Global Warming Alarmists Are Not True Scientists

This hasn’t been a good week for the global warming alarmist industry. An as yet anonymous hero hacked into a computer at the University of East Anglia and released to the world data and e-mails from the heart of the global warming activism and revealed that the biggest names in the global warming industry have conspired to manipulate data, conceal contradictory information and punish nonconformists. It has also been revealed that the computer models used to predict global warming were poorly encoded and buggy.

But most importantly this information showed that global warming science is not being conducted by objective scientists whose primary goal is the elucidation of truth. Instead the biggest names in the field are ideological hacks driven by political agendas. It brings into question whether anything that they have produced in their careers can be trusted.

This is all terribly important as the United States Congress has on its docket a couple of carbon emission controlling bills that will cost trillions of dollars, throw millions of Americans out of work and dramatically erode the liberty of every American. The justification for this despotic legislation is the “scientific research” conducted by the very same men who have been exposed as quacks.

This story hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves. When similar information revealed that tobacco companies knew that their products caused cancer, it was front page news. If embarrassing information were hacked from a health insurance company’s servers, it would be the first item on the evening news.

So far, reaction has been muted. The NBC News website shows nothing. This is hardly surprising as NBC’s parent company is General Electric. General Electric is the world’s largest manufacturer of “green technology,” such as wind turbines. What all green technologies have in common is that they rely upon public subsidies and those subsidies require global warming hysteria. More corruption.

The New York Times, quite laughably, announced that it would not publish the information because its journalistic standards do not permit the publication of illegally collected information. If there really is such a prohibition at The Times, then there is an exemption when illegally obtained information compromises national security.

No honest scientist believes that his profession is incorruptible. Data editing and massaging are unfortunately common. Many granting agencies often distribute money in expectation of a particular result. This might involve a chemotherapeutic agent that a pharmaceutical firm wishes to market. The manufacturer of a nutritional supplement funding research eagerly awaits the results of research that he anticipates will reveal a hoped for probiotic effect. Don’t think that the researcher isn’t aware of his benefactor’s wishes.

In the 1990’s, the Clinton Administration poured unprecedented amounts of cash into global warming research. Then Vice President Al Gore made global warming his signature issue. Billions were disseminated with the stipulation that the money be used to advance his side of a hypothesis.

In academia, careers are made or ruined based upon the amount of extramural funding brought to campus. Individual researchers know that tenure and promotion deliberations will turn largely on the amount of grant money won. Department chairmen seeking to become deans know that the weightiest single section of their resumés will be the amount of extramural funding his department attracted while he was at the helm. The same goes for deans who aspire to become college presidents. And even those who have no aspirations for higher office know that salaries are set based upon how good a rainmaker one is.

Nearly two decades worth of distortion in atmospheric science has yielded an academic atmosphere that rewarded zealotry over scientific rigor. The hierarchy in atmospheric science departments is tilted disproportionately toward those who have brought in the greatest amounts of money. As such, editorial boards at major journals are similarly stacked with those who grabbed Al Gore’s cash. Granting agency committees are typically populated with representatives from academia who are chosen for their success in that field.

What this scandal has revealed is that there is no limit to the corruption that can be purchased when one has access to the inexhaustible United State Treasury.

Arguably the greatest scientist in human history was Ernest Rutherford. He not only won a Nobel Prize, but trained 13 future Nobel Prize winners. And he never took a cent of extramural funding. He believed that no man can honestly serve two masters. He chose the truth. Global warming alarmists chose otherwise.

Mark Steyn has a fine article on this topic too.