The details of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”global warming” fraud get worse. They seem less like reality than something from a satirical novel.
The IPCC engaged in many dubious practices in its meta analysis of academic climate researchers’ original data. Perhaps the most egregious was emphasizing a. projection that a group of Himalayan glaciers would melt by the year 2035. The actual projection, made in a 1996 report by a UK scientist, was that the glaciers might melt by the year 2350; the date seems to have been transposed in a typographical error by an inattentive graduate student. The IPCC went with the graduate student’s error rather than the actual data. Which were readily available.
And the IPCC engaged in some cruder tricks. Beginning in the early 1990s, it removed data from weather stations at high elevations, higher latitudes, and rural areas (all likely to report cooler temperatures) in order to gin up a “warming trend” in its published reports. The weakness and sleaziness of these tricks explain why the IPCC and global warming”activists” shout down skeptical questions with rhetoric about “broad consensus” and “settled science.” The scientific method is a way of discovering observable truths about the world around us. A scientist’s data has to be reproducible; hiding data and discouraging others from questioning it is – in terms of the scientific method – unethical. Yet proponents of anthropogenic global warming and various statist responses have behaved in these ways. Their commitment to statist agendas trumps their commitment to science.
The novelist Michael Crichton (also a medical doctor) summed up the criticism of this junky rhetoric in an oft quoted 2003 speech at Cal Tech:
“I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
I’ve never been a huge fan of Crichton’s novels. But that speech (available in full at http://tinyurl.com/5gbeh4) is a great read.
