Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

“You Have Signed The Death Warrant For Science”

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Thoughts from Judith Curry on the latest insanity in climate “science”:

What you have done with your letter is the worst kind of irresponsible advocacy, which is to attempt to silence scientists that disagree with you by invoking RICO. It is bad enough that politicians such as Whitehouse and Grijalvi are playing this sort of political game with science and scientists, but I regard it as highly unethical for scientists to support defeating scientists with whom you disagree by such methods. Since I was one of the scientists called out in Grijalvi’s witch hunts, I can only infer that I am one of the scientists you are seeking to silence.

[Late-afternoon update]

Mark Steyn: Twenty more disgraces to the profession.

[Bumped]

[Saturday-afternoon update]

Tim Ball’s thoughts on the Climate Monster over at WUWT:

Their RICO charge is so ridiculous it hardly warrants a response, but it does require scientific perspective. It is important to note that none of the authors of the academic peer reviewed papers and books, they claim provide the evidence for their charge, signed the letter. It is likely that most, if not all of them or their institutes, receive funding from a government beyond their academic or government salaries.

The RICO charge is a particularly nasty form of ad hominem attack. By applying it in the global warming case, it tries to make criminals out of people doing their job properly. The real criminal part of their enterprise is that skeptics are doing what scientists are supposed to do, that is disproving the AGW hypothesis. They accuse these properly named scientific skeptics of performing the scientific method, either through ignorance of the method or to silence them. The twenty, like the IPCC and its supporters, directly or indirectly thwart the scientific method by accepting the hypothesis as proven. They then deflect or ignore overwhelming evidence that the hypothesis is wrong including failed predictions (projections). They consistently refuse to consider the null hypothesis.

The attack is not surprising because the IPCC created a monster and were driven to keep it alive. Once you create the monster it becomes uncontrollable and even if it becomes a threat to society, the creator will resist its destruction; worse, you have to keep feeding the monster and will take extreme measures if necessary. This inevitability is the moral message of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

You know who needed a RICO investigation? Bill and Hillary Clinton in the nineties. Not people trying to do science, and trying to prevent awful policy based on shoddy science.

[Bumped again]

14 thoughts on ““You Have Signed The Death Warrant For Science””

  1. The ends justify the means, I suppose; this is the excuse always given by the Left. But this is really the full fruition of the “academic-industrial complex.” Feynman must be rolling in his grave. He would have been so opposed to this.

    1. If he were still alive, he’d be getting the same treatment as Freeman Dyson. The Warmistas would call him senile.

  3. I don’t think RICO is the way to go. It’s too uncertain because the targets could get off on a technicality, such as not being engaged in a criminal conspiracy and being right about the data. These scientists could more effectively pursue their aims by taking just a small part of their government grant money and use it to hire hit men to assassinate any scientist or public figure that disagrees with them. They probably wouldn’t have to kill a whole lot of high profile researchers before the rest got the message and shut up. Heck, in many cases it might be enough to simply rough up people’s children or leave a few dead pets on their porches.

  5. The people actually reducing greenhouse gas will be the defendants, and the ones making money off of innocent people while doing nothing to help our environment will be the plantiffs. I’m sure most of them support Kyoto, solar power, and wind power. It’s not difficult to find where the government took money from taxpayers, shoveled it to crony solar and wind power companies, and the companies went out of business, used bankruptcy to stiff taxpayers, and made no dent to CO2 emissions. While at the same time, companies like Chesapeake Energy were attacked for donating to the Sierra Club to help push natural gas solutions which actually allowed the US to surpass the Kyoto reductions in CO2 emissions.

  6. The readers from Seattle should be careful. Two of the twenty are UW professors. You might find yourself the target of weekly garbage inspections…

  7. What we desperately need is for the Earth to experience a long term cold spell. As long as the corrupted scientists can tease out any semblance of ambiguity, they are going to find a way to do so.

    Unfortunately, my long term prognosis is for a continuation of business as usual – the long term upward trend from exiting the LIA, plus the cyclic ~60 year oscillation. This pattern was laid in well before increasing CO2 could have been driving it.

    The downswing of the oscillation is going to draw out the “hiatus” for the next couple of decades, but temperatures will probably naturally accelerate upwards after that when the oscillation reenters its positive phase. The corrupters have already shown us that they are not above altering the historical record to extend the appearance of warming. They’ll probably manage to string things out through the downturn, and catch the wave of the upswing when it rolls back around.

    Probably. There are those who are suggesting the long term trend is really just the upswing of an even longer periodicity which may have reached its peak, and we could be in store for a longer term decline. But, I doubt it. And so, it is likely enough that, absent a sudden ethical epiphany among the corrputed, AGW is here to stay.

    It may be wise to start teaching Chinese languages and customs to your children, so that they will be advantageously positioned to take orders from our future overlords, after we have destroyed ourselves, while they wisely sit back and enjoy the bounty of fossil fuels.

    1. Been there, done that – in the ’70s environmentalists talked about the coming Ice Age. Amazingly enough, the prescription to prevent the dawning of a new Ice Age was the same as what is needed to prevent Global Warming. . . Fossil Fuels – is there anything they can’t do?

      1. Yeah, one would almost think that the environment is just the latest excuse to force a worldwide Communist government. With them in charge, of course. As if they wouldn’t be the first ones lined up against a wall and shot, should they get their wish.

    2. Here is basically what we are looking at:

      http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1900/detrend:0.75

      I only plot since 1900 because the temperatures have really wide error bars before that. Detrend the data, and the main thing left is very clearly a regular, cyclic component of roughly 60-65 years peak to peak. All of which has been in place since at least 1900. None of which shows any change due to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.

      There is a tiny little blip there in the past 5 years or so. It wasn’t always there. It appeared after the most recent alteration of the surface temperature record which recalibrated the more accurate modern buoy data to agree with the totally inaccurate bucket measurements from oceangoing ships.

      Whether they can maintain that spurious increase or not as new data comes in, that is the challenge the data manipulators face. But, I do not discount their cleverness at finding new ways to do so. They will probably have to become even more blatant in their legerdemain, but anyone who calls attention to it will be labeled a crank, a fool, and a Holocaust denier.

      After all, they’ve been getting away with this rewrite for over a decade now:

      http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:1900/detrend/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:1900/detrend/plot/rss/plot/uah

      Note how the data all match for most of the record, until the turn of the century. After which the Northern Hemisphere diverges from all the others. Lots of stations in the Northern Hemisphere. Lots of opportunities to play fast and loose with the “adjustments”.

      1. Here is a rather striking analysis from an astute commenter at another site.

        USHCN temperature adjustments:

        https://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/screenhunter_3232-oct-01-22-58.gif?w=640

        Relationship to CO2 in the atmosphere:

        https://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/screenhunter_3233-oct-01-22-59.gif

        Believe it or not, they are adjusting the data to increase with CO2, to produce an entirely circular argument. I’d believe anything about these hacks by now. The fix is truly in.

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