The debate is over.

That was his message 11 years ago. It’s a direct quote (backup link here).

Earlier this week, when Gleick issued his non-apology to innocent third parties whose privacy he invaded by making confidential documents public, he sang a dramatically different tune:

a rational public debate is desperately needed…

he declared. Indeed, the word debate appeared three times in his 385-word statement (backup link here). He also said:

Given the need for reliance on facts in the public climate debate, I am issuing the following statement.

…My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate… [bold added]

Right. So after more than a decade of declaring that the debate is over Gleick now claims he’s all in favour of it. He also has the chutzpah to suggest that it’s those on the other side of the fence who are preventing such a debate from taking place.

Now let’s add one more detail to the mix. In late January Gleick turned down an invitation to debate a climate skeptic even though a $5,000 donation would have been made to a charity of his choice.

What is any reasonable, rational person supposed to conclude? Does Gleick really, truly cherish open debate – the kind in which people treat opposing perspectives with courtesy and good grace?  Or is he the sort of individual who’ll say anything to make himself look good?

How very sad.

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h/t Real Science

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read the background story here

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It is fine for people (and scientists) [to] have political ideologies. The problem comes in when you…use science to demand policies. [bold added]

In my view, many climate scientists behave oddly compared to other kinds of experts. In criminal trials the role of expert witnesses is limited and clearly defined. They testify about their direct observations – or the results of tests they have performed.

Not for one moment does anyone think it is the role of a handwriting expert to decide whether the accused is guilty. That is the job of the judge and the jury – after listening to a variety of experts, some of whom will no doubt contradict (and cast doubt on) each other’s opinions.

Although the pathologist who performed the autopsy may have private views about an accused murderer’s guilt or innocence we all understand that it would be inappropriate for that medical professional to voice those views within the courtroom – and doubly inappropriate to do so outside of it.

Yet when it comes to climate, everything gets turned on its head. People with a narrow specialty (in water resources, for example) nevertheless regard themselves as full-fledged “climate experts.” Taking on the role of judge and jury, they imagine that an understanding of their small piece of the puzzle translates into firm knowledge of the far more complicated big-picture. They proclaim that multiple lines of evidence all point to the same conclusion – even though they themselves don’t possess the expertise to evaluate the merits of these other lines of evidence.

It is as if a firearms expert began declaring, while a criminal trial was still in progress, that his evidence, the testimony of the police, and the pathologist’s time-of-death estimate all point in the same direction. It’s as if that firearms expert pronounced the accused obviously guilty and urged the application of the death penalty immediately.

Journalists would never take such behaviour seriously. They’d recognize that the expert was overstepping his mandate by a wide, wide margin. If his views got reported at all, it would be in order to expose and condemn his poor judgment.

So why, when climate scientists step well beyond the mandate of their narrow academic specialty and tell politicians what to do – when they “demand policies” as Judith Curry puts it – does the media think such conduct is OK?

Yesterday, the Associated Press filed exactly that kind of story, one that has since been picked up by numerous other media outlets. The mere fact that “44 scientists” from “28 Iowa colleges” have sent a letter urging politicians to respond to climate change is considered news. The Chicago Tribune report is here. An Iowa television station’s website says this. Here’s the story in a Texas newspaper.

We aren’t told who these scientists are, what their expertise happens to be, or why their views are more worthy of notice than the views of 44 bricklayers. We aren’t even directed to a copy of the letter. So far, I’ve not been able to locate it. Based on another news account, however, it sounds virtually identical to a letter issued by 31 Iowa academics last November (see here and here).

Among the alleged scientists who signed that earlier declaration is Danielle Wirth. Her PhD dissertation dealt with environmental ethics. According to her academic bio page she is affiliated with the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Club of Rome. That makes four activist organizations – in addition to the Iowa chapter of the United Nations association. As a bonus, we read that she enjoys “herbal medicine research and preparation.”

It surely needs to be said that the above does not paint a picture of a rigorous, objective scientist whose opinions about climate change deserve media attention.

Another signatory is Thomas Rosburg, a biology professor who was the proud recipient of a Sierra Club Environmental Educator Award last October.

A third is Mark Aronson, a zoologist whose thesis dealt with rainbow trout. He is the “chair of the Sustainable Campus Initiative Curriculum Committee for the Eastern Iowa Community College District” and the founder of a campus environmental club. The latter encourages “environmental activism and advocacy” and has formal ties with the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy and (here’s one I’d not heard of before) the Wildland Center for Preventing Roads.

