Bradley Fikes writes in the NCtimes.com
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. In one of those columns, I even wrote: “And see Real Climate (www.realclimate.org) for global warming science without the political spin.”
In fact, Real Climate was and is nothing more than the house organ of global warming activists, concerned more with politics than with science.
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.
Read the entire story here in the NCtimes.com
h/t to ClimateDepot
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Takes a lot of humble pie, what price Monbiot?
Britain is cold but not cold enough to freeze hell……:-)
Seasons best wishes to all sceptics!! [ and you lot at this blog, Anthony (great job) and the overworked and dedicated team(recently -exceptionally hard working).
It’s a work in progress.
Concerning: “I wish NPR would take this on and run with it.” While I agree with another here that NPR is part of the MSM, I kinda want to think they are genuinely reachable on this issue. Maybe. The final crash will come when someone in the MSM realizes what a major story this is – a real world changer, and career maker.
Bradley Fikes – “Boy, was I naive”
Common sense wins thank god. Plus the willingness to accept you were wrong, despite arguing long and hard for the opposite opinion.
Wake up others please.
The vast majority of people have neither the skills or education to really know what is going on. That is what makes people like Al Gore truly despicable — He knows he is playing on people’s ignorance.
Better late than never.
Jay Neumark (13:44:24) : “I wish NPR would take this [AGW scam] on and run with it.”
HAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Good one, Jay.
>>True science is the pursuit of what is really happening, not what we think or wish to happen. The older I get the less I “know”
If you applied that thinking to things beyond science you might stop being a liberal altogether.
On the down side, you might have to get new friends.
The words “Dirty Laundry” in quotes. Is that the sum total of the evidence that a fraud has been committed? Please tell me you’ve got more than that. Who was defrauded? Where? When?
Deliberately withholding evidence that goes against your theory in published research is scientific fraud. It is misrepresenting evidence. When you involve someone else in the fraud, that is a conspiracy. When this is done in a clinical trial in the pharmaceutical industry, people can go to jail.
abc radio in australia had cosmos magazine founder wilson da silva on air last nite, giving a run-down of the biggest science stories of the year. was climategate included? of course not. but “Nature” mag was given a big plug and computers achieving full consciousness in the near future was enthusiastically brought up. da silva added that such computers could then solve the BIGGEST problems known to man, such as climate change! to give the presenter credit, he disagreed, saying we could simply turn the computer off.
About Cosmos
Our Cosmos Teacher’s Notes reach 60% of Australian high schools, and we produce a wide range of quality editorial products – such as websites, posters and DVDs – for a range of clients. ..
COSMOS is the brainchild of Wilson da Silva, a former ABC TV science reporter and past president of the World Federation of Science Journalists. It is backed by an Editorial Advisory Board that includes Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, ABC Radio’s Robyn Williams, and is chaired by Dr Alan Finkel, the neuroscientist and philanthropist who is the Chancellor of Monash University in Melbourne.
COSMOS is produced by Luna Media Pty Ltd, a boutique publishing house in Sydney that has twice been named Best Publisher at the Bell Awards.
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/about
2007: Cosmos: TWO OF US: Dr Alan Finkel and Wilson da Silva
Wilson da Silva, 41, is the editor and creator of COSMOS, a science magazine backed by Dr Alan Finkel, 53. Finkel, the millionaire founder of Axon Instruments, has spent US$400,000 buying tickets for da Silva and himself in the hope of being the first Australian space tourists to fly on Virgin Galactic in 2008.
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/media/1262/two-of-us-dr-alan-finkel-and-wilson-da-silva/
Wikipedia: Wilson da Silva
He has been an on-air reporter and producer for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation television science program Quantum, a staff journalist on The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald newspapers, a foreign correspondent for Reuters, science editor of ABC Online, a correspondent for London’s New Scientist magazine, and served as managing editor of the science magazines Newton, 21C and Science Spectra.[1] From 2006-09, he was the founding editor-in-chief of G Magazine, an environmental consumer lifestyle title that was the country’s first carbon neutral magazine and produced on 100% recycled paper…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_da_Silva
cosmos deputy editor is john pickrell:
11 Dec: Cosmos: John Pickrell: No climate for games
The hacked emails affair is a pointless distraction: the science of global warming is unequivocal, and it’s time for governments meeting in Copenhagen to focus on action if we are to save millions of lives.
