Dr. Spencer’s essay below reminds me of this famous cartoon:
Over at Lucia’s she wrote a post saying I had banged the Godwin’s Law “gong” by comparing the PNAS skeptic list paper as “stasi-esque”. For people that don’t know, the Stasi were the secret police of East Germany, post WWII, and post Nazism. So Stasi-esque doesn’t qualify for Godwins Law. They were famous for making lists of people and their associations, to use later for what could only be described as nefarious purposes. Their list making (like the skeptic list used for the PNAS paper) is what is the parallel here.
As for yellow badges, here’s what I’d like to see all skeptics wear. Maybe somebody can come up with a theme variation specific to climate skeptics.
We don’t need the negativism that is being fostered elsewhere.
Dr. Spencer has some interesting comments in his post below. – Anthony
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The Global Warming Inquisition Has Begun
by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
A new “study” has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) which has examined the credentials and publication records of climate scientists who are global warming skeptics versus those who accept the “tenets of anthropogenic climate change”.
Not surprisingly, the study finds that the skeptical scientists have fewer publications or are less credentialed than the marching army of scientists who have been paid hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 20 years to find every potential connection between fossil fuel use and changes in nature.
After all, nature does not cause change by itself, you know.
The study lends a pseudo-scientific air of respectability to what amounts to a black list of the minority of scientists who do not accept the premise that global warming is mostly the result of you driving your SUV and using incandescent light bulbs.
There is no question that there are very many more scientific papers which accept the mainstream view of global warming being caused by humans. And that might account for something if those papers actually independently investigated alternative, natural mechanisms that might explain most global warming in the last 30 to 50 years, and found that those natural mechanisms could not.
As just one of many alternative explanations, most of the warming we have measured in the last 30 years could have been caused by a natural, 2% decrease in cloud cover. Unfortunately, our measurements of global cloud cover over that time are nowhere near accurate enough to document such a change.
But those scientific studies did not address all of the alternative explanations. They couldn’t, because we do not have the data to investigate them. The vast majority of them simply assumed global warming was manmade.
I’m sorry, but in science a presupposition is not “evidence”.
Instead, anthropogenic climate change has become a scientific faith. The fact that the very first sentence in the PNAS article uses the phrase “tenets of anthropogenic climate change” hints at this, since the term “tenet” is most often used when referring to religious doctrine, or beliefs which cannot be proved to be true.
So, since we have no other evidence to go on, let’s pin the rap on humanity. It just so happens that’s the position politicians want, which is why politics played such a key role in the formation of the IPCC two decades ago.
The growing backlash against us skeptics makes me think of the Roman Catholic Inquisition, which started in the 12th Century. Of course, no one (I hope no one) will be tried and executed for not believing in anthropogenic climate change. But the fact that one of the five keywords or phrases attached to the new PNAS study is “climate denier” means that such divisive rhetoric is now considered to be part of our mainstream scientific lexicon by our country’s premier scientific organization, the National Academy of Sciences.
Surely, equating a belief in natural climate change to the belief that the Holocaust slaughter of millions of Jews and others by the Nazis never occurred is a new low for science as a discipline.
The new paper also implicitly adds most of the public to the black list, since surveys have shown dwindling public belief in the consensus view of climate change.
At least I have lots of company.
Amused. says:
June 23, 2010 at 7:03 pm
Shining a light on ignorance is frowned upon.
I’m sure we all look forward to your shining the beacon of your climate wisdom into the cavernous depths of our our ignorance. It should be amusing, if nothing else.
When I was halfway through reading the rants and raves I just had to stop and laugh when I asked myself, “What was in the story we are responding to?” Roy Spencer’s think piece got us thinking alright, just like we think when a questionable baseball call is made. We’ve got all the bluff and bluster of a sports blog going on here. Only on those blogs they use shorter words to say that the other side is full of manure, horse, chicken, or otherwise.
Yes Bruce, I was amused, by it all.
Methodological failures
Anderegg et al claim to have:
“counted the number of citations for each of the researcher’s four highest cited papers (defined here as prominence) using Google Scholar.”
1) However Prall’s actual link to Google Scholar was:
“Search only in Physics, Astronomy, and Planetary Science”
NOT
“Search in all subject areas.”
2) This narrower search missed my two most important publications relating to global warming/climate change, including a 330 page report:
“Application of solar thermal technologies in reducing greenhouse gas emissions”
and
“Methanol: its synthesis, use as a fuel, economics, and hazards”
which was on NTIS’s best seller list for three years.
3) The search wrongly included another researcher with my initials and last name.
4) The search ignored all my 23 patents/applications which will have the greatest impact in ways to improve energy efficiency.
Include Minority Positions:
For the IPCC to be policy neutral, a critical essential reform will be to explicitly include minority positions in every section, led by specialists in those positions. Otherwise the warming activist gatekeepers will continue to exclude all contrary data, evaluations and alternatives. E.g. adaptation to climate change is likely to be much more cost effective than “cap and trade”.
ozoned’s corollary:
The probability of of godwin’s law being invoked is directly proportional to the number of bikes in the shed.
Now for the yellow badges:
Anthony, if you look at the smiley, and rotate it 90 degrees, clockwise, you get approximately:
C :
That is: CO2 — or my personal preference — CO2 is good4u
Eduardo Ferreyra says:
June 23, 2010 at 9:00 pm
Congratulations Eduardo, first for being included in a so distinguished list, and for having been invited by the spanish government, quite an astonishing deed as they have made of their country the greenest and so the poorest; I am sure you will open their eyes to reality.