Personal opinions, disguised as science, are not news. Although we’re been told that “scientists” have signed a letter in Iowa, peeking beneath the surface reveals something else. Rather than circumspect, dispassionate climate change advisors once again we discover activists.

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Peter Gleick has issued a statement about the Heartland documents.

The Heartland Institute is a free-market/conservative think tank based in Chicago that expresses dissident views on climate change (see here for more info). Confidential documents, including personnel matters and financial records, were recently obtained from that organization under false pretenses. Last week they were released onto the Internet. The Heartland says that one of the files – the most-quoted and most sensational of the eight documents  – is an outright forgery. Gleick now says it was mailed to him anonymously. Here’s his story, in his own words:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-h-gleick/-the-origin-of-the-heartl_b_1289669.html

Over at the New York Times, Andrew Revkin, whose judgment early in this story may be of interest to some, bells the cat. About Gleick he now says:

his reputation [is] in ruins…

Read the whole thing here.

Read Gleick’s one-star review of my book over at Amazon.com – and then please buy a copy. He thinks no one should care about the results of my three-year investigation into the climate world, but perhaps you’d like to decide for yourself. Click here to choose Kindle, PDF or paperback.

A German translation of my book is coming soon. I’m also looking forward to doing some speaking in Australia this June – details to follow.

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h/t Ben Pile and Allen Dong

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UPDATE: the 2nd paragraph, above, was inserted within 90 minutes of this post going live

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A certain accusation is repeated time and again in the climate debate. It’s said that skeptics are lavishly funded by fossil fuel interests that are orchestrating a deliberate disinformation campaign. The implication is that wealthy energy companies are analogous to Goliath – and that green groups are underfunded, pathetic little Davids.

These accusations appeared 14 years ago in Ross Gelbspan’s book, The Heat is On. The Amazon.com description, dating back to September 1998, says the book

examines the campaign of deception by big coal and big oil that is keeping [climate change] off the public agenda…

Chris Mooney’s 2005 The Republican War on Science made similar allegations. In 2007, Newsweek magazine devoted a cover story to this same narrative. Implying that “well-funded naysayers” were the problem, it promised to take readers inside “the denial machine.”

But evidence of a vast, well-funded network was scant. The article cited amounts of $10,000, $53,000 and $165,000. There’s mention of a proposed $5 million campaign, but no proof it actually happened. The biggest number was $19 million that Exxon is alleged to have donated “over the years” to “the Competitive Enterprise Institute and others.”

Soon afterward, one of Newsweek‘s own journalists dismissed the cover story as “highly contrived” and “fundamentally misleading.” The reality, wrote Robert Samuelson, is that “we lack the technology to get from here to there,” to make a serious dent in our greenhouse gas emissions anytime soon. Pretending that this is a morality tale about good guys and bad guys not only dumbs down a complex debate, it discourages dissent – something most of us regard as “the lifeblood of a free society” (backup link here).

But the big oil, comic book analysis didn’t disappear. James Hoggan’s 2009 Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming repeats it. So does Naomi Oreskes’ 2010 Merchants of Doubt.

One would never guess that, behind all of this finger-pointing, there’s an acutely embarrassing truth: fossil fuel funding is only a mortal sin when skeptics cash the cheques. When oil companies give money to green groups, their motives apparently interest no one.

In May 2010, during the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Washington Post reported that the owner of the affected oil rig, British Petroleum, had donated nearly $10 million to the Nature Conservancy in recent years. For a time, BP’s chief executive, John Browne, sat on the board of another green group, Conservation International – which received $2 million from the oil giant (backup link here). Among the additional tidbits in the same news article:

The Environmental Defense Fund, which has a policy of not accepting corporate donations [nevertheless] joined with BP, Shell International and other major corporations [in 2007] to form the Partnership for Climate Action…And about 20 energy and environmental groups…joined with BP Wind Energy [in 2008] to form the American Wind and Wildlife Institute…

Lots of green groups, therefore, have relationships with fossil fuel companies. That climate skeptics alone are condemned for going near them is bizarre.

Two weeks ago Time magazine revealed that,

between 2007 and 2010 the Sierra Club accepted over $25 million in donations from the gas industry, mostly from…Chesapeake Energy – one of the biggest gas drilling companies in the U.S… [backup link here]

In other words, what Time describes as the “biggest and oldest environmental group” in America felt morally justified in taking $25 million smackaroos from a fossil fuel company so that it could campaign against other fossil fuel companies – those that sell coal. A search of the BBC and the Guardian‘s website reveals absolutely no coverage of that news story. Not one word (see here and here).

