Climate change hysteria, hype, propaganda and disinformation have become overwhelming lately, and with hurricane season upon us, it can be expected to get even worse. So is evidence that the spectacularly woke and incompetent Biden administration is so dedicated to the enviro-fascism this cult engenders that its priorities have become unhinged. For example, when the Pentagon needed to be devoting it full attention to minimizing the carnage from Biden’s disastrous snap withdrawal from Afghanistan in the two weeks between the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on August 15, 2021, and the final U.S. military flight out of Afghanistan on August 30, newly revealed emails show that top Pentagon officials were working to finalize the Department of Defense Climate Adaptation Plan, which declares climate change a major national security risk. After all, what’s a few dead servicemen and abandoned foreign allies along with the collapse of U.S. foreign policy credibility when the END OF THE WORLD looms?
Central to this international brainwashing and bullying effort—the U.N. recently ruled that children can sue nations that haven’t adequately wasted resources on anti-climate change measures that are likely to have no effect whatsoever on the climate—is the misleading claim that there is “scientific consensus” on the topic, when in fact there is not, and when even if this were true, “consensus” on scientific matters has been wrong, sometimes disastrously wrong, throughout history. The conclusions of this so-called consensus are being parroted by activists, politicians and journalists who couldn’t pass a 7th grade science quiz.
Meanwhile, President Biden is being urged to declare a constitutionally dubious “climate emergency” because of all this “certainty” regarding climate change doom, despite the fact that none of the models have panned out and predictions of deadlines to “save the planet” have been as accurate as the those of latter day prophets who have announced the exacts dates when Armageddon was arriving.
Despite all of this (and more), today’s lie being plastered as a headline on multiple conservative and anti-climate change news and a commentary sources is still a lie, still unethical, and still unforgivable. “1,600 Scientists Humiliate the Climate Ghouls Once and for All,” claims PJ Media, the conservative punditry giant. “Coalition of Scientists: ‘There is No Climate Emergency,” shouts CatholicVote. “Over 1,600 Scientists Sign ‘No Climate Emergency’ Declaration” is the most common phrasing, as used by the Epoch Times.
Utter fantasy. Either the writers responsible for these jubilant articles (“Just as the beta cucks in the climate change brigade prepare to get a job sit on the highway to keep you from living your life, 1,609 experts and scientists from around the world, including Nobel Laureates, have signed a declaration stating that climate change is nothing but lefty flapdoodle,” writes PJ Media’s Kevin Downey) are deliberately trying to mislead lazy and gullible readers, or they are too lazy and incompetent themselves to actually read the declaration they are writing about. Yes, it says that “There is no climate emergency” (NOT that “climate change is lefty flapdoodle”) but it has not been signed by over “1,600 scientists.” Not even close. I’m not going to bother to quote any of the declaration, which is generally reasonable: you can read it yourself. The ethics point is that the thing was signed by, according to the document itself, “scientists and professionals.” As for Nobel Laureates, that’s misleading: for example, the first one listed is John Clauser, who was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments with entangled photons. Citing him as an authority on climate change is like citing a legal ethicist as an authority on The Rule in Shelley’s Case. The second Nobel Laureate listed is Ivar Giaever, 94, a Norwegian-American engineer and physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 for his “experimental discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in superconductors,” whatever that means. I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with global warming, though.
At least those signers are scientists. The alleged list of “over 1600 scientists” is dominated by people like “Gordon Batt, Director GCB Investments Pty Ltd,” “Robert M. Bell, Retired Geologist,” “Richard Blayden, Professional Engineer,” “Don Andersen, Retired Teacher, Programmer,” and “Maxwell Charles S. Beck, lifetime of experience in law, retired Magistrate and Coroner.” Those are just from the Australia group. In the U.S., signatories include “Edward Abbott MD, Retired obstetrician” and “John M. Cape, P.E. former military officer and economics instructor at West Point.” There are plenty of scientists mixed in there too, but nobody should trust a declaration (or the organization that makes it) when it is deliberately misleading, which this is.
As for the outrageous representation of the document as something it is not, well, that tells us how low some conservative publications and writers are willing to go.
This doesn’t help.
Ethics Alarms 
I think you don’t understand this field at all. Here a few top ‘climate scientists’:
https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2021/professor-named-one-of-worlds-top-climate-scientists/
https://www.andrewweavermla.ca/biography/
Lots of the climate scientists are geologists.
