Science’s Untold Scandal: Professional Societies’ Sell Out on Climate Change

Climate Change

(Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)

When we started our careers, it was considered an honor to be a member of professional societies that helped practitioners keep up with the latest developments in their fields through relevant meetings and publications. Senior author Dr. Jay Lehr had the privilege of leading one of these societies long ago.

But things are different now. Whether it be chemistry, physics, geology or engineering, many of the world’s primary professional societies have changed from being paragons of technical virtue to opportunistic groups focused on maximizing their members’ financial gains in support of the climate scare, the world’s greatest science fraud.

In particular, they continue to promote the groundless hypothesis that carbon dioxide emitted as a result of mankind’s use of fossil fuels is leading to environmental catastrophe. You have been hearing about it for the past decade and more, with 21 candidates for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in the next election promoting some form of a Green New Deal—a plan to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and replace them with wind and solar power thereby returning society to the lifestyle of the 1880s.

Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, wrote in 1994 that radical greens had taken over the organization after the fall of the Berlin Wall, leaving him no choice but to resign. The takeover of environmental institutions by extremists is now almost complete, the most important of which may be the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

President Donald Trump is aggressively trying to win back the EPA in the best interests of the nation, but it is an uphill battle as the climate cult has also taken control of academia, political parties, and governments themselves.

An example of how professional societies have apparently been hijacked by extremists concerns the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta, Canada (APEGA). Allan MacRae, a prominent long-time member of APEGA, was named to receive its most distinguished lifetime achievement award in 2019.

Then APEGA staff learned that MacRae had written publicly about the damage done to humanity and the environment by radical greens. APEGA leadership strongly condemned his comments and his award was withdrawn. It led MacRae to write “Hypothesis: Radical Greens are the Great Killers of Our Age,” which explains the APEGA award withdrawal and to support his contention that radical greens have done enormous harm to humanity and the environment with their destructive, misguided policies. MacRae writes, “APEGA refused to discuss the evidence, and baselessly claimed the moral high ground.”

One commenter responding to MacRae’s essay posed a question, the answer to which tells an important story: “How did the Greens get control of APEGA?” Another commenter answered:

The same way they have taken over every other professional organization.  The actual members are too busy building their careers and actually working in the field to spend much time worrying about the day to day operation of the organization. As a result, they are taken over by lawyers and activists whose interest is in pushing their own agenda, not advancing science for humanity.

Another reader commented:

“The long march through the Institutions” as proposed by the Frankfurt school back in the 1930s was launched knowing it would be a generations long policy. Here we are three generations on and they have now taken control of all the western institutions as planned. The socialists do not stop just because their prime construct, the USSR failed in 1990. They regard that failure as simply work in progress. The climate as a tool which can never be tamed, was a genuine piece of strategic genius by the COGS (constantly offended green socialists). They will not stop. The destruction of humanity is too big a prize, they view this activity as pressing the Earth’s reset button.

The same thing is happening in the United States, where feathers were really ruffled at the American Physical Society (APS) when Dr. Hal Lewis, emeritus professor of Physics at the University of California, sent his resignation letter to the Society after being a member for 67 years.

In his letter, he described the joy of working with brilliant physicists for decades, when no one expected to get rich in this field. Lewis explained how studies done within the society had effective oversight that enabled members to stake their reputations on the work of the organization. He said that has all now changed.

Open dialogue has disappeared and all organization policies follow the new politics of the organization leadership rather than the membership. It is apparently focused on the money that accrues to the organization and its members by going along with popular concerns.

Lewis’ letter can be found here. A telling quote from that letter follows:

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 that has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents which lay it bare.

Lewis went on to state that he recruited over 200 members of APS to oppose the new APS policy that fully supports the global warming fraud. Their request for a hearing on the issue was completely ignored.

On March 31, 2019, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) issued a press release announcing the launch of The Climate Solutions Community, a broad committee to identify viable solutions to mitigate, adapt, and become resilient to the effects of climate change.

They totally buy into the dangerous man-made climate change hypothesis with no consideration of alternative points of view. AIChE’s description of their efforts highlight the fact that employment can be gained for their members as a result of the climate scare.

The Geological Society of America (GSA) has fallen into the same trap. In April 2015, GSA issued a Position Statement asserting that:

Human activities (mainly greenhouse-gas emissions) are the dominant cause of the rapid warming since the middle 1900s (IPCC, 2013). If the upward trend in greenhouse-gas concentrations continues, the projected global climate change by the end of the twenty first century will result in significant impacts on humans and other species.