The evidence that global warming is real, and that it is almost entirely caused by man-made emissions of greenhouse gasses, is based on the work of many thousands of scientists across the planet, in many countries, and employed by hundreds of independent institutions. To ignore this truly vast body of work, relying on thousands upon thousands of separate data sets that all point in the same direction, is patently absurd…
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/features/online/3193/no-climate-games
Cosmos:Earth Journalism Award for COSMOS writer
John Pickrell, the deputy editor of COSMOS, has taken out the global Climate Change and Nature category at the prestigious Earth Journalism Awards in Copenhagen for a feature article on ocean acidification.
Almost 1,000 journalists, bloggers and citizen reporters from 148 countries registered in the competition, with just 15 winners selected by a combination of online votes and an independent jury of media and climate experts..
The Earth Journalism Awards were organised by Internews, an international media development organisation, as a way to increase coverage of climate change in the lead up to United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, and to “highlight the efforts of journalists reporting on this challenging subject around the world.”…
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3212/earth-journalism-award-cosmos-writer
Cosmos Editorial Advisory Board includes:
Robyn Williams is an Australian science journalist and broadcaster who has hosted The Science Show on ABC Radio National since its inception in 1975…
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/about/advisory/
Pickrell has three pieces in Science Mag:
1. Could a Deeper Shade of REDD Close the Carbon Gap?
2. As Forest Deal Nears, New Index Maps Profit Potential in Trees
3. Fighting Deforestation Could Imperil Some Ecosystems, Study Finds
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/environmentclimate/
Nat Geo: John Pickrell: Global Warming “Marches On”; Past Decade Hottest Known
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/091208-copenhagen-climate-conference-global-warming-climategate.html
finally, to those who still want to think AGW is a ‘liberal’ thing:
Conservatives to push Senate over US climate Bill
Senior Conservatives are to lobby Republicans in the US Senate to persuade
them to back a climate emissions Bill…
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6964473.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797084
It was never the actual science, the problem has always been in the way the science has been reported to the public. A balance which Anthony and friends should be lauded for their efforts in redressing.
Anyone else think the WUWT team and Steve McIntyre should be put forward for a joint Nobel prize?
US Court Orders Records Unsealed In Cap-And-Trade Fraud Case
http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/stock-market-news-story.aspx?storyid=200912171847dowjonesdjonline000636&title=us-court-orders-records-unsealed-in-cap-and-trade-fraud-case
Congratulations on thinking for yourself. I wish more people would do it!
But don’t be too eager to fall into the opposite trap, which is to assume that all climate science is an out-and-out fraud. I started out in the sceptics camp, back in the early 2000s, when Steve McIntyre was trying to extract raw data about the hockey-stick from Mann, and immediately noted that Mr McIntyre was making reasonable requests, and pointing out real problems, while Mann and his colleagues were refusing to answer questions and smearing when they could. At the time it seemed obvious who the bad guys were, and the amazing thing is that they have got away with this behaviour for so long.
So I started out with the assumption that Mann et al were not to be trusted. But McIntyre, although he was being treated abysmally, refused to fight like with like, and has stuck to only making statements he could justify. You will see that he has no position on Global Warming – it might or it might not be happening. All he points out is that the ‘proofs’ offered so far are so flawed as to be useless. If someone came up with positive evidence that Global Warming was actually taking place, he would be happy to accept it.
It now seems to me to be highly unlikely that the AGW hypothesis is true. Every bit of ‘evidence’ which has been adduced turns out to be poor, and in many cases overtly manufactured (though you will not hear McIntyre claim that). But that is pre-judgement on my part. McIntyre is still looking at the evidence, and if he finds some that is credible, I believe he will happily publish that fact on Climate Audit. And that is as science should be done.
My view of this sorry affair is that Steve McIntyre has been standing up for proper science this last ten years, for a large part of that alone. I reckon that the least the world owes Steve is a Nobel prize, but I think we both know how unlikely that is. The best Steve can hope for is that his fight will be mentioned in text-books a hundred years from now as an object lesson in scientific bravery….
A brave man to modify his views in such a public way.I left a comment of support on his NYT site. If only a MS journalist ( apart from C. Booker of the Sunday Telegraph) would break with the ‘consensus’.
I am very pleased to see Bradley’s post reproduced here. I think you’ll see he is doing a credible job at making up lost ground in his other recent blog posts on this topic. Bradley wrote one of the most accurate and fare reviews of my book a few years ago (on a difficult and somewhat controversial topic – I won’t plug it here, not the place) and I was most impressed with his reporting. Welcome, have a cookie.
