Mike Lorrey looks at the PNAS skeptics paper and some historical issues related to it. – Anthony
My primary area of accomplishment in life, other than virtual worlds development, is in political activism. Despite my technical training, I am a very political animal, having helped Killington, Vermont vote to secede from that state in protest of excessive taxation, and having organized the effort to eminent domain the New Hampshire vacation estates of Supreme Court Justices Souter and Breyer after the Kelo decision, as political theater to “encourage” the two political parties these gentlemen hailed from to support my state constitutional amendment to restrict eminent domain.
I was a founding member of the Free State Project, yes, one of *those* libertarians, guilty as charged. I’ve managed the election campaigns of both libertarians and republicans, and treat politics as a sport or quest to improve our country’s “more perfect union” with principles couched in pragmatic use of political theater and holding petty fascists to their own standards. I’ve studied the Constitution and the writings of the founding fathers extensively, as well as their Enlightenment forebears, and a lot of the little known history of this country. I’ve also studied the history of various flavors of tyranny, in particular the various modern flavors, communism, fascism, islamism, and especially liberalist majoritarian tyranny.
So it is from this perspective that I approached the global warming issue, observing the players and how they act, trying to tease out their hidden agendas, if there are any. Originally I believed the dogma. I founded a company in Seattle focusing on energy conservation safety lighting, inventing new lighting products that were highly rated by the EPA’s Greenlights program. I was once the poster boy of Al Gore’s reinventing government campaign, getting government agencies to buy my new technology despite not having prior issued paperwork, etc. Eventually I was given access by the energy department to a lot of material that exposed to me how screwed up the energy conservation business is, and I started to challenge claims about global warming orthodoxy. I saw how Al Gore, in the early Clinton administration, sabotaged the proposed carbon tax, turning it into a BTU tax, so that coal produced by his home state of Tennessee would not be the most highly taxed energy source. So I questioned more, and was cast out by the ruling party from golden boy status. So I questioned global warming a lot more, online, publicly.
This caused a certain degree of conflict within my family. As some of you know, my cousin is a professional climatologist. When he was still working on his doctorate, certain persons of influence attempted to threaten his academic career before it really got started in order to coerce me into removing statements I’d made about global warming from certain influential email lists. This was in the 2000-2001 timeframe, so I got a pretty early taste of the sort of “tricks” that the high inquistors of the Church of Global Warming would pursue in order to enforce their orthodoxy against heretics like myself, and when I acted offended, about my first amendment rights, I was made to look like the bad guy.
This is why this recent essay about modern political correctness being merely a form of social marxism developed during WWI by a group of renegade marxists who sought to use Freudism to spread marxism through society struck a chord with me. It illuminated a lot of what I’d been thinking over the past years, and perfectly explains why the AGW alarmists behave the way they do. The witch hunts, the character assasination, the Alinsky method du jour. The Hockey Team is a Marxist organization, not in the traditional economic sense (though their prescription for “saving the planet” is extensively marxist) but in how they operate toward their opponents. This is not unusual, though. It has become standard practice in academia to engage in persecution of dissidents from orthodoxy.
This fact is illustrated quite clearly in the new National Academy of Scientists Blacklist of Climate “Deniers” this is the list that is online, referenced by the PNAS paper trying to make skeptics into media untouchables. At first glance, its pretty amusing that the author of this list ranks skeptics by the number of references in the published record to their FOURTH published paper, with the claim that anybody who has only published a few papers, even if they are “big papers” is clearly a lightweight. As if Einstein wasn’t immediately a rock star when he published his first paper on Special Relativity, eh?
Maybe I’m an ignorant heathen, but it seems to me that someone who can’t get their most important ideas on the same subject, with sufficient proof to convince the entire world of the truth of their writing, published in a few papers, is simply regurgitating the same old tired pap and really isn’t intelligent enough to have even one “big paper” in their lives. But I may be wrong. However, the ranking this guy does seems to rank a lot of the best skeptics at the top: Pielke, Jr., Dyson, Lindzen, Tipler, etc. It seems to me, though, that the number of cites should be divided by the number of years since their PhD to give an idea of their relative productivity in their field… However, when you shift the ranking to go on the cites of climate related papers, you get a more impressive list:
68: Roger A Pielke Sr, FAGU
446: James J O’Brien, FAGU
1649: Kirill Y Kondratyev
747: John R Christy
710: Reid A Bryson
278: Sherwood Idso
1562: Robert C Balling
1410: Patrick J Michaels
136: Richard Lindzen, FAGU
1198: G Cornelis van Kooten
1686: Sultan Hameed
954: Willie H Soon
1503: S Frederick Singer, FAGU
625: Petr Chylek, FAGU
1024: James A Moore
500: Roy W Spencer
1230: Nils-Axel Moerner
1651: George Taylor
These are the top 15. Sure, they don’t have NAMES like Dyson or Tipler, but we all know who most of these guys are from their climate work that tends to debunk the AGW garbage, and which tends to get published, and cited by others. I’ll try to post a link to the excel file I made from scraping the PNAS blacklist.
