The problem with climate science is that it isn’t science, and hasn’t been for years, having veered off into thinly veiled advocacy. The frenzied reaction to the recent DOE Climate Working Group report exemplifies this failing. All the usual suspects have lined up to trash the CWG, often in highly personal terms. This is a giant tell that it’s most definitely not about the science, but rather about straying from the faith.
Roger Pielke, junior, knows a thing or two about the consequences of rejecting groupthink. Early in his career he and others crunched the numbers and found that a key tenet of climate science was in error. It had been asserted that hurricane activity, measured by economic losses, had increased, and that this increase was due to human-caused global warming. Pielke et al found that there was no increase, and that greater economic losses were due to larger amounts of development in vulnerable areas, and proved it with massive amounts of data. They followed the data, which led to a politically inconvenient conclusion. And for this they were punished.
Pielke, a tenured professor at the University of Colorado, endured years of astonishingly petty treatment obviously intended to drive him off, documented here: discoursemagazine.com/p…
He’s hardly the only one. There’s a lengthy list of good, honest scientists who have been excommunicated for reaching the wrong conclusions, including Judith Curry, one of five scientists who authored the CWG report. justthenews.com/politic…
On one side you have sober, principled people who follow the data where it takes them. And for their honesty they have endured pure hell. On the other side are people like Andrew Dessler, of Texas A&M, a key figure in the highly coordinated assault on the CWG. Dessler, a sweaty, neurotic, blustering mess of a man with a weakness for personal attacks, once famously predicted that climate change would soon force humans to live underground. For this howler he endured no career consequences whatsoever.
And then there’s Michael Mann, a geophysicist who became rock-star famous in 1998 with the so-called hockey stick graph.
This graph depicted 1000 years of steady temperatures until about 1900, when the graph suddenly veered upward. It was asserted that this spike in temperature was caused by the sudden increase in atmospheric CO2 due to large-scale combustion of carbon-based fuels. It was the smoking gun that climate advocates had long been hoping for, and for his efforts, Mann was richly rewarded.
Like Dessler, Mann is a brittle, histrionic personality given to personal attacks. He is also quick to litigate against his critics. His defamation suit against Mark Steyn, who wrote an opinion piece critical of Mann, dragged on for nearly fifteen years, and resulted in a costly judgement against Mann. Mann is not well-regarded by his fellow scientists, as Steyn detailed in his book titled “A Disgrace to the Profession,” a compendium of over 100 of Mann’s fellow scientists saying what they think of him, on the record. It’s quite something, and in a just world this alone would have ended Mann’s career.
Ironically, the graph that made Mann’s career turned out to have been the product of sloppy science and dubious statistics. The IPCC, which prominently featured it in its 2000 report, quietly dropped it from the next edition.
To any informed, objective observer on the outside, it’s clear as it could possibly be that climate science is fundamentally corrupted, by money, by dogma, by politics, by cults of personality. It’s not a true scientific discipline anymore, and its findings may no longer be taken seriously. And with literally trillions of dollars on the line, that’s a problem.