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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Must have been an existential experience.
For me being a liberal means being against capital punishment, in favour of gun control and universal health care and expecting everybody to contribute to society according to their means with the unfortunates of society being given a helping hand when necessary.
There is absolutely nothing about AGW which makes it a liberal issue. There is nothing about being a liberal which makes for tolerence of fraud and bogus science. There is nothing right wing or left wing about it.
So why are left/liberals groups and individuals continually looking to excuse the inexcusable? Why does the lead against AGW come so much from right wing sources? It is a big eye-opener to see the obvious lack of brain power amongst so many of our ‘leaders’.
In the UK I am in the appalling position of seeing a General Election coming up in the next few months but only the loathsome BNP and the Little Englanders of UKIP offer sensible comments on AGW. The only exceptions are a few older generation conservative politicians who are being ignored by the Boy David.
The only thing certain is I will not under any circumstance vote for Gordon Clown or the Green party.
Bradley Fikes said “Boy, was I naive.”
I don’t think so. I think you were misled by authority figures that you trusted, and a corrupted process of peer review and scientific publication which should have been beyond reproach. You’re more akin to the victim of a crime. You wouldn’t say ‘Boy was I naive to get mugged’ or ‘Boy was I naive that my bank went bust and lost my savings’.
You’d be naive to put your life savings on a 100-1 outsider because it had a lucky name.
It looks to me that there is a lot of work to be done to straighten out the true picture of recent past climate and how significant the effect of anthropic CO2 on future climate will be. That has to start with a rigorous peer reviewed scientific process and readily available, version controlled data and code wherein which there can be no political affiliation of right/left/up or down.
It would be interesting to conduct a research project to determine how similar belief in AGW is to involvement in “cult” movements. AGW adherents seem incapable of conversing with skeptics. They classify those that disagree with them as “denialists” as if their “religion” is under attack. Their use of the images of traincars and deathcamps gives me the feeling that I’m in Guyana being shouted down to by a bunch of Jim Jones believers.
I’m happy for the few people that have begun to escape that mindset.
I’ve been trying to follow several California environmental/science reporters and commentators after the e-mail and code leak (?)/ hack (?). One of which is Mr. Fikes’ weblog.
It really is quite fascinating to see the difference in how the affair is represented. Mr. Fikes’ Sci-Tech weblog at NC Times has been relentless in trying to put the new information in context. As far as I know, it’s the only reporting for a newspaper in California that has accepted the challenging task. I’d be curious to know otherwise. I’m calling Chico News and Review, stat.
And that’s not to say that I wouldn’t be surprised that humans are contributing to warming. It’s just that we need honest accounts of what’s actually going on. I mean, what’s up with that? hahaha, oh boy.
Kudos, excellent work.
Deliberately withholding evidence that goes against your theory in published research is scientific fraud.
Fair enough. So let us be absolutely careful, clear and specific. You are levelling an accusation of outright fraud against Professor Michael Mann of Penn State University for the withholding of evidence. Is that correct?
Please be specific, which published theory in which papers was contradicted by these data? What exactly do the data show?
Please confirm that you wish to make a serious and highly public accusation of scientific fraud against Professor Mann, in the knowledge that it will almost certainly be defamatory if you cannot provide adequate supporting evidence.
Note that Professor Mann did not actually withhold anything, he provided some data to a colleague and asked that he be consulted before those data were shared more widely. In my opinion, given the absurd distortions that some are prepared to indulge in this seems to me more indicative of sensible precautions than fraud.
More detail, please. I am sure that you won’t object to me forwarding your allegations on to Professor Mann while we are waiting, and cross-posting this to RealClimate?
Jeremy (13:57:34):
“What he did was very tough, very difficult to come out and say that.”
Agreed. Do you remember George Monbiot of the Guardian?
Over time they will become increasingly sceptical. IF AGW is wrong then nature and research will reveal the error[s] over time. Remember we were told by the IPCC that CO2 is a well mixed gas, now NASA says no it’s lumpy. We were told about the “death spiral” of Arctic ice melt but now we see recovery since 2007. Even today we are seeing killer COLD weather not killer HEAT.
Those that push people to act now, no time to waste are afraid that their scam would be exposed by nature (see Gore, Pachauri).
Pachauri should stand down immediately if he has any dignity and does not want himself to be remembered by history as one of the greatest hypocritical frauds ever. Gore would come a close second because he is not head of the IPCC thus no conflict of interest.
