Climate Theft

Recent leaks about a think tank's attempt to combat global warming orthodoxy in science education were the result of skullduggery.  Peter Gleick, part of the man-made climate change establishment, has confessed to pretexting.

In his blog on the Huffington Post, Gleick publicly confessed to deceitful tactics that he described as a serious ethical slip.

My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts ... to attack climate science and scientists.

You might be forgiven for thinking that the attacks mostly go in the opposite direction.  In 2009, leaked emails from East Anglia University revealed collusive efforts to hide and falsify data, and blacklist skeptical climate scientists.

“In a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name,” Gleick wrote. “My judgment was blinded by my frustration ... I deeply regret my own actions in this case.”

A pretexting scandal in 2006 at tech giant HP resulted in the resignation of board member George Keyworth, non-executive chairwoman Patricia Dunne and general counsel Ann Baskins.  Today's revelations resulted in Gleick's resignation from the National Center for Science Education.

The admission may not be Gleick's final word on the subject, however, as there is some question as to the authorship of a crucial leaked document.  He may be guilty of forgery as well as deceit in his effort to champion the end of climate orthodoxy by any means.

The Heartland Institute calls [the memo entitled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy”] a forgery -- and [Heartland Institute president Joseph L.]Bast says he believes Gleick may have written it. 

"Gleick also claims he did not write the forged memo, but only stole the documents to confirm the content of the memo he received from an anonymous source,” Bast said. “This too is unbelievable. Many independent commentators already have concluded the memo was most likely written by Gleick.” 

"We hope Gleick will make a more complete confession in the next few days,” Bast wrote.

Even if the memo were legitimate, I'm at a loss as to what the Heartland Institute's effrontery is.  The memo "describes plans to create an anti-global warming science campaign for grade schools that will 'dissuad[e] teachers from teaching science.'"

The implication is that challenges to global warming orthodoxy are not science.  Scientists listed in a Wikipedia article about climate skeptics may beg to differ.

In response to criticism of their Wall Street Journal op-ed piece entitled "No Need to Panic About Global Warming," the original authors raise the salient point with regards to scientific inquiry:

[W]hat is being disputed is the size and nature of the human contribution to global warming. To claim, as the Trenberth letter apparently does, that disputing this constitutes "extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert" is peculiar indeed. 

One might infer from the Trenberth letter that scientific facts are determined by majority vote. Some postmodern philosophers have made such claims. But scientific facts come from observations, experiments and careful analysis, not from the near-unanimous vote of some group of people. 

The continued efforts of the climate establishment to eliminate "extreme views" can acquire a seriously threatening nature when efforts are directed at silencing scientific opposition. In our op-ed we mentioned the campaign circa 2003 to have Dr. Chris de Freitas removed not only from his position as editor of the journal Climate Research, but from his university job as well. Much of that campaign is documented in Climategate emails, where one of the signatories of the Trenberth et al. letter writes: "I believe that a boycott against publishing, reviewing for, or even citing articles from Climate Research [then edited by Dr. de Freitas] is certainly warranted, but perhaps the minimum action that should be taken."

If climate scientists are so certain of their position, why must they resort to fraud, deceit, intimidation and reprisals in order to make their case?

Rather conveniently--too conveniently--for those of a Leftist persuasion, climate science advocates solutions congenial to traditional Statist beliefs, e.g., control of the population and the economy.  It reminds me of what ecologists like Gleick have in common with watermelons: both are green on the outside and red on the inside.

That's a joke about commies in the event you're too young to remember.  At bottom, as with the purveyors of communist utopia, the forfeiture of freedom advocated by the Climate lobby in the name of the greater good is too expensive a price to pay.

Give me liberty, or give me death.  I can say that breezily because, unlike when Patrick Henry originally made the pronouncement, the present danger--doomsday scenarios based on spurious models and falsified data--is imaginary. 

In "After America," Mark Steyn expresses incredulity at people who are precise about the year that climate armageddon will befall us but cannot predict this week's weather with accuracy.  The Gleick episode, like the East Anglia revelations before it, does nothing to relieve my incredulity.

