UPDATE5: (Saturday 10/16/10) It has been a week, and I think this piece has been well distributed, so I’m putting it in regular queue now and it will gradually scroll off the page.
UPDATE4: (Friday 10/15/10) APS member Roger Cohen comments here on Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth op/ed.
UPDATE3: (Friday 10/15/10) Andrew Revkin, after a week (I sent him this story last Friday) of digging around to get just the right rebuttal, responds here at Dot Earth.
UPDATE2: (Wednesday 10/13/10) This just in…click for the story.
APS responds! – Deconstructing the APS response to Dr. Hal Lewis resignation
UPDATE: (Saturday 10/9/10) Since this came in late Friday, many of our weekday WUWT readers might not see this important story, so I’m sticking it to the top for a couple of days. New stories will appear just below this one, please scroll down to see them. – Anthony
(Originally posted on 10/8/10 ) We’ve previously covered the APS here, when I wrote:
While Copenhagen and its excesses rage, a quiet revolution is starting.
Indeed, not so quiet now. It looks like it is getting ugly inside with the public airing of the resignation of a very prominent member who writes:
I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
…
In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.- Hal Lewis
Below is his resignation letter made public today, via the GWPF.
This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.
What I would really like to see though, is this public resignation letter given the same editorial space as Michael Mann in today’s Washington Post.
Readers, we can do this. Here’s the place at WaPo to ask for it. For anyone writing to the WaPo, the national@washpost.com, is the national news editorial desk. The Post’s Ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, is the readers’ representative within the newspaper. E-mail him at ombudsman@washpost.com or call 202-334-7582.
Spread the word on other blogs. Let’s see if they have enough integrity to provide a counterpoint. – Anthony
======================================
Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).
Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.
5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal
==========================================================
Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)
Many of the comments on this thread amount to a conspiracy theory, that climatologists are scamming the public. The argument is that all of the scientists are engaging in dishonest practices just to collect a paycheck. Why stop at scientists. There are a lot of professionals who rely on the trust of the public to collect a paycheck. Doctors, lawyers, auto repair services all have expertise that the public relies on. There are very few who are scamming the public, and none are perfect, but that doesn’t make all of their work useless and invalid.
Many posters believe that the existence of scientists who disagree with AGW is proof somehow that the theory is incorrect. Neither of these propositions makes any sense to me. There will always be dissenters to an established physical theory, because a certain fraction of the population will always be dissenters.
In addition, many of the early dissenters were politically motivated, and were paid by right wing organizations, funded by big corporations, who are against government regulations of any kind. One famous physicist, Fred Seitz, who opposed AGW, also took money from the cigarette companies to debunk the idea that smoking was injurious to health. Even today, there are a number of organizations , like Heartland Institute, who pay physicists to write papers against the idea of AGW, because they oppose government regulation of any kind. Even certain right wing members of the US Congress, are involved in this effort. In addition these organizations engage in petty harrassment against certain scientists, like Michael Mann, whose reactions, as exposed in the infamous emails was understandably human and bitter.
A large number of foolish arguments are made in an attempt to debunk the idea of AGW. Some amount to a denial that the fundamental accepted physics regarding absorption and radiation by molecules is correct; and that the greenhouse gas theory is wrong. Others claim that human activity is not even causing an increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Anyone trained in the fundamentals of science, can see that these arguments are totally wrong, if they have any objectivity at all.
There are more subtle technical arguments about clouds, and the lack of agreement of the models etc. . Most of the people making those arguments don’t really have the expertise to make them based on real knowledge.
The comments by most of the posters on this thread amount to mindless cheerleading for the side they believe in.
Steve Mennie says on October 14, 2010 at 7:17 pm
Well, Steve, thank you for your trite reply. I notice you didn’t bother to answer the question.
Do you happen to know at what level CO2 starts to become poisonous to any plants? Do you happen to know at what level CO2 becomes too dangerous for humans?
Oh, and by the way, how much carbon would re-greening North Africa suck out of the atmosphere?
Larry;
Just knew you’d jump on that purist definition of “finite” But for all practical purposes the supply is unlimited. Energy ALWAYS gets cheaper. Even Obongo can’t repeal that.
