Monday, October 11, 2010

Prof. Lewis: Climate Change is the Greatest and Most Successful Pseudoscientific Fraud I Have Seen

87-year old Professor Hal Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California-Santa Barbara, formally resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) last Wednesday after 67 years as a member.

From Professor Lewis' resignation letter to Curtis G. Callan, Princeton University, President of the APS:

"For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

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 who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I'm not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends."

HT: Tom Hemphill

6 Comments:

At 10/11/2010 7:50 PM, Blogger Benjamin Cole said...

There are also some scientists who contend creationism is possible. I saw one exhibit showing T-Rex alongside early man.

I wonder if creationism will make it onto the 2012 R-Party platform.

Global Warming? Who knows--but there are plenty of serious scientists who are getting fooled, if it is a hoax. Does one 87-year-old scientist's convictions mean a lot, given the body of evidence cited by others working in the field?

Was Marx a better guide than Adam Smith?

 
At 10/11/2010 8:56 PM, Blogger geoih said...

The whole premise of global warming is ridiculous. That a single biological species, in the space of a couple hundred years, has created catastrophic planetary environmental change, on a planet with an inherently unstable ecosphere that has been running in dynamic equilibrium for 3 billion years.

Either the proponents are very self absorbed, they have other more petty motives (money, personal power, etc.), or we need to worry about this creator you allude to.

 
At 10/11/2010 9:36 PM, Blogger juandos said...

Well any sort of liberal climate hoax being pushed by questionable clowns is O.K. in pseudo benny's world...

 
At 10/11/2010 9:50 PM, Blogger gadfly said...

I re-read Professor Perry's informative article but could not seem to find the subject of creationism or Republican-sponsored creationism in the post. Maybe Benjamin got confused because he could not find a scientific basis to defend the warmists.

However, if he has embraced global warming as his religion or profession, he may judge any nonsensical straw man will do to divert attention from truth.

As for Marx versus Adam Smith, Groucho was by far a better comedian while Adam Smith was best known for his absent mindedness ... whatever any of that has to do with pseudo-scientific fraud.

Perhaps Benny could start his defense of global warming by providing empirical evidence that increases in CO2 levels from present minuscule levels does, without question, cause catastrophic warming on Earth. Perhaps he could even tell us what the ideal average temperature for the Earth should be.

 
At 10/11/2010 10:19 PM, Blogger VangelV said...

Global Warming? Who knows--but there are plenty of serious scientists who are getting fooled, if it is a hoax. Does one 87-year-old scientist's convictions mean a lot, given the body of evidence cited by others working in the field?

Note why he resigned from the organization. He and a number of other very prominent scientists were very worried about the statistical methodology and data integrity. All they wanted is that the APS look into the science and have certain questions answered. The APS refused because it was already established by the NAS and the Wegman panel that the Hockey Stick graphs were created by methodological tricks and cherry picking. That is why the AGW side has no interest in debating the science or having any independent reviews take place.

Fortunately, Obama has helped out the skeptical side by having the EPA try to enforce its rules without doing the necessary scientific evaluations. The enforcement actions will be challenged in court where the science will have to be independently reviewed. I can hardly wait to have Mann explain why he thought that short centering was a good idea and why such an r^2 value should be taken seriously when it creates uncertainty bars from floor to ceiling. Or have Hansen explain his statements on sea level increases and why he does not use thermometers to measure Arctic temperatures in areas where there are working stations. One would think that a judge who finds out that 1934 was the warmest year in the 20th century for the US and that the 1930s were the warmest decade would have a few questions about the so-called link between CO2 emissions and temperature. Imagine Briffa explaining his little 'trick' or Jones explaining his statements in his BBC interview. Or the NIWA explaining why it can't support the reported warming trend of 1C in the past century when its raw data shows no warming at all. I doubt that the court will buy the 'dog ate the data' defense that Jones used in the UEA review.

 
At 10/12/2010 8:19 AM, Blogger Bill said...

Poor Benji falls for every leftist canard in the book. What is it about the left that prevents them from distinguishing sh!t from shinola?

 

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