Here is the link to Eduardo’s page:
http://www.mitosyfraudes.org/Articulos.html
Inquisition and Galileo Case are subjects so full of misunderstandings and old and new falsehoods frequently reinforced by popular comments and wrong interpretations. Let’s do some reading and study in order to help to avoid the perpetuation of such errors. More and more historical research is showing the facts and their due proportion. Here is an interesting introduction: http://bit.ly/dwmiTx
I see my comment must have hit the “spam filter” too. And I’m classical “denier” too! LOL
[Reply: I checked and it’s not in the spam filter. May be a WordPress glitch. ~dbs, mod.]
It’s hard to take a journal seriously that most people call pee-nas anyway.
Here’s the Polar Bear Version for Gail. Eating pages of data didn’t seem to work. Hope you get a kick out of it.
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1056/4730469443_fb28421327_b.jpg
“They can offer us nothing but the same stuffy science, the same bullying bureaucracy and the same terrorism by tenth-rate professors.”
“The Inquisitor violently enforced his creed, because it was unchangeable. The savant enforces it violently, because he may change it the next day.”
Eugenics and other Evils by G.K. Chesterton, 1922.
The anti-religious tone in some of the comments here is a pity, because it seems to me that the Climate Change controversy has cut across the usual science/religion constituencies. 20th Century religious commentators such as Chesterton illustrate, sometimes scathingly, that the corruption of science by power is a long-standing problem. Some of his observations seem uncannily relevant today.
“They become steadily less scientific and more official. They develop that thin disguise that is the daily wear of politicians”, The Thing (1929).
“Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich. The word “kleptomania” is a vulgar example of what I mean.”
“Nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has not been debated”
Heretics (1905)
Please post any additional ideas for a badge or button to the following url or stop in to critique the ideas.
http://sweasel.com/archives/6403#comment-50440
I love that spanish inquisition cartoon.
The only way it could be more relative to the global warming inquisition is if instead of the red robes of the cardinals…. they had the three monkeys of the speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil fame. 🙂
Anthony,
I love the site, and love the information you provide. However, the yellow badge comment was out of place and inappropriate.
I know too many people who had to wear yellow badges, or who’s family members did, for the comparison to have any meaning for me. They live all around me here in Israel.
Most things should never be compared to the Shoah, not Global Warming, not the Arizona Immigration law, not the slaughter of chickens for food.
I encourage you to keep doing what you’re doing, but I just felt I had to say something about that one comment.
Again, I really do appreciate your work and the site.
Jonah says:
June 25, 2010 at 2:33 am
Anthony,
I love the site, and love the information you provide. However, the yellow badge comment was out of place and inappropriate.
Appropriate is ‘appropriate,’ whether you agree or otherwise.
The fact of the matter is just this: THE VERY SAME DERISION is being leveled at those of us whom disagree with the ‘status quo’ being FORCED upon us.
Who knows? Maybe in a few years the inveterate jerks pushing the AGW line of BS might just feel EMPOWERED sufficient to round up the lot of us ‘climate deniers’ and gas us out of existence as an example for everyone else.
Can’t happen here, you say?
Wanna bet?
Did anyone notice that the very first reference in this article was to Oreskes? A paper published by someone with absolutely zero background in climate science. Is this the pot calling the kettle black?
Did anyone notice that the very first paper referenced in this article is Oreskes? This is a paper written by someone with absolutely zero background in climate science. Is this the pot calling the kettle black?
Geology is an eclectic science. As an old practitioner, I recognized the thin ice supporting AGW the moment I read the Kyoto Protocols, as by someone who knew little about our world’s climate history. It demonized CO2 by the fact that man’s use of fossil fuels released some of this vital (to plant growth) gas into the atmosphere. It has to be the huge outlay of funds supporting research designed to support this shoddy hypothesis that has corrupted so many scientists into unscientific behavior. My chief concern is the ignoring of the fact that Earth is in a glacial climate mode with iced up poles and has been for the past 14 million years. Recently (earth time) we lapsed into a series of 5 intermittent continental, 100,000 year glaciations N of the 40th parallel in N. America and have been been in the 5th interglacial, termed the Holocene, for the past 12,000 years. The unnatural desire of our Greens to preserve our polar ice and the worlds port cities by maintaining a subnormal world climate, I believe is to endanger mankind to the eventual onslaught of another glaciation. The reality is our weak sun needs all the help it can get from those maligned Greenhouse gases our politicians are so interested in controlling. Should they succeed by beggaring the world I would not bet a plugged nickel on man’s future. Personally, I feel that safety can only be attained with maintaining a healthy GHG, and adding another 2 or 3 deg C to the world climate.
I think the general public has got the hang of AGW rubbish. Next it will be the deviant scientists who have supported it for its lavish research grants. The stupid politicos and Greenies who have been its cash cow will be the last to learn the folly of believing big mouth Al who was in it for all he could make out of windmills and solar panels. And the media support will have lost most of its credibility for totally misunderstanding the biggest scam that ever sullied the world of science.
Well, there was this one, which appers to have been abonadoned by its owner.
I think the term”denier” should be applied to those who have at one time or another bought into the hockey stick paper and thus denied the Medieval Warm period. If holocaust deniers are those who hold peculiar views in the face of overwhelming physical and historical evidence to the contrary it much better describes MWP deniers than AGW skeptics. Deniers in this more appropriate sense would include of course Mann, Jones, Al Gore and the scientists who advised him on his documentary as well as all those scientists who endorsed IPCC III which highlighted these deniers magnus opus.
And this inquisition tactic:
http://www.coxandforkum.com/archives/001066.html