The GSA backs up the statement with vague evidence from paleoclimates and offers their full support for the reports of the widely discredited United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

As is evident from the process described on the GSA Position Statement FAQs web page, the full membership of GSA is not polled after the development of Position Statements. Consequently, it is unknown what fraction of the membership actually support the final statement. However, clearly, GSA leadership recognize that such a position offers employment to many of their members trained in geology.

The lockstep march of professional societies in support of climate alarmism has been going on for years. For example, fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) and a leading Canadian energy expert, the late “Archie” Robertson of Deep River, Ontario, explained in the April 28, 2006, edition of the National Post what happened in Canada:

To claim that the IPCC-2001 assessment was “supported by the Royal Society of Canada” is stretching the truth. Prior to last year’s Montreal conference, the president of the Royal Society of London, whose manner of promoting Kyoto has been criticized, drafted a resolution in favour and circulated it to other academies of science inviting co-signing. The Canadian Academy of Science is one of three academies within the Royal Society of Canada (the other are from the humanities). The president of the RSC, not a member of the Academy of Science, received the invitation. He considered it consistent with the position of the great majority of scientists, as repeatedly but erroneously claimed by Kyoto proponents, and so signed it. The resolution was not referred to the Academy of Science for comment, not even to its council or president (I learned this when, as a member of the Academy of Science, I inquired into the basis for the RSC supporting the resolution).

A similar episode happened in the United States and Russia concerning The Royal Society initiative. Pronouncements from other science bodies are often just the opinions of the groups’ executives or committees specifically appointed by the executive. The rank and file scientist members are rarely consulted at all.

Past IPCC lead author Dr. Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,  explained the problems with a previous National Academy of Sciences report here and concluded: “there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them.”

All of this seriously damages the image of these once-respected professional societies in the eyes of both the public and the membership.

The climate cult that has taken over the environmental movement has never been about the environment. It has always been a mechanism to advance socialism, grow government, reduce individual rights, reduce human population, and ignore the human suffering and environmental damage their policies cause. Activists promoting this anti-human, anti-environment agenda appear to suffer emotional and psychological problems which they seem to deal with by attempting to make others miserable.

On April 27, 1961, at a speech in New York City, President John F. Kennedy said:

We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence – on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.

Those words describe socialism, a system sold as Utopia. It appears that a yearning for Utopia never dies, because it springs from innate spiritual qualities of humanity. But as we have seen in every instance of national-scale socialist “Utopias” such as Cuba, China, Russia, and Venezuela, the result is inevitably suffering, scarcity, environmental degradation, oppression, and death. Truth, reason, and logic are the first values sacrificed along the way. Professional Societies must stop supporting it.

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Dr. Jay Lehr is Senior Policy Analyst with of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC). Tom Harris is Executive Director of ICSC.

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Comments (4)

  • Avatar

    Peter F Gill

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    Here is a copy of my resignation letter to the CEO of the UK Energy Institute for the reasons given:
    There are three fundamental reasons why it is at best unwise to base energy policy on the notion of anthropogenic global warming (AGW, now called climate change). These are:

    Each of the six main hypotheses that make up the overall AGW hypotheses are wrong, faulted or exaggerated
    In spite of all IPCC’s efforts there is no evidence that the world as a whole and the main emitters of so-called greenhouse gases will go along with the UK’s virtue signalling via our Climate Change Act.
    There are a number of unforeseen consequences of energy and climate policy actions of which I shall only mention half a dozen of many:
    a. Increasing fuel poverty (more than 50,000 excess deaths in England and Wales last winter). It is noteworthy that the Fuel Poverty Act matured in 2016 but with no trace of media reporting or any reaction from interested parties like EI. A lot of this is a consequence of increased energy costs which despite the BBC propaganda has little or nothing to do with excess profiteering by the generation industry.
    b. Wrong thinking on biomass and particularly the use of wood pellets to replace coal and the use of what would have otherwise been foodstuff to generate alcohol to partly substitute for gasoline for transport fuels.
    c. The earlier encouragement of a switch to diesel following Gordon Brown being advised by David King that diesels do more miles per CO2 emissions than petrol driven cars.
    d. Concentration on insulation to reduce the carbon footprint of buildings without due consideration of health and safety problems.
    e. The many obvious consequences of the notions that we can go for all electric cars and phase out natural gas supplies to homes by 2050.
    f. The real threat of brown outs and blackouts in the near future until we abandon damaging and self-inflicted harmful energy policies.

