheme twice. Climategate: it's all unravelling now
Not in the U.S. apparently. Obama science officials defend warming research. The president's science advisor said the emails did nothing to undermine scientific consensus on climate change. John Holdren, the science advisor to the president, may be implicated himself in the Climategate scandal.
For a good summary of the scientific corruption read Lord Monckton's summary of Climategate and its issues
James Lewis who describes himself as a scientist by trade who carps as a hobby about the passing parade of human fraud and folly doesn't hold anything back in discussing the Climate Change Fraud
It is the Best of times and the Worst of Times for Science
Scientific skeptics have been there all along. Global warming was always a blatant concoction by normal scientific standards. Scientists I’ve talked to over the years are finally muttering it, in private. Some are looking ashamed. But very few are expressing real outrage at the fraudsters. Too many of them were either suckered or corrupted by money, power, and simple cowardice.
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The sciences are now like Russia after Glastnost: Everybody can see a massive disaster ahead, but nobody wants to say it out loud. We are in that moment of shocked silence just before the bare-naked emperor becomes a target of universal laughter and ridicule. Well, this emperor is buck naked, just like the fairy tale.
As I’ve talked with scientific colleagues in private, they are quietly nodding, yes, yes, of course it’s all BS. Pure model-driven fantasy. Really lousy, deceptive, and fraudulent selection of the data. A gigantic slap in the face for NASA. A thousand greedy grant swingers all over the world. The media chasing scare stories, and fake “scientists” chasing the media. They fed each other lie after lie after lie. It was a very profitable partnership.
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Here’s a bit of truth. Scientists love money. It’s only corporate money that smells bad to them. Government money smells like fresh-mown grass, green and lush. Even if they knew the whole game was a set-up, professors and college presidents went right along with it. Do you have any idea how much pressure college faculty are under to bring in grant money? The big universities get a big chunk of their budgets from “overhead expenses” — payoffs from Washington. Even undergraduate teaching is subsidized by science grants. So are grad students and faculty. In the end, professors don’t get tenure without bringing in a steady supply of money, and after tenure, the pressure only gets worse.