In contrast, both those media outlets filed stories about big oil funding this week. So far, there’s one at the BBC and nine at the Guardian. The sacrificial lamb of the moment is the Heartland Institute – a Chicago-based think-tank that works on a variety of issues. Among these are education, health care, telecommunications, financial market regulation, tax policy, law reform, and the environment.

In the world in which climate activists reside, Heartland is the Devil Incarnate because it organizes conferences for climate skeptics. (I, myself, have attended two of those conferences. The photos I took may be seen here, here, and here.)

On Tuesday, the activist website DeSmogBlog.com posted online what it says are internal Heartland documents. It’s worth noting that Heartland is a private entity. It isn’t funded by taxpayers’ money the way universities or government departments are. Therefore, the public has no more right to examine Heartland’s internal documents than it has a right to examine a labour union’s confidential papers.

If DeSmogBlog’s claims are correct and these documents are genuine it has chosen to violate Heartland’s privacy by revealing details about its budget, financial payments to named individuals, and the mailing addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses of board members. Why? It thinks it’s performing a public service. In its words, these documents reveal that the:

heart of the climate denial machine relies on huge corporate and foundation funding from U.S. businesses… [bold added]

What they actually reveal is that DeSmogBlog can’t do math. Remember, environmental issues are one of several matters with which Heartland is concerned. Yet, according to DeSmogBlog’s purloined documents, Heartland’s total budget in 2011 was less than $5 million. The exact number was a measly $4,638,323.

This is peanuts. Pocket change. Compared to the $238 million the World Wildlife Fund spent in 2011, Heartland’s resources amount to bellybutton lint. The US arm of the WWF had 50 times the number of dollars at its disposal (see page 33 here).

Yet DeSmogBlog would have us believe that these documents are some kind of smoking gun – documentary proof of huge funding by fossil fuel interests. Right. And this molehill is going to overshadow that mountain any day now.

Heartland issued a press release on Wednesday claiming that the most-quoted of these documents (the two-page Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy) is an outright forgery. Unlike the other files it appears to be a low-quality scan created on February 13th – a mere day before certain news outlets rushed to report on it as though its authenticity were an established fact. Heartland says:

We respectfully ask all activists, bloggers, and other journalists to immediately remove all of these documents and any quotations taken from them, especially the fake “climate strategy” memo and any quotations from the same, from their blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.

The individuals who have commented so far on these documents did not wait for Heartland to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents. We believe their actions constitute civil and possibly criminal offenses for which we plan to pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation.

As of this writing, on what is now Friday afternoon in my timezone, DeSmogBlog has declined to remove the files from its website. Given the above, I agonized over whether to link to DeSmogBlog from within this post. Unfortunately, one cannot challenge what that entity is saying without providing evidence of its statements.

But let us return to the funding issue. DeSmogBlog expects us to be impressed that these documents reveal that Heartland raises “money from oil companies” and that it also receives money from a foundation DeSmogBlog characterizes as a “fossil fuel fortune.”

If these are mortal sins I look forward to the posting of internal documents from the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, and Conservation International. All of those groups have also taken oil money. Should they not be similarly drawn-and-quartered?

While DeSmogBlog is at it, perhaps it will purloin confidential files connected to Rajendra Pachauri’s annual Delhi Sustainable Development Summit. In both 2003 and 2004 the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Ltd. and the Indian Oil Corporation Ltd. were among its sponsors.

The 2005 summit was similarly supported by two oil companies – one of which was Shell. In its turn, BP was a sponsor in 2006 and 2007.

In 2008 General Electric joined the sponsorship ranks. The fact that this multinational corporation provides “equipment and services for all segments of the oil and gas industry” was not regarded as an impediment to accepting its financial largesse.

In 2010, one of the people on the summit’s organizing committee was a gent named Jamshed Irani. He’s the director of Tata Sons – which owns Tata Petrodyne. As the large print on the latter company’s website explains, it’s a “Significant player in the Exploration and Production of Crude Oil and Natural Gas.”

Moreover, Pachauri’s summit took money from the Rockefeller Foundation in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. According to Wikipedia, John Rockefeller founded Standard Oil and became the world’s richest man on the strength of his kerosene and gasoline interests.

Isn’t it about time that we journalists, bloggers, and environmental activists all grew up? Either fossil fuel money is dirty or it isn’t. Either everyone who takes it deserves to be tarred, feathered, and have their private business posted on the Internet – or no one does.

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I’ve written previously about the fossil-fuel funding question:

Slurs, Smears & Money (June 2009)

Independent Bloggers vs Corporate Environmentalists (Feb. 2010)

BP, Greenpeace & the Big Oil Jackpot (June 2010)

The Royal Society’s Big Oil Award (Nov. 2010)

Greenpeace, Corporate Stocks & Noah’s Arks (Jan. 2011)

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See also Ben Pile’s Greens to sceptics: show us the money!