The entire list is essentially made from the names of any scientist who has ever signed a letter, petition, or public advertisement expressing doubt about the AGW orthodoxy, IPCC, or the Hockey Team. SO the list really ISN’T about whether their science is for or against the AGW orthodoxy, the list is meant to intimidate and damage the reputations of anybody who has dared to publicly question the absolutist “we have a consensus” political games being played by those who are intentionally politicising climate science to pursue their leftist agenda. This is classic Alinsky tactics. There is no valid scientific purpose for this PNAS paper or this blacklist. It is a political showboating that is going on under the guise of “science”.
berniel:
“…the black list was not made by state institution.”
The NAS is supported by the State. This odious blacklist is now official dogma.
I had posted a [very polite] comment on the site of the maker of the PNAS blacklist. It never appeared. Further, his blogroll lists the sites that he reads. WUWT is missing – yet he responds specifically to WUWT posts.
Defenders of this situation, have at it. I look forward to your defense of this official PNAS blacklist.
This is black-helicopters paranoia, folks. And as usual, not a trace of true skepticism in sight.
Dave Springer says:
July 7, 2010 at 6:30 pm
> I remember the effort to take the SCJ’s fancy vacation homes under the eminent domain laws they found to be constitutional. Brilliant.
It started with the proposal to take Souter’s home and turn it into the Lost Liberty Hotel. (With an ice cream parlor to be named Just Desserts.)
Have you seen Souter’s home? It was no fancy vacation house, see old and new at
http://www.bergproperties.com/blog/retired-supreme-court-associate-justice-david-souter-pays-510k-for-a-new-3500-square-foot-house-in-hopkinton-nh/
Somehow Wikipedia tolerates the story, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Liberty_Hotel
One good thing out of all of it was that it helped firm up limits on eminent domain in New Hampshire and other states.
Getting close to the time we will be able to fight fire with fire.
Wonder how the warmies will feel when they have zero funding.
The current administration spent it all.
Sorry if this was pointed out on an earlier thread, but I thought it worth pointing to the irony that this PNAS paper did not pass normal peer review. It is marked as ‘contributed’, meaning that the senior author, as a member of the NAS simply sent the manuscript to two colleagues, then submitted it to PNAS together with their ‘reviews’ for publication. This is very far from peer review in the biological sciences where reviewers are selected by an editor and offer anonymous (and frequently tough) criticisms. Whether PNAS should retain this route for publication is a different discussion but its amusing that this particular paper, seeking to measure the reputation of other scientists, should be slipped into the literature through a backdoor.
Mike Lorrey says:
July 7, 2010 at 7:56 pm
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Saved that for future reference. Extremely well said.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Gneiss says:
July 7, 2010 at 8:00 pm
This is black-helicopters paranoia, folks. And as usual, not a trace of true skepticism in sight.
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Uh huh. And did you ever think that your hand-waving is even remotely better?
You won’t address what is being said, because you can’t. You don’t know, so you dismiss.
And as usual, not a trace of truth-seeking from one of the Believers.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Smokey
The paper is a compilation of the voluntary signatures to open letters or declarations expressing skepticism of the IPCC’s findings and how often papers published by said people are cited, there is nothing arbitary about it.
All this paper does is put the voluntary letters and declarations contrary to AGW in one place, hardly a Machiavellian exercise, except for maybe a lazy Machiavelli who can’t be bothered to look up things on the net for themselves.
Inhofe is also accused of further fuelling a spike in hate mail and politically motivated freedom of information requests in the three months since the emails of climate scientists were stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.
Yes, that’s so outrageous because FOI requests should only come from those who agree with you. [insert emoticon indicating mordant sarcasm]
We don’t have a single black boot on the neck Party, but we do have a Good Cop/Bad Cop political agenda that has been at work for decades.
That is why there is a Tea Party. AGW isn’t an end, it’s a means to an end: the ultimate pickpocket followed by chains and debtors prison.
Ha…I knew the mass exonerations of Mann and Jones would push WUWT toward the nuttery right. Kind of like the way the 911 Commission report made truthers even crazier.
REPLY: Boris, you’ve been saying terrible things about me and this blog from day 1, it wouldn’t matter what we published, you’d find a way to make some smart-assed comment out of it. It is your MO -A
lichanos says:
July 7, 2010 at 6:30 pm
You apparently haven’t investigated this issue well enough yet. There have been threats, both direct and veiled.
