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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Phil C. You seem to be suggesting that Mann et al might be tempted to sue? Look at this by Lord Monckton: http://www.cfact.org/a/1652/Monckton-names-names-on-Climategate. He is clearly baiting a whole list of “The Team” to sue him. Problem for them is that would lead to the submitting to legal discovery procedures, and then it would all come out, not just what was revealed in the Climategate papers. I suspect Monckton has deep pockets. Go for it Dr Mann!
Bradley,
Welcome to the skeptic’s camp. I’ve been one since ’98, but generally thought AGW would implode like the 70’s Ice-Age business.
“Being a skeptic doesn’t mean I deny significant AGW could be happening; it just means I’m withholding judgment until the fraud is removed”
I’ve acquired raw data from GHCN. Links to data, fairly simple source code (Linux), and straight-forward workup are available at http://justdata.wordpress.com Feel free to drop by… If you leave a question or suggestion, I’ll generally crank out a new mini-analysis by the next day. Please, no questions on SSTs, I haven’t deciphered their mixed file formats, yet. :-/
Lord, let there be a healing power come down from heaven and make disbelievers out of these warming sinners.
Welcome to the true and correct line Bradley, which is skepticism. You can never trust anyone who has not proven themselves to you. Why? They are people, and people are the least trustworthy animals on the planet.
This is my first post here, but I have always been a skeptic of AGW. Thanks to WUWT and CA among others for all the great work they do, and American Thinker has been a leader in posting skeptical pieces. Most of the political AGW skepticism has come from the conservative side. In his farewell address President Eisenhower warned about gov funded science being allowed to dictate policy.
I don’t believe anyone above the age of 14 has a right to be naive about anything which will have an effect on anyone other than himself. Most of us have the desire and proclivity to be naive though, it is easier, no effort required. US citizens should know better, this nation would never have come to be through naivety and blind trust, and the founding fathers told us to never allow folly in government and that an uninformed or misinformed electorate would not be able to retain a functioning republic.
Whenever you find you have veered off the course you cannot get back onto the course by continuing to go straight ahead, you must “over-steer” to get back on track.
Congratulations! And thanks for your honesty.
“pat (15:02:21) :
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.”
Well, as such an intelligent computer would probably become a sceptic immediately, what choice would we have but switch it off?
But to be cereal, even the lesser computers i work with have never expressed much enthusiasm for AGW.
Bradley, et al.,
Yanno, in the normal course of events, we can’t all be expected to not believe the “peer reviewed” pronouncements of experts. As a matter of fact, we should generally listen to expert consensus.
When I first heard about AGW, I was concerned. I care about this stuff as a matter of course in my life. There was something, though, that niggled at me. It was the nature of the folks making the assertions. They seemed awfully aggressive. Disdainful. The comments were hyperbolic, too. That’s what sets me off.
When folks substitute rhetoric for science, my alarm bells go off. I started doing research.
The thing is, I was not met with tons of credible skeptical work. I just kept smelling something was off. It was only through reading this site (and others) and REALLY digging was I fully and confidently convinced that the ONLY proper stance on Warming (let alone the Anthropogenic sort) was skepticism.
It wasn’t easy dig out the truth and I’ll forgive any layman for getting sucked in. It was a brilliant plot and it almost worked.
I congratulate you, Bradley. The mark of a good professional is the ability to say, “I was wrong”.
Well done.
Back in the late ’80s I accepted AGW as a thesis that needed some verification and exploration. Being the PhD that I am, I did some digging. The thesis came up empty. Now we know why it was so empty. Yeah, from time to time we will get an En Nino and the temperatures will spike like ’98 but that is out of our hands. Pilmer has an interesting thesis on El Ninos being cased by earthquake storms in the western Pacific. If so the El Nino may hang a bit longer. Right now, all I can say is that we are really globally warming in Boston at what is expected to be an overnight now of 13. Goes well with the ‘noreaster we just had. A couple more good dumps and its call ’78 all over again. But let us see. Hadley assures me that this will be the warmest winter on record. Who am I to argue?
