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”.
Steve in SC says:
July 7, 2010 at 8:06 pm
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.
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NAH, the Demirats will pass the Amnesty bill and buy themselves lots and lots of new friends who will vote them back in.
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Bill Illis says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:41 pm
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 …
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The “debate” has always been about power, greed and absolute control. It has never been about “science” Science is just the mask used to get naive people to willingly put on the collar and chains of a slave.
The end game is Agenda 21 and “global governance” That is why Maurice Strong was Chair of the First Earth Summit in 1972 when CAGW and environmentalism first came to political prominence He was chair at Kyoto. But perhaps the most significant information is his membership on the U.N.-funded Commission on Global Governance.
“On July 14, Kofi Annan released Maurice Strong’s initial plan..The 95-page document, entitled Renewing the United Nations: A Programme for Reform, is a step-by-step program to implement many of the recommendations advanced by the UN-funded Commission on Global Governance in its 1995 report entitled Our Global Neighborhood. The reform plan comes as no surprise. Maurice Strong was a member of the Commission on Global Governance and a lead author of its report.” http://www.iahf.com/world/un-refm.html
As Walter Schneider puts it:
I wonder what proportion of individuals discussing and worrying about sustainability ever read Agenda 21. Here is the link to the full text of it: http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/res_agenda21_00.shtml
It is a detailed prescription for the goals and objectives of a global, totalitarian system. It is all out in the open and always was. It has nothing to do with a conspiracy. Those with the potential for absolute, total power to control have no need to conspire. They just do.
Gail Combs says:
July 8, 2010 at 12:15 pm
Agenda 21 is a wish list of a foolishly inspired elite. We are allowed to wish for anything but there are laws, ya know, bigger than us…and that “Strong” guy…living now in China!…does he ignore that sometimes heads are cut over there?
@Enneagram says:
We all saw Mann … shouting with the crowd: “The people, united, will never be defeated” That was the first time in my long life the last thing I could have imagined being heard in an american street, which was a daily scene during the 1960′s in south america.
Guess I am revealing myself as a member of the liberal-ruling-cabal of marxist pseudo-scientists when I say that although I am probably younger than you, I have heard that being shouted in many American streets over the last thirty years. I guess you don’t pay attention to demonstrations – your choice, but they are legal and constitutional – and you don’t read or watch news that reports on stuff you don’t like to hear about – not a wise choice. I suppose you associate that slogan only with Latin American leftism, but if you think about it, it really has a down-home flavor to it, no?
Tim Neilson says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:51 pm
“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, …”
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Tim the Germans before World War Two and before things turned ugly started compiling lists. These lists included farms, animals and other assets and who owned them…. for later confiscation. Guess what is going on now?? The UN/WTO is having governments to compile lists. Specifically lists of Farms and what assets are on them. I and many other farmers received a USDA questionaire that must have been 50 pages in length within the last couple of years. People who subscribed to horse, farming or gardening magazines also got the highly intrusive questionaire. That is step one:
Many of us protested the questionaire and the government issuing “Premises ID” and tagging our animals. Take a look at this and see if there is not backlash from the government towards individuals over an issue THAT WAS NOT A LAW!!!
4H and NAIS: http://xstatic99645.tripod.com/naisinfocentral/id33.html
The Drs Fallice worked on the project to show mad cow disease came from scrapies in Sheep. Unfortunately for the Drs Fallice there was no proof. Here is the USDA retaliation: http://nonais.org/index.php/2006/09/25/fallice-sheep-disease-free/
AND then there was the day break raid and holding at gunpoint for two weeks of the Henshaws on false charges: http://nonais.org/2006/09/29/henshaw-incident/
OR an example of the government fighting dirty: Karen Nowak, Pond Ridge Farm Hackney Horses: Since it is apparent that some of you think our government agencies are above board, let me share a story of my recent experience….
These are just a few examples of harassment by US officials. I have two friends I correspond with who have had their homes broken into and their computers trashed. The response by local law enforcement is ” well you would not have these problems if you would just sign up for premises ID and quit making waves…”
So please do not try to tell us this list is innocent, US farmers, especially in Wisconsin will laugh at you. http://naissucks.com/wordpress/?p=400
lichanos says:
July 8, 2010 at 12:45 pm
Well, and I did not mean Mann also, the “man on the spot” was J.”death trains” Hansen.