Richard;
Not hypothetical!
eadler says:
October 14, 2010 at 8:01 pm
The comments by most of the posters on this thread amount to mindless cheerleading for the side they believe in.
I assume you are at least speaking about yourself, especially given your preceding “reasoning” where you have not even touched any of the significant “sceptical” criticisms which are routinely put forth at WUWT, including above. So just who else are you talking about?
The warming trend alleged does not have nearly enough data to support it. Wikipedia entries on global warming is largely controlled by climate scientists who do not understand physics. I do not mean quantum mechanics or some fancy eigen function based mathematics of no relevance either. Of course they do try and get fancy with all that math without real evidence. Show me how it is indisputable.
eadler Oct 14th 2010 8:01
It’s obvious that any objective person would confirm your well reasoned argument by simply looking at the numerous comments on this site.
I would add another point. I believe that many of the comments here are using a deliberate language technique of associating any anti-AGW comment with ‘good’ and any pro-AGW with ‘bad’ . By hyping up the readers emotional reaction for anti-AGW comments it allows irrational and false arguments to be slipped into the discussion.
Any propogandist can make an argument along the lines ‘you are a fool and don’t you know that CO2 can’t affect the climate’ or ‘we are wasting gazillions of dollars,yen,roubles on a total sham in a well know conspiracy of millions of scientists trained in secret AGW camps and CO2 is obviously beneficial to humanity all of the time ‘ . This is a bit more than cheerleading , its closer to deliberate manipulative mis-selling.
LazyTeenager says:
October 12, 2010 at 5:29 am
So where do these trillions of dollars actually come from? The total USA climate change budget appears to be 2000 milion dollars per year.
To get trillions you need to have climate change activities on the same scale as military expenditures and that ain’t happening. Somebody has been lying to the old guy.
P.S. I do not approve of exploiting a 90 year old by waving him around like a propaganda flag to be shot at. Let him enjoy his grumpy old guy years in peace.
The old guy is actually pretty up to date. Global nominal GDP is estimated by IMF to be $62 trillion in 2010 and it is projected to rise to $82 trillion during the next five years.
On the other hand according to IPCC AR4 cost of mitigation is expected to be several percent of GDP (up to 5.5% by 2050, depending on scenario).
I suppose you can handle percents at least as proficiently as the old guy and if you actually do the math you’ll see the situation can adequately be described as trillions being at stake.
You should also take into account the fact it is virtually certain the IPCC is underestimating costs and that the money to be redistributed by government policies would be much more than actual losses. Quite a financial incentive, one would say.
Therefore if somebody has been lying to the old guy it was either the IMF or the IPCC (or both). And they’re not lying just to him, but to all of us, which is exactly the kind of problem that made the old guy jump. Because it is not he alone who is being exploited, but you as well.
Larry Fields says:
October 14, 2010 at 7:41 pm
I wrote: “Most physical scientists believe that the Earth’s supply of cheaply-extracted CONG (coal, oil, natural gas) is finite. ”
“Paul, it’s logic-check time.”
Had you removed your Malthusian blinkers for a moment you might have been able to understand my comment, and restrain yourself from coming back with an invalid pseudo-syllogism. The store or stock of a certain good might be finite, but the supply is not finite if the stock can be replenished indefinitely. Hydrocarbon fuels can be (so long as we have the energy) so their supply is not finite. Supply is an economic measure of availability, not a physical measure of quantity like mass (note the “cheaply extracted” tag you yourself added). As I stated previously: oil is not finite in any economically relevant way.
For me the big clue to the lies is the cure the rich and powerful come up with, this does not help the situation one bit but bankrupts the west and gives our wealth to China who use it to produce more CO2. Kindly tell me how that is not enough proof of the scam?
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/28728
eh?
wassat?
Darkinbad the Brightdayler says:
October 15, 2010 at 4:27 am
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/28728
eh?
wassat?
____________________________________________________________
Seems like utterly unsubstanciated rubbish to me.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/03/how-long-will-global-warming-last/
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.earth.031208.100206
I doubt if it will get into a serious newspaper, yet alone a serious journal after peer review, but there again you really can’t tell these days.