More importantly, we today have some of the most powerful individuals in the world tightening the noose around America’s energy throat because they are members of this cult. These individuals are too powerful (and too corrupt) to ignore. Renewable energy isn’t the goal. Denial of energy is the goal…. Along with denial of water and land on which to grow food.
This has happened throughout history.
Our country is being systematically strangled for energy. The FDA is so obstructionist, they won’t let skimmers suck up 99% of the gulf oil because 1% might be returned in the discharge. This is psychotic. Members of this cult are devoid of rational thought.
And
villabolo says:
July 7, 2010 at 7:28 pm
The difference between these two sides : Inhofe vs AGW establishment (which includes most members of Congress, The President, Most of Europe, Academia, and the EPA) is that his attack is defensive. Inhofe is not the big dog here. The US DOJ is on the CAGW side!
But hopefully, if we take the house this year, he can get some real teeth. Exposing the FRAUD of CAGW is absolutely necessary to stop this dangerous cult. The courts must be used because the CAGW “scientists” are political activists enjoying cover from the ruling party. This is the only way to get the facts into the open. I have no pity for those who would destroy this country. They should be prosecuted.
jcrabb says at 8:25 pm [ … ]
You have it wrong. The PNAS blacklist names political undesirables. Rather, people should be free to offer their opinions unimpeded by political correctness. Blacklists like the PNAS list do not allow that. They are the equivalent of the Supreme Soviet Politburo.
It is reprehensible that a free society should accept the blacklisting of those with a different scientific point of view.
Why do you and Boris defend the PNAS blacklist?
lichanos said [on persecution of dissidents by environmentalists]:
“It is not the black boot of the one party state coming down on your windpipe.”
It is. In the USA, both parties are green. In the UK, all three parties are green.
There is one party in any modern Western state, and it is green.
Not to mention that the green banner of Al Gore’s religion merges seamlessly with the green banner of the fundamentalist Islam. Jews, take note.
lichanos says:
July 7, 2010 at 6:30 pm
“Oh my, it’s commentary like this that makes me embarrassed to be a climate change skeptic.”
And then goes on to say how the AGW movement isn’t the worst form of socialism nor the worst form of fascism, but later bemoans the misguided environmentalists. lichanos, correct me if I’m wrong on summarizing your statement.
That said, given the multinational response, the laws that have already been passed, and the world leaders demand for more to be done, I’d say reality differs. If the Hansens, Manns, Jones’ of this world are bright enough to be given weight to their opinions, then they can’t possibly be oblivious to the laws which are being passed at their behest. Viewing the laws that have been passed, which most of us live under, I can’t understand how you don’t see the totalitarianism in the said laws. The world’s demand and necessity of energy and the subsequent throttling of said energy can’t be expressed in any other way other than oppression. The proposed and/or implementation of taxing industrial entities for the byproduct of production can be seen as nothing other than a tax on capitalism. Please define socialism again, because I can’t see how that doesn’t meet the criteria. The intrusion of personal liberties in response to this alleged catastrophe hasn’t been seen in a few decades, yet, foretold by Orwell. Today, in-home displays, which can communicate, via the ZigBee protocol, with the various appliances in your home has been implemented. By implemented, I mean control when your appliances can be used or not. In what manner do you choose to rationalize away the totalitarian implications of such an vile act? How do you not throw this at the feet of the “AGW” crowd and the complicit various powers? By various powers, I mean, government and quasi governmental entities, such as utilities. You may take offense of the communism and fascism references if you will, but that simply denies the reality the rest of us are living today.
Personally, I don’t give a rat’s azz if this globe is warming or not. Likely, (with a confidence factor of 60%) 90% of the rest of the world feels the same way. Yet, we have intrusive laws being passed. We have restrictive power use being supplied. We have punitive damages being assessed to productive corporations for no other reason than to continue to be productive they require more energy.
Yeh, no socialism there, no fascism there, no totalitarianism there. It’s just some tree huggers out of skelter. I’m very glad there are some that understand the world isn’t always made of people just misguided, but there are, indeed, people of evil intent.
a group of renegade marxists who sought to use Fruedism to spread marxism through society
What is ‘Fruedism’?
Note to lefties: It is your side that has politicized everything. We can’t even eat or breath in peace without the word “unsustainable” and “man is destroying the world” thrown at us. Get over yourselves. I don’t know what you are doing to your environment, but my little piece of the world is better than ever.
Layne Blanchard says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:09 pm
Our country is being systematically strangled for energy. The FDA is so obstructionist, they won’t let skimmers suck up 99% of the gulf oil because 1% might be returned in the discharge. This is psychotic. Members of this cult are devoid of rational thought.
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Very well said.
Chris
Norfolk, VA
It would be nice if the debate changed to WHAT is right or wrong versus WHO is right or wrong.
