Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
This is the 30th anniversary of James Hansen’s testimony to Congress regarding “global warming”. It was his testimony that set off the disastrous 30 Year War on Carbon. There have been articles in the press celebrating the anniversary of his testimony and lauding Hansen’s role, but I see nothing to celebrate. It has been a war with lots of casualties, mostly among the poor who can least afford it. It’s a war that has increased my electricity price by 50%. I can afford that … but there are many who can’t. It’s a war that has plunged thousands of people into a new kind of poverty, “fuel poverty”. Fuel poverty is where in midwinter, you have to make a choice between heating and eating …
I shudder to think about what that choice must be like.
And sadly, one of the main casualties of this mad war is the reputation of climate science itself. The disreputable actions of far too many activist scientists have blackened the names of every honest climate scientist and indeed of the entire field.
How did we get into this insane fight against a natural component of the atmosphere? Much of it traces back to a very successful underhanded scam pulled off by Jamex Hansen surrounding his Congressional testimony during that summer thirty years ago.
Why do I call it an “underhanded scam”? Here’s a description of the chicanery from an interview with Senator Tim Wirth, one of the flim-flam artists who helped James Hansen with his Congressional testimony. The interviewer is asking Senator Wirth about the events surrounding that Congressional Hearing. The interviewer asks:
What else was happening that summer? What was the weather like that summer?
Senator Wirth: Believe it or not, we called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6 or June 9 or whatever it was, so we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo: It was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it. It was stiflingly hot that summer. [At] the same time you had this drought all across the country, so the linkage between the Hansen hearing and the drought became very intense.
Simultaneously [Mass. Gov. Michael] Dukakis was running for president. Dukakis was trying to get an edge on various things and was looking for spokespeople, and two or three of us became sort of the flacks out on the stump for Dukakis, making the separation between what Democratic policy and Republican policy ought to be. So it played into the presidential campaign in the summer of ’88 as well.
So a number of things came together that, for the first time, people began to think about it. I knew it was important because there was a big article in, I believe, the Swimsuit Issue of Sports Illustrated on climate change. [Laughs.] So there was a correlation. You figure, well, if we’re making Sports Illustrated on this issue, you know, we’ve got to be making some real headway.
So these underhanded cheats set the stage for hyping “global warming” by deliberately choosing the hottest day of the year for Hansen’s testimony. Then they morphed his oh-so-movingly hot testimony into a very successful partisan political issue for the Democrats.
And the amazing thing is, Senator Wirth sees his deceit as something to boast about!
“But wait”, as they say on TV, “there’s more”. Here’s the next question to Senator Wirth:
And did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?
Senator Wirth: … What we did it was went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right? So that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room and so when the, when the hearing occurred there was not only bliss, which is television cameras in double figures, but it was really hot. …
So Hansen’s giving this testimony, you’ve got these television cameras back there heating up the room, and the air conditioning in the room didn’t appear to work. So it was sort of a perfect collection of events that happened that day, with the wonderful Jim Hansen, who was wiping his brow at the witness table and giving this remarkable testimony. …
There you have it. Wirth and Hansen picked the hottest day, opened the windows, and disabled the air conditioning to create a made-for-tv illusion of global warming, nobody could deny it seeing Hansen and the Senators sweat … and now Senator Wirth is boasting about how clever they were. Can’t get much more pridefully underhanded than that.
They say that “Fish rots from the head down”, and the Thirty Year War on carbon dioxide is a clear example of that. The war on carbon dioxide was born in lies, cheating, deliberate subterfuge, and intentional misrepresentations by James Hansen and Senator Tim Wirth … and it has continued down that same path since the beginning.
They also say “As the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined”, and starting with Wirth and Hansen deceiving the US Congress, down through Michael Mann and his lies about the Hockeystick being validated, to Peter Gleick and his lies about the Heartland Institute, to Caspar Amman lying to get the Jesus Paper into the IPCC report, the field has had far, far too many devious, deceitful “scientists” shading the truth, ignoring opposing evidence, disabling air conditioners, and telling porkies to advance their allegedly noble cause.
And to advance their careers as well, although surely that is only coincidental …
The most amazing part of this story is that even though these scientific malfeasants fooled Congress, and even though they lied their keisters off, even though they stacked the peer review panels with reviewers blind enough to put Stevie Wonder to shame, and even though the governments and the universities and the scientific organizations and the mainstream media all bought into their deceit and lies, even despite the fact that tragically they poured billions and billions of dollars down the rathole in the process … they still haven’t convinced the core of the US population that CO2 is the double extra secret control knob that can simply be turned up and down to regulate the global temperature to the nearest degree.
