Global Warming Science - www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming
Climate Change Alarmists Deny Science
[last update: 2019/10/27]
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Academia Stifling Science, Alarmists Denying Science
Recently two more universities have silenced or are trying to silence scientists who do not agree with the politically correct alarmist party line on “climate change”. These are discussed in the following sections.
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University of Victoria, Canada
UVic has terminated adjunct professor Susan Crockford, one of the leading polar bear scientists. Her crime? She says the polar bear populations are not declining. What a denier! She runs the Polar Bear Science website: https://polarbearscience.com/ And has a new book: The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened
But now she has been terminated: https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/was-this-zoologist-punished-for-telling-school-kids-politically-incorrect-facts-about-polar-bears “A world-renowned expert in animal bone identification has lost her position at the University of Victoria (UVic), she believes for telling school kids politically incorrect facts about polar bears. … Absent any other plausible explanation, Crockford has concluded that she was removed in order to suppress views on polar bears and related climate change issues and prevent her from continuing to challenge the high-profile academics who claim polar bear populations are in crisis.”
“During the time she delivered lectures to elementary school students, Crockford says she was continually “astonished to learn that every single teacher believed that only a few hundred to a few thousand polar bears were left.” She feels duty bound as a scientist to speak up, to point out that the global population is officially estimated to be in the range of 22,000 to 31,000 and may be much higher. ”
“Jeffrey Foss, a former chair of UVic’s philosophy department, says Crockford has been punished for speaking her own mind about matters of fact, which means she has been denied academic freedom and free speech. “I’m beginning to lose faith and hope in the university system,” he says.”
Science stifled by the by the politically correct!
More on Susan Crockford: https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2019/10/16/the-excommunication-of-susan-crockford/
----------------------------- A friend from Victoria came to visit recently. We hadn’t seen each other for many years but had been in engineering together more than 40 years ago. I was surprised to find out he had been suckered by the “climate change” alarmists, since I thought his science and engineering background would provide him with the capability to see through the scam. In the early 1990s he questioned my support of environmental groups. Recently I explained to him: I stopped supporting environmental groups around the year 2000, because the advent of the Internet allowed me to research the topics and I discovered that the environmental groups simply tell lies in order to keep the money flowing into their coffers. I’d like to sue them for lying so much but the oil companies won’t send me any money!
After his visit I sent him the following graphs. The first shows Victoria annual mean temperatures plotted at https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data_v4_globe/
The above graph data was downloaded to Excel and the following plot shows the last 25 years – a definite cooling trend.
His response: “If cc is real and we do nothing: -Very bad failure If cc is real and we do something: -Correct action taken If cc is false and we do nothing: -We save money If cc is false and we do something: -Money lost and environmental improvement”
Wow! That is what’s done in ignorance – when you have no idea about what outcomes are most likely, you go for Pascal’s wager. “Pascal argues that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas he stands to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (eternity in Hell)” [Wikipedia] Substitute “climate change” for “God” in Pascal’s Wager and there you have it – “Pascal’s Climate Wager”.
It appears that the sheeple in Victoria do not want to know the truth, but just go on believing the new green religion.
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University of Washington, USA
UW is trying to silence Cliff Mass (Professor, Atmospheric Sciences, UW – his specialty is weather prediction and modeling) His crime? He says he believes that CO2 is causing global warming, but presents actual data without twisting it into convoluted alarmism! What a denier! (Amazing that although he is not a denier, they call him one because he is not sufficiently alarmist since he only believes in global warming – not in the apocalyptic catastrophism that the alarmists demand!) He runs a Pacific Northwest weather blog: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/ His post regarding the UW trying to stifle him: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-university-of-washington-should-not.html “a Dean and her senior staff at UW’s College of the Environment (COENV) have suppressed diversity of viewpoints and censored the social media of faculty and staff, including this blog. I will review apparent violations both of the faculty code and constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech. … Their actions are a direct threat to the very nature of the University of Washington and our democracy. And I need your help to rectify the situation.”
“if you were a faculty member in the College of the Environment and you had a different viewpoint than College leadership regarding this initiative [statewide carbon tax initiative], they were prepared to make your life very difficult.”
His most egregious mistake: “I discussed the issue of politically well-connected groups securing funds at the public trough and used the century-old political metaphor of “pigs at a trough”, not in the text, but in a single picture (see below). ”
“This metaphor is frequently used in the media and books, such as Arianna Huffington’s hard hitting book on political corruption in America, which described the greed of the politically connected (see below).”“The activist students claimed that such a metaphor was racist because some members of the 1631 consortium were from minority groups. They ignored the fact that the 1631 coalition was overwhelmingly white and well-to-do. The fact I was expressing political opinions outside the UW did not seem important to them, nor did they care about the concept of freedom of speech. They wanted the department and college administration to do something about me and my blog.”
Again, science stifled by the politically correct! Anyone who is not sufficiently alarmist is a racist!
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More recently, Cliff had a blog post on what he called the “real climate debate” https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-real-climate-debate.html
Cliff is clearly in the ACT group. But he excludes the third group, which includes most AGW skeptics – who evaluate the climate data with a rational scientific non-political viewpoint and conclude that there is insufficient evidence to support the CO2 hypothesis at all.