Chris Edwards says:
October 15, 2010 at 4:08 am
“For me the big clue to the lies is the cure the rich and powerful come up with, this does not help the situation one bit but bankrupts the west and gives our wealth to China who use it to produce more CO2. Kindly tell me how that is not enough proof of the scam?”
There are no facts or logic behind this statement, which is simply a statement of a conspiracy theory.
In fact the Chinese are leaders in alternative energy technology, despite the fact that they burn a lot of coal to power their industry.
The rich and powerful in the US are funding organizations like the Heartland Institute and Cato Institute, and are pouring tens of millions into the Republican campaign chest. They have been doing this for years. The Republicans have been the principle political opponents of the scientific theories behind global warming, and originated the propaganda campaign opposing the idea that humans are warming the planet by burning fossil fuels.
The people driving opposition to AGW are taking advantage of human nature, which involves a reluctance to take action on problems that appear to be abstract and are theorized to occur in the future. Some misguided individuals in the scientific community who need to be mavericks, like Hal Lewis, are adding to this propaganda, playing the martyr to the cause of truth. In my opinion, the opposition to AGW is an army of cracked pots, led on by scoundrels shilling for the big energy and coal companies, for example, Tim Ball.
PeteM says:
October 15, 2010 at 1:07 am
eadler Oct 14th 2010 8:01
It’s obvious that any objective person would confirm your well reasoned argument by simply looking at the numerous comments on this site.
You seem to confuse the slew of logical fallacies eadler used including Straw Man, ad Hominem, ad Populum, and Poisoning the Well, to name just a few for a “well reasoned argument”, a common mistake of CAGW/CC/CD Believers.
You then compound your error by adding further straw man arguments.
The following statement for example uses both the Ad Hominem and Straw Man arguments: “Any propogandist can make an argument along the lines ‘you are a fool and don’t you know that CO2 controls our climate”?
See how that works?
By the way, good luck with you and your cohorts’ cheerleading of a dying Belief system. I guess it must support your world view or something, so is hard to give up. Maybe they should start a 12-step support group for you folks: Warmaholics Anonymous, perhaps.
Just a suggestion:
http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2010/10/15/who-you-calling-a-fraud/
REPLY: Thanks Keith, I sent a note to Andy Revkin last Friday. It took him a week of digging to get the results he wanted. – Anthony
I see Revkin went straight into ad hominem mode and dug up previous statements from Prof. Lewis followed by a an attack from a third party on the Professor’s credibility. Nice one Andy!
It seems official now. RC allows none of my poost through now.
Revkin’s position and responses skate around the core issue that Lewis attempts to highlight: that using the primitive tools to hand to justify massive and draconian choking of the world’s energy usage is fraudulent, both scientifically and politically. The evident motivation for the fraud is control over trillions of dollars of redirected resources; potential and actual skimming of billions off that flow is not difficult.
Steve Mennie says:
October 14, 2010 at 7:17 pm
Richard Sharpe says:
October 14, 2010 at 6:46 pm
Xamana says on October 14, 2010 at 6:31 pm
Everyone here is shouting “RA RA” but what about the environment?
Even if pollution doesn’t cause global warming does that make it okay?
Where’s the integrity in trying to stop measures to mitigate the trashing of our planet?
Which measures are those?
CO2, for example, is not a pollutant. It is an essential ingredient in plant growth.
Richard…H2O is an essential engredient in plant growth as well…this doesn’t mean that all plants flourish under water.
Richard..I suppose my ‘trite’ response was to your equally trite statement that CO2 was and essential ingredient etc…This statement is irrelevant to any discussion of CO2 forcing of climate..or pretty much anything else..Its the equivalent of saying that because one aspirin is good for paint relief that taking 10 would be ten times better..
Oops…that should, of course, be pain relief..although it may work for paint relief as well
Rob Potter says:
October 15, 2010 at 11:15 am
I see Revkin went straight into ad hominem mode and dug up previous statements from Prof. Lewis followed by a an attack from a third party on the Professor’s credibility. Nice one Andy!
I’m kinda slow in most ways so I may have missed something..but how is referring to someone’s previous statements on the subject in question (Hall Lewis’ opinions on AGW) an example of ad hominem?