Thirty years on now, and all that time they tried and they tried, and they lied and they lied, but they just couldn’t pull it off.
So what I’m celebrating today is the 30th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln being proved right when he said “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
And on this anniversary I’m also celebrating those who have fought the good fight in this war, and it is a long and tiresome fight indeed. First and foremost, Anthony Watts, whose original Surfacestations project morphed into Watts Up With That, the most successful climate blog ever. Next, Steven McIntyre, whose dogged pursuit of the smallest details showed just where the Hockeystick was fatally cracked, and who exposed errors in dozens of papers.
Among the professional scientists who have followed the facts and fought for the scientific method, I give big props to Drs. Bill Gray (sadly no longer with us), Roy Spencer, Tim Ball, John Christie, Pielkes Pere et Fil, Willie Soon, the dean Fred Singer, the irrepressible Judith Curry, Craig Loehle, and many more honest scientists known and unknown.
Beyond them are dozens and dozens of amateur scientists, bloggers, journalists, and people from other disciplines doing or reporting on interesting original climate research—Jo Nova, Steve Goddard, Matt Ridley, Warwick Hughes, Jennifer Marohazy, Donna Laframboise, Roger Tallbloke, Bishop Hill, the delightfully mad Lord Moncton, Lucia Liljegrin, James Delingpole, Ross McKitrick, and many, many others.
(I apologize in advance for leaving out anyone whose name I should have mentioned, but rest assured, your contributions are known beyond the confines of my faulty memory.)
Next up for war decorations are the moderators of all of the climate-related blogs, particularly of WUWT. Since WUWT has a worldwide reach, it needs to be moderated 24/7. This is done by a global group of dedicated people who have selflessly donated their time to keep the doors open. Kudos to the moderators on all the blogs.
Next are all of the other active participants in the climate discussion, AKA the commenters. I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned from the comments on all of the blogs—there’s always something new, some different way to look at things, some insight about how I might be able to solve a problem.
Next, a special war medal for those who have show me and others where our scientific claims are wrong. Science progresses inter alia by one person trying to find flaws in the scientific ideas of another person. It is essentially adversarial, and nobody likes to be publicly shown to be wrong. Me, I hate it … but being shown wrong has saved me months, perhaps years, of following some incorrect understanding down some blind alley. It is the willingness of the skeptics to be wrong that will sustain people’s faith in the scientific process.
To round it all out, I want to give a shout-out to the lurkers, those who read the articles and comments with great interest, but rarely or never comment. The lurkers are the unseen nine-tenths of the iceberg that give it the mass necessary to bring down the big “ship of fools” …
Anyhow, that’s what I’m celebrating on this 30th anniversary of the start of the Carbon Wars—this mad, ad-hoc, unorganized, chaotic army of professional and amateur scientists, interested individuals, bloggers, people with unconventional scientific ideas, intellectual nonconformists, lurkers, climate curmudgeons such as myself, general weirdos, and a host of other in-laws and outlaws who have united under the banner of science-based skepticism, and who have fought the combined power of governments, universities, activist scientists with billions in funding, and the mainstream media to a standstill.
My profound congratulations to all involved. Not that the war is won, but at least we’re at what might be called the “Churchill inflection point” … well done to everyone, thanks for fighting the good fight.
w.
PS—The “Churchill inflection point”? It is that point in a war that Churchill described as follows:
It is my best judgement that after thirty years of climate science being hijacked by activists, we are now at the end of the beginning of the fight to return sanity, transparency, and honesty to climate science.
PPS—when you comment I ask that you quote the exact words you are discussing. Your subject is always crystal clear to you … but not to others. So please, to avoid misunderstandings, quote the subject of your musings.
Pure childishness, the politics of the playground.
Now see where its going:
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/tesla-employee-sabotage-illustrates-critical-importance-of-user-permissions/
What could a single disgruntled person could do to a global (?) fleet of similarly programmed electric cars – as per what Hansen/Wirth got up to on a tiny one-off local scale.
Just wow
Hasn’t Tesla just had some sort of brake fail issue that was ‘fixed’ via a worldwide update process, as pioneered by Microsoft to render their software (and your computer hardware) increasingly slow, dumb and useless – forcing everyone to buy new computers after 3 years or less. Nice work if you can get it.
(Of course Windows 10 bypassed all that, junk from the word go yet still perpetuates the multi gigabyte ‘update’ myth so everyone thinks they’re getting something good. Obviously a spy at work in there but who’s side is (s)he on?)
