Is Climate Science Politicized? An Exchange

By Robert Bradley Jr.

Kim Rogalin posted on social media (Facebook) about the controversy concerning the (now removed) Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence (fourth edition) of the National Academy of Sciences Federal Judicial Center (FJC). Her post (August 28, 2026) summarized a Federalist article, “After Climate Activism Scandal, 25 State AGs Push Feds to Suspend Grants to National Science Org,” where author Shown Fleetwood wrote:

The problem with that chapter centered on the fact it was not neutral or unbiased, as the science manual is supposed to be, but was written by activist lawyers and academics actively involved in climate lawsuits filed across the nation, plus plaintiffs, advisors, and climate experts participating in those trials. Being written by public advocates of climate lawsuits, while citing materials and using whole sections written by attorneys and academics testifying for the plaintiffs in those lawsuits, doesn’t just tiptoe along the line of the appearance of impropriety. It is flat-out improper and should have been sufficient by itself to disqualify the climate science document from inclusion in the FJC science manual….

The Academy did the right thing by removing the climate chapter from its website and formally investigating.

Jim Cooper Exchange

Enter Jim Cooper, Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, who commented.

What BS. Members of National Academy of Sciences are elected based of quality of their scientific research not their political positions. Members are elected … in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Membership is a widely accepted mark of excellence in science and is considered one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive. Current NAS membership totals approximately 2,700 members and 500 international members, of which approximately 200 have received Nobel prizes.” [NAS here]

I then engaged him as follows:

Bradley: Shame that climate science ruined the reputation of science in general. From Climategate to RCP 8.5.

Jim Cooper: No the shame is folks unwillingness to read the scientific literature . As retired scientist and Scientific Journal Editor, I know that the scientific evidence for Climate Change is robust and the quality of the research on par with other scientific fields. The exchange of personal opinions in a few emails did not affect the quality of the published research. I challenge you to prove otherwise using links to credible documentation.

Bradley: Are/were you part of the problem? Climategate was about real-time cheating for ‘the cause’ (and getting called out for it) and an admitted promise to attempt to skew peer review. Read the quotations! Secondly, what about all the journal articles based on RCP 8.5. Retraction? Climate models are not science….

Bradley: What about the busted paradigm of RCP 8.5-based peer-reviewed articles? Why did the profession turn the speculative (and now rejected) model scenario into a base case? Politicization or mass intellectual error?

Cooper: Again and again I will remind you and others that posts without links to credible domination for claims are noise. Links please, otherwise I will not respond.

Bradley: It is international news in the climate community that RCP 8.5 was formally rejected after a decade of primary use. It was the basis for literally thousands of published climate articles. Roger Pielke Jr. has covered this in detail. Are you following the debate? So again my question: “What about the busted paradigm of RCP 8.5-based peer-reviewed articles?” rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/rcp85-is-officially-dead

Conclusion

My points were never directly answered by the self-anointed authority. If I had made the same case in a journal article, providing a link, what would Cooper have said? My guess is that he would state that it was not a quality journal. Such is the narrative that the experts do not want to disturb.

Climategate lives–and should never be forgotten. As a leading climate alarmist-qua-scientist, Andrew Dessler, stated back in 2009: “There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.”

Jim Cooper Background

In a previous Facebook post concerning the Climate Change Reality Forum, Cooper wrote:

The goal of this site is: “The Climate change reality forum is an open Facebook group established to reach people with information that differs from the IPCC’s official position on this subject.” IPCC presents scientific research findings and the only valid debate must be with scientific research findings accompanied by full citation of sources not opinions. But I find that the latter predominant thus are not honest discussions of reality.

This led to more than one hundred comments, with Cooper responding to criticism by stating:

It’s your responsibility to prove your claims using data and/or previous published research findings. That’s part of critical thinking, and I repeat in science all statements and/or claims must be backed by citation of credible documentation. Please provide a link to paper where the figure appears….

How true–except when it comes to climate science and other politicized areas of scientific research.

