Know your enemy : the alarmist scientist. Posted by Pointman on June 28, 2013 · 27 Comments

I’d like to preface this piece by saying there are a number of scientists doing significant work in the field of climate science whom I deeply respect. They have all along raised the balanced doubts about the supposedly “settled” science and I’ve no doubt taken some easily avoidable professional damage for doing so. I don’t necessarily see eye to eye with all of them over every aspect of the climate debate, but high-profile people of courage, integrity and reason, prepared to speak out are all too scarce in an area so brutally controlled by a thought police and are therefore to be prized even more highly.

They are the brave few who for years have put themselves into a very real danger zone, while everyone else kept their mouths shut and their heads down. Over the years more than a few of them, like Prof. Bob Carter this week, have paid the price for such integrity. For what it’s worth, they have my lasting admiration and if you’re a true skeptic, they should have yours as well.

Posterity will one day exonerate them, and it will be at the expense of those shadowy creatures who had them removed from their positions.

Climate alarmism was, and could only have been, a child born of good times. In the midst of an extraordinarily long fifteen year economic boom when most people had jobs, money, houses and not many real concerns, it was something that a number of people actually needed to invent. The politicians needed a danger they could save us from and as it happened, a few scientists raised some genuine concerns over the slight temperature uptick that occurred in the closing decades of the previous century. The political activists of the well left of centre group, still reeling from the double whammy of the death of the liberal dream in the eighties and the collapse of Soviet communism in the nineties, needed it even more desperately.

That little spark of concern was deliberately fanned into a raging inferno that reached its peak at the end of the opening decade of this century.

The political activists hijacked the environmental organisations and more importantly, traduced a hitherto obscure and sleepy branch of science that dealt with the Earth’s climate. As the vague concerns raised by some increasingly politicised climate scientists gradually mutated into doom laden certainties, the media seized on them as good old-fashioned scare the pants off them headline stories. Since the suggested salvation from such a frightening thermogeddon looked like a nice way of redistributing the world’s wealth, an overwhelmingly liberal mainstream media jumped on the promotional bandwagon with alacrity.

A monstrous and building synergy developed. The stories coming out of the science became scarier and scarier, the alarmist headlines became more frequent, climate activist lobbies pressured governments to do something, people got worried about their carbon footprint and to top it all, the politicians began assuring us they could actually save the planet. It was all good stuff for certain people and to see exactly who those people were, you’ve only got to follow the money trail.

Lots of people were making impassioned speeches but it’s who is actually making money out of the whole situation which is always the important pea to keep your eye on. Governments raised more money by imposing green taxes, the environmental organisations filled their coffers with public grants to save various things, financial dealers made billions trading carbon instruments, thousands of people found employment as carbon emission regulators and climate science was the beneficiary of an avalanche of research funding. Everyone else was a loser. The rich got richer and as usual, the ordinary person and the poor got screwed.

A few compliant third-rate scientists were catapulted blinking mole-like out of obscurity and up into that media firmament of stardom. Basking in their new-found adulation, they became masters of the climate universe. The media hung on every word they uttered, the politicians engaged them as climate advisers, big business paid them handsomely for the cachet of their time as consultants, little men suddenly became important little men and gradually, the details of the science not only became unquestioned but also unquestionable.

Anyone who raised a doubt about their god-like authority was to be equated with a holocaust denier. They put their peculiar idea of science at the service of the “cause”, had prominent dissenters removed from their jobs, bullied and browbeat their way to the top and almost complete control of their field, subverted and redefined the peer review process, crowed over the tragic death of opponents, substituted consensus for scientific proof, ploughed straight through the confirmatory bias barrier and right into raw naked advocacy, assured us the seas would boil, the ice caps would melt and snow was a thing of the past.

They became arrogant superstars of Facebook and Twitter, bent the independence of a grovelling money hungry academia to their will, addressed massive international climate conferences in far away exotic places as revered demigods alighting on Earth, reframed the non-existent global warming as climate change, withheld or lost their source data, wrote pseudo-psychological papers to smear their opponents as insane, deleted emails and hid behind non-disclosure agreements and Freedom of Information legislation.

A new and lordly priesthood was born.

Again and again, they unhesitatingly found new depths to drag the integrity of science down to. In short, they betrayed everything I ever loved about it.

But the deeper truth is that when it came down to them, it was never really about the science. For such little men it was always about ego tripping, power and above all money. The political activists saw them for what they really were and simply pimped them out on the mean streets of power.

Gimme yuh dolla big boy, I give you pleny what you wan. Pleny big time boom boom. Ise a good girl, a clean girl, ganteed. I show you good time foh ya monee. Gimme da monee.

They obligingly churned out alarmist paper after alarmist paper and were rewarded with more money every time. The climate activists amongst them fed the suitably spun press releases of the half-baked science out to their equally like-minded friends in the media, who just cranked up the hysteria machine even more.

The end result is that climate science now looks like an old, tired and shop-worn whore whose better days are well behind her.

In the years to come, it will fall to those few good men I alluded to in the opening paragraphs, to mitigate the disaster in credibility brought about by those smaller men and rebuild from the scorched earth upwards what is still an important area of research. No good deed goes unpunished, to use that cynical expression, but it’s a challenge I feel they’ll take on, if only because they were the ones who all along had the strength of character to refuse the king’s shilling.

©Pointman

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