The only reason I got into this whole debate was to try and prove my brother was wrong to deny that co2 was destroying the planet. In trying to find evidence to back AGW as a matter of fact I converted myself into an evangelical skeptic! Now I hunt down and question every warmist I can get my hands on. I say well done to any individual that questions assumptions that at one stage were facts of a shameful, blameful truth! We have been raised to feel that we are destroying the planet and it is not easy to accept or even question that what we were told may be wrong. A G W is a lie but god knows it was painful for me to come to that conclusion. It was thanks to this site that I was able to make the
leap but I do wonder if such sites are enough to take the fight onto the streets? Say the word and I will march next to you onto parliament and make my voice heard above the leftist ecocentrics that scourge themselves with arrogant self rightiousness! We need to start the revolution and not just talk!! Mind you I have just got in from the pub. Merry Christmas all and a happy new year.
Divide and rule. Always seems to work. Find out what factors most agree on, dirty water and air are pretty high on the most undesirable list of things we want about us.
But, somehow, this agreement gets to become the argument that divides us into opposing factions!
Forget the fringe lunatics who inhabit both our worlds, we all want the same things emotionally. Happiness, achievement and a sense that those that come after us can feel at least as good as we’d hoped to be.
So why do we argue about those things we agree about? Is it because we fail to see that apparent opponents in one sphere share pretty much the same core values but in only slightly different ways?
Is it that the old propagandist trick of “god is on our side” versus “thus they are the spawn of Satan” is as effective in the 21st century as it was in the 11th century?
I suspect that it is. The motives and tactics of the past are as poweful now as they have always been.
Those that seek power are, thank whoever, are on the fringe but they do know which buttons need pressed and when!
Maybe it’s time to consolidate the forces of the majority of each side to show the dividers that it’s time to reject the hoary old button-pressers.
Or do we just let them rule over us again?
Glad to see Bradley and many others make the leap from believer to investigator. After studying the subject for thousands of hours, and reading hundreds of papers, I’m still dumbfounded that there are so many people out there that see something alarming in the science, when I still can’t find anything that looks unnatural or unprecedented. It is not unlike being in a bad episode of the twilight zone to see our politicians behave the way they do, oblivious to what the science actually says.
While the switch to a skeptical viewpoint is interesting and I thank Bradley for his article, it is not uncommon. The one unprecedented thing I am really looking for (and have been for years) is a skeptic that went alarmist.
Has there ever been a single documented case? I think that’s a very interesting and unique statistic.
Please let me know if you find anyone.
I really admire the posters who do not hesitate to brand some of these goings-on as “fraud.” I glory in their resolve. That’s far too adventurous for me, however. I’ve been involved in perhaps a hundred suits for defamation, from the liability insurance angle, and got burned more times than I like to think about. The thing about it is, the term “fraud,” in this context, can take on a rather technical definition. I frequently read the notion that one doesn’t really have to worry about defaming “public figures,” since they have the burden of proving “actual malice.” Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Until the judge defines “actual malice” as publishing something “with reckless disregard of its truth or falsity.” That presents a “material issue of fact,” to be resolved by the jury. In other words, it can be very difficult to get one of these cases “thrown out of court.” All of which is not to imply any legal competency on my part. I could easily be all wet. Still, I think it easy enough to get ones point across without indulging in questionable diction.
Well is there any other branch of “SCIENCE” that encompasses as many diciplines (or seems to) as does “Climate science” ?
It seems that we have everything from cosmologists and nuclear physicists, to botanists and zoologists, anthropologists and archeologists. Mathematicisans ans statisticians, and political scientists and economists. Epidemiiologists and psychologists, social scientists to behavioral psychologists, and on and on.
No wonder there are countless thousands of “climate scientists” who have a vested interest in some aspect of climate sicence. The marine biologists who has spent a lifetime studying a rare marine worm like maybe the pololo worm, and its habits and habitats; and s/hge knows that the pololo worm doesn’t reporduce if the water temperature is below 15.3 deg C or above 27.6 deg C. Maybe it’s because one sex likes it hot and the other likes it cold. Actually I think they are hermaphrodites or something weird. Some people study a fossil bacterium in ocean bottom mud cores, or maybe its a pollen from a rare tropical plant, that lives in the Amazon, that gets into the river water and floats out to sea.
