Science’s Untold Scandal: The Lockstep March of Professional Societies to Promote Climate Change
Icecap Comment:
Thank you Tom and Jay. You are exactly right. It extends to all societies. It is a sad day for science. See this earlier post.
“When it comes to future climate, no one knows what they’re talking about. No one. Not the IPCC nor its scientists, not the US National Academy of Sciences, not the NRDC or National Geographic, not the US Congressional House leadership, not me, not you, and certainly not Mr. Albert Gore.”
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By Tom Harris and Dr. Jay Lehr May 24, 2019
(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. AICh’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 International Panel on Climate Change’s (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 favor 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.
The Biden administration is persistently digging an economic grave for Americans by looking to import both oil and alternative technologies rather than developing domestic sources to restore energy independence.
Having banned the importation of Russian oil in reaction to Putin’s attack on Ukraine, the administration reportedly is seeking substitute supplies from Venezuela, Iran, and Saudi Arabia rather than from Texas, North Dakota or Canada.0:33 / 50:24
President Biden may view reliance on oil imports as a temporary measure since he has said his long-term plan is to have so-called green energy sources become dominant. However, even if the administration’s energy savants can get past the reality that wind and solar cannot reliably supply base load power to large populations, they will be relying on the importation of minerals and materials from a hostile China.
A majority of raw materials for renewable technologies originate in China, which helps to explain why most U.S, solar panels come from there. The U.S. relies on China for 80 percent of its rare earth needs. The rare earths come with strange names like neodymium and praseodymium. Indian publication ThePrint offers this description:
“Of the 17 rare earths, neodymium is arguably the most needed in the world right now. Electric vehicles cannot function without this and lithium, which is mostly found in Bolivia. (W)ithout neodymium, an iPhone cannot vibrate, air pods would not work and neither would wind turbines. This is because for all of them to work, they need to be powered by Rare Earth Permanent Magnets (REPM), which are the most powerful permanent magnets.”
So, by moving toward green energy, the U.S. would not be freeing itself from energy insecurity, but rather shifting its dependency to Chinese materials. In energy terms, the Biden administration’s much vaunted transition from fossil fuels is doubly risky because solar and wind are intermittent, only available less than 30 percent of the time.
This intermittency - a product of sunsets, clouds and the vagaries of winds - contributes to the high cost of solar and wind. They must be backed up reliably by more conventional sources - mostly coal, natural gas or nuclear. Their availability is more than double or triple that of the alternatives.
The elephant in the room is the huge oil and gas reserves that sit unused inside U.S. borders. Even while facing one of the most dangerous geopolitical situations in his lifetime, Biden is refusing to declare the need to use perhaps his most valuable strategic asset.
The U.S. Energy Information Agency estimates 38.2 billion barrels of crude oil and 473.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in U.S. reserves. This ranks U.S. in the global top 10 for crude oil reserves. The current administration apparently would rather make America economically weak, spiralling towards hyper-inflation, rather than use resources readily available in its own backyard
The largest natural gas reserves in the world are found in the Appalachian Basin of the eastern United States. Unfortunately, much of this product is stranded due to lack of needed pipelines which have been stalled by environmentalists and poorly thought-out bans.
There may be enough time for the U.S. to avoid being borne to the cemetery of the economically deceased, but only if the American people can muster the political will to take advantage of its resources and ingenuity. Otherwise, the current administration’s legacy might be that of a pallbearer.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition and holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, England. He resides in Bengaluru, India.
We have been lectured to ‘trust the science’ which was ever changing throughout the COVID threats. Increasingly, evidence grows that the ‘science’ details were largely made up as it goes and used as a cudgel for political ends including power and policy advancement.
The same has been seen in recent decades as environmentalists, woke universities, think tanks and governments and our corrupt media sought to build the case to demonize carbon dioxide and fossil fuels. The goal is New World Order or really One World Governance.
In Their Own Words
“The common enemy of humanity is man. 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.”
-The Club of Rome Premier environmental think-tank and consultants to the United Nations.
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”
- Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment
The UN IPCC kicked it into high gear in 1995. Ben Santer was appointed the convening Lead-author of Chapter 8 of the 1995 IPCC Report titled “Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes.” In that position, Santer created the first clear example of the IPCC manipulation of science for a political agenda. He used his position to establish the headline that humans were a factor in global warming by altering the meaning of what was agreed by the committee as a whole at the draft meeting in Madrid.
The consensus of the large group of scientists assigned with assessing the proposed effects agreed in their summary of the main chapter of the report was: “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in Greenhouse gases.”