The problem of persuasion (please let’s avoid the religous overtones of ‘conversion’) is an important one if we want to see a return to sound science and sensible policy making.
It helps, when opening the door, that we show that the house of scepticism has many rooms. It helps to avoid colapsing the issue into a political polarisation.
The danger is to send out the message that the evil enemy is the environment movement generally, and so anyone who has campaigned for some nature conservation is not welcome.
I remember my younger sister in the 80s saying to a feminist active in the 70s that she was not a feminist. The older feminist asked if she thought women should be paided the same as men when they do the same job, and whether she thought women should be force to resign when they got married? That’s what she campaigned for. I once picnicked with some right wing anti-greenie friends of family in an old growth forest out the back of a now very expensive beach resort where I shivered with the memory, only 10 years earlier almost in that spot, of the shock as the person beside me was suddenly grabbed and dragged away by the dreadlocks in the protest to preserve this forest.
The gains of the conservation movement of the 60s and 70s are for all to now enjoy. Part of the reason the US (and Australia, where I live) is cleaner now is due to regulation. Law. Yes, being told what to do and not to do. And another part of the reason is that the dirty work has been exported to China to be undertaken at near subsistence – and so to support our afluence. When Americans deny or ignore this global reality it offends many potential supporters.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that it has through the right side of the US media that the sceptical voice has mostly been heard – and where it has credit is indeed due. But just as not all feminists are separatists, likewise not all environmentalists are fanatical control freaks blind to reasonable persuasion. And many of them are probably right now surveying WUWT – a haven for enviro-minded sceptics. So, from one greenie to another…welcome aboard!
Up until several years ago I was neutral on global warming, I just didn’t know which side was correct. Then one day I was driving, listening to NPR. They did a segment on farmers journals which seemed to prove that we are planting about 2 weeks sooner than we did several hundred years ago. That seemed to me at the time a convincing argument (I didn’t yet know the difference between natural warming and AGW). About 10 minutes later it occurred to me that the segment never once mentioned the medieval warming period, which seemed to me to be disingenuous at best.
Since then most times I have encountered exaggerations it has been from the alarmist side. Now I read about raw data being hidden/destroyed or perhaps massaged. I see computer code that applies “fudge factors”. UEA says the fudge factor was never used for published results, but what was it for then?
I have drawn my own conclusion.
Bradley Fikes, welcome here! I was welcomed here two years ago when I apostasised from active support of AGW. I was absolutely determined to get to the bottom of the science, and since the warmists had posted so many “answering skeptics’ issues” I had to study for about six weeks solid before I was really sure which “side” had the truth. In the end, it was a very clear, clean division. Click my name to read a self-taught skeptical climate scientist’s account.
Tarpon:
I don’t know about the state of the education system today, but I learned about photosynthesis in grade 7. That was all I needed to know to set the alarm bells off in my head when the AGW crowd started calling CO2 a toxin. It’s not as if a person needed a science degree to have smelled a rat. Public ignorance indeed.
Being a skeptic means to me, of having an attitude of “Question Everything”
Its not having an open mind but having a mind that is guarded to the con and con-men who are always probing for that next score.
But don’t be too eager to fall into the opposite trap, which is to assume that all climate science is an out-and-out fraud.
I’m aware of that peril as well. I wouldn’t go so far as to say all climate science is a fraud. Skepticism does not mean disbelief, it means not being credulous. Once the fraud and bad science is full exposed, we’ll have a much better understanding of the good science on climate.
Hate to say this, but there pleanty of uninformed climate skeptics too – just not nearly as many as on the AGW side.
Bradley, if you want to add a Pulitzer to your resume, rely on the resources on this site and at Climateaudit then follow the money.
It’s a bit like waking up from a dream ain’t it.
I’ve always been a sceptic on AGW. As soon as I heard about it back in about 1988 (I was at University (studying Geology) at the time) I thought it was a complete crock. Nothing I’ve seen, read, heard or experienced in any other way since then has changed my mind.
TS – Concerning: “I wish NPR would take this on and run with it.” While I agree with another here that NPR is part of the MSM, I kinda want to think they are genuinely reachable on this issue. Maybe.
I do agree with you but not for the same reasons as you. Don’t forget NPR is government funded and 2010 doesn’t look so good for Dems. If NPR was smart (meaning that want gov. funding after 2010) they may indeed be “genuinely reachable” on the AGW issue.
Congratulations, Bradley. Uncritical belief is a difficult thing to overcome, and usually cannot be imposed from outside ones self.