Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
Bureaucracies are ideal environments for groupthink because it is critical for them to eliminate any notion that they are unnecessary or that the problems might have a resolution. You control the story by any means necessary.
Those involved in fighting the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) deception from the start, are all too familiar with the signs of groupthink that I identified in an earlier article. It was even more important in this case because, as the leaked Climatic Research Unit (CRU) emails indicate, they knew it was a false message. Indeed, the fact that the emails were so damaging is strong evidence.
A role of some members of the group is to act as “Mindguards,” those “who act as self-appointed censors to hide problematic information from the group.” It appears, we have a case of one of the Mindguards still operating. The question is why?
Recently, an event occurred that on the surface seemed innocuous. It reminded me that even though CRU and its denizens were exposed for corrupting climate science, many of them escaped and scattered to plum jobs groupthink continues., some continue the battle. One of the people heavily involved almost from the start was Gavin Schmidt. He later gained employment with NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA GISS) where he appears to pursue the same activities of defending a false message. Recently it was reported that Schmidt sent the following Twitter message.
“This reminds me of a point made before (but not recently I think): the claim that the Jun 23rd 1988 Hansen testimony was deliberately scheduled for the climatologically hottest day of the year was (and is) wrong.”
The problem for Gavin is that the person who arranged the hearing explained what he did. Senator Timothy Wirth was interviewed on PBS Frontline, hardly a Koch Brothers sponsored network and responded to questions as follows.
“How did you know about Jim Hansen?
… I don’t remember exactly where the data came from, but we knew there was this scientist at NASA who had really identified the human impact before anybody else had done so and was very certain about it. So we called him up and asked him if he would testify. Now, this is a tough thing for a scientist to do when you’re going to make such an outspoken statement as this and you’re (sic) part of the federal bureaucracy. Jim Hansen has always been a very brave and outspoken individual.”
What else was happening that summer? What was the weather like that summer?
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.
And did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?
… 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. …
What is it about this that Schmidt doesn’t understand? Why is he claiming that it didn’t happen?
Some might say it’s because of the the recent WaPo article where Senator Wirth recants his former interview with PBS Frontline, which aired in 2007. Now 11 years later, he says he “made it up”, perhaps in response to blowback he’s gotten.
In my opinion, the answer to these questions appears to be in Schmidt’s role at the CRU. He was in groupthink classification a “Mindguard.” The group was increasingly annoyed at the questions and challenges they were getting as more people began to catch on to what they were doing. Schmidt proposed a counterattack.
The idea is that we working climate scientists should have a place where we can mount a rapid response to supposedly ‘bombshell’ papers that are doing the rounds and give more context to climate related stories or events.
The word “working” was used frequently by the group to suggest all those who criticized them lacked currency and inside information and were obviously uninformed. It is another trait of groupthink.
We know from the emails that they had reliable mainstream media people directly communicating with them. For example, on July 23, 2009, Seth Borenstein, masquerading as a national science writer for the Associated Press wrote to them,
“Kevin, Gavin, Mike, It’s Seth again. Attached is a paper in JGR today that Marc Morano is hyping wildly. It’s in a legit journal. Watchya think?”
Another example was the unhealthy connection between Richard Black of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the CRU. As Michael Mann wrote,
…extremely disappointing to see something like this appear on BBC. Its (sic) particularly odd, since climate is usually Richard Black’s beat at BBC (and he does a great job).
We may do something about this on RealClimate, but meanwhile it might be appropriate for the Met Office to have a say about this, I might ask Richard Black what’s up here?
RealClimate is a reference to Schmidt’s counterattack solution driven by their siege mentality, and clearly, these media people could serve as conduits. On December 10, 2004, Schmidt reported:
Colleagues, No doubt some of you share our frustration with the current state of media reporting on the climate change issue. Far too often we see agenda-driven “commentary” on the Internet and in the opinion columns of newspapers crowding out careful analysis. Many of us work hard on educating the public and journalists through lectures, interviews and letters to the editor, but this is often a thankless task. In order to be a little bit more pro-active, a group of us (see below) have recently got together to build a new ‘climate blog’ website: RealClimate.org which will be launched over the next few days:
The group he referred to included Mike Mann, Eric Steig, William Connolley, Stefan Rahmstorf, Ray Bradley, Amy Clement, Rasmus Benestad and Caspar Ammann. They are familiar names to anyone who followed the saga of the leaked emails and the ongoing climate science debate. Evasiveness pervaded the behavior recorded in the CRU emails, and RealClimate (RC) continued to counterattack.
So, we know Schmidt carved out a role as Mindguard at CRU. Now it appears he is continuing the role at NASA GISS. Why would he bother to concern himself with the shenanigans in 1988? Why would he try to revise what happened? We know the group has a history of rewriting history including the paleoclimatic and secular record.
There appear to be a few incentives. One is that public concern is waning as this report notes,
A lot of work on climate change these days is trying to address what seems to be a major part of the problem; people don’t care all that much.
A survey by the Guardian newspaper of 18,000 people in 17 different countries found that,
Overall, climate change achieved a 12.8 percent share of concern, ranking behind only international terrorism and the threat of poverty as the most concerning issues globally.
However, doesn’t that mean that 87.2% are not concerned?
The second incentive is the Trump election. It is threatening to expose the entire fiasco and certainly is making more people look at what was involved. US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement was followed by actions against the EPA and their involvement with the global warming issue. Pruitt began the process, but his replacement Wheeler is going to dig deeper and discover the entire story.
The third incentive is that the Green Climate Fund that replaced the Kyoto Protocol is failing. Virtually nobody is paying up, and the Executive Director Howard Bamsey resigned following a disastrous meeting in which no new projects were approved.