They have degrees in Urban Health and Mathematics. That is who ‘climate scientists’ are. All Physics Ph.D.’s have to study all area of physics in graduate school, they don’t specialize until later. To say that a Ph.D. in physics doesn’t understand climate change as well as an urban health specialist is foolish.
When we are told there is consensus among scientists on climate change, the reasonable assumption is that they are climate scientists. Same here. Sure, a physicist or a chemist or a biologist will understand most any scientific matter better than Nancy Pelosi, but so what? If the geologist has not in fact researched climate change, appealing to his or her authority is misleading. Meanwhile, a lot of those on the list are not scientists at all, so the whole thing is untrustworthy and self-discrediting.
The best you can say is that it is no more dishonest than the “consensus” claim.Otherwise, you’re in denial. “Lots of the climate scientists are geologists” doesn’t mean that all geologists are climate scientists, and you know it. If you go to law school, you study many kinds of law. But a criminal lawyer who called himself a real estate law expert would be lying. No physicist would be admitted as an expert witness in a trial regarding climate change.
The list is a massive exercise in deceit.I understand deceit very well.
So, a mathematician who doesn’t understand the science behind climate change, but who programs models that don’t work is a ‘climate scientist”, but a physicist who understands the data and can see that it doesn’t say what they are being told isn’t to be trusted? Someone who studies urban development counts because someone hired them as a ‘climate scientist’, but someone who looks at the data from the NASA satellites and realizes that the model doesn’t reflect reality doesn’t count.
There is no ‘climate science’ field. Physics is the closest you are going to come.
In your analogy, a criminal lawyer couldn’t be considered an expert on laws covering murder, but an economist could if they were hired as an expert in legal aspects of murder.
BTW, you really insulted the physics Ph.D.’s here. When I said they studied all areas of physics, I mean that a physics Ph.D. covers as much material as 5 Ph.D.’s in chemistry. Because of that, I know people who spent 10 years in graduate school to get their Ph.D. in physics. The physics Ph.D. is really an expert in every area of physics by most people’s standards.
So any “scientist” is an expert on climate change? Baloney. Unless we know whether that scientist has applied his or her training to a specific study of the subject, we cannot rely on their expertise in related fields to justify appeals to authority.
And I have no idea what this was supposed to mean: “In your analogy, a criminal lawyer couldn’t be considered an expert on laws covering murder, but an economist could if they were hired as an expert in legal aspects of murder.” Criminal law is a specialty, and the principles in that specialty are applicable to all aspects of the field. A criminal lawyer who agreed to write a will would be engaging in irresponsible conduct.
And you’re quibbling. Look at the list: the 1600 includes non-scientists. Even if I granted your expansive interpretation, it still isn’t a list of 1600 scientists, meaning that the list and its representation are lies.
“The best you can say is that it is no more dishonest than the “consensus” claim.”
And that is exactly the position I have always taken. Consensus is not Science. Consensus it Politics.
So yes, I do agree that this list of 1600 people–whoever they are–signing their names to this statement is completely bogus and means nothing . . . for the exact same reason that “Consensus” means nothing in regards to claims of “climate emergency”. It’s all just one big Appeal To Authority and real scientists should know better.
Show us your evidence or go home.
–Dwayne
“Show us your evidence and explain it clearly without deceit or generalizations or go home.”
I mean sure . . . all that would be SUPER but let’s start with Step One. Actually DO IT.
I have seen EXACTLY ONE example of someone explaining “Climate Change” using an actual scientific evidence-based explanation and not falling back on “Consensus”: It was on Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s 2014 reboot of the Carl Sagan “Cosmos” series. I have a lot of respect for NDT on that episode because it wasn’t alarmist and he was very clear about calling out the difference between climate and weather and how one has almost nothing to do with the other.
One.
Exactly ONE.
–Dwayne
But wait! There’s more! A billion poor people will be dead by 2100!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12465331/One-BILLION-people-die-climate-change-2100-study-claims.html
And these are experts!
Here’s the “expert’s” page on his school’s electrical and computer engineering department’s page:
Joshua M. Pearce
Professor
Ph.D. in Masterials Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, USA
B.Sc. in Physics and Chemistry, The Pennsylvania State University, USA
Dr. Pearce’s Free Appropriate Sustainability Technology (FAST) research group.