I good rule of thumb is to examine incestuous citations per paper (papers with authors in cited paper being the same as on new publication), the more self citations there are , the more worrying it is. More than 20% incestuous citations is overboard; 35% is warning bells; 50% or more is dire.
Mike Lorrey:
Thank you for your article and subsequent posts below it.
Yes, those who promote adherence to the scientific method and, therefore, reject AGW catastrophism come from every part of the political spectrum. And it seems to me that only in North America is this presented as being a left vs. right issue.
I was a speaker at the first Heartland Climate Conference. During a dinner I was sat at a table where some right-wing Americans were pontificating about how AGW is a left-wing myth. I pointed out that their assertions may possibly be true in their country, but those assertions are not true in the UK where the right-wing Conservative Party is a prime promoter of AGW. Indeed, I said I was attending the event to speak against the AGW hypothesis because I am convinced that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) cannot happen to a discernible degree and so cannot become problematic except as an excuse for political action(s). And, I said, I am a left wing socialist of the old-fashioned British kind.
One of them responded that they knew AGW is socialism and they knew “who the enemy is”.
I was shocked. I naively thought consideration of AGW is a matter of scientific consideration and not about having those of similar opinion declared as being “the enemy” on the basis of political views. I had not experienced this before.
However, and fortunately, I can report that the organisers of the Conference did not share this view about “enemies” and no others at the event seemed to share it either.
As you say in your article, at all places in the political spectrum there are people who are fervently pro-AGW and there are people who are fervently anti-AGW. And, as you also say, the Marxist methods used by the pro-AGW advocates does not indicate that they are Marxists: their methods only indicate that they have chosen to use methods they consider to be effective.
Personally, I despise them for using such methods.
Richard
Steve in SC says: “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.”
What do you think carbon taxes will be used for?
Jimbo says: “If AGW is ever falsified this list will have the opposite effect for which it was intended. They may even receive a joint Nobel Prize”
They should certainly be given honors, but I doubt if a Nobel Prize will be of any value by the time this farce is over.
mike –
thanx for the followup.
Richard S Courtney –
there are attempts in australia to portray believers/sceptics as left/right, and there are attempts by the MSM and some Team Members to portray young people as believers while older people are allegedly selfish ‘deniers’. rejecting such attempts to divide and conquer is vital in this far-from-won battle.
an example of the latter:
7 July: Korea Times: Kenneth Rogoff: [PS] Can good emerge from BP oil spill?
Kenneth Rogoff is professor of economics and public policy at Harvard University, and was formerly chief economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Anger is especially rife among young people…
Might a reawakening of voter anger be the ticket to rekindling interest in a carbon tax?…
A carbon tax can help preserve the atmosphere while also discouraging some of the most exotic and risky energy-exploration activities by making them unprofitable…
Some say that young people in the rich countries are just too well off to mobilize politically, at least en masse. But they might be radicalized by the prospect of inheriting a badly damaged ecosystem…
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2010/07/137_68963.html
Kevin wrote on July 7, 2010 at 6:40 pm:
I think Kevin is right in terms of economics. However, both Fascism and Corporatism arose from socialist politics. To expand on Kevin’s thought, both are tyrannical, in that they deprive citizens of choice through some level of force (authoritarianism or totalitarianism).
Climate change is a stalking horse for the socialist agenda (DSA USA is the Democratic Socialist of America):
DSA USA. “Toward An Economic Justice Agenda.” Political. Democratic Left, May 2008. http://www.dsausa.org/pdf/eja_may2008.pdf
Blacklist? It reads more like an Honor Roll.
Congratulations to all who made the cut. Each has good company.
Mike Haseler says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:53 pm (Edit)
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.
Nail on the head Mike. You can trust a scot to cut through the crap and tell it like it is. In my opinion, this is why trying to pidgeon-hole the players on the climate carousel is a waste of time. These old political categories are obsolete.
What I see are players with a range of motivations using whatever tactics they think will further their agenda. The western nation politicians are using the AGW mythology to justify taxing the population to generate sufficient money to maintain law’n’order and at the same time using the AGW story to try to discourage the rise of the developing nations. The Corporates are riding the gravy train to enrich themselves. The Academics are garnering research money and prestige. Useful tools as the trusted purveyors of scientific ‘Truth’ who the public trust(ed).