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Check out my two-year-old DeSmogBlog parody – and my all-kidding-aside free speech critique

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The 2007 Newsweek article may be seen here or below:

Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine
Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine Part 2
Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine Part 3
Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine Part 4
Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine Part 5
Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine Part 6

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But there’s also a dark side to group dynamics. At the extreme end we find mob violence. In the heat of the moment, normally law-abiding people can behave in profoundly anti-social ways if those around them are setting a bad example. More typically, though, our imaginations are merely prescribed and constrained by commonly-held beliefs.

Lots of smart people used to think that masturbation caused blindness. Many otherwise decent men once argued that women aren’t intellectually equipped to handle money. Indeed, it’s impossible to read about other historical eras without concluding that much of what people now fervently believe to be true will be dismissed as nonsense by our descendents (see the book, The Experts Speak) .

I find it peculiar, therefore, that no government bodies, research institutions, or scientific organizations have paid attention to the role that group psychology or team dynamics might be playing in the climate change context.

Before they began promoting the idea that human-caused global warming is a planetary emergency shouldn’t the authorities have done a bit of due diligence? Shouldn’t they have gone to some trouble to assure themselves that this conclusion wasn’t a case of groupthink within the relatively small, relatively insular climate science community?

Which brings me to a paper still-in-progress authored by Arthur Rörsch, a former Dutch professor of molecular genetics (backup link here). He has examined the current draft document written by the science section of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The final version of that report isn’t expected until 2014. Nevertheless, he sees few signs that the IPCC has learned anything.

Rörsch’s paper refers to “post-modern science” in its title. From his perspective, the people writing the latest IPCC report share a common, flawed mindset. In his words:

rules of logic are applied only within the context of a chosen cultural paradigm based on a given thought system.

Accordingly, he alleges that:

All fourteen chapters of the IPCC report start from the assumption that atmospheric CO2 is a dominant forcing agent for global temperature. [bold added]

Rörsch is further appalled by the IPCC’s habit of presenting conclusions on an opinion-based probability scale. At one end is exceptionally unlikely. At the other is virtually certain. In his words:

This procedure results in the application of subjective judgment by groups of scientists, who in effect reach their verdict by a “show of hands”. Such a process is the domain of social and political science, and should play no part in a true, traditional scientific report…

In Rörsch’s view, the scientific literature the IPCC plans to cite in its next report

is selective towards papers that support the [dangerous human-caused global warming] hypothesis, and even the papers that are included are then selectively analyzed towards the same end.

Here’s another zinger:

establishing that [dangerous human-caused global warming] exists requires a scientific assessment study that weighs the evidence both for and against the hypothesis. That assessment should not…merely proclaim the merit of the…hypothesis. [my bold]

The IPCC draft report only makes sense, says Rörsch, if one concludes that its authors are operating within an “unchallengeable thought system.”

In other words, the next IPCC opus seems unlikely to tell us anything we haven’t heard already.

A hand-picked group of people will once again produce a document that reveals a great deal about their own worldview. Once again, they will ignore some of the most obvious and difficult questions.

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To be a climate skeptic is to find oneself in an awkward spot. Eminent science organizations have publicly declared that human beings are causing dangerous climate change. Among these are the US National Academy of Sciences, the Science Council of Japan, the Académie des Sciences in France, and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

How can rational, intelligent people not take their word for it? How can someone such as myself – who lacks any scientific training whatsoever – imagine that my own misgivings deserve to be taken seriously when such esteemed bodies have spoken?

Yesterday a new report was released that goes a long way toward answering those questions. Written by Andrew Montford, the author of The Hockey Stick Illusion and the Bishop Hill blog, it takes a close look at the misbehaviour of the world’s oldest science academy.

The UK’s Royal Society was founded in 1660. For more than 300 years, Montford writes, it “adopted a position of aloofness from political debates, refusing to become embroiled in the controversies of the day.” Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the society’s journal explicitly declared that it was not the job of that organization:

to give an official ruling on scientific issues, for these are settled far more conclusively in the laboratory than in the committee room.

This circumspect approach was reinforced by the Royal Society’s longstanding motto: Nullius in verba – a Latin phrase which means on the word of no one or nobody’s word is final.

But in recent years, while few of us were paying attention, the Royal Society was taken for a joyride. Three centuries of tradition were impulsively abandoned.