All of these people probably feel they are making major contributions to science. I’ve no doubt that many of them are; just on the theory that there isn’t any such thing as too much knowledge.
But most of these diciplines can’t really have that much to do with the crux of climatology; is the earth’s climat changing in an un-natiral way, and are human activities involved (maybe) but in what way? Is it our misuse of the land, and the rape of tropical hardwood and rain forests; or is it our dirty atmospheric effluent habits; or is it an innocuous trace gas like CO2 that is an essential for life on planet earth.
To my mind; it is the Physicists and chemists who largely must address these questions; by proving the cause and effect relationships, that maybe statisticians, and data gatherers turn up.
I’m not happy with a model of the earth, that says the sun irradiates earth at 342 Watts per square meter 24/7, the model attributed to Trenberth, who is embarrassed that they can’t explain the cooling.
Well heck I would be embarrassed too if I was promoting a model that clearly isn’t in any way resembling this planet we live on. I see the sun at around four times the level that Trenberth sees, but my sun only illuminates about 52% or so of the planet at any one time; rather than the whole planet 100% of the time like Trenberth’s model planet.
An airless planet would be half illuminated by the sun at any time, well actually the sunlight would fall on about 181 degrees of the earth due to the 30 minute angular diameter of the sun. With our atmosphere, you now have bending due to the refractive index of air, which now bends the sunlight about one more degree around each edge so that something like 183 degrees is illuminated; Well of course morning and evening twilight add even further to that. But the sun never illuminates all of the planet at any one time, and the peak of that hemispherical illumination is four times what Trenberth says.
That is not inconsequential, since the irradiated portion then gets much hotter than in Trenberth’s model, and since the cooling LWIR emissions go as about the 4th power of the temperature, the real cooling rate is much higher than in Trenberth’s model.
Well it is really up to us hard scientists; the Physicists and chemists to put the real active mechanisms together; but I doubt that the biologists can be left out; there’s too much living stuff going on in the oceans, and the land greenery to leave the life sciences out of the picture.
But we don’t really need the political scientists, or epidemiologists and psychologists; they are just getting in the way. (i’m not expunging them; just thing they need to move out of climatology into more productive fields for their diciplines.
Now I’m a Physicist but I don’t work in this field; and probably nobody would pay me to do so. But I can at least try and make some of this palatable for those who are interested, but maybe aren’t equipped to conenct the dots.
I don’t see a whole lot of room under this tent; for anyone who has an agenda.
RE: Phil Clarke
I smell a rat. A big, fat, Commie lawyer rat!
Since we’re telling stories..
I was neutral on the whole thing a few years ago. I kept hearing the alarmists saying “Read the peer review literature”. Big mistake on their part, because that’s exactly what I did. I even bought subscriptions to some of the journals. In my mind it was pretty clear from reading these journals that the alarmists were making things up. I was convinced CO2 global warming was garbage and the scientists were lying even back then. But I didn’t really know just how bad things were until ClimateGate broke.
This isn’t fun for me at all. I can’t tell you how much I hate feeling compelled to have to make the videos I’ve made on the fraud in climate science. I really wish I lived in a world where that wasn’t needed.
Politically, I consider myself an independent. I’ve only cast two votes in my life, one for John Kerry and one for Obama. But both were really votes against George Bush. While I had a great deal of respect for McCain’s military service, I saw him as a continuation of Bush policies.
Obama is worse than Bush ever was. I’ll be sending him as many Republicans as I possibly can in the next election. At every level of government.
Here is another story of conversion. My own and the Democratic Party. I sent this to my local paper. It’s just a small rural paper but I wanted to speak to the difficult thing I did today.
12/22/09
To the Editor:
Today is a sad day for me. I have found it necessary to travel to the court house and change my party affiliation. My family has been a strong supporter of the Democratic Party going back many generations, from my grandfather’s hosting of Senator Wayne Morse’s final campaign swing through Wallowa County, to my great grandfather’s friendly, yet politically opposite relationship with Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois. It has been an unbroken and significant piece of our family life till today.
Why this change? I cannot, in good conscience, continue to support a party whose rank and file politicians adhere to a cap and trade policy that will lead, and indeed already has, to loss of livelihood and abject poverty in undeveloped countries as companies seek carbon profits over jobs and wages.