As more people reconstruct the entire AGW deception, they will undoubtedly find the Senator Wirth orchestration of the 1988 Senate hearing. The tone and details of the story are alarming and deeply disturbing to any normal outside person. What’s frightening is that Wirth appears to think that what he did was clever and well within the manipulations associated with Senate hearings. The truth is it is extreme even for that environment. Tell that story to the public, and you realize how damaging it is to the entire AGW story. I think that is why Schmidt wants to claim it never happened. On the face, this appears illogical because by mentioning it you run the risk of drawing attention. It was the type of risk the CRU group, with Schmidt’s active involvement as Mindguard, took for years. They thought as the creation of RealClimate confirms that by getting out in front of the story they could control it.
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Nice reading!
It is interesting to read how people in other cultures react to the so-called “Climate defenders”.
A first observation of the Climate Defenders, is that they seem to suffer from the well known decease called: Fact-fobia. But further studies of their rhetorics reveal that they are plain and simple specimens of the breed: Bureaucrats, and their goals are to attain power, keep and increase their power, and eliminate anyone who threatens their way of life.
In my home country, Norway, it is social suicide not to support the official view on “Human induced climate change.”
I have submitted about 100 articles and critical notes to various public media. like newspapers, and not one note has been published.
I know that this is censorship, because I was a regular contributor to these media regarding social issues for many years, and all those articles were published.
This note is just to tell you that in Norway the methods of silencing anyone who try to criticise the official view on the climate change, is to deny them access to public space, and to cut off any public spending. Like newspapers who dares to print anything remotely criticising the official views, will loose their financial support from the government. Anyone who do research showing that the mean temperature has actually gone down the last 40-50 years will loose their research grants, get fired, and will be denied any academic job.
And so on.
I am a retired petroleum geologist, who to a large degree has made a living of reconstructing paleo climate.
Schmidt was handpicked not for his science but he was a ‘safe pair of hands ‘ who would carry-on with Hansen ‘good work’ without question.
At this stage it worth considering what makes a good climate ‘scientist’ , a think skin, a massive ego and an ability to talk through the side of your mouth is clearly important. But more importantly it seems a willingness to employ industrial scale levels of smoke and mirrors, to lie with a straight face and to never question why models fail to match reality .
But can you blame them, this is an area that went from a little known and less cared about area of natural sciences to major league with more money than it could spend , in a short time and without actually offering much on the science front . All that money and all those ‘experts ‘ and computing power and they still no better at weather forecasting. Meanwhile their professional standards can be best called ‘heads you lose , tails I win ‘ so its an easy , well paid life for third rate academics who otherwise would find it hard to get any job, while a lucky few have made millions . So why would they want to change any of that ?
Hand-waving rubbish. Post something informative, back it up with something, anything.
No body believes politicians are other than self interested. Money, power and the votes that keep that coming are their three driving objectives. All else is optional. They assume whatever gets these goals is justified, debate proves the case, not the facts. Which is why lawyers and the law control things, not reason, not justice, not the facts. Politics and politicians are not decent, honest or truthful, but they make sure what they do is legal, by laws they pass. The basis of the democratic system. Twas always thus. just hope it doesn’t go the next step – Hitler, Putin, Erdogan, Netenyahoo, Sisi and most of the African lot were/are all elected. Are politicians inherently bad and self serving or good and altruistic. Discuss.
He might have been part of a discussion to delay it hence the 6th/9th 23rd mix up. Only thing that makes sense, mixed with self importance. Hardly something completely made up. Definitely not the whole truth.
As a result of climate “science”, all science is now regarded as “science”. Where there was once great respect, mixed with healthy skepticism, for science, now there is an expectation of lies and scams. It is increasingly difficult to separate science from dogma. Now one must consider the agenda behind each scientific opinion, perhaps most importantly where is the funding coming from and who controls it.
The search for the truth has by many small deviations turned to the search for money.
It requires a complete suspension of critical thinking to find Wirth guilty of some crime or critical role in the beginnings of the AGW history. The implication is that the room temperature played a far more important role in how Congress received Hansen’s testimony than the actual charts and information he shared. The implication is “gosh, it’s a hot day – we believe you!” as opposed to “it’s overcast and cool – I don’t believe your data!”
Wirth and Hansen were relying on creating a ‘complete suspension of critical thinking’. It is called political theatre, and it is far more effective than minor props such as charts and figures.
A career politician boasting about setting up a committee room to make it hotter than it is supposed to be to push an agenda? And now, when the public perception of AGW is way down on the list of importance, he says that he was lying to attempt to give the agenda a boost? I am shocked! Shocked, I say, to believe a politician would do such a thing!!!
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” Mencken
It is likely a stretch to believe that the testimony of some obscure political operative like Hansen could give birth to the whole CAGW movement.
Let’s face it, if it wasn’t global warming it would be something else. Our politicians and media seem to require the populace to be constantly alarmed about something
The end of the cooling trend from the 1940’s to 1980 is what gave birth to the CAGW movement.
Before 1980 the rage was Human-Caused Global Cooling. When the cooling trend stopped, the climate scientists latched on to another speculation: Human-Caused Global Warming/Climate Change.
For some reason, Alarmist Climate Scientists seem to think trends go on forever.
It is amazing as to what motivate the trolls to come out. When there are certain very specific topics, like some discussion of one of the high priest in the AGW religion, the trolls seem to come out of the woodwork. While there are a couple that try to make what appear to be logical arguments others do not even pretend they just act as the most nasty of trolls. It is like some tweet or text message goes out calling the trolls together to attack and obfuscate.
Fanatics have to have some belief system that makes them feel ‘special’. When Marxism waned and its economic dogma had failed again, these fanatics moved to climate. Essentially it became the new religion of totalitarianists. The enemies of the future are always with us.