The Case of Michael Oppenheimer

Perhaps the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change doesn’t regard activist scientists as damaged goods because neither the National Academy of Sciences nor the American Association for the Advancement of Science does, either.

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Who is William R.L. Anderegg?

[photo credit]

The lead author of a research paper causing an uproar in the climate science world appears to be a student. Six months ago, a person with this same name (and an identical e-mail address) uploaded a blog post during the December 2009 Copenhagen climate summit.

Describing himself as "a student at Stanford University" William R. L. Anderegg was witness to an event that will long be remembered for the number of limousines imported into Denmark so that the earth-friendly delegates might spurn free public transit.

Certain that the occasion was historic, this naively young mind writes:

To say there is diversity here would be a bland verbal tribute to the stunning myriad of life. To say this is a conference of complex and difficult issues would be capturing only a molecule of water in a turbulent river. To say that this entire thing is overwhelmingly chaotic would pay tribute merely to a single snowflake in a whiteout blizzard...

As a student studying climate change, I knew that this was an astounding opportunity to attend this conference. As a young person, I knew this was an opportunity to shape the world that our generation will inherit.

Could you run that by me, again? The lead author of a paper which purports to assess the achievements and credibility of hundreds of collective years of scientific expertise, that lead author is a climate change student at Standford University?

The same Stanford University at which paper co-author Stephen Schneider happens to teach?

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>> The media, Mother Nature & oil spills
>> Shielding climate orthodoxy from free speech
>> The activists, the poll & the data
>> Climate bible gets 21 'F's on report card

Systemic Failure: Invasion of the Drama Queens

I love the boys over at Climate-Resistance.org because they're big-picture thinkers. Their analysis emphasizes the ethical, philosophical, and political aspects of the climate discussion.

This week they've been saying that replacing Rajendra Pachauri as chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) won't solve our problems. Personally, I think he needs to go. But it's true we'd be having a totally different discussion had numerous parties not failed us.

You have to be a bit of a drama queen to interpret a few degrees increase in temperature over the span of a century as a catastrophe. The fact that this mindset has been adopted by so many people means the failure has been systemic.

That's it man. Game over, game over. sound bite Aliens sound bites

Private Hudson (Bill Paxton), Aliens

Let's look at those who are now tainted by their support for the outrageously flawed 2007 IPCC climate report:

1. The United Nations, the wicked stepmother of this sad story. The IPCC is a United Nations creation. But it has no conflict-of-interest guidelines. It has no checks-and-balances to prevent its hijacking by special interests. It is also exempt from the sort of Freedom of Information provisions now commonplace in democratic nations. In other words, it lacks accountability and is structurally a disaster.
   


2. The Nobel Peace Prize committee, which devalued its most precious resource. The Nobel committee bestowed its seal of approval jointly on the IPCC and Al Gore - even though there are significant discrepancies between what the IPCC says will happen and what Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, dramatically implies. Now that the government of India has established its own climate body, and the government of the Netherlands says the IPCC got basic facts wrong (regarding the percentage of its country that falls below sea level), the Nobel prize has never seemed more tarnished.
   


3. NASA, supposedly a purveyor of scientifically-sound info. Until late January of this year, NASA parroted on its website the absurd IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by the 2030s. According to Jeffrey Kargel, at the University of Arizona, this statement "was just so wrong it wasn’t worth discussing." Surely the question needs to be asked: if NASA is clueless about such matters, why should we pay attention to anything it says about climate change going forward?


4. The science academies of more than a dozen of the world's best-educated nations. Reputable organizations such as the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of the UK have endorsed the IPCC's climate analysis. This joint 2008 statement cites the IPCC as though it were the purveyor of gospel. Did it not occur to these folks that third-party verification of IPCC findings should be undertaken before they, too, declared that the entire world needed to "transition to a low carbon society"? Drug trial results are closely scrutinized. Corporate financial statements are routinely audited. Yet science academy bureaucrats told us to blindly trust IPCC reports.
   