5 9 votes

Article Rating

32 Comments

ResourceGuy

October 15, 2026 10:21 am

The academy was late to respond and that is another problem.

Sweet Old Bob

October 15, 2026 10:32 am

Biased ?

Do wild bears crap in the woods ?

😉

Gunga Din

October 15, 2026 10:48 am

“Is Climate Science Politicized?”
Of course not!
Everybody knows that Michael Mann’s “The Cause” was about scientific integrity.
(Anybody know how to make a giant “/SARC” tag?) 😎

SxyxS

Reply to Gunga Din

October 15, 2026 11:00 am

If climate science is not politicized than politics do not exist.
Climate science is more political than politics themselves – it has to be as it can not win the fight on the scientific battlefield.

NotChickenLittle

October 15, 2026 10:50 am

Regardless, catastrophic climate change due to humans is relentlessly presented as gospel in the press and popular media, in schools from elementary through university, and as a tenet of faith on the political left. “Everybody knows” climate change is happening and at an unprecedented rate due to “fossil fuels” and the Magic Molecule CO2. The drumbeat never stops.

It’s as if the proponents of CAGW have never experienced weather extremes before, in their whole lives, until one happens – it’s hot this summer and records were set somewhere: “See! Climate change is real!” It rains somewhere and floods result: “See! How can you deny climate change!?” And on and on.

And the “climate scientists” some secretly and some openly ride the waves of propaganda which benefit them, not in search of truth but only in self-interest, the truth be damned.

Nicholas Schroeder

October 15, 2026 10:54 am

“It’s your responsibility to prove your claims using data,,,”
Uummmm, yum, data……

You said:
Kewl & thanks some more.

Copilot said:
You’re welcome, Nick. https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/17.0.2/svg/1f604.svg
And honestly, thanks for uploading the PPT. It moved the conversation from slogans to something much more productive: an actual experimental argument.

After reading it, I think I understand your position better than when we started:

Your primary claim is not that arithmetic is wrong.
Your primary claim is not that the Sun supplies more or less energy than the standard budget shows.
Your primary claim is that radiative and non-radiative heat-transfer processes are inseparably coupled in a real surface-atmosphere system.

The heater experiment, fan experiment, mist experiment, sealed-box experiment, and vacuum experiment are all intended to demonstrate that changing the effectiveness of non-radiative pathways changes the equilibrium temperature and therefore the radiative share of the energy transfer.

Whether the broader climate conclusions follow is where the scientific debate would occur, but at least now I can see the logical chain you’re trying to build:
1.   Surface temperature depends on all heat-transfer modes.
2.   Therefore radiation cannot be considered in isolation.
3.   Therefore treating the Earth’s surface as an independent blackbody emitter is questionable.
4.   Therefore the 396/333/63 bookkeeping loop should be re-examined.
That is a much more precise argument than many climate debates ever get to.

One thing I particularly appreciate is that your presentation explicitly tries to connect a physical experiment to the theoretical argument rather than relying solely on criticism of the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram.

So: kewl discussion. Thanks for sharing the report. https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/17.0.2/svg/1f44d.svg
And for what it’s worth, if you ever decide to refine the presentation for a technically skeptical audience, I’d focus heavily on slides 7, 12, and 13, where the heater/vacuum methodology and conclusions are presented, because that’s the part most likely to generate a substantive physics discussion rather than a philosophical one.
Sources

Consensus view: A bad assumption, bad math, bad physics, bad balance, insults and censorship.

My view: Hard data, classical science, experiment, balance and open debate.

Nick Schroeder, BSME CU ‘78

Joseph Zorzin

October 15, 2026 11:03 am

Cooper said, “I know that the scientific evidence for Climate Change is robust and the quality of the research on par with other scientific fields.”

Absurd. Certainly not on a par with physics and chemistry, most of which can be verified in a lab. I’ve said it before on this forum and I’ll say it again, the mass of a proton is 1.67262192 × 10-27 kilograms. Now, that’s robust science. When has climate “science” come up with FACTs like that?

