By Andy May
While researching my next book, I found a bit of interesting deception on the Intelligence Squared web site. This is the organization that hosted the famous March 14, 2007 global warming debate on the motion “Global Warming is not a Crisis.” Debating in favor of the motion were the late Michael Crichton, Professor Richard Lindzen (MIT, now emeritus), and Professor Philip Stott (University of London, emeritus). Against the motion were Dr. Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists, Dr. Gavin Schmidt of NASA, and Professor Richard Somerville of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The debate was held at the Asia Society and Museum in New York City. Their auditorium holds 258 people and, I presume, every seat was filled. The audience was polled on the assertion before the debate and after. According to the verbatim transcript of the debate (one of the tabs on the Intelligence Squared link above), moderator Brian Lehrer, announced the results at 1 hour 37 minutes:
“And now the results of our debate. After our debaters did their best to sway you…you went from, 30% for the motion that global warming is not a crisis, from 30% to 46%. [APPLAUSE]
01:38:58
Against the motion, went from 57% to 42%… [SCATTERED APPLAUSE, MOANS] And “undecided” went from 13% to 12%. The hardcore ambivalent are still among us. [LAUGHTER] So, in terms of opinion change, those in favor of the motion, have carried the day, congratulations to the team for the motion.”
You can hear the debate and the results on an NPR recording as well.
Gavin Schmidt was intensely embarrassed at their clear defeat in the debate. As Anthony Watts wrote in 2018, eleven years after the debate, Schmidt was so demoralized and defeated he still would not appear on stage with skeptical scientists, like Dr. Roy Spencer. Schmidt reportedly said debates are not worthwhile, regardless of the outcome. This is quite shocking to hear, debate is at the heart of scientific research. If you will not debate your points, you are not doing scientific work.
As you can probably imagine, I was nearly knocked to the floor when I clicked on the Intelligence Squared tab for the debate results on 28 December 2020. This was after I had listened to the debate and read the transcript. Under the tab on December 28 and still there January 6th, I read the winner, post-debate, was Against the motion, by 89%! Someone with access to the Intelligence Squared web site had radically changed the results from a win for the climate skeptics to a win for the alarmists. You may still be able to see this when you go to the web site. I wrote to them about this error December 28, and have received no answer.
As Wim Rost found, the Wayback machine shows that the correct results were on the web page December 15, 2016 as you can see below. Use this link to search the Wayback machine yourself. Be patient, it takes a little while to bring up the calendar.
There is certainly no excuse for lying about the results of this famous debate, but someone did.
Stretching the truth has never been a problem for the alarmists, therefore this re-writing of history fits right into their MO.
Next: “Ironing out” the Glacials. Belittling the MWP was just a warming up for them. Some Interglacials also didn’t behave: too warm. So much to do and so little time….
Looks like the change was made during the second half of Nov 2020 and first week of December 2020
I goggled Guardian and Lovelock to find that infamous interview from 11 years ago where he is not surprised at the Climategate emails because he has seen the dubious measuring of the ozone hole. I get a whole heap of damage control articles and podcasts posted since.
Just a little playful rascal. It must be like Jesus saying ” just joking” to the left.
Andy,
I am surprised that nobody here has mentioned the Forbes article by Roger Taylor from September 28, 2011-
” The Global Warming Debate Produces an Indisputable Winner”.
It covers the outcome of the Intelligence Squared Debate from March 14,2007.
The Motion was “Global Warming is Not a Crisis”.
The article is freely available online and outlines the facts you have here plus the following-
“For the next two hours the experts sparred on the science.
When the debate ended the audience rendered its verdict.
Now having had a chance to hear the scientists themselves,the audience switched sides(from a pre-debate vote of 57% to 30% against the motion with 13% undecided) and sided with the global warming ‘skeptics’.
By a vote of 46% to 42% the audience voted that global warming was not a crisis.”
The outcome of the Debate is indeed indisputable.
I have kept a copy of the article although I doubt anyone will try to send the Forbes article down the Memory Hole.
Make a scan of the article and post it as a .jpg.
Then it will be on WUWT for ever. 🙂
Here’s an archive link for that article, so even if they re-write the past you can still see it.
https://archive.is/IR4cX
Herbert, I read the article, I just didn’t need to cite it for this post. It is a good article.
13+ more years of “not a crisis” has happened since that debate. The evidence that there isn’t an impending crisis has grown, so the only thing the alarmists can do to prop up their scam is to lie and mislead. Expect to see even more dishonesty from the climate alarmists.