Pronouncements are now issued from the mountaintop about who is right and who is wrong regarding scientific questions. Moreover, the Society has become a hive of political activity – releasing press statements, making demands on politicians, criticizing democratically elected presidents in foreign countries, and harassing corporations.

It is important to understand that the membership of the Royal Society, the “1,500 Fellows and Foreign Members, including more than 80 Nobel Laureates” for whom the Society claims to speak, were never consulted about this monumental change of direction. Nor were the views of the broader membership taken into account before the Society began making climate change rulings in their name.

The Royal Society’s first global warming statement appeared in 1989. Montford reports that it was measured in its language and upfront about the fact that many aspects of our climate are poorly understood. A mere ten years later, however, the Society released a new report which declared:

The CO2 issue is real and increasingly urgent…

If you’re thinking that this was an awfully long way for science to travel in such a short time span, it may be worth noting that the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in December 1997 and that, in the years that followed, a great many people went to a great deal of trouble to persuade additional countries to ratify it.

Fully half of Montford’s 40-page report is devoted to describing, in disheartening detail, the myriad climate faux pas of the Royal Society since the year 2000. This body now appears to be just another arm of government (its main source of funding) promoting the global warming party line.

For example, the Society has made numerous statements about climate change that are scientifically dubious. One example is a BBC television show narrated by its current President, Sir Paul Nurse. Montford writes:

A large section of the programmed was given over to a defence of the global warming hypothesis, with evidence for the ‘consensus’ position presented by a NASA scientist named Bob Bindschadler…Bindschadler embarrassingly claimed that manmade emissions of carbon dioxide dwarfed natural ones, when even the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] own figures show that the opposite is true.

The error was later acknowledged by Bindschadler. But that doesn’t change the fact that the president of the Royal Society knows so little about the subject matter on which he was lecturing the rest of us that he failed to notice this howler.

The Society also now meddles in realms in which it can claim no expertise at all – for example, economics. When the controversial Stern Review – a report written by UK government economists – was released in October 2006, the official launch was held not at a government facility but at the Royal Society headquarters.

In other words, the Society’s then president, Sir Martin Rees, chose to associate the good name of his eminent, centuries-old scientific organization with an economics report that would later be called “deeply flawed” and “well outside the mainstream of published economic writings” with respect to certain key calculations (see pp. 36, 46, 59 and 60; backup link here).

By late 2009, some of the Fellows of the Royal Society had began to push back. As a result of their efforts, in late 2010 a new statement on climate change was issued that is more neutral. Montford observes:

the Society chose to present its new paper as a development of their previous papers rather than what it actually was – a radical change.

The fact that a contingent within the Society is now attempting to set things right is encouraging. But that does not erase the harm that has been done. In Montford’s view, the Society’s tarnished reputation will not be restored – nor trust rebuilt – until this organization openly acknowledges what has transpired.

For the past 13 years those in charge of this venerated institution have taken it on a reckless and costly detour.

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The report was funded and published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Read the entire thing here. It’s a stunner.

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To be a climate skeptic is to find oneself in an awkward spot. Eminent science organizations have publicly declared that human beings are causing dangerous climate change. Among these are the US National Academy of Sciences, the Science Council of Japan, the Academié des Sciences in France, and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

How can rational, intelligent people not take their word for it? How can someone such as myself – who lacks any scientific training whatsoever – imagine that my own misgivings deserve to be taken seriously when such esteemed bodies have spoken?

Yesterday a new report was released that goes a long way toward answering those questions. Written by Andrew Montford, the author of The Hockey Stick Illusion and the Bishop Hill blog, it takes a close look at the misbehaviour of the world’s oldest science academy.

The UK’s Royal Society was founded in 1660. For more than 300 years, Montford writes, it “adopted a position of aloofness from political debates, refusing to become embroiled in the controversies of the day.” Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the society’s journal explicitly declared that it was not the job of that organization:

to give an official ruling on scientific issues, for these are settled far more conclusively in the laboratory than in the committee room.

This circumspect approach was reinforced by the Royal Society’s longstanding motto: Nullius in verba – a Latin phrase which means on the word of no one or nobody’s word is final.

But in recent years, while few of us were paying attention, the Royal Society was taken for a joyride. Three centuries of tradition were impulsively abandoned.

Pronouncements are now issued from the mountaintop about who is right and who is wrong regarding scientific questions. Moreover, the Society has become a hive of political activity – releasing press statements, making demands on politicians, criticizing democratically elected presidents in foreign countries, and harassing corporations.

It is important to understand that the membership of the Royal Society, the “1,500 Fellows and Foreign Members, including more than 80 Nobel Laureates” for whom the Society claims to speak, were never consulted about this monumental change of direction. Nor were the views of the broader membership taken into account before the Society began making climate change rulings in their name.