Dr. Pearce is the John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation at the Thompson Centre for Engineering Leadership & Innovation. He holds appointments at Ivey Business School, the top ranked business school in Canada and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Western University in Canada, a top 1% global university. His research concentrates on the use of open source appropriate technology (OSAT) to find collaborative solutions to problems in sustainability and to reduce poverty. His research spans areas of engineering of solar photovoltaic technology, open hardware, and distributed recycling and additive manufacturing (DRAM) using RepRap 3-D printing, but also includes policy and economics. His research is regularly covered by the international and national press and it is continually ranked in the top 0.1% on Academia.edu. He is the editor-in-chief of HardwareX, the first journal dedicated to open source scientific hardware and the author of the Open-Source Lab:How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs, Create, Share, and Save Money Using Open-Source Projects, and To Catch the Sun, an open source book of inspiring stories of communities coming together to harness their own solar energy, and how you can do it too!.
—-
Wanted: Students to make a distributed future with solar-powered open-source 3-D printing and recycling. I am recruiting research students at every level now – PhD, MESc and Undergrad.
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“Climate science investigates the structure and dynamics of earth’s climate system. It seeks to understand how global, regional and local climates are maintained as well as the processes by which they change over time. In doing so, it employs observations and theory from a variety of domains, including meteorology, oceanography, physics, chemistry and more. These resources also inform the development of computer models of the climate system, which are a mainstay of climate research today.”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/climate-science/
I’m not sure what the actual standard for “climate scientist” is, but if we used a standard that might be commonly understood and accepted (Maybe “having a masters degree in natural sciences and actively in the field of studying, measuring and reporting on climate phenomenon”?), I doubt that there are 1600 on Earth.
Bingo. It’s another fake statistic, like “85% of all women are victims of sexual assault,” or whatever it is. I can’t believe anyone here is defending it, or any part of it.
Interestingly, there are parallels in this to a post I’ve been working on for about a week off and on that I finally posted today. I was going to post it in the Open Forum tomorrow, as probably one of the best (rhetorically, not in outcome) examples of a narrative-driven panic scandal that ended up being fairly uncontroversially bogus I’ve ever seen. Americans might even remember it even though it was Canadian.
“Yes, We Have No Mass Graves”
https://humbletalent.substack.com/p/the-scandal-that-probably-doesnt
Sorry, was going to post this tomorrow [but will be on a plane].
Nice piece, HT. Glad to see there are malevolent shit stirrers north of the border as well.
Re: “defending it.” I think the issue is there are no criteria whatsoever for what constitutes a “climate scientist.” The climate zealots consider anyone who’s in favor of climate alarmism to be a “climate scientist.” Which is ridiculous and unethical. I’m not saying the anti-hysteria people should be doing the same thing, but Jesus H. Christ, let’s at least acknowledge the hysterics have been calling anyone they like a climate scientist. I think that’s where the alleged pushback is coming from. It’s a double standard problem.
And I also think anyone holding a physics Ph.D. is clearly entitled to consider themselves conversant in “climate science” if they’ve done their research.
It’s also a calling lawyers, teachers, soldiers and dilettantes “scientists” problem.
Tony Heller is #144 on the “from the USA” list. I won’t speak to the others nor deny that the list might have its problems. But there are few people on the planet who have invested more time and effort into analyzing temperature data and debunking claims made by alarmists than Tony Heller.
His credentials in the climate debate, even as a geologist, are 100% legit.
Look, anyone with intact critical thinking abilities can figure out that the cliamte change panic and hype makes no sense. It we’re going to put the bar that low, then any evidence of substantial intelligence and rigorous training in any kind of analysis should count. But the magic attached to “scientist” without knowing if that scientist has examined the data carefully applying the relevant criteria or has just read a few pundit pieces makes that designation intellectually dishonest.
The problem is, no one knows what “a climate scientist” is. There are no degrees offered in “climate science,” are there? Does anyone have a Ph.D. in “climate science”? Are there any such graduate programs on offer? Sure, anyone on the list who’s simply a PR guy or an administrator of a program is not a scientist of any stripe. But frankly, I think the entire enterprise of “climate science” is suspect and certainly vaguely defined. I’d say “climate scientist” most likely means “computer modeler.”