I will risk having my head torn off by venturing a political comment.
I have no place of pride in the debate on climate craziness, as a canadian we have the privilege of being lead by the virtue signaling Champ of climate change, so we have our own problems.
Which Biden probably makes far worse.
Reviewing the US election in light of what happened today, the democrats may very well have stolen it with massive fraud.
But that is a gigantic claim that requires extraordinary proof.
Isn’t that what is said to Loydo, Griff ET al on here every day regarding AGW?
If they feel the world is ending due to our actions its up to them to prove it.
If there was massive election fraud that too requires proof
hereistheevidence dot com, for one source.
If it can’t be proven in court of law how can it be evidence?
Don’t get me wrong, i’m as worried as anyone of what the radicals in the democratic party might get up to, but burning it all down isn’t a solution.
I think the last couple months of garbage now cost republicans the senate giving the democrats free run. They needed to calm things at least until the georgia runoffs
“But that is a gigantic claim that requires extraordinary proof.
Isn’t that what is said to Loydo, Griff ET al on here every day regarding AGW?”
That applies to the Trump Team’s claim’s, too. They need to convince the public that what they say is true.
I just heard a report that says a busload of Antifa thugs showed up at the Trump rally and it was they who caused the trouble, not the Trump people.
Now, I don’t have any confirmation of that yet, but think about it: Normally, you would think that if there is going to be a big Trump rally that there will be Antifa thugs to show up and cause violence among the Trump people, but Antifa was conspicuosly absent on that day. Why? Perhaps they and the Demcrats had a plan to ruin the Trump rally and blame it on Trump and his supporters.
One thing about it, in these cases, the truth usually comes out eventually, and many times does not represent what was reported initially.
Yes, Trumpers need to prove fraud, claiming it without proof is not acceptable.
as to Antifa doing the deed yesterday, none of those guys i see on film look like antifa to me, but yes lets wait and see.
What level of proof do you require?
Keep in mind that “beyond a reasonable doubt” does not apply to civil tort actions.
Whoever the criminals were that broke into the Capital Building, there were not that many of them compared to the crowd that was present.
I think the police arrested 52 people and are looking for several dozen others, so that’s not a lot of people compared to the estimated 50,000 people who were outside *not* causing any trouble.
Nobody condones the breakin of the Capital Buildng. Nobody. Including Trump, who called for a peaceful demonstration three times during his speech before the crowd marched to the Capital Building.
When the violence broke out, Trump called on the crowd to leave, and they left. Peacefully. The police had no trouble pushing the crowds back because the crowds were cooperating with them.
So Trump and the Republicans are being blamed for what a few hundred individuals did on their own. Nobody from the Republican side told them to do this.
And what about security? Obviously, the Capital police were not prepared for the breakin. Even though they knew tens of thousands of people were going to show up at 130pm. It was public knowledge. They were woefully unprepared.
But that’s not the only security problem that has been revealed in the last few weeks. We had an incident where someone walked up to Nancy Pelosi’s house and sprayed graffiti on it. Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and third in line to the presidency. And you can walk up close enough to her house to spray paint it? And as far as I know, they don’t even know who the perp is who did it. Unbelievable!
And Republican Senator Hawley had protestors on his front lawn scaring his wife and child to death with their screams.
I hope the Mad Mullahs don’t notice this lack of preparedness on the part of our politicians. It might give them ideas.
Expect more of this as Progressives move into power. US government statistics will eventually be no longer reliable.
Especially the FBI crime statistics. However, climate data will be jimmied to support AGW.
It will no longer be possible to check claims of political narrative when the data are no longer data.
Still shows 89% as of Jan 7th, even down to details of how the votes switched. Perhaps they are on an extended break?
You would think this would be a nice compact story for the media to dig into and report on.
Having been kicked to the kerb/curb by his former acolytes, Michael Moore might have a reason to dig into this.
I’ve ploughed through most of the debate here and what keeps coming to mind about scientific debate in front of an audience is.
Albert Einstein Quotes
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
There appears to be one prolific commenter who falls into the “you don’t understand it well enough” category.
If you explain simply and people say that’s nonsense then it’s quite likely it is nonsense.
Arthur Conan Doyle got it horribly wrong when he said “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” He didn’t consider unknowns both known and unknown.
If this is picked up by a newspaper, or someone like Guido I would think they would be screwed….
If someone has lied about this, what else have they lied about?
“One can evade reality, but he cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.” ~ Ayn Rand.