About the media he says: “Much of the "mainstream" media parrots the message of the ASP side. The Seattle Times is a great case in point, with headlines of massive heat related deaths (750 die per event!) and catastrophic wildfire seasons that have no basis in good science. But there are plenty of others, such as the LA Times and the NY Times. There are some major media outlets that are more balanced (such as the Wall Street Journal).” [Cliff has skewered the Seattle Times’ biased coverage several times in his posts.]
And: “In many ways, the ASP group appears to be a religious movement, not unlike the many millennialist movements of the past. As other groups in the past, they predict an apocalyptic future (including fire and brimstone!) and that one must "believe" in their viewpoint or be rejected as a "denier." The ASP folks have a holy viewpoint that comes from authority (they claim based on the views of 97% of scientists). There is no debate allowed, the science is "settled." Sounds like religious dogma.”
He says:
The two closest NASA GHCN stations to Seattle that have data back to the 1920s are Cedar Lake and Concrete. The graph data was downloaded to Excel and the plots on the right shows the last 25 years. Cedar Lake has a cooling trend and Concrete close to zero trend.
If we include stations that have data back to the 1930s, Monroe is available, showing a cooling trend over the last 25 years.
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Other Scientists Stifled
Joanne Nova has described the treatment of other scientists who dare to question the climate dogma. (How dare they!)
“The academic casualty list includes Peter Ridd, Bob Carter, Murry Salby, Bjorn Lomborg, David Legates, Nick Drapela, Pat Michaels, Mitchell Taylor, and now Susan Crockford. Outside academia those expunged from screens include David Bellamy, Johnny Ball, Phillip Vernier. Forced out of institutes were Caleb Rossiter and Lennart Bengtsson. The threat of RICO investigations drove Roger Pielke into a different career. Read “my unhappy life as a climate heretic“. Likewise Al Gore sacked Will Happer.
Others put up with the bullying and stay silent til they retire like Dr Rex Fleming from NOAA or they report anonymously after working for 40 years at the National Weather Service. Sometimes the bullying even follows people home, like Dr Fisher, economist and former ABARE manager who’s house was egged. All he did was model the costs of climate policies. Art Robinson ran for Congress and his three children were targeted at Oregon State Uni. No doubt there are more, please add them in comments.”
Judith Curry, former professor and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology: “A scientist’s job is to continually challenge their own biases and ask “How could I be wrong?” Scientists who demonize their opponents are behaving in a way that is antithetical to the scientific process. These are the tactics of enforcing a premature theory for political purposes.
There is enormous pressure for climate scientists to conform to the so-called consensus. This pressure comes from federal funding agencies, universities and professional societies, and scientists themselves. Reinforcing this consensus are strong monetary, reputational, and authority interests. Owing to these pressures and the gutter tactics of the academic debate on climate change, I recently resigned my tenured faculty position at Georgia Tech.” https://judithcurry.com/2017/03/29/house-science-committee-hearing/
Garth Partridge, former chief research scientist at CSIRO Atmospheric Research: ”we have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem—or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem—in its effort to promote the cause. It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society’s respect for scientific endeavour. … The trap was set in the late 1970s or thereabouts when the environmental movement first realised that doing something about global warming would play to quite a number of its social agendas. ” https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2014/01-02/fundamental-uncertainties-climate-change/
See also: Climate Inquisition: https://realclimatescience.com/2019/10/new-video-the-climate-inquisition/
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Conclusion
Even though the last 25 years have shown no warming, the ASPs in the Pacific Northwest are trying to silence the climate debate. They are so sure we need to restructure society (supposedly to save the planet) that we cannot discuss the science. Their religious dogma does not permit it.
All the anti-science Democratic Party 2020 presidential candidates declared support for a “Green New Deal”, setting unrealistic goals for “decarbonization”.
Unfortunately the Democrats want to do just that. And they seem incapable of doing the math (see: https://cliscep.com/2019/10/17/maths-is-hard-for-the-green-minded/) Perhaps that is because math is racist: https://reason.com/2019/10/22/seattle-math-oppressive-cultural-woke/
The Seattle math framework pdf: https://www.k12.wa.us/sites/default/files/public/socialstudies/pubdocs/Math%20SDS%20ES%20Framework.pdf
As Matt Ridley (author of The Rational Optimist) states: “But the great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses put to the test. So a really bad idea cannot survive long in science.
Or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I have changed my mind. It turns out bad ideas can persist in science for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they can turn into intolerant dogmas.” http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/what-the-climate-wars-did-to-science.aspx
Ridley: “These huge green multinationals, with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, have now systematically infiltrated science, as well as industry and media, with the result that many high-profile climate scientists and the journalists who cover them have become one-sided cheerleaders for alarm, while a hit squad of increasingly vicious bloggers polices the debate to ensure that anybody who steps out of line is punished. They insist on stamping out all mention of the heresy that climate change might not be lethally dangerous. [bold added]
Those who express even the mildest doubts about dangerous climate change are ostracised, accused of being in the pay of fossil-fuel interests or starved of funds; those who take money from green pressure groups and make wildly exaggerated statements are showered with rewards and treated by the media as neutral.”
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