Santer as Lead Author replaced it with: “There is evidence of an emerging pattern of climate response to forcing by greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosol… from the geographical, seasonal and vertical patterns of temperature change… These results point toward a human influence on global climate.”
It was just a start of central planning and control. This was openly admitted by politicians and lead UN IPCC
“The future is to be [One] World Government with central planning by the United Nations. Fear of environmental crises - whether real or not - is expected to lead to compliance.”
- Former Washington State Democratic Governor Dixy Lee Ray
“Our aim is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to change the global economic system… This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history.” In simpler terms, replace free enterprise, entrepreneurial capitalism with UN-controlled centralized, One World government and economic control.”
- UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres
“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. It is not. It is actually about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”
- IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer
AOC’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti admitted that the Green New Deal was not conceived as an effort to deal with climate change, but instead a “how-do-you-change-the-entire economy thing” - nothing more than a thinly veiled socialist takeover of the U.S. economy.
Above we have shown in their own words how the indoctrination of the world on the alleged perils of global warming evolved.
Advocacy Keeps Coming
Virtually every month and year we see stories in the once reliable media and from formerly unbiased data centers that proclaim the period among the warmest such period in the entire record back to 1895 or earlier (often 1850). They also claim the warming due to greenhouse gases is causing more extremes of weather and more deaths. The base data they use has serious issues and is often more model than real data.
In the ADDENDUM to the Research Report entitled: On the Validity of NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU Global Average Surface Temperature Data & The Validity of EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding, Abridged Research Report, Dr. James P. Wallace III, Dr. (Honorary) Joseph S. D’Aleo, Dr. Craig D. Idso, June 2017 (here) provided ample evidence that the Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST) data was invalidated for use in climate modeling and for any other climate change policy analysis purpose.
“The conclusive findings of this research are that the three Global Average Surface Temperature data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever - despite current claims of record setting warming.
See more here.
That is made even more true given that 71% of the earth’s surface is ocean and the only ocean data prior to the satellite era began in the 1970s was limited to ship routes mainly near land in the northern hemisphere. According to overseers of the instrumental temperature data, the Southern Hemisphere record is “mostly made up”. This is due to an extremely limited number of available measurements both historically and even presently from Antarctica to the equatorial regions.
In 1978, the New York Times reported there was too little temperature data from the Southern Hemisphere to draw any reliable conclusions. The report, prepared by German, Japanese and American specialists, appeared in the Dec. 15 issue of Nature, the British journal and stated that “Data from the Southern Hemisphere, particularly south of latitude 30 south, are so meager that reliable conclusions are not possible,” the report says. “Ships travel on well-established routes so that vast areas of ocean, are simply not traversed by ships at all, and even those that do, may not return weather data on route.”
In 1981, NASA’s James Hansen et al reported that “Problems in obtaining a global temperature history are due to the uneven station distribution, with the Southern Hemisphere and ocean areas poorly represented,” --- (Science, 28 August 1981, Volume 213, Number 4511(link)
In 1989, the New York Times admitted the US data released from NOAA failed to show a warming trend since 1895. Even in 1999, the temperature still trailed 1934 - James Hansen noted “The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year 1934.”
This finding was amplified recently by MIT graduate Dr. Mototaka Nakamura in a 2020 book on “the sorry state of climate science” titled Confessions of a climate scientist: the global warming hypothesis is an unproven hypothesis.
He wrote: “The supposed measuring of global average temperatures from 1890 has been based on thermometer readouts barely covering 5 per cent of the globe until the satellite era began 40-50 years ago. We do not know how global climate has changed in the past century, all we know is some limited regional climate changes, such as in Europe, North America and parts of Asia.
The Inconvenient Pause
Confounding the warmist claims, the satellites not under climate center control and increasingly some of the data center data provided contradictory results for almost two decades. Following the super El Nino of 1997/98, global temperatures flat-lined to over 18 years, even as the monthly claims of unprecedented warmth.
Nature and IPCC Lead Author Kevin Trenberth acknowledged the ‘pause’ and cyclic influences of natural factors like El Nino, ocean cycles on global climate.
Buoys to the Rescue
Satellites starting in the late 1970s began to provide full ocean coverage though they could only measure the ‘skin’ temperature, subject to diurnal variations. Around 2004, a network of floating and capable of diving ARGO buoy (3833 as of October 2020) globally that provided coverage of ocean temperature and heat content largely missing for the previous century. They inconveniently initially agreed with the lack of warming.