Attempts by the status quo to maintain its prerogatives have not fared well in most fields over the past century.  This battle is a test of whether the 60's-70's counter culture, which has been so successful in overturning the received order, is subject to criticism now that it is the status quo in the climate science community, as elsewhere.

The Meltdown of Climate Science

It has been a tough anniversary for climate alarmists.  5,000 emails circulated among the world's leading climate scientists were released on the second anniversary of the original leaks that derailed the UN redistribution train headed into 2009's Copenhagen summit.

Noman would be uncomfortable with the leaking were not the confederates of climate fraud so monopolistically entrenched in academe, popular media, business and government.  They don't fight fairly, so it's hardly upsetting when someone pounds them with brass knuckles.  Neither do they learn from experience.  The original revelations just stunned them; they didn't deter them.  They've stuck to the same story, and agenda, despite public exposure of fraud and intimidation.

Like the first "climategate" leak of 2009, the latest release shows top scientists in the field fudging data, conspiring to bully and silence opponents, and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory in private than they ever admit in public. 

The scientists include men like Michael Mann of Penn State University and Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, both of whose reports inform what President Obama has called "the gold standard" of international climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 

To Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.) ... the leaker or leakers responsible are attempting to "sabotage the international climate talks" and should be identified and brought "to justice." 

One might sympathize with Mr. Markey's outrage if, say, the emails were maliciously rewritten or invented. But at least one scientist involved—Mr. Mann—has confirmed that the emails are genuine, as were the first batch released two years ago. So any malfeasance revealed therein ought to be blamed on the scientists who wrote them, rather than on the whistleblower who exposed them. 

This is the real significance of the climategate emails. They show that major scientists who inform the IPCC can't be trusted to stick to the science and avoid political activism. This, in turn, has very worrying implications for the major international policy decisions adopted on the basis of their research.

Bret Stephens chimes in, albeit with a secularist view of what he calls "climate religion," to pillory climate science as "another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen." (In the event that he wanted to, but couldn't, cite St. Paul correctly, the quote from Hebrews (1: 11) is: "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.")  

Stephens' issues with religion aside, he has a point about the fundamental pretentiousness, neigh silliness, of climate science.

This week, the conclave of global warming's cardinals are meeting in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th conference in as many years. The idea is to come up with a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire next year, and to require rich countries to pony up $100 billion a year to help poor countries cope with the alleged effects of climate change. This is said to be essential because in 2017 global warming becomes "catastrophic and irreversible," according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.

Unfortunately for those on Chicken Little's bandwagon, the financial crisis intervened to require the aforementioned wealthy, but struggling, countries to address real, not imaginary and politically convenient, problems.

Stephens continues:

A religion, when not physically extinguished, only dies when it loses faith in itself. 

That's where the Climategate emails come in. First released on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit two years ago and recently updated by a fresh batch, the "hide the decline" emails were an endless source of fun and lurid fascination for those of us who had never been convinced by the global-warming thesis in the first place.

But the real reason they mattered is that they introduced a note of caution into an enterprise whose motivating appeal resided in its increasingly frantic forecasts of catastrophe. Papers were withdrawn; source material re-examined. The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren't going to melt in 30 years. Nobody can say for sure how high the seas are likely to rise—if much at all. Greenland isn't turning green. Florida isn't going anywhere. 

Religions are sustained in the long run by the consolations of their teachings and the charisma of their leaders. With global warming, we have a religion whose leaders are prone to spasms of anger and whose followers are beginning to twitch with boredom. Perhaps that's another way religions die.

Stephens certainly doesn't know much about religion.  But, he can identify scientific charlatanism when he sees it.

Thank God for the FOIA leaker, who has flooded the scientific laboratory and public square with disinfecting light, transparency and full disclosure: truth's best defenses against private actors' grab for public money--obscene amounts of it--through the agency of government.

Noman's only question is why these politicized scientists are not out of their tenured jobs, perhaps even in jail for attempting to defraud the public.

Pray God that the climate hucksters are increasingly laughed out of the halls of political power by revelations of their shoddy research and shoddier politics.  Perhaps the end truly is near, though in ways scientists didn't intend while plotting to manipulate findings and silence opposition.