This North San Diego newspaper blogger got an unexpected number of comments due to a Climate Depot link. South, East and West San Diego have been alerted! Wait till she sees what hits her now.
What has happened and will continue to happen is that the voice of authority that so many have relied on in order to dismiss skeptical claims has been suddenly deflated. The authority of dozens of scientific academies around the world is finally shown to be not the voice of their members but that of their politically motivated leaders.
Physicists and us chemists too are the closest so far to tossing out the writers of our official statements on Global Warming. I know the former president of the American Chemical Society, Breslow, who works up the street from me, just past NASA’s GISS (above Tom’s Diner) at Columbia. His take on Global Warming that he told me after an unrelated seminar in which he was heckled about lack of concern with impending environmental disaster was quite brief: “Politics is broken”.
If you’d like a better understanding of the viewpoint of most chemists, note that he also scoffed at the ban on benzene due to a tiny suspected number of leukemia cases in some factory, proudly pointing out that benzene was their favored hand-washing solvent back in the day. We use acetone instead now. It was easier before the Safety Police arrived on the scene in the late 90s who noticed this and installed solvent detectors on our drain pipes in order to fine us! It now costs more to throw away a chemical than to buy it and they wont let us store large libraries of them any more either. Organic Synthesis just isn’t as fun any more when half a century worth of half-full bottles of reagents are no longer kept in lighted walk-in closets at the end of the hall of each group’s lab. Number of serious accidents caused by such chemical “morgues”? Zero. Amount of weekend research lost waiting for reagents to arrive in the mail? A lot! Number of creative ideas no longer stimulated by chemical morgues? All it takes is one at a time to delay energy or medical breakthroughs.
Common sense has been lost. “Environmentalist” bureaucrats have no common sense, yet they already police local affairs. Climate Alarmism is the ultimate power grab by such control freaks. Environmentalism’s petty tyranny has finally turned enough children into young adult fanatics willing to inflict a failed revolution upon us all using the full force of government, Constitution be damned. At least the courts still have the last word and do not suppress opposing views once they are forced to hear a lawsuit. A Scopes Trial or two would be quite effective for skeptics.
Hop over to RealClimate.org to hear their wailing demonization of skeptics, and note a strong undercurrent of psychological projection in this scattered sample:
“It would seem if this story (for this is all this tale is: a story to frighten) is true then denialism is much like the Church of Scientology or indeed any other cult.”
“Someday soon, maybe now, we realize that further discourse with such fools and idiots serves no purpose. Such denialism is now clearly dangerous.”
“Who is to blame for the development of this irrational cult of a postulated solar influence upon the Earth’s climate?
The IPCC is not without responsibility for providing the free ride for solar crusaders.”
Such blog comments are highly encouraged by statements from environmentalist leaders:
“An entire generation will soon be ready to strangle you and your kind while you sleep in your beds.” – Joe Romm (Clinton official)
“What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing is a criminal act.” – David Suzuki
“I wrote a post that advocated for the jailing and execution of global warming deniers. If any of you have read my former posts – I may get very angry sometimes – but I truly don’t want for anyone to die. I’m vehemently against the death penalty – and do my best to respect all forms of life.” – Anonymous retraction of an article on TalkingPointsMemo.com
4 years ago you couldn’t convince me that Global Warming wasn’t a done deal.
Then somebody challenged me to look for myself.
Darned if he wasn’t onto the real story.
Welcome to the outside of the box, Bradley.
Einstein on smashing atoms at will and predictions of manned flight reminds me of the alleged prediction by T.J.Watson, founder of IBM that there would ever only be a market for five computers. This quote is disputed, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson
Nevertheless, if he did say such a thing, and if Einstein really did say what he is supposed to have said, then we also have to admit that these men, geniuses in quite different ways, were almost certainly open-minded and flexible enough to change their opinions when the facts changed, or rather when further knowledge and experience was gained.
It would be nice to think, would it not, that the current AGW-catastrophists were so open-minded and flexible.