I don’t think the debate is settled yet so the focus should be on what is factually accurate. By moving the debate to WHO, you are skipping the step where the science proves 3.0C per doubling is accurate. You are assuming it is and that makes the WHO question a “political” one rather than a “scientific” one.
“We have punitive damages being assessed to productive corporations for no other reason than to continue to be productive they require more energy.”
OK, yeh, that was probably fragmented too much.
We have punitive damages being assessed to productive corporations for no other reason thanthey wish to continue to be productiveand they require more energy to be productive.……….for the people that can’t read between the lines.
villabolo says:
July 7, 2010 at 7:28 pm
“It illuminated a lot of what I’d been thinking over the past years, and perfectly explains why the AGW alarmists behave the way they do. The witch hunts, the character assasination, the Alinsky method du jour. The Hockey Team is a Marxist organization, not in the traditional economic sense (though their prescription for “saving the planet” is extensively marxist) but in how they operate toward their opponents.
Villabolo
I think you hit the nail squarely on the head. Seems those that attack, conveniently choose to “not remember” the carefully crafted attacks on the most qualified Climatologists/scientists who dared to question the orthodoxy of AGW or raised objection to the scary prediction, the questionable results of climate models that were peddled as scientific truth. Easy then to snipe and email each other to plant destructors in the way of any article that didn’t toe the line of CAGW. How many times did we get scientific consensus rammed down our throat and if we dared to quote any authorative scientist in support of the sceptics, The he’s an Effin liar, worked for big tobacco, paid by big oil and all this being fed out from those convenient cabal of insider government paid, academic protected, taxpayer funded towers of evil – yep they have convenient as well as short memories, the epithets hurled, the ad hominem attacks. It was nasty then from the warmist eletist side, and when the tide turns against their shoddy version of science, its the same old spite and nasty black balling to defend their right to plunder the public purse WITHOUT QUESTION from academics, science, under dictatorial protection.
Hmmn not surprising that the tide of public opinion has turned as even the much ignored and detested start to understand how badly the have been conned, and they are weeping and whining – I just say with a smile – who are the real deniers now!!
Thanks for the article, thought provoking and timely as they struggle to pull their jackboots on – its hard with underpants around ankles!! (and their fingers in their ears)
Layne Blanchard says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:09 pm
But hopefully, if we take the house this year, he can get some real teeth. Exposing the FRAUD of CAGW is absolutely necessary to stop this dangerous cult. The courts must be used because the CAGW “scientists” are political activists enjoying cover from the ruling party. This is the only way to get the facts into the open. I have no pity for those who would destroy this country. They should be prosecuted.
VILLABOLO:
Forever the bully pretending to be the victim. Can’t you smell the oil all over yourself?
***********
“Those who bring ruin on their families will inherit only wind, and the fool will be servant to the wise.”–Proverbs 11:29 Today’s New International Version
“The critics of AGW are not having their lives threatened, they are not, the vast majority of them anyway, being tossed out of their jobs, …”
Oh, well that’s all right then. Only a minority of them are being tossed out of their jobs. Why didn’t someone say so? Nothing to worry about at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud
http://www.the-family-doctor.com/the-family-doctor/f/freudism.htm
Whatever. It’s abstract, generalizations applied to individuals. It’s upside down on its first outing. Freud was insanely wrong.
To those who want to take politics out of this debate: the simple truth is you can’t because if you take away the politics from the global warming scam, all you have is a small bit of apparent warming of no concern to anyone.
So whilst I do not particularly agree with the specific analysis above, I do agree that understanding the politics of the global warming scam is fundamental to understanding the causes and power base of this scam.
I used to be a member of the Green party in Scotland, I was even selected to stand for the Scottish Parliament with an outside chance of getting in. However when I looked at many of the activists I found they were far far more interested in what I’d call pink-socialism than in green conservation.
But eco-activism has been a god send for the left, creating a whole new group of people who are willing to support parties of the left who would traditionally have voted for parties on the right. Indeed, the voters who are most likely to vote “green” tend to be professional classes (old ABs) who would otherwise tend to vote for the right.
But to be honest, I could equally make comments about the right. In Scotland, the biggest winners from the huge government created subsidy toward wind have been land owners and commercial wind farm developers. I could easily make the case that this whole global warming scam is conspiracy of the right dreamt up by rich landowners to such money from left leaning politicians.
And don’t be smug if you are a middle leaning “liberal”, because I could just as easily put forward a liberal intelligentsia conspiracy to get government to pay for airy fairy academic rubbish for the traditional “sit on the fence” academics of this world.
The truth is that this scam is supported by a rainbow alliance include left leaning greens, right leaning land-owners and centrist academics. And that is one hell of an alliance: the left with its ability to mobilise the populace, the right with its money and the centrist who have been able to control the academic research agenda.