People in this country, (and perhaps everywhere), fall into two categories, Useful Idiots and their masters, and the rest of us. Walter Williams is most definitely with the rest of us. The Warmers Strike Back by Walter E. Williams http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2010/03/17/the_warmers_strike_back Stephen Dinan's Washington Times article "Climate Scientist to Fight Back at Skeptics," (March 5, 2010) tells of a forthcoming campaign that one global warmer said needs to be "an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach" to gut the credibility of skeptics. "Climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of 'being treated like political pawns' and need to fight backâ¦" Part of their strategy is to form a nonprofit organization and use donations to run newspaper ads to criticize critics. Stanford professor and environmentalist Paul Ehrlich, in one of the e-mails obtained by the Washington Times said, "Most of our colleagues don't seem to grasp that we're not in a gentlepersons' debate, we're in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules." Professor Thomas Sowell's most recent book, "Intellectuals and Society," has a quote from Eric Hoffer, "One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation." Environmentalist Professor Paul Ehrlich, who's giving advice to the warmers, is an excellent example of Hoffer's observation. Ehrlich in his widely read 1968 book, "The Population Bomb," predicted, "The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer." Ehrlich also predicted the earth's then-3.5 billion population would starve back to 2 billion people by 2025. In 1969, Dr. Ehrlich warned Britain's Institute of Biology, "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." Despite these asinine predictions, Ehrlich has won no less than 16 awards, including the 1980 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' highest award. Stanford University professor and environmentalist activist Stephen H. Schneider is another scientist involved in the warmer retaliation. In a 1989 Discover Magazine interview, Professor Schneider said, "We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." Former Colorado Sen. Tim Wirth, now president of the United Nations Foundation, in 1990 said, "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we'll be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy." Environmental activist predictions have been dead wrong. In National Wildlife (July 1975), Nigel Calder warned, "... the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind." In the same issue, C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization warned, "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed." George Woodwell's, founder of the Woods Hole Research Center, comments suggest that the warmers are gearing up for a big propaganda push. In one of his e-mails, Woodwell said that researchers have been ceding too much ground. He criticized Pennsylvania State University for their academic investigation of Professor Michael Mann, who wrote many of the e-mails leaked from the Britain's now disgraced Climate Research Unit. Stephen Dinan's Washington Times article reports, "In his e-mail, Mr. Woodwell acknowledged that he is advocating taking 'an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach' but said scientists have had their 'classical reasonableness' turned against them," adding, "'We are dealing with an opposition that is not going to yield to facts or appeals from people who hold themselves in high regard and think their assertions and data are obvious truths.'" Fortunately, for the American people, Sen. James M. Inhofe, R- Okla., is considering asking the Justice Department to investigate whether climate scientists who receive taxpayer-funded grants have falsified data. He has identified 17 taxpayer-supported scientists who have been major players in the global warming conspiracy.
Yes, indeed scientists fight back and clowns like Inhofe will eventually pay the political price of their McCarthy-like threats against scientists. In an exceptionally strongly worded open letter, 250 members of the US National Academy, including eight Nobel Laureates, defend the integrity of climate science and call for an end to the lies, deceptions and McCarthyism: Climate Change and the Integrity of Science "We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet. "Scientific conclusions derive from an understanding of basic laws supported by laboratory experiments, observations of nature, and mathematical and computer modeling. Like all human beings, scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designed to find and correct them. This process is inherently adversarialâscientists build reputations and gain recognition not only for supporting conventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating that the scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a better explanation. That's what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einstein did. But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeply tested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of "well-established theories" and are often spoken of as "facts." "For instance, there is compelling scientific evidence that our planet is about 4.5 billion years old (the theory of the origin of Earth), that our universe was born from a single event about 14 billion years ago (the Big Bang theory), and that today's organisms evolved from ones living in the past (the theory of evolution). Even as these are overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong. Climate change now falls into this category: There is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend. "Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientific assessments of climate change, which involve thousands of scientists producing massive and comprehensive reports, have, quite expectedly and normally, made some mistakes. When errors are pointed out, they are corrected. But there is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change: "(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact. "(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. "(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth's climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes. "(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic. "(v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more. "Much more can be, and has been, said by the world's scientific societies, national academies, and individuals, but these conclusions should be enough to indicate why scientists are concerned about what future generations will face from business-as-usual practices. We urge our policy-makers and the public to move forward immediately to address the causes of climate change, including the unrestrained burning of fossil fuels. "We also call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them. Society has two choices: We can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively. The good news is that smart and effective actions are possible. But delay must not be an option." http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5979/689 Who would have thought the conspiracy was so far reaching?
They will still vote him in regardless. When scientists falsify their data, what do you expect. The embarrassment is those scientists.
The global warming "scientists" want to have it both ways. They are engaging in a political campaign using scientific arguments. They are not pursuing science for the sake of science. If they were, they wouldn't be so hysterical, be plotting retaliation aginast those who challenge them and bragging about twisting data to create alarming scenarios. When challenged however, and in the case of the East Anglia group, caught with their pants down, they retreat in horror, hissing that they are scientists and how dare people attack them or their motives. At the same tiem, they feel free to suggest that anyone who disagrees is either crazy or being paid off by oil companies. It's obvious there is a scientific disagreement, not consensus, and that the claims of imminent danger were about as accurate as the fears that Iraq was readying WMDs. In both cases claims of impending doom were used as a substitute for actual evidence.
The CRU at UEA were indeed challenged - by smear, innuendo, unfounded defamatory accusations and an extended campaign of harassment. Two successive inquiries exonerated Phil Jones and his associates of any scientific malpractice. There is no evidence of falsification of results. Stop telling lies. There is a scientific consensus. Every national science academy, scientific society and professional association of international standing that has publicly issued an official position has asserted the reality of AGW. Not one disputes it. This includes such bodies as the Royal Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union and dozens more. Taken together all of these organizations are the peak bodies of world science. Looks like consensus to me. It is true that some deniers get ridiculed on science blogs around the net. And it is generally richly deserved for the nonsense published. These situations generally come about when somebody makes extraordinary claims (that if they were actually provable would probably lead to a Nobel Prize) and backs them up with a pile of nonsense. One latest instances is a piece of twaddle on WUWT claiming there is no greenhouse effect because on Venus the high surface temperature is due to high atmospheric pressure. Now, I may just have a lowly BSc in Physics and done no science for 30 years, but I could see it immediately for the load of trash that it was. If anybody thinks I'm wrong, for a large sum of money I'll sell you the plans for a perpetual motion machine. It is absolutely right that such stuff gets the treatment it richly deserves. Scientific criticism is often quite harsh. It's a bit of a rough and tumble business where the best ideas survive. Society should expect no less. PS. The WMD claims were a shameful farrago of lies and deception but completely unrelated to climate science.
It's kind of silly to continue to debate this, but I'll ask you this last question. It's an extraordinarily easy one for someone who holds himself with such high regard . Are we getting hotter, or are we getting colder? I don't expect a definitive answer, seeing that the "climate scientists" have recently learned the beauty of the hedge, just give me the over/under