The "Science" of Authority

Funny. The global warming crowd has made fun of anybody who didn't get on the bandwagen and they derided any attempt to get lists of scientists who questioned the orthodoxy of global warming. (Note: almost nobody denies temperatures have warmed over the last 150 years, the argument is over whether the rise in temps are caused by humans and how much the data reflects urban heat islands or even, as in the case of the Hadley CRU, fraudulent data.)

Now the Hadley climate research group has rounded up 1700 scientists to sign a petition affirming that the science is "sound". Funny... since when is science done by committee vote? This is especially odd since most scientists realize that their career would be ended if they go against orthodoxy. So most are like this scientist:

One scientist told The Times he felt under pressure to sign. “The Met Office is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming,” he said.

Professor Slingo denied that the Met Office had put anyone under pressure. “The response has been absolutely spontaneous. As a scientist you sign things you agree with, not because you are worried about what the Met Office might think of you,” she said.

The reality is that the orthodox position controls the purse strings, controls peer review, controls the journals, and has shown its willingness to destroy anybody who goes up against it. So when they come for your signature, you sign.

So what does a list of 1,700 UK scientists 'defending the “professional integrity” of global warming research' mean? That's what is pointed out in this Times article by Ben Webster:

The Met Office has embarked on an urgent exercise to bolster the reputation of climate-change science after the furore over stolen e-mails.

More than 1,700 scientists have agreed to sign a statement defending the “professional integrity” of global warming research. They were responding to a round-robin request from the Met Office, which has spent four days collecting signatures. The initiative is a sign of how worried it is that e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia are fuelling scepticism about man-made global warming at a critical moment in talks on carbon emissions.

One scientist said that he felt under pressure to sign the circular or risk losing work. The Met Office admitted that many of the signatories did not work on climate change.

John Hirst, the Met Office chief executive, and Julia Slingo, its chief scientist, wrote to 70 colleagues on Sunday asking them to sign “to defend our profession against this unprecedented attack to discredit us and the science of climate change”. They asked them to forward the petition to colleagues to generate support “for a simple statement that we . . . have the utmost confidence in the science base that underpins the evidence for global warming”.

In this post from yesterday, you can watch how a physicist carefully dances around the issue of whether he 'believes' the global warming mantra. His research is damning. It shows that we are on the cusp of falling into a new little ice age. It shows that the fanatical focus on CO2 makes no sense if you look at past climate history. But he dare not question orthodoxy. His research undercuts the global warming orthodoxy but he carefully never draws that conclusion because it would endanger his funding and his career. Sad.