When did the party I grew up with switch from regard for workers, and individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without discrimination to corporate greed at the expense of the common man trying to feed his starving children? When did we say it was okay to close factories so that carbon credits could be sold and profits spread among the already filled bellies of the rich?
So yes, I am sad today. I have removed myself from the political party I love, and that generations before me have loved. But on further thought, what I have done today is a deeply liberal thing, and I am proud to have done it.
Pamela Sue Gray
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 tolerance 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?”
I agree that there’s nothing inherent in the science that makes this a left/right issue, but:
Green organizations have received enormous donations and benefactions in wills, which has given them traction,and then clout. There seems to be a tendency in many progressive organizations to get hijacked by their zanier elements.
So far environmentalism can claim a good record in improving things, and it has no obvious self-interested motivation to be malign or dishonest. That makes it hard for others in a party that aims at the greater good to oppose them.
Green activists are today the only large group willing to do the scut work of politics and ring doorbells, canvass by phone, put up signs, engage in “direct action,” etc. This makes them useful to parties.
And they are fearsome enemies in terms of energy and vitriol. To oppose them is to arouse the opposition of the PC cult generally.
And their terrific, professional persuasive campaign has won over many core Democratic voters — voters whom professional politicians must pay attention to.
And the enemy-Other the Greens invite Democrats to oppose is the traditional Democratic target: the uncaring, short-sighted, money-oriented business culture. On the other side of this coin, “being green” appeals to the “caring” /compassionate element in the Dem. party. (Caring about the planet, etc.)
Dems. identify with modernity, which means science — and science was packaged as being settled. The warmists made sure that any would-be scientific dissenters from the consensus got the message that they would pay a penalty for heresy.
Some Democrats have what P.J. O’Rourke called a camp-counselor mentality. They like to “play parent,” blow whistles, make people hop, and regulate things as a way of throwing their weight around and making Others toe the line.
(There must be more reasons — this is off the top of my head.)
All this has made greens and their CAWGism a vital element in the Democratic party’s coalition. Dems can’t afford to offend them or Nader (or some other Green candidate) will split off more votes in 2012.
Richard Feynman on Honesty in Science:
“It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked–to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can–if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong–to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another. ”
Honest scientific papers acknowledge the opposition. Used car salesmen emphasize the good points and let the bad ones speak for themselves. Lately, “climate scientists” have had more in common with used car salesmen than with Feynman’s hypothetical honest scientists.
Phil Clark said:
“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?”
Go for it Phil, please!
We would all like nothing more than to see everything come out in the discovery process. And it will all have to, or you would have no case.
So go for it buddy. I guarantee you, our pockets are deep enough.
George E. Smith (17:19:26) :
+1000
Oops, meant to say great-great grandfather. And yes, he and Lincoln would talk politics from time to time. My great-great grandfather was an active Democrat and politician who was much younger than Lincoln. Lincoln was known to gather together up and coming politicians from all political parties and share stories and jokes by the hearth.
BBC acknowledging The “Little Ice Age”?
“Many of us think of the Christmases of our youth as being snow-laden festivals of sledging and snowball fights.
But that may have more to do with romanticised notions old fashioned Christmases than anything we have lived through. The “Little Ice Age”, a period of global cooling that ran between about 1550 and 1850, meant white Christmases were not uncommon in centuries gone by. Its influence is still there in the classic literature of the time and traditional Christmas card designs.”
Is a white Christmas just a dream?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8424432.stm
seems like there is a trend there, some 10-15 years between “highs”
WWS:
“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.”
“Group-think” must also be removed from the equation, which implies a two-year do-over of “the science” under the auspices of panels of independent scientific statesmen — preferably mostly retired.
TerrySkinner (16:05:34) :
To answer your question: AGW gives the excuse for the state to organize every aspect of people’s lives. This is the socialist Mecca.
I was spewing warmism 25 years ago, so I actually beat Al Gore to the punch. Not something I am particularly proud of, but it is what it is. I was a lot more impressionable and prone to utopian nonsense when I was in my late teens and early 20s.