Make the Pause Go Away
In 2015 pressure from the politicians funding the sciences told the scientists to fix the inconvenient facts. John Bates, data quality officer with NOAA detailed how Tom Karl in a paper in Science in June 2015, just a few months before world leaders were to meet in Paris to agree on a costly Paris Climate Accord, removed the inconvenient pause by altering ocean temperatures
“They had good data from buoys...and “corrected” it by using the bad data from ships. You never change good data to agree with bad, but that’s what they did - so as to make it look as if the sea was warmer. Remember with the oceans covering 71% of the globe, even small adjustments could have a major impact. Bates here noted “the evidence kept mounting that Tom Karl constantly had his ‘thumb on the scale’ in the documentation, scientific choices, and release of datasets -in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.”
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My philosophy when I taught meteorology and climatology in college was to show my students how to think - not what to think. As Socrates said, “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” I told my students that data is king, and models are only useful tools. Any model"s output or any theory needed to be examined and validated using data and must always used with caution.
Responding to the claims about drastic runaway warming and increasing extremes in the media have been fact checked and debunked here.
Carbon Dioxide, the Gas of Life
NASA imagery has shown CO2 is a plant fertilizer that has sparked mass greening of the earth and huge increases in crop yields.
It has a major positive impact. Crop yields have consistently reached record levels. The Sahara desert has shrunk 8% since the 1980s.
Dr. Will Happer, Princeton Physicist talks about the great benefits of CO2 to the biosphere and to all of humanity, says we are coming out of a CO2 drought and humanity would benefit from CO2 being 2 to 3 times higher.
Dr Patrick Moore, ecologist and co-founder of Greenpeace says we are coming out of a CO2 drought and humanity would benefit from CO2 being 2 to 3 times higher.
The claims about the climate impacts of increased CO2 are greatly exaggerated. Claims about drastic runaway warming and increasing extremes have been fact checked and debunked in detail here.
The Big Lie of the ‘Social Cost of Carbon’
The Social Cost of Carbon is said to be high… instead it is strongly negative - carbon dioxide is a benefit. We pump it into greenhouses to make the plants grow. We need more not less.
The real existential threat comes would come from radical environmentalism and their prescribed remedies. The economy in every country that has moved down an extreme green path the past 2 decades have seen skyrocketing energy costs - some 3 times our 2020 levels. Now our country chose to follow them down the rabbit hole.
The world is not ready for the so-called renewables and we are seeing clear global evidence that the push away from clean natural gas and oil and nuclear has already started a super inflation era that is already hurting all the world’s businesses and people.
This is because renewables are unreliable as the wind doesn’t always blow nor the sunshine. We saw that in Europe the last 2 decades and Texas in February 2021. And don’t believe the claims that millions of green jobs would result. In Spain, every green job created cost Spain $774,000 in subsidies and resulted in a loss of 2.2 real jobs. Only 1 in 10 green jobs were permanent. Industry left and in Spain unemployment rose to 27.5%. Many households in the countries that have gone green were said to be in “energy poverty” (25% UK, 15% Germany). The elderly are said in winter to be forced to “choose between heating and eating”. Extreme cold already killed 20 times more than heat according to a study of 74 million deaths in 13 countries.
The Chamber of Commerce agreed:
U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute’s Energy Accountability Series 2020
“Candidates for elected office have pledged to ban the very technology that has enabled the boom (and the never thought possible energy independence) - fracking. This raises an important question: what would happen to American jobs and the economy if fracturing was banned? In this report, the Chamber’s Global Energy Institute has undertaken the modeling and analysis to answer that question.
Simply put, a ban on fracking in the United States would be catastrophic for our economy.
Our analysis shows that if such a ban were imposed in 2021, by 2025 it would eliminate 19 million jobs and reduce U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by $7.1 trillion. Job losses in major energy producing states would be immediate and severe; in Texas alone, more than three million jobs would be lost. Tax revenue at the local, state, and federal levels would decline by nearly a combined $1.9 trillion, as the ban cuts off a critical source of funding for schools, first responders, infrastructure, and other critical public services.
Energy prices would also skyrocket under a fracking ban. Natural gas prices would leap by 324 percent, causing household energy bills to more than quadruple. By 2025, motorists would pay twice as much at the pump ($5/gallon).” (note gas prices are already there in many areas).
A Call to Action
We need to IMMEDIATELY reinstate the pipeline, restart drilling and oil and gas production to meet our needs and that of the world instead of funding predator nation production that will revive their terrorist programs.
If the generals need something to do, tell them to take up knitting. We are all going to need more sweaters as there are signs the next cold cycle phase may have begun.