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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Al Gore could come out of this a hero.
He simply has to declare that the IPCC misled him, AGW is a fraud and that it is now settled.
“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.”
You do not Invent the Internet, win a Noble, and win an Oscar by being stupid.
Bradley J. Fikes (19:14:30) :
I also welcome you to our dark cabal. Your public statements deserve the praise you have received.
I’m much more strident than most here. AGW in my estimation is a complete fraud concocted for purely political reasons. And I’ve yet to be shown an evidence to the contrary.
You’ve come a long way. Imagine how far you have yet to travel.
Re: Flint (17:12:40)
I am also reluctant to call it fraud unless and until the “fudge factors” and other insertions into the derived temperature record are shown properly and scientifically unjustified. But it looks and smells very bad.
But I will call the behaviour of most of the Hockey Team as wilful scientific misconduct of a type that takes my breath away, and I’m not easily winded.
Here’s a scary read;
The New Environmentalists Eugenics:
Al Gore’s Green Genocide
http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2007/2007_10-19/2007-13/pdf/36-46_713_ainsworth.pdf
[REPLY – Best be careful, Michael. I find myself compelled to take LaRouche with a very hefty grain of salt.]
If you are feeling ambitious, open up Pandora’s box called Agenda 21.
I have been a skeptic all along. First it was pure prejudice: The same dang people with the same dang solution for yet another fill-in-the-blank reason. Been there, done that. I expected it would blow over in a few years like all the rest.
But instead it went viral. So I started to look more closely into the evidence. And a skeptic (of the lukewarming variety) I have remained. I did think the manipulations, etc., however, were more subconscious than not — until the emails and Poor Harry’s Almanac!
Bradley J. Fikes (15:02:10) :
Do you even know what it is that you claim he’s withholding?
[REPLY – Best be careful, Michael. I find myself compelled to take LaRouche with a very hefty grain of salt.]
Me very, too, but that report is an eye opener, check out the footnotes.
Sorry, footnote #2 in this report,
“The only opposition to the Rockefeller/Club of Rome Policy presented at the Bucharest conference came from Helga-Zepp La Rouche.”
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202007/GWHoaxBorn.pdf
Nick Stokes,
Hockey stick data.
This claim is not scepticism, which involves the withholding of judgment. It is advocacy. The writer has clearly made up his mind that fraud has occurred, and appears to have skipped from one position of advocacy to its opposite.
The evidence of fraud, playing favorites, shutting out skeptics from the peer review process, etc, is right in the Climategate emails and documents. Most of this is in rather plain English, and doesn’t need scientific elaboration.
And I have not gone to any position of advocacy; indeed I retain an open mind about AGW. I just want the fraud and bad science cleared out. That is a properly skeptical attitude in the wake of such a revelation.
photon without a Higgs
When I say ’science’ I am not talking about what Briffa, Mann, Santer, Jones, et al, did.
I am talking about what Soon, Balluinas, Spencer, Lindzen, Svensmark, et al, are doing. That science hasn’t changed.
And my views on that science haven’t changed. I regard what Svensmark has found, for example, to be an interesting hypothesis but still in need of more confirmation. I wrote about this before Climategate, and I still think it’s true. The only difference is much that I assumed to be true about AGW is not reliable because of the bad acting of major scientists.
Bradley J. Fikes (21:44:53) :
Hockey stick data.
Well, that’s pretty broad. But it isn’t data, it’s a calculated result – residuals. And they’re red. That doesn’t make them wrong, and Mann clearly seems to think there is good reason why they should be red. He’s happy to pass them on to Osborn, and he doesn’t say they should be kept secret, only to check with him before passing them on to others (which is pretty normal good manners anyway).
It’s clear what he’s worried about is another “auditing” by McI, a self-appointed auditor. The probable reason is that dealing with that takes time and trouble, and a great deal of invective is directed his way. He’s under no obligation to facilitate that process.
I’d remind you, BTW, that you have here only a fragment of Mann’s email, as quoted by Osborn. He may well go on to explain in more detail why he thinks the file should not be sent to McI.
re: Michael (20:44:46) yes, thank you!
i see some people mentioning their personal stories of having believed AGW or not. So … i never believed cAGW. in fact, i doubt that humans have any influence on the climate of our planet. i won’t believe it until i see proof in the form of repeatable, verifiable experiments (and that includes unaltered data!).
Steve Oregon (20:54:06) :
Al Gore could come out of this a hero.
He simply has to…
Everyone would know he’s trying to save his own skin. Wouldn’t work.
I, like many others, started out somewhat centrist and skeptical in the entire AGW debate. While it was easy to feel emotionally swayed by the empassioned pleas of the green supporters of AGW, as soon as more and more alarmist stories came out (ice caps disappearing soon, increased hurricanes, drought, etc) I was inclined to do a bit of research.
Common sense told me from the start… with all this talk of tipping points, why had this not happened before? Indeed, why were we alll alive and discussing this today? I can never get past the argument that the earth has previously gone through cycles of both temperature and CO2 concentrations far outside the current experience and somehow runaway warming (or cooling) never occured… why not?