The Royal Society’s first global warming statement appeared in 1989. Montford reports that it was measured in its language and upfront about the fact that many aspects of our climate are poorly understood. A mere ten years later, however, the Society released a new report which declared:

The CO2 issue is real and increasingly urgent…

If you’re thinking that this was an awfully long way for science to travel in such a short time span, it may be worth noting that the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in December 1997 and that, in the years that followed, a great many people went to a great deal of trouble to persuade additional countries to ratify it.

Fully half of Montford’s 40-page report is devoted to describing, in disheartening detail, the myriad climate faux pas of the Royal Society since the year 2000. This body now appears to be just another arm of government (its main source of funding) promoting the global warming party line.

For example, the Society has made numerous statements about climate change that are scientifically dubious. One example is a BBC television show narrated by its current President, Sir Paul Nurse. Montford writes:

A large section of the programmed was given over to a defence of the global warming hypothesis, with evidence for the ‘consensus’ position presented by a NASA scientist named Bob Bindschadler…Bindschadler embarrassingly claimed that manmade emissions of carbon dioxide dwarfed natural ones, when even the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] own figures show that the opposite is true.

The error was later acknowledged by Bindschadler. But that doesn’t change the fact that the president of the Royal Society knows so little about the subject matter on which he was lecturing the rest of us that he failed to notice this howler.

The Society also now meddles in realms in which it can claim no expertise at all – for example, economics. When the controversial Stern Review – a report written by UK government economists – was released in October 2006, the official launch was held not at a government facility but at the Royal Society headquarters.

In other words, the Society’s then president, Sir Martin Rees, chose to associate the good name of his eminent, centuries-old scientific organization with an economics report that would later be called “deeply flawed” and “well outside the mainstream of published economic writings” with respect to certain key calculations (see pp. 36, 46, 59 and 60; backup link here).

By late 2009, some of the Fellows of the Royal Society had began to push back. As a result of their efforts, in late 2010 a new statement on climate change was issued that is more neutral. Montford observes:

the Society chose to present its new paper as a development of their previous papers rather than what it actually was – a radical change.

The fact that a contingent within the Society is now attempting to set things right is encouraging. But that does not erase the harm that has been done. In Montford’s view, the Society’s tarnished reputation will not be restored – nor trust rebuilt – until this organization openly acknowledges what has transpired.

For the past 13 years those in charge of this venerated institution have taken it on a reckless and costly detour.

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The report was funded and published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Read the entire thing here. It’s a stunner.

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When I purchased the NOconsensus.org domain name and began this blog in 2009, I was directly challenging the notion that such a consensus existed. Once I’d begun researching it didn’t take long to discover that many reputable, experienced, highly-credentialed scientists don’t subscribe to the supposed climate consensus.

I thought the public had a right to hear about those people – and to evaluate their arguments firsthand.

Much has changed in the past three years, but much has not. Over at the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media an article dated yesterday tells us that “the world’s scientists agree” that the atmosphere is warming. We’re also told that there exists:

“a broad consensus on causes and potential consequences” [of climate change] among “highly regarded institutions in the international scientific community.”

Global warming is called “the greatest moral issue of our time,” and we read that:

Rabbi Melanie Aron…equates a do-nothing approach to climate change to a person’s sitting by a pool and reading while a child in sight is drowning. “You would be seriously condemned,” she says, “but today, many of us are standing idly by while the lives of the children of the future are being seriously threatened.”

That a rabbi, of all people, is suggesting that people with alternative perspectives are equivalent to monsters takes my breath away. But alas, such is the state of the debate.

In any case, Jay Currie has contributed an insightful comment to Judith Curry’s consensus discussion. He points out that, because climate science is a relatively young scientific discipline, there has been a shortage of grownups to set a good example, to nip delinquent behaviour in the bud:

Consensus is a proxy for “common wisdom” or “commonly believed”. It is, as [BBC journalist Richard] Black rightly points out, a nose count. It is not, of course, science.

The appeal to consensus is simply an appeal to authority in a very young and, if I dare say so, rather immature science…

The games revealed in Climategate 1 & 2 are not at all surprising given the immaturity of the science. Unlike a relatively mature science like physics or biology, there are no elders, no Nobelists (except the Peace Prize kind), no Hans Bethes, or Oppenheimers or Feynmans, to call the infants to order. As the Climategate emails reveal, things get pretty nasty when there is no adult supervision. Peer Review is redefined as Lord of the Flies; bullying runs rampant and interesting results are repressed for “the Cause”.

