The latest carper on the right to go nuclear over well established scientific data that points out the interrelationship between advancing global climate change and human activities is an individual who calls himself in the most dubious of terms "a scientist by trade" and a very obscure one at that named James Lewis. As a professional bomb thrower for the right wing, Lewis has his uninformed rants published in one of the most un-respected internet sites out there that goes by the name: Pajamas Media.It has come to Lewis' attention that the New York Times is a leftist publication that has had to bow to common sense and include more right wing thought within it's pages. Lewis cites the recent addition of John Tierney, a well known libertarian. Besides attending Yale as an undergraduate, Tierney's claim to fame as a writer on scientific topics was established by his "collaboration with novelist Christopher Buckley, Tierney co-wrote the comic novel, God Is My Broker, in parody of financial and spiritual self-help books. He also wrote The Best-Case Scenario Handbook, a parody of the popular Worst-Case Scenario Handbook series." Quite an accomplishment indeed.
But lets get back to Lewis and his monumental recent crackpot discovery that serpentines its convoluted path through every right wing bogey man: "Most scientists are liberals, and like so many on the Left they think that a little lying to the public can't be all bad. They are utterly wrong. When science becomes an official lie it starts to decay; you don't know whom to believe any more. And if you can't believe published data, real science becomes impossible. I date the decay of public science to the AIDS fiasco twenty years ago, when the public health establishment failed to warn gay men that yes, AIDS is a gay disease and is communicated most often by anal intercourse.
"The establishment lied and lied and lied," Lewis claims, and more and more young men died, and the disease spread and spread. Now it's in Africa, where anal intercourse is commonly used by female prostitutes as cheap birth control. That is why African AIDS has a somewhat different epidemiology. But it all goes back to a regime of lies by scientists and public health doctors. The lesson is: when science lies, people die.
"British medical science lost credibility after the mad-cow scare," explains Lewis, "another blown-up fraud, like global warming, based on math models that never made any empirical sense. I will never believe the British Medical Journal again, and I have real doubts about the Lancet. The journals Nature and Science have become shockingly corrupt and dishonest on global warming. They are still trying to push it half-heartedly, but they really know the jig is up.
"That's why I believe the New York Times felt compelled to hire John Tierney," claims Lewis. Tierney is giving them cover by writing about global warming as an hypothesis, not a Marx-given truth. If the global warming fraud is finally breaking down, the Times wants to say it knew it all along. If, by some miracle, the politicians manage to keep squeezing more billions of dollars out "to stop the rise of the oceans," as Obama yelled out in his victory speech, the Times will take credit for saving the planet. They want to have it both ways.
According to Lewis: "The sciences are now like Russia after Glastnost: Everybody can see a massive disaster ahead, but nobody wants to say it out loud. We are in that moment of shocked silence just before the bare-naked emperor becomes a target of universal laughter and ridicule. Well, this emperor is buck naked, just like the fairy tale.
"As" Lewis has "talked with scientific colleagues in private, they are quietly nodding, yes, yes, of course it's all BS. Pure model-driven fantasy. Really lousy, deceptive, and fraudulent selection of the data. A gigantic slap in the face for NASA. A thousand greedy grant swingers all over the world. The media chasing scare stories, and fake "scientists" chasing the media. They fed each other lie after lie after lie. It was a very profitable partnership."
According to Lewis: "What's so mind-boggling is that we live in a period of extraordinary real science. We are in the midst of a biotech revolution, a materials science revolution, a genetics revolution, a brain science revolution, a near-miraculous nano-level physics revolution – just astonishing stuff." Lewis urges the public to "be celebrating good science.
Lewis then proceeds to go after the right's most hated punching bags: "Instead, the media are full of phony superstitions and the worst kind of pseudo-science. If this is the best of times, it is also the worst of times — with a fetid plague of fraud whipped up by the likes of Al Gore, who helped to put fanatics like James Hansen into power. Hansen is not a scientist. He is a zealot who uses math models to push his personal crusade.
Now Lewis dazzles his readership with his ponderous scientific knowledge which he is only too happy to fill column space with: "Any half-decent scientist can whip up a computer model to predict anything you want. Disasters are easy to build into a model, because all you need is a positive feedback loop. CO2 is supposed to reflect heat back to earth, which is supposed to increase other greenhouse gases, and if you fiddle long enough, yes, you can predict the world is coming to an end. The same kind of model will predict that your body will explode in a big puff of steam tomorrow. Or that your brain will go into a epileptic fit. Models that run out of control are a lot easier to conjure up than models that predict stability in a hypercomplex, nonlinear climate system. What's really hard to explain about the climate is those long, long periods of stability.
"As Professor Fred Singer and others have shown," says Lewis, "none of the climate models can "retrodict" the solid data of the past. How could any decent scientist therefore claim to predict global temps in the distant future? Global warming was always a flaming fraud, and at some level a lot of scientists knew it. They just kept their heads down — to their everlasting shame.
"Everybody outside the climate game just assumed the frauds must be telling the truth," claims Lewis. All that modeling seemed to be somebody's specialty, and you don't arrogantly invade somebody's specialty, do you? So the mounting fraud went unpunished for years and years, while politicians like Al Gore made sure the money went to feed the fraud," enough already with the character assassination of Al Gore!
Finally Lewis gets to the truth of the matter in his version of muckraking journalism: "Here's a bit of truth. Scientists love money. It's only corporate money that smells bad to them. Government money smells like fresh-mown grass, green and lush. Even if they knew the whole game was a set-up, professors and college presidents went right along with it. Do you have any idea how much pressure college faculty are under to bring in grant money? The big universities get a big chunk of their budgets from "overhead expenses" — payoffs from Washington. Even undergraduate teaching is subsidized by science grants. So are grad students and faculty. In the end, professors don't get tenure without bringing in a steady supply of money, and after tenure, the pressure only gets worse.
"My question is," Lewis asks, "what shall we do with the science frauds once everybody gets it? The rules are very clear. Science organizations and universities have strict regulations against fraud. Proven liars are fired, and if they have stolen money by deception, they should be held legally responsible to pay it back or go to jail.
"Bernie Madoff, Lewis crows, "is a small operator compared to James Hansen. Madoff just got 150 years. Hansen is still ranting against the plain evidence.
"There are honest mistakes in science." Lewis must believe that those are the only kind the right should be held accountable for, as he continues, "On the frontiers of science everything looks vague and debatable for a while. But you don't drop your standards so low that any con artist can get away with fraud. That's what's happened in climate modeling. It is therefore crucial to re-establish the credibility of science. That means firing the guilty, and if necessary, prosecuting them.
"We'll know that the sciences are on the road to health again when the biggest crooks are exposed and fired," Lewis chortles. Don't expect it soon. But honest scientists should speak out, as many of them are beginning to do. Climate modeling has become a rubble-strewn disaster area, and historically, tainted fields are simply choked off and allowed to lie fallow for a generation or so before the first green shoots can grow again. Choke off the money, and the climate game will wither. All that accumulated expertise can be put to do something useful — like predicting the stock market or trying to beat the house in Vegas.
"Good science is always humbling," Lewis postulates. "If you don't start out humble, the data will make sure you end up that way. It's only when you drift into self-serving fraud that the data always support your fixed and preconceived beliefs. Albert Einstein was humbled by quantum mechanics. Well, NASA has been humbled by its wild and irresponsible venture into divine prophecy.
In the end, Lewis believes: "It is high time for honest scientists to speak out."
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