Physical Sciences

It’s the question raised by yesterday’s New York Times article on the push for balance in classroom discussions of global warming, though, as Jay Richards aptly notes over at The American, the real point of Leslie Kaufman’s story is “to connect the teaching of evolution to the climate change debate.”

Now when I read anything on the environment in the New York Times, I try to keep a couple of deconstructionist qualifiers running in the back of my head: “This is what the New York Times wants me to believe about the issue” and “What are they trying to accomplish with this piece?” I know it’s cynical, but when it comes to environmental stories, I just don’t trust New York Times reporters to keep it straight.

Some things they want to accomplish with this piece:

(1) Divide and conquer skeptics of global warming orthodoxy and Darwinism, by painting the latter as ignorant religious zealots, in hopes of starting a fight among conservatives. No doubt they’re hoping that, say, Richard Lindzen will have to explain why he agrees with those nefarious creationists on the global warming issue, and that he’ll have to spend his time issuing statements of agreement with evolution.

(2) Make it harder for official bodies to encourage critical thinking on global warming, since attempts to do the same with regard to evolution have, in recent years, met with fierce resistance and only modest success.

This is the media analysis required with today’s journalism, though I would call it prudent rather than cynical.
Richards goes on to consider how the debate over evolution and the debate over climate change are alike — and how they differ:

It seems that climate scientists aren’t just nasty and unprofessional in emails. Dr. Andrew Watson, a leading climate scientist from the scandal-plagued School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, appeared December 4th on BBC’s Newsnight program with global warming skeptic Marc Morano. Morano, who runs the superb Climate Depot site, took Watson to task for his denial of the scandal that has rocked the Climate Research Unit at Watson’s university. Watson, who bears an amusing resemblance to Richard Dawkins, clearly was not accustomed to vigorous questions from his lessers, and appeared angry, defensive, and arrogant. At the close of the interview, after telling Mornao to “shut up” and still on live television, Professor Watson commented “What an Read More ›

Some very prominent members of the American Physical Society are circulating an email asking the Society to withdraw a position statement adopted on 2007 that supported the theory of global warming. It’s a powerful statement by leading physicists who are obviously furious about the ClimateGate fraud and about the impact it will have on science. Compare this statement to the cowardly and arrogant editorial in Nature and to the spinning of this transparent fraud by faux pro-science journalists and blogs.

Note that the authors of the email have tried to get the APS management to withdraw the 2007 statement supporting global warming theory because it was based on the fraudulent science. They were unsuccessful, and the APS management has also refused to bring the issue to the membership. Establishment science is circling the wagons to protect this fraud.

Ethical scientists are mortified by the scientific misconduct and fraud in climate science; the question is: are there enough ethical scientists to bring integrity back to science? These courageous folks are trying very hard. I hope they succeed.

The email:

Round-up of some recent noteworthy articles on ClimateGate:

Sheril Kirshenbaum, who blogs at Chris Mooney’s blog Intersection, seems to have an better understanding of the ramifications of the ClimateGate fraud than Mooney does. This fraud will unravel the global warming hoax in short order (public opinion was moving against it even before ClimateGate), and it will likely lead to a civil war within science, pitting scientists who adhere to high standards of integrity against opportunists and ideologues who use science for their own purposes.

But Kirshenbaum gets the problem and the solution completely wrong.

Her post:

Post modernism is creeping into science. The bizarre rationalizations for the self-admitted scientific fraud perpetrated in the ClimateGate scandal are a radical departure from traditional scientific standards. Scientists are rushing to defend the indefensible: manipulating data, faking data, destroying data to prevent examination by other scientists, and conspiring to take control of peer review to advance a particular scientific theory. All of these acts constitute gross scientific misconduct, and several decades ago commission of any of these transgressions would have ended a scientific career. No so any more. The leading scientific journal Nature has defended all of these scientific crimes by asserting that these scientists were under stress, and the Nature editors have made the bizarre claim that evidence for Read More ›

The climate fraud spreads to NASA:

The pro-global warming blog Climate Change Denial is spinning like a top. Devastated by the revelation of pervasive fraud in climate science, the warmists are clearly dazed and grasping at any tactics that might salvage their ideological hijacking of science, now laid bare. In their latest post, “Swiftboating the Climate Scientists”, they ignore the transparent scientific misconduct and fraud revealed in the highest eschalons of climate science, and accuse the skeptics of attacking climate science for base ideological motives. The term “swiftboating” alone is risible and actually revealing; warmists are nearly all leftists, still simmering over the implosion of the Kerry/Edwards candidacy. It’s ironic that these “objective” scientists and activists use a left-wing political slur to attack skeptics who demand honest science.

A commenter (Starchild, # 20) summed up the scope of scientific fraud revealed in ClimateGate quite nicely:

The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre.

In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century [go to the link to see the graphs; the fraud is astonishing]

But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result [go to link above to see graphs]

Read More ›

From Anthony Watts at Watts Up With That

The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre.

In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century [go to the link to see the graphs; the fraud is astonishing]

But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result [go to link above to see graphs]

Read More ›

Now this is settled science:

A pampered hereditary monarch of a tiny ‘playground for the rich’ statelet has announced that anthropogenic global warming is for real.

Albert II, Sovereign Prince of Monaco (Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre Grimaldi), head of the House of Grimaldi and the current ruler of the Principality of Monaco, son of Rainier III, Prince of Monaco and his princess consort, Grace Kelly, has ended the controversy over global warming. Albert, known for flying in private jets around the world in order to appear for global warming photo-ops and to encourage people to forgo heavy carbon footprint activities like driving to work and heating their homes, has announced:

“There is no more room for doubt.”