Lord of the Flies, indeed. I think that’s a particularly apt observation.

And yet, while peeking at Climategate e-mails recently, I stumbled on a doozy authored by the late Stephen Schneider (backup link here). He was a well-respected scientist and the founder and editor of the journal Climatic Change. Born in 1945, he was one of the elders in the climate change world. When he died in 2010, at the age of 65, people said marvelous things about him – many of which were richly deserved.

But if we want to know where the contemptuous, sneering, arrogant attitudes of younger climatologists comes from, we need look no further than the example Schneider himself set . I’ve cut-and-pasted that 2003 e-mail below, leaving its grammar and spelling intact.

Addressed to an employee of the Environmental Defense Fund!! – and cc’d to a long list of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change insiders (see the bottom of this post for their names) – this e-mail is so nasty it makes me cringe. I apologize in advance to those being disparaged here, but it’s important not to avert our eyes. This is the mindset that anyone daring to challenge the supposed scientific consensus has been up against:

Hello all. Ah ha – the latest idiot – McKitrick – reenters the scene. He and another incompetent had a book signing party at the US Capitol – Mike MacCracken went and he can tell you about it – last summer. McKitrick also had an article – oped, highly refereed of course – in the Canadian National Post on June 4 this year. [URL removed for brevity]

It was a scream. He argued there is no such thing as global temperature change, just local – all natural variablity mostly. To prove this he had a graph of temperature trends in Erie Pennsylvania for the past 50 years this is from memory) which showed a cooling. THat alone proves nothing, but when reading the caption I noticed the trend was for temperature in October and November!! So one station for two months consitituted his “refutation” of global warming – another even dumber than Lomborg economist way out of depth and polemicizing. I showed it to a class of Stanford freshman, and one of them said: “I wonder how many records for various combinations of months they had to run through to find one with a cooling trend?” THe freshman was smarter than this bozo. It is improtant to get that op-ed to simply tell all reporters how unbelievably incompetent he is, and should not even be given the time of day over climate issues, for which his one “contribution” is laughably incompetent. By the way, the Henderson/Castles stuff he mentions is also mostly absurd, but that is a longer discussion you all don’t need to get into – check it out in the UCS response to earlier Inhofe polemics with answers I gave them on Henderson/Castles if you want to know more about their bad economics on top of their bad climate science. “Enjoy”, CHeers, Steve

When smart, sincere people challenged the dominant climate science clique a leader of that clique responded by hurling insults. Idiots. Incompetents. Bozos. 

In two paragraphs Schneider libels Ross McKitrick, his co-author Christopher Essex, Bjorn Lomborg, Ian Castles, and David Henderson.

Henderson is only a former head of Economics and Statistics for the OECD. Castles was only in charge of the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Lomborg is only a word-renowned academic and author. Essex is only the associate chair of applied mathematics at the University of Western Ontario.

And McKitrick, well he just happens to earn his living as an economics professor. In his spare time he’s been half of the celebrated M&M team (Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick) – you know, the folk heroes who demolished the infamous ‘hockey stick’ climate graph.

But Schneider had not one good word to say about any of them. This elder scientist didn’t encourage his younger colleagues to treat dissent with patience, tolerance, and humility. He didn’t demonstrate, by his own behaviour, that science is a cooperative exercise, that knowledge evolves via skepticism, re-examination, and questioning.

Instead, he taught the youngsters to call non-members of the clique bozos.

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UPDATE: I missed it at the time, but Ross McKitrick responded to Schneider last November, after the Climategate 2 e-mails became public. It seems that Schneider was confused about a few things. Read all about it here.

UPDATE #2: Climategate 2 broke while I was traveling in Europe for two weeks last fall. It seems I missed a great deal of the discussion during that time. Here’s what Matt Ridley wrote on the same topic back then.

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Schneider’s e-mail was also addressed to:

• Ray Bradley
• Keith Briffa
• Tom Crowley
• Gabriele Hegerl
• Malcolm Hughes
• Phil Jones
• Mike MacCracken
• Michael Mann
• Tim Osborn
• Jonathan Overpeck
• Ben Santer
• Lonnie Thompson
• Kevin Trenberth
• Tom Wigley

If any of these people objected to Schneider’s sneers, if any of them demonstrated positive leadership by injecting a more measured tone, I’d be delighted to let the world know about it.

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Having read some books and blogs by then, the concerns raised by skeptics seemed reasonable and persuasive. But that was a judgment I was making from afar. A more direct assessment was in order – it was important to take the temperature, so to speak, of a room in which skeptics had congregated.

