Perhaps the ONLY way to “clean up” the current rash of junk science is to bar those who hold left-wing views from holding positions of responsibility within the scientific community
By now, virtually everyone’s familiar with ClimateGate, the scandal that effectively destroyed the Global warming Movement.
How bad was the scandal that originated out of East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit (the CRU)? The British government concluded last week that the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit violated the nation's freedom of information act, although the violations occurred too long ago for prosecution.
A few decades down the road, most who’ve followed the Anthropomorphic Global Warming Movement (AGW) believe that people will look back and wonder how so many government, corporate and media leaders were taken in by propaganda that was based on such shoddy and dishonest evidence, not to mention being taken in to the point that they advocated devoting trillions of dollars to a cause that turned out to be completely based on flagrant dishonesty and dissembling.
The scandal has gotten so huge, so uncontrollable that the leader of England’s Greenpeace has demanded the resignation of the chairman of the IPCC!
Recently the London Times reported that John Sauven, the head of Greenpeace UK has demanded that Rajendra Pachauri resign as chairman of the IPCC.
As John Sauven, the director of Greenpeace UK put it: “The IPCC needs to regain credibility. Is that going to happen with Pachauri [as chairman]? I don’t think so. We need someone held in high regard who has extremely good judgment and is seen by the global public as someone on their side.”
So even the leadership of Greenpeace UK understands that low scientific standards and reckless disregard for the truth are destroying the credibility of the global warming community, and John Sauven has had the courage and integrity to speak up about it.
Unfortunately, Al Gore, who shared the Nobel Prize with Rajendra Pachauri and the increasingly discredited IPCC, and has a special relationship with and responsibility to environmentalists to clearly state that poor science and flawed judgment have no place in the leadership of the movement to stop climate change, has to date, said nothing.
As a result, no less a figure than Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations has said, "The global warming movement as we have known it is dead," adding, “The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics."
Journalists from all over the world have also weighed in with scathing criticisms. David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen recently wrote, “To my survey, there is not a single aspect of the ‘anthropogenic global warming’ hypothesis that has been left standing by recent revelations, and more shoes drop every day.”
SEE: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/Resisting+temptation/2515360/story.html
But it’s gotten far worse than that; Sir David King, the British government's former "chief scientist," has even had to abandon his arguably paranoid claim that "highly sophisticated" foreign intelligence services and/or wealthy rightwing Americans were behind the e-mail leak from the University of East Anglia, that touched off the bottomless "Climategate" scandal in November. For as he admitted to the Guardian on Monday (a generally reliably Left-wing newspaper), he had simply failed to follow the story.
All the e-mails were hacked through a single server. They included e-mails saved from as far back as 1996, and various data sets that fatally undermined the credibility of the whole international "anthropogenic global warming" research effort - by illustrating conscious selection of statistics, and direct manipulation of reporting in scientific publications, by major players.
Again, David Warren weighs in, “From what I can see, I doubt Sir David was dishonest. He had simply averted his eyes from inconvenient truths. This is a very common human foible, and scientists are, I insist, human beings. Had he been following the story he would have grasped that everything came through one server, that the information had not been cherry-picked by some nefarious spy agency over 14 years.
“I might almost say the same for the disgraced Dr. Phil Jones, the former boss of the East Anglia operation, now implicated in various cover-ups, attempts to intimidate and silence skeptics, and purposeful breaches of Britain's freedom of information act. I'm sure he "believed" in what he was doing.
“Like communist apparatchiks in the good old days, a global warm-alarmist may "honestly" think he is serving a higher purpose, that he is on "the right side of history," that he must cut a few corners for the greater good, that the end will eventually justify the means. Read Dostoevsky on this. The book is Crime and Punishment, and the character is Raskolnikov. By subtle increments a failure of candour degenerates into major-league crime.”
That’s why it’s no exaggeration at all to claim that not only has the entire edifice of AGW imploded, but its foundation has been completely eroded by the ongoing CRU scandals.
As David Warren’s investigations showed, “Not only all the numbers, but all the assumptions behind "AGW" - not "most," but all - have depended on the manipulation of facts by persons who had an interest in manipulating them. Often the specific incident is small, but the falsehood is cumulative. Investment in the illusion grows, the stakes become too large to forfeit. Yet the reality remains: that we still don't know any more about long-term human influence on climate than Punxsutawney Phil can know by observing his own shadow.
“This should have been obvious to climatologists from the beginning. At the simplest level, they could observe that global temperature estimates depended on a slur of constantly changing thermometer locations and time sequences. NASA's recent admissions are the more pathetic for that reason: from the top down, these were men who should have known better than to think they could fly beyond the end of such a limb.”
Again, as David Warren has noted, “Perhaps now, more people will finally understand what many have known for years: Man-made climate change was never really a problem - but rather, a solution.
“For just as the science of the IPCC has been exposed as fraudulent, so have its apparent motives. The true ones became strikingly evident when the negotiating text for the "last chance to save the planet" International Climate Accord, put forth in Copenhagen in December, was found to contain as many paragraphs outlining the payment of "climate debt" reparations by Western nations under the watchful eye of a U.N.-controlled global government as it did emission reduction schemes.” SEE: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/Resisting+temptation/2515360/story.html
But the CRU’s scandals aren’t the only examples of politics, predominantly Left-wing, Big Government politics infecting and debasing science by rewarding those who push “solutions” that advocate the expansion of government.
In 2006, Britain’s once prestigious Medical Journal, Lancet published a study that found that an additional 650,000 people died in Iraq as a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation...it subsequently turned out that the study had been funded by George Soros and that its data were false.
As explained by Dr. Elizabeth Whelan in a must-read column in today's New York Post, Lancet in 1998 published a supposedly scientific, peer-reviewed paper by the now discredited physician, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, which claimed that standard childhood vaccines cause autism.
Despite the fact that Dr. Wakefield’s paper was contested by other scientists, many parents were influenced by it not to give their children vaccines, and a number of children have died as a result. Now, 12 years later, Lancet's editor finally admits the article was junk science and has retracted it. He has not, however, resigned or been fired.
As the great Lawrence Auster wrote, “Our age could be called the Age of Rebellion against Truth. Ideological zealotry - an attitude that often combines material greed with the spiritual kind - has now infected science and medicine as well as other, softer fields. In this instance, it appears that an ideology of "anti-vaccinism" got started somehow, and, in pursuit of it, truth and science and human well-being got thrown out the window.”
Most of those who’ve paid any attention over the past decade have realized that the Lancet has lost much of its former prestige and standing since it’s become infamous for running faked statistics on, among other things, Iraqi casualties.
Recently, Phyllis Chesler, the feminist author of "The New Anti-Semitism," called out the absurd Arabism of the Lancet, as seen in a piece where they blame endemic domestic violence in the "Palestinian Territory" on Israel. In a critique she sent to the Lancet and posted online, Chesler writes:
“Their study is titled: "Association between exposure to political violence and intimate-partner violence in the occupied Palestinian territory: a cross-sectional study." And yes, they have found that Palestinian husbands are more violent towards Palestinian wives as a function of the Israeli "occupation" - and that the violence increases significantly when the husbands are "directly" as opposed to "indirectly" exposed to political violence.”
It would seem that virtually EVERY subject touched by “scientists” who hold Left-wing agendas has been tainted by their penchant for flawed logic and made-up “facts.”
If there’s another solution to this problem other than vetting scientists by the ideologies they hold, it’s difficult to see what that might be.
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