Beware Fake Science News: here is why
Beware so-called ‘experts’ with ‘scientist’ tagged onto their job description. If you qualify in a proper science you are a ‘Physicist’, a ‘Chemist’ a ‘Biologist’ etc. These are proper terms indicating rigorous training in one of the ‘hard’ sciences.
Usually those trained in the ‘hard’ sciences are the smartest people. They have spent years studying at universities, passing tough exams. They openly share data and their collective efforts over the past 150 years or so, applying the traditional scientific method, has rewarded us with the industrial revolution and every technological advance of society.
Those who are less smart – less capable of applying rigorous mathematics, theorems and analytical reasoning – but who still want to be associated with the veneer of science opt to work in the ‘soft’ sciences (such fields are a modern phenomenon).
These ‘soft science’ people are ironically self-identified by their reliance of having to tell you in their job title that they ‘do science.’ For example, beware the social scientists, the climate scientist, and behavioral scientist.
These are very often groups of people who are advocates of some agenda other than purely science – very often politics is their guiding principle. Let us take a look at one case in point.
World-renowned climatologist, Dr Tim Ball has long been a champion of exposing the political bias among ‘climate scientists.’ Dr Ball obtained his PhD in 1983 before political activists hijacked his field for the purposes of corrupting data, swindling taxpayers and foisting a de-industrializing anti-science ‘green’ agenda on the world.
Dr Ball rightly asks us to look to what real climatologists used to do: collect data. This is what he learned from one of the great climatologists of the 20th century: Hubert H. Lamb who founded Britain’s highly-influential Climatic Research Unit (CRU), University of East Anglia. An excellent short account of Lamb’s legacy can be found online.
Dr Ball writes of Lamb:
“I had the privilege of Professor Lamb’s assistance while working on my doctoral thesis. I visited with him at the CRU and we discussed many topics besides the thesis. We discussed the serious lack of data and the need for long climate data reconstructions, which, as he explained in his autobiography was the main purpose of establishing the CRU.
“When the Climatic Research Unit was founded it was clear that the first and greatest need was to establish the facts of the past record of the natural climate in times before any side effects of human activities could well be important.”
Finally, he identifies the shift that in my opinion led to the debacle that was exposed in the leaked [Climategate] emails and other places.
“Since my retirement from the directorship of the Climatic Research unit there have been changes there and in the direction of my own efforts. My immediate successor, Professor Tom Wigley, was chiefly interested in the prospect of world climates being changed as result of human activities, primarily through the burning of wood, coal, oil and gas reserves…” “”After only a few years almost all the work on historical reconstruction of past climate and weather situations, which had first made the Unit well known, was abandoned.”
Dr Ball laments that there is even less data now than when Lamb stepped down. Records have been abandoned, expurgated, modified and raw data lost or modified without explanation.
Ball continues:
“As a result, computer models, that became the center of climatology, are built on virtually nothing. I watched this ascendancy and it has been an unmitigated disaster. Lamb was right in his original objective and his wider understanding to climatology.”
The greatest irony today is that we now live in an Orwellian topsy-turvy, back-to-front world of misinformation and wholesale politicization of science in the service of Big Government and corporate elites.
Naturally, ordinary citizens as well as independent scientists have retaliated against the rise of junk science. In America Donald Trump championed the populist mood. A self-confessed opponent of government-funded climate fraud Trump won the U.S. presidential election on a platform of wholesale reform against the “climate hoax.”
Mainstream misinformationists (those who talk of fighting ‘fake news’ by censoring all but their own fake news) call Trump a liar. They still try to sell the old sky is falling narrative and are siding with the climate scientists who have been in the pockets of Big Government for 30 years. This defense of junk science is typified by articles such as this last week from the Washington Post ‘Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump’ (December 13, 2016)
Therein author Brady Dennis writes about the “guerrilla archiving” of climate researchers desperate to transfer years of climate data off of government servers onto private ones.
