US physics professor: ‘Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life’

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is his letter of resignation to Curtis G. Callan Jr, Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society.

Anthony Watts describes it thus:
This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.

H/W is the start of the letter. Dr. Lewis becomes painfully explicit in explaining his point:

Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

Lewis very specifically lists his problems with the current iteration of the APS, and why it is no longer a worthy representative of science, before going into his concluding statement (go to the linked article for all the Gore-y details).

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal

Just in case some envirowackos want to claim that Dr. Lewis is somehow not qualified to offer this slap-down to the APS establishment, his C.V. gives the lie to that concept:

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety
Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)

With over a quarter-century of teaching HS sciences, including physics, the APS’ actions smack of the attitude that gave an Italian scientist a very difficult political problem when he went against the orthodoxy of his day. THAT scientist was Galileo Galilei.

Any scientist that is unwilling to allow actively encourage scientific debate is unworthy of the name, and unworthy of the responsibility that he has presumed to take on to expand human knowledge about the universe in which we live.

When I first saw this, I had trouble believing it was serious…Gates et al have to be totally convinced of their status as übermenschen, if not demigods, who are uniquely qualified and endowed to assume on their own authority, the power to  play dominance games with the planet that we all live on. Not even the most arrogant polluting industrial managers (say, of the ChiCom steel industry for example) don’t openly and proudly proclaim a stated goal to consciously and deliberately change the climate of the Earth!

Bill Gates pays for ‘artificial’ clouds to beat greenhouse gases

The first trials of controversial sunshielding technology are being planned after the United Nations failed to secure agreement on cutting greenhouse gases.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire, is funding research into machines to suck up ten tonnes of seawater every second and spray it upwards. This would seed vast banks of white clouds to reflect the Sun’s rays away from Earth.

The British and American scientists involved do not intend to wait for international rules on technology that deliberately alters the climate.

The arrogance here is breathtaking…especially considering the actual state of the art of much of what passes itself off as “climate science”, but has been proven by the Climategate and other similar revelations to be based on conspiratorial coordination of faked, distorted, and fatally limited data.

Silver Lining, a research body in San Francisco, has received $300,000 (£204,000) from Mr Gates. It will develop machines to convert seawater into microscopic particles capable of being blown up to the cloud level of 1,000 metres. This would whiten clouds by increasing the number of nuclei.

Uh…rain and clouds mostly result from evaporation. The salt mostly stays dissolved in the sea. With Gate’s plan, NOW we can be the lucky recipient of precipitation in the form of salt water…won’t THAT do wonders for maintaining the soil!

Stephen Salter, Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design at the University of Edinburgh, said that there was no need to wait for regulations because the trials would not add chemicals to the atmosphere.

…uh…having taught Chemistry for over a quarter-century, I can assure the learned professor that water (H2O) and salt (NaCl) are in fact chemicals, and that water in it’s vapor phase is a MUCH more powerful greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide.

But Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the Government, said that experiments with potential consequences beyond national borders needed international regulations. He told The Times: “I do not see any geoengineering solution which does not have unintended consequences or is not far too expensive.”

At least HE has retained some situational awareness concerning unintended consequences!

Let’s hope that this particular form of megalomaniacal insanity is squelched before it afflicts us all.

At times, when mentally cursing yet another BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) from a Windows crash, it was easy to attribute diabolical intent to Bill Gates. Now it looks like he’s in need of crashing the climate like it was a cheap PC.

Hide the Decline II
This video is better than the first one – it illustrates (in passing) what Mann et al did to actually fake the results: omission of unfavorable data, etc.

Mann is NOT a happy camper about all this.

The Chief’s crying crocodile tears.

A key piece of evidence in climate change science was slammed as “exaggerated” on Wednesday by the UK’s leading statistician, in a vindication of claims that global warming sceptics have been making for years.

Professor David Hand, president of the Royal Statistical Society, said that a graph shaped like an ice hockey stick that has been used to represent the recent rise in global temperatures had been compiled using “inappropriate” methods.

“It used a particular statistical technique that exaggerated the effect [of recent warming],” he said.

The glowbull warmists need to take their stick and get the puck out!

Reported from the UK’s London Telegraph. (Of course! You didn’t think the U.S. mainstream media would cover this sort of thing, did you?)

No people on earth are more righteously Green than the Germans. They built the foundations and set the tone of the modern Green movement in, ahem, the 1930s. They invented the phrase Atomkraft Nein Danke. They were the first country to allow nasty, dangerous Sixties eco-radicals to reinvent themselves as respectable politicians. They were the first place to buy, wholesale, into the solar power con, which is why so many of their rooves – especially on churches – shimmer and glow like reflective-coated crusties at a mid-Nineties rave, while the German taxpayer is ruing the day his government ever chose to subsidise (Achtung Herr Cameron!) this fantastically pointless scheme… (Hat tip: Robert Groezinger, et al)

So when the Germans say “Auf Wiedersehn AGW” it really is time for the rest of the world to sit up and take notice. And that’s exactly what they just have said. See for yourself in this tear-inducing glorious feature in one of their leading newspapers.

Der Spiegel has done a number on AGW – one of the best and most comprehensive I’ve read in any newspaper anywhere – and it could hardly be more damning.

Truly, the experience is akin to having honey (really good stuff, heather probably) licked off one’s body by nubile blonde Nibelungen.

For the condensed version see the rest of the piece in the Telegraph.

