David Rose has a rather depressing yet not surprising article in the Mail on Sunday that documents the hive mind mentality, or some might call it a ‘mob mentality’, of warmists.
It’s about Dr. Richard Tol, whose dared to try to distance himself from what he viewed as overly alarming claims in the IPCC Working Group II Summary for Policymakers. As a result, he has incurred the wrath of the Internet climate mob.
The article also documents some of the changes due to the political intervention into the draft review process and as an extra bonus highlights some of the all-to-predictable dishonesty from Bob Ward.
Green ‘smear campaign’ against professor who dared to disown ‘sexed up’ UN climate dossier
- Richard Tol claims he is fighting a sustained attack on his reputation
- Professor from Sussex University is a highly respected climate economist
- Criticised by campaigners after saying report summary was ‘alarmist’
- In his opinion, it focused on ‘scare stories’
The professor who refused to sign last week’s high-profile UN climate report because it was too ‘alarmist’, has told The Mail on Sunday he has become the victim of a smear campaign.
Richard Tol claims he is fighting a sustained attack on his reputation by a key figure from a leading institution that researches the impact of global warming.
Prof Tol said: ‘This has all the characteristics of a smear campaign. It’s all about taking away my credibility as an expert.’
Prof Tol, from Sussex University, is a highly respected climate economist and one of two ‘co-ordinating lead authors’ of an important chapter in the 2,600-page report published last week by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
He has been widely criticised by green campaigners after he claimed that the much shorter ‘summary for policymakers’ – hammered out in all-night sessions between scientists and government officials over a week-long meeting in Yokohama, Japan – was overly ‘alarmist’.
In his view, the summary focused on ‘scare stories’ and suggestions the world faced ‘the four horsemen of the apocalypse’.
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This is just another data point on the graph of CAGW’s journey to rejection, ridicule and eventual oblivion. This sort of rat shot invective against those who articulate the absurdity and fraudulence of CAGW is to be expected because that is all that is left in the ammunition locker.
“Richard Tol claims he is fighting a sustained attack on his reputation by a key figure from a leading institution that researches the impact of global warming.”
Any information on who is the “Key Figure”
When you get right down to it, the one thing that has alarmed the alarmists most has been the
lack of warming. That drives them crazy and leads to absurd claims, like that from Mann recently :
“Warming has not stopped, only slowed down.” Yeah, slowed down. As in stopped.
Reblogged this on This Got My Attention and commented:
More indications of the deteriorating integrity in the academy. The days of “sifting and winnowing” http://www.secfac.wisc.edu/siftandwinnow.htm are long gone, it seems.
Smear campaign. As predictable as the rising sun. Eventually this will be their undoing. They will go after the wrong person and the public will say no more. “Sir, have you no decency?”
Everything’s right on time and according to script. A new scary, unsubstantiated report is published. Someone of conscience objects. Person of conscience is then smeared in public to enforce the dogma of fear and catastrophe. Same old, same old…
$1 billion PER DAY is spent world-wide on “global warming.” Not even “climate change” but “GLOBAL WARMING. If you were getting a piece of that money, would you really like ANY voice that says, “Ya know, maybe we’re being too alarmist”?
I like the phrase used in the Daily Mail article
Climate McCarthyism
Very appropriate.
The objective of the UN is the destruction of Western Civilization. They couldn’t care less about “climate change,” except as it gets people to accept UN dominance. Dr. Tol didn’t go along with the scare, which makes the elaborate story from the IPCC . . .
USELESS
That’s why the reaction. It’s not science. It’s advocacy. Not for “climate,” but for world hegemony.
The report was “hammered out in all-night sessions between scientists and government officials.” Guess whose opinions prevailed. And if an unwise scientist makes trouble, down the hole he goes. Like in 1935 Germany. 1939 is just around the corner.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/11/23/the-scientific-firmament.html
OK, …how do we help Dr. Tol?
My sympathy for Dr Tol is restrained by the observation that he has been quite content to play along with the scaremongering of the IPCC until now.
Now he is a heretic, a turncoat even, in the eyes of the Team.
Nothing new here, the mob always eats its own, until the rabid ranting of the most powerful loony dominates the scene.
CAGW will be a historic example of the recurring madness of crowds.
Herd beasts are always obsessed with dominance and pecking order, the popular wisdom of the moment, must be adhered to or the heretics be stomped.
Trouble is that popular wisdom is elusive and causes the believers to turn on each subgroup of their support in turn.