I too was a “believer”. I got my electric from wind turbines and bought a low emissions car. When the UK temperature record was broken in 2003 by 2degrees I felt that kind of vindicated my belief, even though it was merely a weather event rather than a climate event – I guess a lot of other Brits felt the same. Then in 2007 the “Great Global Warming Swindle” came out. I didn’t see the program but I saw the row it caused in the comments of the Guardian newspaper. I also saw that the “deniers” were asking rational questions about the ice core data and in reply they were getting abusive ad-hominems. Something was clearly wrong. So I went to look at the graphs of the ice core data. At first the graphs were shown in high resolution and I could see some of the issues that were raised. Then suddenly the graphs dissappeared and were replaced with the comment “the high resolution graphs have been removed since the plotting artefacts of the high resolution data is misleading and could lead to erroneous interpretations”. So something really strange was happening. So I got the Vostok and other ice-core raw data from the web and plotted it in Excel. Then I could see for myself that the CO2 did indeed FOLLOW the temp and that high levels of CO2 did not result in permanently high temps nor were higher temps and higher CO2 levels than today unusual.
If anything the ice-core data showed not that global warming was real and dangerous, but that high levels of CO2 had little impact on temperature. Since then the AGW has gone rather quiet on ice-core data.
I went over to RealClimate to discuss my findings with “the Team” but they were highly dismissive. I realised that perfectly reasonable scientific enquiry was not welcome at RealClimate and the website was nothing more than a means by which “the Team” could communicate their belief system to their disciples – most of whom had political motivations for being there.
Clearly I had been lied to. AGW was not real. I changed sides. Since then I have seen the same kind of lie perpetrated over tree ring data and surface station data, and each time this has been associated with cover-ups and obfuscation and each time RealClimate has spouted nothing more than propaganda in their defence.
I am not afraid of AGW, what I am afraid of is that a small number of AGW proponents have succesfully manipulated millions of people through lies and subterfuge and misrepresentation.
this is starting to sound like an intervention or an AA-meeting…not that I would know of course 🙂
The obvious thing is as the global mean temperature continue not to follow the predictions of the IPCC, there will be more rats leaving the sinking ship of AGW alarmists. I hope we will soon all come to our senses and finally have a real scientific debate WITHOUT the politicians, and their “bribe” money that funds a lot of the climate science research these days. Somehow, I doubt this will happen but one can only hope.
Mr. Fikes,
Welcome to the real world. I must say that you will now retire at night without complete or perfect answers to the mechanisms of global climate; fact is, we don’t know. But, we do know we don’t know, and realise we need more data and more study.
It is a more disquieting world than the AGW world, with its comfey “settled science” cushions, but there’s a heck of a lot more discussion and ideas and thoughts going on in this real world.
Me too!
Hey Brad,
Welcome to the Skeptics Club. Two quick pieces of advice. In the eyes of your liberal colleagues you have become a traitorous pariah – prepare yourself for exile unto the Wilderness. Secondly, start digging. Live by the immortal words of General “Buck” Turgidson: “I smell a rat. A big, fat Commie rat!”
All The Best!
Bradley, I have found that it is much better to be completely sure of what little I as an individual can actually know than it was to be following along with a crowd that seemed to know everything, even though I couldn’t understand why any of what they said was true. Maybe your experience will be the same.
It will also be interesting to see if some of your former “friends” who thought you were smart because you agreed with them about AGW won’t now treat you as a dim-witted pawn in the hands of us evil skeptics. Might make an interesting follow-up column in your paper.
re: Phil Clarke
Bradley, don’t rise to the bait offered by this RC-troll. It’s a trap. Sit back and watch him get taken to task.
I sympathize with all who wish that NPR or some similar outfit would examine this, and are wondering why they won’t. I don’t count them out completely yet; we are at a remarkable time where everyone who is involved in this in any way has to make a choice – face the evidence honestly, or support the status quo? Before Climategate, it took a great deal of work to come to a scientific conclusion, and it is no surpise that the average non-technical person erred on the side of those acknowledged to be “experts”.
But now, the revelations are so gross, and so noxious, that it takes a conscious act of will to ignore them. It takes a decision to deliberately hide from the truth, and any news organization that does this is no longer worthy of the name.
Anyone who look at this honestly I believe will be forced to come to the same conclusions that Bradley Fikes has, which is that nothing can be known for certain until the fraud is removed from the equations. *Nothing* is certain until that is done, and the people to blame for that are NOT the “skeptics” but rather are those scientists who abused their positions and caused the fraud. And anyone, and any organization, which refuses to acknowledge this must now be recognized as being complicit in the fraud, since it is too obvious now for “plausible denial” to be an excuse.
NPR, it is time to choose – report honestly, or be complicit in the fraud yourselves. You can’t be a party to a lie on this issue and try to hang onto your credibility with any other issues, credibility doesn’t work that way. Choose.
