The Person who Set the Stage for Entire Deception of Human-Caused Global Warming (AGW) – Stephen Schneider.

By Dr. Tim Ball,

Most of the world still believes that humans are causing climate change. The belief persists, despite the evidence of deliberately corrupted science exposed in leaked emails, and consistently failed forecasts. It persists without any empirical evidence. Unnecessary policies and massively expensive policies evolved from the deception of certainty. Carbon taxes and alternative energies that are unable to replace fossil fuels without some massive breakthrough in energy storage capacity continue to drain budgets and divert from solving real problems. The momentum behind this deception is amazing and at present unstoppable. It is driven by a certainty that is supported by concocted evidence from the pre-programmed, pre-determined outcome, computer models. There is no empirical evidence, so how and why does the belief continue? How did the idea gain and maintain this force? I believe, there is one person to blame because he set the tone and created the mantra that facts don’t matter; he made it necessary to maintain the illusion of AGW at all cost. It was so effective that even to ask questions is to put you in a category of societal repulsion. You become one of those “deniers.”

I was very annoyed when I saw the eulogy to Stephen Schneider in the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It reads in part;

The Synthesis Report of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is dedicated to the memory of Stephen H. Schneider, one of the foremost climate scientists of our time.

Steve Schneider, born in New York, trained as a plasma physicist, embraced scholarship in the field of climate science almost 40 years ago and continued his relentless efforts creating new knowledge in the field and informing policymakers and the public at large on the growing problem of climate change and solutions for dealing with it. At all times Steve Schneider remained intrepid and forthright in expressing his views. His convictions were driven by the strength of his outstanding scientific expertise… His association with the IPCC began with the First Assessment Report which was published in 1990, and which played a major role in the scientific foundation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. His life and accomplishments have inspired and motivated members of the Core Writing Team of this Report.

The last sentence tells the story but only if you know the complete involvement of Schneider in the greatest deception in history.

The dilemma for all these early advocates of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was that if they knew climatology, they knew that the work of the IPCC was corrupted science. If they didn’t speak out, they were complicit in the deception. If they didn’t know, and a remarkable number didn’t, then they are incompetent. Often, some only became aware of the deceptive science because of an untoward circumstance, such as associating with a known skeptic.

Schneider knew because he published a book about global cooling in 1976 titled, “The Genesis Strategy” when cooling was the consensus. He wrote,

“There is little food stored to cushion the shock of the kinds of weather problems that so suddenly and unexpectedly damaged crops in 1972, 1974 and 1975, and there is growing evidence that such damaging weather may occur more frequently in the next decade than in the last one. The most imminent and far reaching [danger] is the possibility of a food‐climate crisis that would burden the well to do countries with unprecedented hikes in food prices, but could mean famine and political instability for many parts of the nonindustrialized (sic) world.”

The author of the NYT article summarizes that Schneider was

“…reflecting the consensus of the climatological community in his new book, “The Genesis Strategy.”

I was part of the climate community at the time but knew from the historical records and understanding of underlying mechanisms that this was just another climate cycle. Too many people exploited the pattern of the moment driven by funding, career enhancement or political persuasion. None of them looked at the science or worse and they only picked the science that appeared to confirm their situation. They jumped on what I call the trend wagon and argued it would continue forever. It was wrong, cynical, exploitive and had nothing to do with the amoral and apolitical positions and work that are essential to science.

Stephen Schneider set the tone for what followed. His mendacious, manipulative philosophy entered the public arena with his 1989 interview in Discover magazine, part of which said,

On the one hand we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but& which means that we must include all the doubts, caveats, ifs and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we have to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This double ethical bind which we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.

Sorry Stephen there is no decision between effectiveness and honesty. The fact he could even suggest that there was underscores and exposes the corrupt thinking that created and drove the massive deception. The problem is that people like Schneider are evil geniuses. It one thing to have such ideas, it is another to implement them. It parallels Maurice Strong’s implementation of the idea of “getting rid of the industrialized nations.”

In 1996 Schneider co-chaired a conference that put his idea of being effective without being honest into operation. It was a non-IPCC conference but included all the key players involved in the IPCC corruption ,and the CRU leaked emails. In fact, the conference titled was a manifesto on how to proceed, how to end-run science and the truth in every way. The conference titled “Characterizing and Communicating Scientific Uncertainty.” I urge you to read and weep but learn what Schneider did. Here is the opening paragraph.

Uncertainty, or more generally, debate about the level of certainty required to reach a “firm” conclusion, is a perennial issue in science. The difficulties of explaining uncertainty become increasingly salient as society seeks policy prescriptions to deal with global environmental change. How can science be most useful to society when evidence is incomplete or ambiguous, the subjective judgments of experts about the likelihood of outcomes vary, and policymakers seek guidance and justification for courses of action that could cause significant societal changes? How can scientists improve their characterization of uncertainties so that areas of slight disagreement do not become equated with purely speculative concerns, and how can individual subjective judgments be aggregated into group positions? And then, how can policymakers and the public come to understand this input and apply it in deciding upon appropriate actions? In short, how can the scientific content of public policy debates be fairly and openly assessed?

All the names are here, Santer, Schlesinger, Tol, Karl, MacCracken, and Trenberth with his first probability table (Figure1). It is an attempt to confuse by pretending to clarify.

Figure 1

The inclusion of Schneider’s eulogy and the sentiment it expresses about his influence on them and the entire IPCC process is absolute proof of my thesis. He more than any other person created and drove the biggest deception in history; intellectualized most perversely the concept of uncertainty into certainty and provided the method for converting inadequate and incorrect evidence into a form powerful enough to be the basis of world-changing philosophy and policy.