We read:
“Something that seemed a little paranoid to me before all of a sudden seems potentially realistic, or at least something you’d want to hedge against,” said Nick Santos, an environmental researcher at the University of California at Davis, who over the weekend began copying government climate data onto a nongovernment server, where it will remain available to the public. “Doing this can only be a good thing. Hopefully they leave everything in place. But if not, we’re planning for that.”
So ironic! The topsy-turviness, the brazen hypocrisy of the above is perhaps best exposed when we contrast and compare this spin with what the leaked emails of Climategate scandal of 2009 showed us.
At that time Professor Phil Jones (Head of the UK’s CRU set up with such great hopes by Hubert Lamb) was exposed destroying rare and irreplaceable climate data from around the world.
Why did he do this? Because he and his cronies had been defying freedom of information requests from independent scientists for years. Contrary to the false narrative of the Washington Post these climate activists are the REAL data destroyers.
CRU’s Phil Jones and his accomplices were shown to be only preserving raw data that fitted their man-made global warming agenda. Jones indeed admitted to British police that he destroyed and “lost” irreplaceable temperature data from around the globe. All gone. Unrecoverable.
In fact, the UK investigators said Jones only escaped criminal prosecution because the very short statute of limitations (six months) had already expired when his data destruction exploits became public.
Jones and his fellow climate cultists unlawfully hid (and still hide) the truth. That truth, in the priceless raw temperature records, proved skeptics like Donald Trump were correct: the global warming narrative is ‘man-made’ by fraudsters.
We now have the disgusting Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, declaring that Trump has appointed a “band of climate conspiracy theorists” who will undo all Jones and co’s “important work.”
To the Washington Post Halpern bemoans:
“They have been salivating at the possibility of dismantling federal climate research programs for years. It’s not unreasonable to think they would want to take down the very data that they dispute,” Halpern said in an email. “There is a fine line between being paranoid and being prepared, and scientists are doing their best to be prepared. . . . Scientists are right to preserve data and archive websites before those who want to dismantle federal climate change research programs storm the castle.”
But 2017 promises to be a huge year for scientific truth.
In a ‘David versus Goliath’ mismatch Dr Tim Ball will be the gallant defendant in a multi-million dollar show trial in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada from next February exposing to the world Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann’s chicanery.
For readers not aware of the back story Mann is the creator of the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph promoted far and wide as “proof” of man-made global warming. But Mann refuses to let anyone, even his own climate cult, see his metadata to verify it. Mann’s excuse for keeping his numbers secret is the same as Phil Jones: duplicity.
Well-funded Pennyslvania State University’s climate professor Mann is suing 77-year-old pensioner Ball for allegedly libeling him when Ball wrote an article stating Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn. State” for hiding key data.
Instead of ‘saving the planet’ Mann cites his profit motive as his main concern:
“My computer program is a piece of private, intellectual property, as the National Science Foundation and its lawyers recognize. It is a bedrock principle of American law that the government may not take private property “without [a] public use,” and “without just compensation.””—Dr. Michael Mann’s letter to Congressman Joe Barton (7-15-05)
So, if Michael Halpern and his Union of Concerned Scientists are truly caring about the public seeing all the climate data then they should be siding with Dr Tim Ball and demanding Michael Mann puts ALL his hockey stick graph numbers in the public domain so we can judge for ourselves who really are the climate liars. But we know Halpern and his self-serving Union of Concerned Scientists are 100 percent behind their Mann.
As Sir Isaac Newton once said (paraphrased): “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Michael Mann, just like Phil Jones and Halpern et al. are a disgrace to everything H.H. Lamb stood for. Not only do ‘climate scientists’ not stand on Dr. Lamb’s shoulders, they’ve made a concerted effort to cut his legs out from under him.
*****
John O’Sullivan is CEO of Principia Scientific International (PSI), co-founded with Dr Ball and other ‘Slayers’ (originators and authors of the ground breaking book: ‘Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory).
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