5. Prestigious, influential science journals. While the public assumes such journals are devoted solely to rigorous scientific inquiry, one-sided political commentary regarding global warming has appeared in the editorials of these publications since at least 2001. In 2008, Nature (owned by Macmillan Publishers which is, in turn, owned by the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group) even endorsed Barack Obama for US president. We're naive to imagine that the science media isn't political. [more here]
   


6. The mainstream media, who've become a cheerleading squad. It's the media's job to hold governments accountable, to shine light on special interests and snake-oil salesmen, to promote informed discussion about vital issues of the day. Instead, journalists fell for some of the lamest lines imaginable: the "science is settled" and the "debate is over." Rather than providing their readers, viewers, and listeners with the opportunity to make up their own minds (in a democracy, voters get to decide for themselves, remember?), journalists gushed over Al Gore's eco crusade and ignored skeptics. This is called betraying the public trust.


7. Environmental groups, who've morphed into big business. Green activists say they're saving the world. They're also empire building. As Climate-Resistance points out, between 2003 and 2008 the World Wildlife Fund raised $3.1 billion dollars. Similarly, Greenpeace raised $2.4 billion over a 12-year period. To keep that kind of money flowing into their coffers, might some people be willing to exaggerate environmental threats?
   


8. Politicians from top to bottom, from one end of the spectrum to the other. Wrapping oneself in a green cloak is easy. But solving tough problems in the real world is what they're elected to do. In Toronto, where I live, public transit faces dramatic funding cuts and there isn't enough money to keep school swimming pools open. But ads in my community newspaper tell me that grants "of up to $25,000 are available" to environmental groups for projects that "reduce emissions... and help us adapt to climate change." The more I examine governments around the developed world, the more I find this pattern.
   


9. Ordinary folks like you and me. Yes, many of us have busy lives. We're focused on getting our families through the week, and through the school year. Some of us are coping with illness and injury. We don't have endless hours to untangle complicated political questions. But before we make up our minds about a matter as important as climate change, should we not spend some time listening to more than one side of the story? We wouldn't convict someone of a crime without giving them an opportunity to defend themselves. We shouldn't convict carbon dioxide emissions of triggering all manner of disaster before we've considered the opinion of one or two people who think this theory is nonsense.
   

We've all contributed to this train wreck. Now we need to stare down the drama queens and start behaving like grownups.

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>> NASA's mistaken glacier info
>> The big picture: the Y2K lesson
>> Science says: hop on one foot
>> Scientific organizations: should we trust them?

Our Hyperactive Planet

A few pages before the Harvard-educated MD, Michael Crichton, ends his global-warming-doubting novel State of Fear, one of his characters says the following:

...our planet remains amazingly active. We have five hundred volcanoes, and an eruption every two weeks. Earthquakes are continuous: a million and a half a year, a moderate Richter 5 quake every six hours, a big earthquake every ten days. Tsunamis race across the Pacific Ocean every three months.

Our atmosphere is as violent as the land beneath it. At any moment there are one thousand five hundred electrical storms across the planet. Eleven lighting bolts strike the ground each second. A tornado tears across the surface every six hours. And every four days, a giant cyclonic storm, hundreds of miles in diameter, spins over the ocean and wreaks havoc on the land.

The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide. For these same apes to imagine they can stabilize this atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief.

Earlier, the character has explained that Earth is "five billion years old" and has been "changing constantly all during that time." The current atmosphere, he says, is actually the third distinct one the planet has produced.

Yes, this is a work of fiction. But it also contains a 20-page annotated bibliography, as well as a 5-page "Author's Message" followed by 6-page essay titled "Why Politicized Science Is Dangerous."

This essay reminds us that eugenics (which embraced the idea that "inferior" humans should be sterilized to protect the gene pool) was once supported by the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council.

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Scientific Organizations - Should We Trust Them?

Frequently, when one expresses skepticism regarding global warming theory, knowledgeable folk respond with a version of the following:

Numerous scientific bodies from around the world believe global warming is a real and present danger. Who are you to second-guess such esteemed organizations - to substitute your judgment for theirs?

This question is entirely and absolutely appropriate. When I began researching the global warming debate back in April, I was deeply troubled by the fact that I had no clue how to respond.