The conference was a one-day affair in which two dozen scientists, economists, and politicians presented their point-of-view to an audience of 250. The majority had been allotted 15 minutes of speaking time as part of a panel discussion.

The person who impressed me the most that day was a bearded, bespectacled Australian geologist named Bob Carter. Neither loud nor brash he seemed to me to be closer to a stereotypical Canadian than a stereotypical Aussie.

Having spent nearly 24 hours on a plane to get there, Carter used his 15 minutes to explain why the mindset of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) jeopardizes public safety.

The IPCC, he pointed out, is fixated on global climate. As a result, governments around the world are incorporating that idea into their long term planning. But as Carter explains in his 2010 book, Climate: The Counter Consensus, “no-one, but no-one, lives in a global climate.”

The natural disasters that kill people are local phenomenon. The risks we face depend on where we reside.

Carter made this point by comparing the natural hazards that threaten Australians versus New Zealanders. Being so near to one another, one might expect their concerns to be virtually identical. But New Zealand has geological fault lines to worry about.

In Carter’s fateful words, “It’s not a matter of if there’s a major earthquake, it’s a matter of when there’s a major earthquake” (less than two years later an earthquake near Christchurch killed 184 people and caused widespread damage). Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions top the list of natural hazards for which New Zealanders need to be prepared.

Just a short hop across the Tasman Sea, however, matters are utterly different. In a country as drought-prone as Australia, bush fires are an ever-present danger – as is flooding. In Carter’s words, the chances of an earthquake there “are small and of a volcanic eruption almost zero.”

Although they are next door to each other, government planners in New Zealand and Australia need to focus on different concerns if their respective populations are to be protected from natural hazards. Instead, the IPCC expects both of these nations to devote enormous amounts of public funds and government attention to worrying about a theoretical average global temperature that poses no direct harm to anyone.

A few years ago Carter described himself as a Johnny-come-lately to the climate debate. Tipping his hat to other scientists who’ve been attempting to inject a less alarmist tone into public discussions since the early 1990s, Carter remarked:

I only lifted my eyes up from a microscope around the turn of the century. I’ve only been doing it for eight years, and my God, I’m tired.

Carter’s view of climate science is profoundly influenced by the fact that he’s a geologist. He thinks in terms of geological time – eras and epochs. When compared to those timescales, 150 years of thermometer readings is a mere blink of an eye. As he writes in his accessible, well-argued book:

By overemphasizing the trivially short instrumental record, and greatly underemphasizing the varied changes that exist in geological records…the IPCC signals its failure to comprehend that climate change is as much a geological phenomenon as it is a meteorological one.

All of the above is a long-winded way of saying that a public that has heard about Al Gore’s ideas but not Bob Carter’s is a public that has been spectacularly ill-informed. A debate that includes one of these voices but not the other is no debate at all.

Today QuadrantOnline has published the first of a 3-part series written by Carter. It’s a round-up of happenings in the climate world during 2011 – with an emphasis on the Australian situation. You can read it here.

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Spelled out, UNESCO’s full name is the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization. I’ve never paid it the slightest bit of attention. But while doing a Google search for something else recently I stumbled across a 135-page document published back in 2008. Its title? The contribution of early childhood education to a sustainable society.

We’re talking about toddlers here. You know, those years in which potty training, shoe tying, and learning to tell the time are all major milestones.

It turns out that UNESCO is on a “quest to achieve sustainable development” – and thinks “our youngest citizens” should be enlisted as foot soldiers (p. 3).

This document is a collection of papers associated with a workshop held in Sweden. A range of topics are discussed and there’s some diversity of opinion. Overall, however, the participants are in general agreement that wholly political ideas such as sustainable development have a place in nursery schools.

Here are some of the creepy declarations to be found within its pages (all are verbatim quotes):

• educating for sustainability should begin very early in life. (p. 12)
• Young children can be encouraged to question over-consumption. (p. 13)
• young children have capacities to be active agents of change now… (p. 20, italics in original)
• Through their learning and social activism, the children were able to highlight their concerns… (p. 22)
• even very young children…can be proactive participants…as initiators, provocateurs, researchers and environmental activists. (p. 22)
• learning begins at birth…and even before. (p. 54)
• We must find some effective methods of teaching sustainable development that can make children understand deeply, and even shock them out of their unawareness. (p. 85)

Has the UN no decency? Are there no proselytizing-free zones left?

Many jurisdictions frown on advertising that is aimed at children. How, then, can it be OK for green politics to invade child care centers – for innocents to be targeted in their cradles?

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The UNESCO document is backed up here.

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