Joseph Zorzin

October 15, 2026 11:05 am

“Climategate lives–and should never be forgotten.”

Has it ever been covered in a major science journal? Wasn’t it quickly covered then rapidly forgotten by the MSM?

Jeff Alberts

Reply to Joseph Zorzin

October 15, 2026 1:27 pm

After several ~~investigations~~ whitewashes.

Joseph Zorzin

October 15, 2026 11:12 am

Cooper is obviously focused on the trivial change in temperature supposedly world wide. But, many climate crisis skeptics agree there is a trivial change- very trivial! Cooper fails to appreciate the politics involved- such that we’re told we must spend trillions to arrive at net zero nirvana. And I bet he never addresses other concerns like how we don’t like seeing millions of acres of land being covered with solar panels and whale habitat being disturbed by at sea wind turbines. And the vast amount of new mining that will be necessary to produce vast amounts of wind and solar energy. And the problem of industrial scale batteries. And he seems unaware that many areas of the world will be BETTER with a slight warming- longer growing seasons for example. So, he seems to think he’s won the battle because the skeptics can’t PROVE that there isn’t a trivial change in temperature.

Joseph Zorzin

Reply to Joseph Zorzin

October 15, 2026 11:14 am

Then Cooper goes on to say, “It’s your responsibility to prove your claims using data and/or previous published research findings. That’s part of critical thinking….”

What exactly have climate “scientists” actually PROVEN? So, only he understands critical thinking- implying that the skeptics are dummies.

Jeff Alberts

Reply to Joseph Zorzin

October 15, 2026 1:28 pm

They have only proven that there have been changes in averages.

Nicholas Schroeder

Reply to Joseph Zorzin

October 15, 2026 1:31 pm

GMST rise 0.0156 C/y per 40 y UAH.

-1

Phillip Chalmers

Reply to Nicholas Schroeder

October 15, 2026 3:51 pm

There is no aspect of reality validly designated as a global mean temperature in any way shape or form.
It is a fantasy, a notion, a spurious mental invention using crude mathematics.
The only objective data directly relevant to the question will ever be a measure of the amount of energy leaving the planet and the amount of energy arriving on the planet collectively measured and aggregated over a thirty year period.
That would then tell us about the state of something humans call a “climate” applied to planet earth for about one human lifetime.

Rud Istvan

October 15, 2026 11:13 am

‘Climate Change Reality Forum’
I will bet that Forum never discusses the following realities:

Sea level rise did not accelerate as predicted.
Arctic summer sea ice did not disappear as predicted.
Polar bears were never threatened as predicted, as they consume about 80% of their annual caloric intake during the spring ice seal whelping season.
Glacier National Park did not lose its glaciers as predicted.
Climate models predicted a tropical troposphere hotspot that does not exist.

KentN

October 15, 2026 11:27 am

Shouldn’t Mr Cooper provide links supporting “I know that the scientific evidence for Climate Change is robust and the quality of the research on par with other scientific fields.” ?

Rud Istvan

Reply to KentN

October 15, 2026 11:54 am

He can’t because there aren’t any.
”quality of research on par with other fields”. Some counter examples:

In 2010 Dessler published a paper purporting to observationally prove that cloud feedback was positive. Except his correlation coefficient was 0.01.
In 2013 Marcott published a paper in Science purporting to prove the hockey stick. Except the paper was easily provable academic misconduct. And when presented with indisputable evidence, Science did nothing.
In 2016 PMEL published a paper purporting to show that ‘ocean acidification’ had caused spat set failure at the Whiskey Creek Oyster Hatchery, ignoring that Whiskey Creek was not estuarine and that the spat set failure was caused by the Hatchery stupidly not adjusting its Pacific seawater intake to summer estuarine pH when forcing its oysters to spawn by raising the seawater temperature to summer estuarine levels.

rah

October 15, 2026 11:43 am

A story with a rhetorical question as it’s title.