My journalistic instincts told me this issue smelled. It reeked of hype and fear-mongering. How could responsible scientific organizations be mixed up in this?

I'm now far closer to formulating a detailed outline of what seems to have happened to the culture of science in recent decades. That explanation will ultimately comprise one or two chapters in the book on which I'm working. For the moment, let me draw attention to two pieces of a larger puzzle.

First, I’ve been reading the 1976 third report to the Club of Rome titled RIO: Reshaping the International Order. This book's overall premise is that humanity must adopt a system of world government in order to solve problems associated with nuclear weapons, Third World poverty, and environmental degradation.

The book's proposed solutions include a laughable number of new international bodies to plan, regulate, and tax just about everything. In other words, bureaucracy and taxes will save us!

In Chapter 7, Section 5 (p. 133 of my Signet paperback edition) one finds the following quote:

“In the past, specialists [this term is used interchangeably with scientists] have often been reluctant to engage in political debate or to share their knowledge and fears with the general public. Given social dilemmas, they have often preferred to adopt neutral rather than value positions, to tacitly advise rather than openly advocate. This generalization no longer holds true. In many branches of science there are radical movements. Increasingly, both in the rich and poor worlds, scientists are involved in active advocacy which they see as an intellectual and ethical duty.” [bold added by me]

In other words, back in 1976 it was being admitted that “many branches of science” had become politicized by radical elements. It was acknowledged openly - by people who approved of this development - that some scientists were abandoning the dispassionate stance we expect of them in favor of overt activism.

The are many reasons to be troubled by this. Roger Pielke Jr's book, The Honest Broker (which I discuss here) examines a number of them.

I also recommend this article, available free online, titled The Double Standard in Environmental Science. Its author, a soil erosion expert, argues that research findings that suggest humanity is making environmental progress get rejected by prestigious science journals, even though they're based on decades of real-world measurements. Yet papers that reach alarming conclusions get published, even when their authors have little expertise and scant data. His experience suggests this bias has been operating since the early 1980s.

My second point comes from a 2008 paper (also free online) authored by Richard S. Lindzen, of MIT, titled Climate Science: Is it Currently Designed to Answer Questions? Anyone who thinks scientists dwell in an ivory tower dreamily insulated from crass political considerations will find it difficult to hold such opinions after reading this text in its entirety.

I'm going to focus on one aspect in particular. At the top of page 5, Lindzen observes that science organizations:

"are hierarchical structures where positions and policies are determined by small executive councils or even single individuals. This greatly facilitates any conscious effort to politicize science via influence in such bodies where a handful of individuals (often not even scientists) speak on behalf of organizations that include thousands of scientists and even enforce specific scientiific positions and agendas."

On page 7, Lindzen discusses the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS):

"The academy is divided into many disciplinary sections whose primary task is the nomination of candidates for membership in the Academy. Typically, support by more than 85% of the membership of any section is needed for nomination. However, once a candidate is elected, the candidate is free to affiliate with any section. The vetting process is generally rigorous, but for over 20 years, there was a Temporary Nominating Group for the Global Environment to provide a back door for the election of candidates who were environmental activists, bypassing the conventional vetting procedure. Members, so elected, proceeded to join existing sections where they hold a veto power over the election of any scientists unsympathetic to their positions. Moreover, they are almost immediately appointed to positions on the executive council, and other influential bodies within the Academy. One of the members elected via the Temporary Nominating Group, Ralph Cicerone, is now president of the Academy. Prior to that, he was on the nominating committee for the presidency...Others elected to the NAS via this route include [well known activists] Paul Ehrlich, James Hansen, Steven Schneider, John Holdren..." [bold added by me]

This gives one pause, doesn't it?

I don't mean to suggest that no statements issued by any scientific body can be trusted. That would be foolish. But there are serious and compelling reasons to be cautious of activist-scientists in the environmental/global warming arena.

Life would be far simpler if we didn't have to wonder if what we're hearing is pure, unadulterated scientific evidence - or whether we're being fed someone's political agenda.

P.S.
This mixing of politics, activism, and science is also evident in the genetically modified food debate. See my blog post Do As I Say, Not As I Do.

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