We are progressing backwards. I blame carbohydrate food & refined sugar (and booze & cannabis & opiates & caffeine & nicotine & Prozac & Viagra & Trash TV & spam)
Junk Everything creating Junk People – yes Hansen Gore Wirth Jones Mann Obama Cameron etc etc. Looking at you.
“We are progressing backwards. I blame carbohydrate food & refined sugar (and booze & cannabis & opiates & caffeine & nicotine & Prozac & Viagra & Trash TV & spam)
Junk Everything creating Junk People – yes Hansen Gore Wirth Jones Mann Obama Cameron etc etc. Looking at you”
You can’t post anything without bringing this up, can you.
Mixed feelings. Following the climate ‘debate’ has been hugely educational for me but at the same time that the whole ‘debate’ has gone on for so long and reached such dark depths is despairing.
Bertrand Russell :
“I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. . .” Letter to Gilbert Murray, March 21, 1903.
This is what defines the 20th century. The 21st began with the biggest lie ever – Gore being a pathetic Russell wannabee.
China and Russia are not playing along with any repeat theatrics from the transatlantic. Trump neither – his voter base (like Brexit, now Italy) have had enough of the damned Bertrand Russell 20th century.
And in fact the medieval so-called 30 years war was in fact 100 years of carnage, ended with the famous win-win Treaty of Westphalia, carved on the UN entrance wall. Today China’s win-win policy against “zero-sum” , the BRI is the new Treaty to be signed up a.s.a.p.
So yes the “30” year war should be over.
So every scientific association on the planet is wrong because: someone turned the heat up in a meeting 30 years ago, and some bloggers.
Only, it probably never happened. Oh dear.
No wonder nobody takes you seriously now (if anyone ever did).
“So every scientific association on the planet is wrong because”…
… their evaluation committees were staffed by volunteers, meaning greens, and they didn’t really engage with skeptical objections. In some cases they shut out or ignored minority statements (AGU) or their own study subcommittees (APS).
You mistake the opinion of the politicians who run those associations with the opinion of the members.
Then again, alarmists are famous for using bad data to form their own opinions.
Al Gore arranged for the aircon to be turned off.
” The disreputable actions of far too many activist scientists have blackened the names of every honest climate scientist and indeed of the entire field. ”
That was AGW ‘s intent. It is a political movement disguised as science.
When you start from the basis that the only way you can win is be applying ‘tricks ‘ you have admitted that your ideas cannot stand on their own strength, which should make you question the validity of your ideas
Of course religions do not work like that , ‘faith ‘ is all that is required , and the more ‘faith’ you have the less you need to consider facts .
Willis when you write:
“they still haven’t convinced the core of the US population that CO2 is the double extra secret control knob that can simply be turned up and down to regulate the global temperature to the nearest degree.”
It reminds me of one of the first things I learned in engineering school (and relearned over and over throughout my career in systems engineering):
“For every complex problem there is a simple solution and it’s wrong.”
It comes from:
For Every Complex Problem, There Is an Answer That Is Clear, Simple, and Wrong. So almost said H.L. Mencken as part of a longer aphorism. The whole quote is, “Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”Dec 7, 2015
Steve Milloy
Ah, yes, how could I forget Steve?
w.
Another great perspective, Thanks Willis. A typo, missing the second ‘e’ in ‘pere’, Pielkes Per et Fil.
Thanks, fixed.
w.
Willis….
Yes! A nice article to mark the event and remind us all of the social, economic & industrial vandalism wrought by these malign, misguided people and their followers. It begs the question of what could have been done with all the money that’s been wasted on this farce. As Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out many times, we could solve many real world problems with all that loot.
Also, BTW, since somebody pointed out the required “e” in Pere, you should also have an “s” in Fils (=son). Thanks!
+1 thank you.
Lurker
In my view, the biggest fraud committed in all of this is when the National Weather Service (or someone! in that field) decided to name June 1st ‘the first day of meteorological summer’.
Meteorologists have decided that the 1st day of a month is easier to deal with that the real day of seasonal change, so the 1st day of meteorological whatever is what THEY say it is. Another sample of their need to control something they cannot control. I don’t know who was behind this, but it is ridiculous.
Summer starts with the Summer Solstice, which is today, June 21st. It is THE longest day of the year.
It does NOT start on a day picked by a bunch of people who had to use computer modeling to figure out that warm air twists as it rises (wind shear) and moves forward, when they could have spent some time in direct observation watching a smoke stack or in a hayfield watching hot air tossing cut hay around. Mars has dust devils, too.
The laziness involved and the need to control what people think or believe is just appalling.
Today is THE first day of Summer. Happy Summer Solstice!
Doesn’t it make more sense to have the longest day as Midsummer’s day?