Mike Lorrey’s analysis is useful because it provides us with the opportunity to lance the boil which threatens to divide the international sceptical confederation. And I don’t mean to criticise Mike Lorrey, I just think needs to add Mike Haseler’s and Richards Courtney’s perspectives into the mix of understanding.
We are all in this together.
The return of the blacklist.
I must have missed the pogroms, inquisitions and reigns of terror caused by “liberalist majoritarian tyranny”. Can you point to an example, or is it that you don’t like Democratic presidents when they’re voted in by democratic means?
@ur momisugly John A:
I must have missed the pogroms, inquisitions and reigns of terror caused by “liberalist majoritarian tyranny”.
Ha ha! Right on, John A!
John A says:
July 9, 2010 at 6:33 am
“…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…”
I must have missed the pogroms, inquisitions and reigns of terror caused by “liberalist majoritarian tyranny”. Can you point to an example, or is it that you don’t like Democratic presidents when they’re voted in by democratic means?
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You are not alone. Most people have missed it because examples are never covered in the news but it is happening right now. Here are articles that explain the “reign of terror” in the USA.
I will leave out the intentional genocide of Native Americans that continued until the 1970’s with forced sterilization programs and stick with the present dat.
Here is the more subtle reigns of terror:
“Civil asset forfeiture has allowed police to view all of America as some giant national K-Mart, where prices are not just lower, but non-existent — a sort of law enforcement ‘pick-and-don’t-pay.'”
—U.S. Representative Henry Hyde
Incredible as it sounds, civil asset forfeiture laws allow the government to seize property without charging anyone with a crime. Until FEAR achieved the nation’s first major federal forfeiture law reform at the turn of the millenium, the government was allowed to keep whatever property it seized without ever having to prove a case. Seized property was presumed guilty and could be forfeited based upon mere hearsay—even a tip supplied by by an informant who stood to gain up to 25% of the forfeited assets. Owners were forced into the untenable situation of trying to prove a negative—that something never happened, even though no proof of any illegal act had been offered at trial. “ http://www.fear.org/
Intentional removal of farmers from their lands (resulting in suicides & social upheaval)
History: http://www.opednews.com/articles/History-HACCP-and-the-Foo-by-Nicole-Johnson-090906-229.html
Actual example of a reign of terror: http://www.readthehook.com/stories/2006/10/05/COVER-boarSlaughter-F.doc.aspx
In depth analysis of above incident: http://nonais.org/index.php/2006/09/29/henshaw-incident/
Documents: http://nonais.org/index.php/2006/10/02/henshaw-documents/
Another example:
http://nonais.org/2007/03/02/607/
http://nonais.org/index.php/2007/09/24/mi-greg-niewendorp-served-warrant/
http://www.naisstinks.com/index.php?con=Fight_For_America_Farms_in_Wisconsin
http://nonais.org/2010/03/11/wi-judge-kills-premise-id/
Please note this fight is NOT ended. I just got a phone call from the government on tagging my sheep this morning…
The Federal Reserve Act 1913: you had better become familiar with how money works are you will never see what is actually going on:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Banks/Bankers_MoneyMachine_WOD.html
http://www.bigeye.com/griffin.htm
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/reserve.htm
A Primer on Money by SUBCOMMITTEE ON DOMESTIC FINANCE. COMMITTEE ON BANKING AND CURRENCY. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. 88th Congress, 2d Session
http://www.devvy.com/pdf/2006…/Patman_Primer_on_Money.pdf
The newest: “Debtor’s Hell” http://www.boston.com/news/specials/debt/
In jail for being in debt: “In January, a judge sentenced a Kenney, Ill., man “to indefinite incarceration” until he came up with $300 toward a lumber yard debt. “http://www.startribune.com/local/95692619.html?page=2&c=y
None of the above answers my question, but thanks for playing
Ah, wonderful photograph! With the name of the blog post, the subject matter of blacklist, and the police sign in the image, was I alone is assuming that this was an image of a member of the French Resistance being dragged off by the collaborators to interrogation and certain death? That interpretation of the image fits the melodramatic tone of the post for sure.
The white coat of the guy on the truck was a little disconcerting. Still a great photo, but it’s from a documentary series on mental hospitals. Published in 1955…I figured it was taken in 1945.
The real story…?