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December 9, 2009
American Physical Society Members Have Second Thoughts on AGW
Posted by The MaryHunter at December 9, 2009 12:19 PM
ClimateGate's latest impact on the scientific community: more divisions between the sensible and the soma-takers. Rather than continue to jump the shark, some members of the The American Physical Society would rather carefully revisit the society's 2007 statement that global warming poses a dire emergency to the nation and the planet.
Criticism is not coming from the lunatic fringe either, but from solidly mainstream scientists who are -- shudder the thought -- actually acting as scientists are supposed to: trying to get beyond fiction and politics to actual data and facts.
One APS dissenting member is William Happer, a physicist who runs the Happer Lab at Princeton University. Another is Hal Lewis, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A third is Robert Austin, another Princeton physics professor and head of a biophysics research group.
They've been circulating a letter saying: "By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen... We have asked the APS management to put the 2007 statement on ice until the extent to which it is tainted can be determined, but that has not been done. We have also asked that the membership be consulted on this point, but that too has not been done."
Of the signatories [to the petition] so far, Happer says, 77 are fellows of major scientific societies, 14 members of the National Academies, one is a Nobel laureate, and there is a large number of authors of major scientific books and recipients of prizes and awards for scientific research. He adds: "Some have accepted a career risk by signing the petition. The 230 odd signatories can hardly be dismissed as lightweights compared to those who spread the message of impending climate disaster."
Other APS members shed more light onto the ClimateGate fiasco:
This has become a common refrain: Hans von Storch, director of the Institute for Coastal Research, calls the climate change axis a "cartel." A colleague, Eduardo Zorita, went further and said the scientists implicated in the e-mails "should be barred" from future United Nations proceedings and warned that "the scientific debate has been in many instances hijacked to advance other agendas." One estimate from a free-market group says that 12 of the 26 scientists who wrote the relevant section of a U.N. global warming report are "up to their necks in ClimateGate."
And still, this is Al Gore's reaction:
Of course, this is the very same Al Gore, High Priest of Climatology, who believes that the earth's interior is several million degrees (pinky to cheek), over 1000 times hotter than the surface of the sun.