Jim Gorman

October 15, 2026 12:18 pm

Seldom if ever, does climate science provide a variance of a distribution when quoting a mean value. Without some idea of the range in a distribution, one has no way to judge if a change in the mean value is significant or not.

Sparta Nova 4

October 15, 2026 12:18 pm

Oh boy. This will be fun. Or esteemed “flame warriors” will have a field day with this.

Sparta Nova 4

October 15, 2026 12:19 pm

Missing is the definition of the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers, requiring unanimous concurrence by over 130 political representatives.

Sparta Nova 4

October 15, 2026 12:25 pm

The Guardian (one of our favorite publications /sarc) now calls it Climate Breakdown.

Charles Armand

October 15, 2026 12:27 pm

(This message is long; it consists of two parts.)

Mr. Cooper’s reactions remind me of this line by M (Judi Dench) in Casino Royale, after Bond was caught on surveillance cameras causing a disturbance in Africa: “They only care about what we do if we’re photographed doing it.”

Here, there are no photographs, but there is written evidence of agreements between researchers belonging to the same clique to silence dissenting opinions, boycott journals publishing work they disapprove of, and provide as little information as possible to those who request it (and are legally entitled to obtain it under FOIA). For people like Mr. Cooper, this is apparently not enough to demonstrate that climate science and the institutions involved in it are thoroughly politicized and engage in intellectual sectarianism that flouts good scientific practice. This is absolutely appalling. The fact that such prominent figures in the climate “consensus” as Phil Jones, Michael Mann, and others engaged in these exchanges tells anyone acting in good faith more than enough about how transparency was never an option seriously considered by the proponents of institutional climate science.

I can no longer remember which climate scientist said something along these lines about the hockey stick curve: “I don’t see why we should provide them with the results of 25 years’ work if all they want to do is pick it apart.” Reading that, I felt as though I were listening to a petulant child. Why should it matter that 25, 50, or 75 years’ worth of work might be dismantled in a matter of weeks or months? That is what we call scientific progress.

For a scientist, stubbornly clinging to an error can lead to some strange things.

Here is a little story. Everybody knows the “water memory,” a theory developed by Jacques Benveniste, who fell into disrepute after the results of his work were published in an article in the prestigious (which apparently matters) scientific journal Nature, before being demolished by a rigorous investigation. The article was retracted, as it should have been, but Benveniste could not accept it. He then developed a new theory to salvage the original one: what he called “digital biology.” Here is what Gemini has to say about it:

“Isolated in his INSERM laboratory (from which he would eventually be expelled), Benveniste refused to abandon his research. To explain how water could retain information in the absence of molecules, he formulated a new hypothesis: molecules did not communicate through direct contact, but through low-frequency electromagnetic signals.
According to him, each biological molecule has its own ‘digital signature’ or characteristic Hertzian fingerprint. It is this vibrational signal, rather than the matter itself, that would trigger biochemical reactions in the organism.

Taking his concept to the extreme in the late 1990s, Jacques Benveniste claimed to have succeeded in:

Recording the electromagnetic signal of an active molecule (such as ovalbumin or histamine) using a computer sound card.

Digitizing this signal and storing it as a standard computer file.

Sending this file by email (he notably claimed to have sent it from Clamart to the United States).

‘Replaying’ the audio signal onto a sample of pure water placed next to loudspeakers, claiming that the water then acquired the same biological properties as the original molecule.

This subsequent research finally destroyed his credibility in the eyes of the academic world.
Sanctions and ridicule: He lost INSERM’s support, his funding was cut, and he was awarded the derisory Ig Nobel Prize twice (in 1991 for water memory and in 1998 for the digitization of biological signals).

Setting up his own organization: To continue his experiments, he founded his own private company, Digibio, funded in part by private investors and supporters of alternative medicine.

Jacques Benveniste died in 2004, aged 69, without ever having succeeded in getting his digital biology protocols validated by an independent scientific body.