I don’t know this fellow Revkin, but, has he lost his mind?! That was a complete non-sequitor at the end of his “reply” by quoting David Ropeik. Hal Lewis is showing no fear. He accuses his opponents of suppressing inquiry into fraud masquerading as fact. He “feels” betrayed. The fact of fraud and the concomitant feeling of betrayal does not necessarily produce fear in a mature human. So, Ropeik is wrong.
As far as I’m concerned, Revkin is quoting some pseudo-scientific quack named Ropeik whose statements are so insipid that they can be debunked using the very thing he’s commenting on. Neuroscience says nothing about “facts” because we have no idea how a human represents a “fact”, much less have a firm definition of the notion of “fact”. As you might expect, our knowledge of “feelings” about facts or anything else is currently in its very beginnings. What a joke this Ropeik is!! I’ll bet he’s on a lecture circuit as a motivational speaker or some such nonsense.
UPDATE3: Andrew Revkin, after a week (I sent him this story last Friday) of digging around to get just the right rebuttal, responds here at Dot Earth.
In the link there is this comment on the change of attitude of prof.
Lewis :
What a difference a couple of decades can make.
The answer is what I have discussed before: physicists are socially naive people. Having a strict training in the scientific method which is continually reinforced during the career years, ( each talk in a conference is like a thesis examination) they cannot easily imagine that in other so called “scientific” disciplines things are not just like in their own microcosm. He accepted on trust the peer reviewed results of the “climatologists” of that time, and included in good faith their conclusions in his risk assessments.
The difference the couple of decades have made are:
money, money, money.
Suddenly climate “science” was big business eating billions from the available funds for research ( money1), and suddenly politicians smelled money and put a large price tag and generated pyramid schemes (EU carbon exchange) that made politicians and others millionaires (money 2), and the specter of taxing the air one breathes came around the corner (money 3). The Ottoman called it head tax.
This onslaught on the pocketbook made even physicists look up and smell fish.
Asking the world to commit economic hara kiri is sure to get even a physicist’s attention.
Once one starts looking into the details of the (in) famous GCMs and their physics justification, which probably did not exist before the IPCC reports a decade or so ago, the precarious and arbitrary foundations become evident. One cannot justify such drastic measures on such flimsy “science”.
The change should be no surprise.
A further thought..(as I stated previously, I’m rather slow) If referring to a person’s previous statements about a subject is equivalent to an ad hominem attack, how would you defend Attorney General Cuccinelli’s desire to refer to ten years of M. Mann’s emails?
Just read Revkin’s ridiculous ‘reposte’ and was quite impressed with Lewis’ responses to his emails.
But I keep thinking – with some of the so called core science (I am thinking physics and absorption of radiation here) being allegedly agreed, wouldn’t it be an extremely useful piece of scientific literature for the likes of the APS or the RS to chair such a production, warts and all?
If the APS, RS and all the other societies who have issued climate ‘statements’ and taken a stance on behalf of their ‘members’ (which by the way – do not necessarily constitute the majority of practising scientists in my view, many for example, do not take an active role in their ‘societies’) – could at least agree ‘base’ levels of understanding – at least they could perhaps produce more genuinely scientifically based statements instead of wishy washy acceptance ‘speeches’ of an alleged concensus based science (which in reality is the acceptance of the concensus by its review panel!).
It would be beneficial to pro- and anti- GW sides to have a real (perhaps even incontrovertible?) ‘reference’ document from which research and debate could move forwards. Why, if the core science is so settled, is such a document unavailable? (at least to my current knowledge)
Yes, I know the IPCC reports are supposed to be almost ‘reference’ material – but we all know how wrong their stuff can be! The trouble with any overview (such as IPCC docs) is that the errors and uncertainties are not fully disclosed – if they were (in a proper scientific manner) the final conclusions would necessarily be full of mights maybes and low or high possibilities, etc – which when you start to ‘add’ or ‘multiply’ them together – well, you’d just become a ‘don’t know’ voter!
Is it really beyond the realms of possibilty that the real Independent scientific community out there could ‘get it together’ without all this pro and anti stance and associated BS?
If this were a murder mystery video, you’d want to rewind and restart at the beginning to see where we lost the plot!