Anthropogenic Global Warming: The Greatest Fraud in History?

Anthropogenic Global Warming: The Greatest Fraud in History?

by James Lewis

From Pajamas Media, January 30, 2009

Like famished swine shoving each other aside to get to the trough, self-proclaimed scientists and real politicians are again launching headline upon headline to claim yet another disaster in the name of utterly unproven global warming. Did you know that the flock of geese that flew into US Airways jet engines this month in New York City were put there by global warming?  And that London fogs, or rather their absence, are making global warming worse?

Yep. It’s right there in the paper, Maud.

As scientific skeptics are finally discovering the courage to speak out, the hype machine is faltering just a little.

But President Obama just appointed a True Believer to be science czar in the White House.  So we can expect the politicians to keep hammering on this little piggy bank until the last golden coin drops out. You’ll be paying for the biggest false alarm in history for years to come.

But what worries me most is that the credibility of science may never recover — and perhaps it shouldn’t. Credibility has to be earned, and once it’s squandered may never be recovered. By now far too many scientists have knowingly colluded in an historic fraud, one that would put Bernie Madoff to shame. We are seeing political larceny here on a truly planetary scale.

Why should scientists who’ve gambled their own reputations on this fakery ever be trusted again? They shouldn’t. Would you entrust your life savings to Bernie Madoff? Right.

I’m not a climatologist. Like most scientists I rarely judge what others do in their fields. And yet it’s been flamingly obvious for years now that the hypothesis of human-caused global warming violates all the basic rules and safeguards that protect the integrity of normal, healthy science. That’s why AGW (anthropogenic global warming) looks like a massive fraud, the biggest fraud ever in the history of science.

If that’s true, anybody who cares about science should be outraged. Even if you don’t care about that ask yourself if you want your next medical exam to be honest. Or the next time you drive across a traffic bridge, do you want the engineering tests to be falsified? If scientific corruption becomes endemic, we risk losing one of the great jewels of our culture.

So here are some fundamental violations of scientific integrity that any thoughtful person should recognize. I’m not going to touch on climatology — the case against the warming hypothesis has already been made very well by experts. I just want to talk scientific common sense.

Threatening the skeptics.

Scientists get seduced by enticing ideas and bits of evidence all the time. That’s why every scientist I’ve ever known is a thorough-going skeptic, even about his or her own data. Especially about one’s own data, because one’s career is on the line if it doesn’t check out. So we need skepticism in ourselves and others. Good science honors the rational skeptic.

Which is why it’s beyond outrageous that AGW believers are publicly attacking thoughtful skeptics — not on the facts, but on their sheer temerity in doubting their precious orthodoxy.

According to the Guardian:

James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

That is Stalinism; it is never, ever done in real science. Stalin shot real scientists and promoted scientific frauds who helped to kill Soviet food production. Right there we know we’re looking at political corruption and not real science.

Read the rest here