Although regarded as pseudoscience by the international scientific community, the idea of digital biology was taken up after his death by virologist Luc Montagnier (Nobel Prize in Medicine). Montagnier made similarly controversial claims that DNA emitted electromagnetic waves in water, temporarily reigniting the controversy without providing reproducible evidence.”

(Continued below)

Charles Armand

Reply to Charles Armand

October 15, 2026 12:28 pm

This may seem laughable (and understandably so), I ultimately find the whole story rather sad. Benveniste was a world-renowned immunology researcher, regarded by his peers as a very serious candidate for the Nobel Prize in Medicine, thanks to his groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of allergy and inflammation. These findings revolutionized the treatment of asthma and anaphylactic shock. A serious man, then, who had come up with an idea no more foolish than any other and who, had he admitted he was wrong, would have lost none of his credibility. How can one make scientific innovations if one is unwilling to take even the slightest intellectual risk? He was unable to detach himself from his mistake and sank deeper into it, like someone trapped in quicksand. In a different context, this reminds me of the way climate modelers cling to their model outputs to the point of prioritizing them over observations. So much work cannot possibly have been for nothing!
Well, yes and no. It was for nothing in the sense that it was refuted by various lines of evidence, but this failure taught us something. This particular path is not viable, here is why, and here is what that teaches us about the state of the world and how we can discover more about it. We must continue to make progress with even greater determination and complete honesty.

Feynman is one of my heroes. We know what a scientific genius and extraordinary communicator of science he was. But while it is true that great men themselves stand on the shoulders of giants, those giants would not necessarily have achieved much without the dozens, hundreds, and thousands of scientists whose names remain unknown, who never made a revolutionary discovery during their careers, yet who nevertheless kept digging away relentlessly, out of sheer love of knowledge.

Giving_Cat

October 15, 2026 12:44 pm

Climate Science is every bit a science as is Economics.

Rud Istvan

Reply to Giving_Cat

October 15, 2026 1:19 pm

There are two BIG important differences.

Economics does not need to call itself a ‘science’.
Economics is usually at least directionally useful, even if not precise.

’Climate Science’ is neither a ‘science’ nor useful.

Frank from NoVA

Reply to Rud Istvan

October 15, 2026 1:52 pm

Keynesian economics, and its many variants, is a pseudo science that became ‘mainstream’ because it justifies / enables active government intervention in the economy. It’s basically how the US government piled up almost $40T of unpayable debt since the so-called gold window was closed in 1971.

Rud Istvan

Reply to Frank from NoVA

October 15, 2026 2:19 pm

Yes, but speaking as a PhD level economist, economics is a LOT more than just macro Keynesian spending policy. There is macro Freedman monetary policy. There is macro Leontief I/O analysis. There is micro price elasticity of demand. There is micro economy of scale. And outside macro and micro, there is also much valuable stuff like capital market theory or behavioral expectations. Plus a lot of math ‘tools’ first developed for econometrics.

I'm not a robot

Reply to Rud Istvan

October 15, 2026 3:32 pm

It is not Climate Science, it is Climate Politics. Very different playing fields.

I'm not a robot

Reply to Giving_Cat

October 15, 2026 3:29 pm

Ouch!

I’ve always been a bit impressed by Economists, since they reportedly must grok partial differential equations.

But then, there is that “dismal science” moniker.

MarkW

October 15, 2026 2:23 pm

Anyone who claims that those who are elected to the NAS based solely on their scholarship has demonstrated a will full blindness to reality.

Phillip Chalmers

October 15, 2026 3:40 pm

A man who treats models and the study of models as genuine, authentic mainstream science is not a scientist.
A man who does not understand that pal review is not any sort of review, historically data and evidence has always been required when guesses aka theories are being tested and judged.
Review means – do the work again taking into account all the possible ways that the theoretical claim might be falsified.
The thermometer and the tidal gauge and the historical record are data, models are tools examining complex systems to find clues as to internal mechanisms.
The IPCC models have failed the test of time – all predictions have actually been wrong when the time has arrived to test reality.
They have also been wrong by greater margins.