Buy Popcorn.
This is ugly, but it is to be expected. As the whole global warming scare collapses, those like Ward who cannot escape the permanent record of their shame will get increasingly vicious to those who can walk away.
Years ago I worked with an expert patternmaker for steel castings. As a teenager he had escaped from a former soviet satellite state to the west. Their village was close to the border, but any escape by young folk was met with reprisals against their remaining family by party officials and secret police. Eventually some thirty teenagers escaped on mass on the one night. The family members facing reprisals now outnumbered the oppressors in the village and no reprisals resulted.
However the wide readership of David Rose and other sceptics mean that such a mass breakout may not be necessary for some of the former fellow travellers. As the numbers dwindle, those remaining will become increasingly insane. Their foaming and shrieking will seem increasingly ludicrous and will only serve to make anyone with a chance of escape (no record of vilifying sceptics) more likely to flee.
Ward’s vile antics expose the black heart of the whole AGW machine for the world to see. Who wants to remain on team AGW when Bob Ward is on the team?
” hammered out in all-night sessions between scientists and government officials over a week-long meeting in Yokohama, Japan”
Is this what they mean by the scientific process?
Yet no one in Academia rises to the defense of Tol. The silence is defining. You hear nothing about this being an assault on “academic freedom”; or about how the mob is “anti-science”. It would seem that academic freedom means only the freedom to agree with the consensus.
Politics has always been an ugly bastard brother to scientific endeavor. We will never change that. However we must resist the attempt by anyone to co-opt science into a political endeavor. Those that do deserve and should expect the scorn and resistance of true scientist. When that has happened free men will have no longer be free and science will only be science. .
Take away their money and they will have nothing.
Well, this IS WWIV. Don’t expect rationality to prevail, or science or logic or honesty or justice, necessarily. The bombs are falling all over the world, they just don’t go BOOM when they land. Yet. The first refuge of the climate scoundrels may be ad hominem, but the last resort of will be violence. Consider the stakes. The media must be made to realize the consequences of aligning themselves with despotism, fiddling with the Mayor of Toronto while the Constitution is on fire in Washington DC.
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2014/03/05/rat-snake-bob/
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2014/03/07/bob-wards-despicable-harassment-campaign/
I have been really impressed with Tol appearing on the scene with a clear voice of authority and competence. They trashed economist Lomborg too, and he then moderated his biting attacks on elitist “no development in view of my mountain lair” environmental movement supporters. Those multimillionaires (and their wives) are now failing to hold back the tide of public opinion turning against them. Only aversion to old school anti-science conservatism (stem cells, Darwin, drug war scares, etc.) now creates much inertia towards younger generations joining what is now considered to be a political movement that skeptics represent.
I have a Climate McCarthyism graphic appropriate to this thread:
http://s6.postimg.org/kdr0qt181/Climate_Mc_Carthyism.jpg
All the summaries and executive versions are fashioned to be more alarmist that the underlying reports. Dr. Tol was not aware? He is hardly the first to complain, but being an economist, his doubts are immediately dangerous to the insurance industries and various other economic parasites — the UN itself being one of the biggest with its CDM scam. Tol complaining about a UN report hyping “climate change” is like complaining about a report from Exxon singing praises about petroleum. Is this economist unaware how the UN makes a lot of its dough?
john robertson
My sympathy for Dr Tol is restrained by the observation that he has been quite content to play along with the scaremongering of the IPCC until now. …
I disagree. Dr. Tol has simply stuck to his expertise – he has accepted IPCC predictions of climate change, and used his expertise to dismantle their economic predictions.
Two observations:-
1. If we are intolerant of divergent opinions, we are just like the people we despise.
2. Dr. Tol is well within his rights to avoid commenting outside his field of expertise.
Dr. Tol has certainly not stayed silent when academically questionable statements have come to his attention, for example, when the Cook “97%” study misclassified Dr. Tol’s work as “supportive” of the IPCC, Dr. Tol put some real effort into showing what a shonky study it was.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/01/tol-statistically-deconstructs-the-97-consensus/
Perhaps this Bob Ward?
http://www.channel4.com/news/scientists-challenge-work-of-climate-change-dissenter
Bob Ward, of the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the LSE, has published what he claims is a detailed account of Professor Tol’s input to the IPCC report, pledging “I will continue my efforts to have the errors in Professor Tol’s work corrected as a service to researchers, policy-makers and the public.”
‘all-to-predictable’ – minor typo – should be all-too-predictable
Dave