Phil Clarke – “who was defrauded”
The American Taxpayer who funded the research that led to the paper(s) for which the data and methods were hidden from public scrutiny.
That’s who is defrauded.
If Mr Mann worked for himself, or a private company, I would have no problems with his hiding all this under a Intellectual Property umbrella.
Problem is, We all PAID for it, and he was not forthcoming about it.
Oh how nice, Phil Clarke is using this blog to try and professionnally threaten Fikes for his thoughts.
Nice display of thuggery there, Phil. Although I doubt anyone here is surprised.
MrCPhysics (13:55:03) :
“If any genuine scientist sees this (link below) and doesn’t feel his stomach churning, I will lose all faith in science…”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/a_climatology_conspiracy.html
It turned my stomach. Ben Santer is a punk and a bully, pure and simple – and should resign (or be removed) from LLNL…
>>TerrySkinner (16:05:34) :
For me being a liberal means being against capital punishment, in favour of gun control and universal health care and expecting everybody to contribute to society according to their means with the unfortunates of society being given a helping hand when necessary.
>>There is absolutely nothing about AGW which makes it a liberal issue. There is nothing about being a liberal which makes for tolerence of fraud and bogus science. There is nothing right wing or left wing about it.
>>So why are left/liberals groups and individuals continually looking to excuse the inexcusable? Why does the lead against AGW come so much from right wing sources? It is a big eye-opener to see the obvious lack of brain power amongst so many of our ‘leaders’.
I’ve been a skeptic since I realized that this was more about politics than science. I began digging into the people who were at the heart of this whole scam, people like Maurice Strong and his ilk. You may be a good hearted liberal with perfectly reasonable positions (even if they are positions I disagree with).
But the hard truth is at the far left of liberal thought is a core that believes fundamentally in economic redistribution controlled by an intellectual elite who just know what’s best for us. That thinking goes by many names, socialism, communism, fascism, etc., but it’s all of a piece. I hate to break it to you but AGW was never about science and these people have admitted it over and over for any who were willing to listen. This was about money and power.
You might want to put that into your calculation the next time you hear conservatives talk about small government, transparency and freedom. Most of us actually mean it.
Wow . . . is all I can say after reading the comments. These are some amazing stories of confronting the science.
The Swift Institute on Global Warming [An extreme Malthusian view]
May, 2007
http://climateguy.blogspot.com/2007/05/taking-co2-seriously.html
Life is deadly. All living things that breathe oxygen burn their food and emit poisonous CO2 as a pollutant. With every breath they contribute to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and, hence, to global warming. And yet, for all the frantic formulas floating around aimed at the reduction of CO2 emissions, particularly through limitations on the burning of fossils fuels (dead living things), little attention has been paid to this obvious other source (still living things). Rough calculations suggest that CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are dwarfed by the emissions from these living things, including human beings. Emissions from human metabolism alone, assuming a world population of six billion people and an averaging of their state of activity, are estimated to be equivalent to approximately half of 1990 fossil fuel emissions. Add to these human sources the CO2 emissions from all other creatures on the planet, including plants which respire as well as photosynthesize, and the total amount of emissions from living things is staggering.
To forestall the forecasted calamities of global warming, there must be a reduction of “living things emissions” (LTE’s). This can be approached in two ways, by reducing the number of living things, through their humane or not so humane elimination, and by reducing the amount of respiration of each living thing, through enforceable limits on exertion. With regard to the first, we appear to be well on our way. The loss of habitat through development, deforestation, and agribusiness has contributed greatly to loss of life and species extinction. Warfare will continue to contribute significantly as well, along with genocide. Human and animal population control and sterilization further limit LTE’s. All of this is a good start, but just a start. It’s time to let go of our pets. The number of livestock on farms, which has swelled enormously, could be cut back substantially with the elimination of meat from our diet. We must also begin to give serious consideration to euthanizing expendable members of our family and community. With regard to worklife and lifestyle, we must work hard at not working hard, thereby lowering our metabolism, respiring less, and reducing our CO2 emissions. The impulse to exercise must be exorcised, along with fitness clubs, marathons, and organized sports. Caffeine, which speeds up metabolism, must be banned. The work ethic must be replaced by yoga and meditation. Only by minimizing all effort will we survive. If we are serious about reducing CO2 emissions, we must all do our part, as little as possible.