Yes it does. Summer really starts about June 1st. Winter starts about November 1st. The current definitions are beyond stupid.
Yes, and I did agree that using Mid-summer’s Eve is fine with me, but the meteorologists are putting the start of Winter on December 1st, not November 1st. It’s this deception which I object to.
Where I am now, snow frequently falls in October while the gees are still migrating. It isn’t moving the start of Winter backward when that happens, however.
The Winter Solstice is the shortest day of the calendar year. We all know that. I think the Romans had their Saturnalia at that time, and that started their new year.
The Roman new year was in March, until Caesar moved it to January 1.
Thanks, Felix. Latin class was a long, long time ago.
Phil.
Glad you said that rather than me.
You can take the flak from Sara.
🙂
Not that it matters in the slightest, but it’s a bit of a hassle to have to look up the astronomical charts to figure out what the first day of summer is, or any of the other seasons, since they move around from year to year.
Well, frankly, Phil, in them there Olden Times when people didn’t have calendars and clocks, and based their activities on the appearance of the Sun at specific spots on the horizon at specific times of the year, Spring and Summer were not separate seasons in our sense of the word. Spring began with horses foaling, sheep lambing and cattle calving, not based on the Roman calendar. There was also, in some cultures such as Stonehenge (lunar and solar) and Chaco Canyon, a lunar-based timing.
In the sense that the longest day of the year was and still is the Summer Solstice and there was no wall calendar to check, then yes, the label Mid-Summer’s day is applicable, but it’s a modern term – modern, meaning that even Shakespeare used it.
My objection to ‘meteorological’ season is that it appears to be an attempt to dismiss the past that is so important to keep intact.
If I say I agree with Phil, does that reduce my chances of getting one of your home-cooked meals at the eventual WUWT meet-up?
rip
Oh, you’d get that anyway, ripshin. I don’t care if people disagree with my viewpoint.
Since it’s raining and chilly enough to make it worth the effort, I am fixing red beans and rice with smoked sausage for supper, and cornbread. Always cornbread. Makes a great snack, too.
Sara
Sounds good, I’ll have rip’s portion.
Willis: You are a model of curiosity and transparency.
Without I hope being too gloomy, I would add some caveats to your hopefulness that things are “turning around.” There is a replication crisis in many fields of science, including, surprisingly enough, NASA’s study of the size of asteroids. One would think medical research, including diet and nutrition, would be golden because it is close to home for people; we need to look after #1. Yet these fields are also marbled with bullshit. Part of the problem is that there have always been too many boomers (which is different from the Malthusian point that there are too many people); when they sought jobs in the academy, “publish or perish” created incentives to shovel out poor quality work. Government has played a huge role in the way it directs rivers of money. I think one big issue is that modern or post-modern people can’t decide what to do about nature: accept it as a standard or at least a limitation–something to live up to, or live within? Or is it something to be overcome in order to make human life as good (including as just) as possible? The latter might put an emphasis on science as our greatest hope of transforming the world, but it can also lead to utopian hopes, potentially crazy and unscientific, even cruel. If people want to reduce CO2 emissions, they should embrace nukes, but they don’t even study this possibility. There are plenty of anti-vaxxers and anti-GMOers in the academic community.
Bravo, Willis. Very well done.
Cheers, Bob
Thanks, Bob. Always good to hear from you.
w.
Another avid lurker here, although I read every article, I’ve only commented a hand full of times over the last 12yrs or so. I’d like to thank Anthony for providing the medium, and his tenacity in the face of oppersition. Also all the authors, mods, and commenters who have contributed to a great website, one that has changed my mindset over the years, from one originally formed by focusing on deluded greenwash and peak oil doom to something much more pragmatic.
We bought our “doomstead” 14yrs ago, back then, green friendly woodburning heating/cooking seemed the way to go, but let me tell you, sourcing, cutting, splitting, and seasoning enough wood, with enough calorific value, to heat a 2000 sq ft building is not practical! I started with hand saws and mauls, with a small car trailer, this evolved into chainsaws and hydraulic splitters on a 1965 Ford 2000 tractor and trailer I restored for the purpose. We got through 47 M3 of “free” Willow one year, free is in inverted commas because it mite be free in the field, but by the time you add in the labour required to get it into the stove it’s a long way from free!
Sanity prevailed, we’re in the process of renovating the building. I baulk at the wasted cost of all the copper pipes/cylinders we’re ripping out from the back boilers, although the £800 scrap value was nice, it’ll help pay for the modern oil fired underfloor heating system, and propane cooking range the wife always wanted, it won’t cover the ridiculous cost of the insulation we need to meet greenwashed building code regulations. We looked at open loop GSHP heating, eyewatering costs, although the actual pump and borehole was reasonable (about £14k), the regulatory costs involved were rediculous since to get the gov payments you had to use an approved contractor, who sets the price based on the RHI payments rather than actual costs, we’d have been lucky to get the system in for less then £40k! Maybe the insulation costs will be repayed in heat savings within my lifetime, though I doubt it!