    When I first became involved in what is now the Energy Institute it was called the Institute of Fuel. I ghost wrote a number of papers for Derek Ezra who later became chairman of NCB. By the end of the 1960s we had economically attractive solutions to all coal’s downsides and I am talking about SOX, NOX and particulates not of course CO2 which is of no consequence in a warming world (for whatever reason) unless of course God stops Henry’s Law applying. Now I see the hierarchy of institutions like and including the EI are in bed with politicians who have no knowledge of science and go along with a number of agendas without question or challenge. No doubt this will be very good for those wishing gongs (English graduate Bryony Worthington who drafted the Climate Change Act quickly became a Baroness).

    The present situation is worse for someone like myself with a degree in physics, a committed environmentalist since being a teenager, someone who has studied meteorology since learning to fly in the early 1960s and who has been studying climate mechanisms for circa twenty years. My voice can no longer be heard above the one-track message put out by almost all of the media and the institutions which share the BBC’s stance that a podium should not be given to anyone who has a different message than one that supports the AGW agendas.

    As Chair of the Institute of Physics Energy Group and later as Chair of the London and Home Counties Branch of the Energy Institute I always tried to get a number of speakers to cover the various facets of controversial topics. This was because my education ensured an attitude that progress is dependent on scepticism and challenge not everyone saying yes.

    The direction of EI particularly as represented in Energy World is very clear, and in my view very wrong. In consequence it is no time for me to resign my fellowship and leave EI before it becomes the Renewable Energy Institute that it so desires. I have therefore cancelled the Direct Debit that is usually called upon to pay for my membership each year.

    Finally, I will offer some predictions:

    • The general public will eventually become aware that their electricity and other energy related costs are not increasing because of excess profiteering by the energy and other companies but instead as a direct or indirect result of faulted energy policies
    • Brownouts and blackouts will become inevitable in the not too distant future unless energy policies are changed quite radically

    Reply

  • Avatar

    FauxScienceSlayer

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    American Society of Civil Engineers, founded 1852, issues statement days after 9/11 that three steel framed skyscrapers fell from progressive collapse. When FEMA issued their fake report, Sept 2002, ASCE sent support. When this was not enough, NIST issued their fake report, Aug 2004, ASCE again agreed. The Twin Towers were designed for 120 mph hurricanes and had no damage from five hurricanes prior to 2001.

    Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth has good analysis of this controlled demolition.

    American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers, founded 1894, is a DOE puppet on Carbon climate forcing fraud.

    “Airmen of ASHRAE, Enter the Fray” > CanadaFreePress

    Reply

  • Avatar

    THOMAS W ADAMS

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    In the midst of all this genuine academic concern, why is it that we hear nothing of the real elephant in the room? Namely: the imminent ice age?

    Reply

  • Avatar

    aido

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    While the Alarmist Climate Change Movement may seem to be an altruistic plan for mankind, history has shown us time and time again that when power over their own destiny is taken away from the people, that power tends to corrupt those who have acquired it. They whittle away at basic human freedoms in the name of a more just and ordered society. Secret police forces, suspension of individual rights and courts that produce only the ‘right’ judgment follow.
    In 1974, two years after their apocalyptic polemic ‘The Limits to Growth’, the members of the Club of Rome produced another book, ‘Mankind at the Turning Point’. This book drew heavily on the gloomy scenarios of ‘Limits’. It also reinforced the notion of impending doom if we didn’t change our ways. Some of the stuff in this book would reinforce the concerns of any conspiracy theorist, such as:

    “Now is the time to draw up a Master Plan for sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of finite resources and a new global economic system”.
    And in case you thought that this was just a pious hope for the future, with everyone pulling together and doing their bit, the same book goes on to say, chillingly:

    “It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual States, however powerful”.

    And just how were these ‘world leaders’ (as they seem to see themselves) going to get the world’s population to go along with their Master Plan?

    “… democracy has failed and new forms of governance are required …In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself. The common enemy of humanity is man”.

    Wow! Mankind is humanity’s enemy!

    Reply

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