Many of Eric Raymond’s various insightful comments on the current disastrous state of climate research and the Climategate scandal have been collected. My favorite comment:
One of the reasons AGW flimflam angers me is that it crowds out sane, constructive environmentalism. An environmental lobby that really cared about saving the planet would be agitating for crash programs to replace the burning of fossil fuels with nuclear energy; buying up rainforest acreage to stem loss of biodiversity; funding research into better battery- and supercap-based storage technology so low-density renewable power sources could be aggregated into baseload power. But the envorinmentalists we have won’t do these things, because they’re fixated on the wrong problems and the wrong means of solving even those.
His call for opening all the data and code for full scrutiny is also singing my song, and goes back to my repeated calls for reform of our badly broken and corrupted peer review system.
Read the whole thing right here.
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How long have we’ve been saying that global warming is a scam?
Ever since they tried to censor Dr. Richard Lindzen from MIT.
-HB
It strikes me as “religious fervor” more than a simple scam. The apostates and heretics must be silenced.
Watching this all play out, I’m becoming more convinced that religious fervor is a common and unavoidable part of the human experience.
It’s almost like Neitzche forgot the second sentence…
“God is dead. Long live God.”
Once something like this reaches a certain critical mass of believers, those believers become an “inner circle”…and, as C S Lewis has pointed out, the desire to be part of an inner circle is a very powerful and very dangerous human drive… “of all earthly powers (this desire) is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.”
and
“To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still- just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig- the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”- and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure- something “we always do.”
And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face- that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face- turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.”
I think those interested in “constructive environmentalism” need to leave the term “environmentalist” and it’s derivatives behind. Rationally minimizing human impact on the environment is conservation. Advocacy of environmental protection for the sake of environmental protection regardless of cost is a moral/religious practice, and we need to recognize that environmentalism is a religion. If Climategate doesn’t demonstrate that, I can’t imagine what will.
“our badly broken and corrupted peer review system”
A little off topic for the post, but another thing we need to try to preserve: I’ve noted in my exposure to other cultures that Americans tend to be uniquely resistant to appeals to authority. I’m not sure why this is, but it’s a trait we need to promote and nurture if possible, as a defense against this sort of thing in the future.
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