My simplistic gut feeling is that the earth´s systems have a natural tendancy to buffer temperature swings. My intuitive guess was always that the oceans were that buffer. Seems like common sense to me. But somehow the IPCC was persisting with the “act now or we are all doomed tomorrow” line of debate on CO2.
Anywho… I ended up at sites like these, and saw that the science was far from settled, and that there are a lot more questions about climate than answers.
Sadly the”situation is normal, nothing to see” story does not sell newspapers. That´s why I am thankful for ClimateGate as it brings that element of excitement that attracts the press, but brings people back into the skeptical mind set of not accepting the IPCC AGW agenda as gospel.
evanmjones (21:18:26) :
I have been a skeptic all along.
Me too, only I’ve vehemently opposed the proposition. Not because I knew the science was bad. (We all knew that.) But because the extrapolation was horrible. If the proposition of AGW was true, then……. fill in the blank. Ask yourselves, what laws have we already invoked to thwart the “inevitable doom” of AGW? What hardships have we imposed on our fellow man to keep ourselves safe from the terrible AGW?? It is not good enough to say to ourselves, “I didn’t believe it. I tried to sway them in a different direction.”. How many people have died because we allowed the AGW theory to persist? All the while knowing, it was a hoax?
To all those people posting here (whether calling themselves liberal or not) who proclaim the “bias” of Fox News, how do you explain why the liberal media (CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, BBC, etc.) are not covering Climategate, and not offering views from scientists who disagree with AGW???
I think CNN was dragged partially on board a couple weeks after Climategate broke due only to the critical mass of the story, but do you have an example of a prior report that presented a balance between warmists and skeptics? I’ve looked around and I haven’t seen it. In the days after Climategate broke the rare MSM mentions I found made zero mention of the content of the material and instead instantly parroted the CYA lines of the CRU and others involved.
It doesn’t just happen that Fox is covering this fairly (as is a Russian TV station). Fox is indeed fair and balanced. Did you know they have more liberal contributors than conservative? Have you actually watched a few weeks of Fox coverage and then checked them for bias or omissions like the liberal media? Many organizations (third party, including a group at Harvard, which is certainly not conservative) have done this, by the way, and the Fox coverage gets the highest marks for balance.
Yes Beck and Hannity are conservative (and not part of the pure news shows), but fact check their Climategate coverage. See if you find anything inaccurate or taken out of context. If you do find something legit I’ll bet they correct it on air.
If you think the climate bias you are seeing in the MSM is limited just to climate you are sadly mistaken. If you’ve been getting all of your news from liberal sources such as CNN for years and you’ve bought into it, Fox may seem very slanted to you, but that’s your own bias. I strongly suggest you read the book ‘Bias’ by Bernard Goldberg, and he happens to be a Democrat.
It’s great that people like Bradley have had their eyes opened by Climategate. Many others here who are knowledgeable about AGW but somehow think that the MSM is not covering it for some benign reason need to rethink things, and perhaps need to start extrapolating to other issues to see what other key news they’re not getting.
@Bradley J. Fikes (21:53:30) :
On the Svensmark thing, your are correct it is a hypothesis and most sceptics take it as such not as proven fact, however what you might not have noticed or not have tied together is that the CERN CLOUD experiment is ongoing right now testing the foundation of that hypothesis: Does Cosmic Rays produce Clouds? From what CERN says they will have prelimenary results next year. If you haven’t seen this you might be interested, it is the presentaion for the experiment done by Dr. Japer Kirkby:
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1181073/
Oh how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Agenda 21 For Dummies
Kevin Kilty (19:46:24) :
“… the irony is that he and Leo Szilard held the original patent on the nuclear reactor.
I don’t think so. Sizilard patented the concept of the chain reaction in 1933. I have never read anywhere that his former mentor Einstein had anything to do with it. I cannot vouch for the quote by AdderW (13:59:41), as I can only find it at Wikiquote, where it is said to have been published in the Pittsburgh Gazette in 1934. If so, it would appear he was probably unaware of his former student’s inspiration, which would be reasonable, since Szilard immediately saw the implications of his idea in making weapons of war, and pleaded with the British Government to keep it secret.
Maybe you were thinking of the Einstein-Szilard refrigerator?
Here is a nice Einstein quote which the panjandrums to Copenhagen should perhaps consider:
Incidentally, the first artificial nuclear reactor was constructed by Szilard and Fermi in 1942.
Nick Stokes (22:17:39) :
“The probable reason is that dealing with that takes time and trouble…
Bollocks. If they need a full time staff member to respond to inquiries, they can hire an ombudsman.
“…and a great deal of invective is directed his way.”
The invective is because he has been refusing to share his data. This is like the proverbial kid who killed his parents pleading for leniency on account of his being an orphan.
“He’s under no obligation to facilitate that process.”
Yes, he is. That, my friend, is Science. Openness, sharing, and replication are what it is all about.
Bart (22:58:50) :
That, my friend, is Science.
No, it’s auditing. And auditing, if done, needs to have a structure. Imagine if anyone could claim the right to audit your tax returns. If you had a few enemies, you’d be doing nothing else.
Scientists have ways of interacting that doesn’t include barrages of FOI requests and the general snarling that goes on at CA and WUWT. Not to mention publication of private emails. You may be able to force scientists to do it your way, but you can’t expect them to enthusiastically volunteer.