Or, here’s the complete original very thorough, detailed, and lengthy der Spiegel story itself. The truth is out there!

The starting reference point is HC1009, labeled: A CONCURRENT RESOLUTION, Calling for balanced teaching of global warming in the public schools of South Dakota.

The Chief has taught HS sciences for a quarter century…and the prevailing orthodoxy on AGW (anthropogenic global warming: you know, man made!) is junk science at best, and at worst is totally bogus intellectual fraud. After formally studying a number of relevant scientific disciplines, IMHO AlGore and the glowbull warming advocates are claiming far, far more than is supported by the VALID evidence…which looks better and better with every successive debunking of junk “evidence” that has been used by the IPCC, and other agencies like the UK Meteorological Office, East Anglia University Climate Unit, etc.

The US science teaching establishment to a large extent has drunk the AlGore Kool Aid…and has little bashfulness about promoting what IMHO is a grossly distorted pseudoscientific dogma in the classroom.

This is the backstory on HC1009…which is well intentioned, but is in need of some important correction to be credible. Some of these corrections have been noted several places in the blogosphere. Badlands Blue and Madville Times both have erupted on this to some degree at least…CAH seems to be a bit more sensible in his comments, but admittedly both have properly noted some real problems, which were also noted with a bit more specificity in a posting from SD Politics.

Overall, the Chief concurs with the latter of these, not so much with the former commenters. The references in the bill to “astrology(!)”, “thermography”, and “interrelativity” (which suggests some sort of warp drive travel or something) obviously (at least to me!) need to be cleaned up.

There is one additional wording change that I would heartily suggest. The passage in the bill that states “That global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact;” is also incorrect in this context.

The Chief continually stressed to his students that a “scientific theory” is NOT a guess about something…it is rather a unified explanation that is able to account for a large body of related proven scientific phenomena. The idea a man-made glowbull warming is IMHO a LONG way from reaching the level of established theory. A more appropriate statement in the bill at that point would be “That global warming is a scientific hypothesis rather than a proven fact”.

In science, a hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a scientific question. The validity or non-validity of the explanation may be established by the process of experimentation. To be supported, a hypothesis must be demonstrated REPEATEDLY by experiments (or data) that are clearly and concisely defined, and are available to anyone else interested in the topic, who then is able to also demonstrate the same conclusion. If the conclusion can not be logically and unambiguously supported from a number of independent sources then if cannot be considered as being scientifically valid.

That is the current state of the hypothesis of AGW today, and as more and more cases of shoddy research, flawed and/or missing critical data, and evident “rigging” of the scientific review process comes to light, it becomes less and less likely that AlGore and others of his enviromental ilk are correct in their assertions of “estab;lished science”.

So, what’s to get exercised about concerning the scientific Waterloo being defended by the orthodox “warmists”?  It is neatly summarized in Ken’s concluding paragraph in his above- noted and linked post at SD Politics:

Climate change alarmism is in a crisis right now, for good reason. Cap and Trade legislation, a very costly proposal based on very dubious quasi-scientific ideas, is something the State of South Dakota ought to be concerned about. It is easy to make mistakes when putting a resolution together, but if we are going to weigh in on this we need to be rather more careful in our choice of words.

Hear, hear!

Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

The bullet point highlights:
* Data for vital ‘hockey stick graph’ has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before – but NOT due to man-made changes

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Dr. P.J. should note that it’s easier to do this when telling the truth…that way one only has to remember the ACTUAL facts, not the always more complex web of phony “facts”.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

This must be the upper academic version of the traditional “My dog ate my homework!” excuse

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

But…he can pull together “data”, supposedly going back thousands of years in some cases, and use it to project global climate patterns for hundreds of years into the future…but we can’t accurately predict climatic conditions for this year or the next.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

The Glowbull Warmists need to use that hockey stick to make like a goalie and “Get the puck out!”

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

Wonder what his first clue was…no doubt the discovery that medieval times was deficient in SUV’s.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

This gives a whole new perspective on the term “junk science”!.
Of course the boneheads in the Baraq Hussein administration are still genuflecting at the Great Gaean Altar, and proclaiming their determination to pursue “cap and tax” by hook or by crook.

World may not be warming, say scientists

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”. It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife.

That was then, this is now:

However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years. These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

DUH – d’ya think, maybe?

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama. “The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

This article goes on to detail problematic temperature monitoring sites; things like location next to air-conditioner exhaust vents, trash incinerators, and in the path of jet-blast from airport runways.

Unbelievable! Check it out for yourself.

U.N. climate panel admits Dutch sea level flaw

The U.N. panel of climate experts overstated how much of the Netherlands is below sea level, according to a preliminary report on Saturday, admitting yet another flaw after a row last month over Himalayan glacier melt.

A background note by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said a 2007 report wrongly stated that 55 percent of the country was below sea level since the figure included areas above sea level, prone to flooding along rivers.

Maybe someday the IPCC will reach the level of a competent H.S. science fair project. By recent evidence, they’ve still got a way to go.

It’s also worth noting that the U.K.’s Guardian is FAR from being any form of right-wing journal.

Leaked climate change emails scientist ‘hid’ data flaws
Exclusive: Key study by East Anglia professor Phil Jones was based on suspect figures

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones’s collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had “screwed up”.

OUCH!   Hard to state it any more clearly than that!

More details in the rest of the linked article, and here also…predictably there’s a continuing attempt to weasel out of the embarrassment, but the egg on the faces is clearly visible.