Regrets, I have a few. Don’t regret getting our place, it’s in a idyllic location, no neighbours. Don’t even regret the Permacuture Design course I did, although my old Navy back injury prevents me growing our own food thesedays it has helped me design lots of things, from the building renovation to our soon to be natural swimming pool. All that wasted labour up the chimney, that’s a big regret. Not being able to offer Willis & family a (warm) space to stay on his visit to the UK, life is greatly enhanced by meeting interesting people, and Willis is still in the top 10 most interesting folks I’d like to meet, and play some guitar with.
Thanks Willis, for this post, for many others, and for being so damn interesting.
Haha…growing up on a farm in Tennessee, we also heated our house with wood. Grandpa always used to call it wood that heated you twice. Once when you cut it and once when you burn it.
rip
Lurker Pete
Keep posting.
Some climate regimes tend to run in 30-year cycles, right?
Long time lurker. I am always amazed at the breadth of knowledge by the commenters on this site. I am curious why the MSM, including Fox, has been doubling down on the climate scare stories lately. Is it the upcoming midterms?
Fox is doing that now? They really are nitwits. Frankly, I do not believe any TV talking head has a real clue about any of it.
It probably is the November elections. Fox should stick to gossip and stop grubbing around like CNN has been doing.
Dennis Bird
Death throes.
My impression is that the commenters are about half retired, graduate engineers and the other half geologists. Both disciplines get a very broad education. Sort of the technical equivalent of liberal arts.
Fox is up for sale. There is a bidding war between Disney and Comcast.
The celebration of the prophecy of the oracle of Hansen shows that one would have an easier time arguing the veracity of the virgin birth with an Evangelical than disagreeing with the gospel of the Church of Climate.
Whenever I see an article in the paper by a big brained economist from some major Canadian bank on how the value of the Canadian dollar is sure to head up, you can be sure the correct course of action is to sell Canadian dollars and buy US.
Free advice is pretty much always worth what you paid for it. This is very much my thoughts on the advice given on how to solve global warming.
Like it or not, fossil fuels are the heart of modern urban society. The energy they provide allows us to concentrate millions of people into massive cities.
The knee jerk solution is to tax fossil fuels out of existence. Very popular with the friends of government that stand to benefit. But will it work?
About as likely as the assurance that the Canadian dollar is going to go up in value.
I just keep track of what the soothsayers actually predicted, not what their modern day sycophants claim they predicted. Look at the Scenario A in the link below from Popular Science 1989 and all the other ludicrous predictions.
https://books.google.com/books?id=vAAAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA54&dq=james+hansen&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-zq_Bp-LbAhUnyoMKHZ72D7YQ6AEILTAB#v=onepage&q=james%20hansen&f=false
On a positive note they have not only ruined the reputation of science, religion, and environmentalism but have done great damage to hysterical Marxism.
McCarthy is vindicated, they are everywhere and they are a mentally unstable threat to human life.
A survey was done recently on Australian young adults . 70% believe in socialism Very scary.
Well, they’ve grown up under a socialist system, which permits them to survive by doing nothing at all.
When the chips are down and supplies on the shelf run out, how will they survive? Who will cook for them? (Not me!!!;-) )
All those sci-fi dystopian stories from Mad Max to Panem’s Hunger Games and Divergent’s dislike of individuality indicate that none of them see a real future ahead of them. That’s sad.
Worse than blackening the name of climate science, it has blackened the name of all science.
Look at how many people who the instant they hear the word “model”, assume that it’s a sc@m.
Just look at the reaction of many towards the article on a new model for how glaciers flow from yesterday.
Automatic rejection, the assumption by many that it’s a trick designed solely to support the notion that CAGW is real.
Yes we must resist the temptation toward becoming a cult of opposition.
Churchill went on “We shall never surrender . . .we will fight them on the beaches …”
“Nullius in verba” “Take no one’s word for it”.
Keep up your great effort effort to restore science to its foundations of validation of predictions against facts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_LncVnecLA
https://royalsociety.org/about-us/history/
For once I’ll follow instructions. “… after thirty years of climate science being hijacked by activists, we are now at the end of the beginning of the fight to return sanity …” Agree.
You left one very important person off your list w . . . Willis Eschenbach, whose writings (all of them) I thoroughly enjoy and learn from.