This is the third time this has been posted on ATS already.
Hal Lewis is just some 90 year old crank physicist who has absolutely no background in climate science. He merely resigned from the American Physical
Society because he has been trying to push his global warming denial propaganda on them for years, and he was mad that nobody would agree with him. So
he wrote this big, melodramatic resignation letter and now all the denier blogs have picked it up and are posting it for all of you to sponge up
without any scrutiny to
his motives..
For those of you who want to jump to conclusions go right ahead. For any of you who actually want to hear the WHOLE story about this incident, and see
how it is being used to manipulate you - then read on:
(Copied from the other two threads)
Hal Lewis was part of an extremely aggressive lobbying campaign to petition the APS to revise their
official statement on climate change. He seems very bitter about it in his resignation
letter, implying that the petition was
overw
helmingly rejected by the APS council because, as he puts it - "other forces are at work".
Now never mind the fact that the council took the petition very sincerely, appointing an independent committee of esteemed scientists led by
MIT nuclear physicist Daniel Kleppner to look into the matter. This
committee spent FOUR MONTHS reviewing the science of climate change on the basis of Hal's allegations that it is largely unsettled and misrepresented.
So never mind that the committee
found these allegations to be completely untrue.
Let's just assume they were all "in on it" too (because you know, a nuclear physicist whose own work has nothing to do with climate change will get
more grant money if he supports it blah blah blah).
So this shouldn't matter anyway - because if there really is no "scientific consensus" on global warming, who cares what the council says - Hal's
petition is what really matters, right?
So let's go ask those 47,000 or so scientists that had an opportunity to sign it:
Only 0.45% of Physicists sign Denier Petition
Yes that's right - out of
47,000 possible respondents: a whopping
206 of them put their name to this crucial document. And as the link
above points out - this amounts to
0.45%, which coincidentally is roughly the same number of people who fall for Nigerian email scams. Weird
huh!
Anyway you can read more about the demographics of the signees
here in this report.
BUT WAIT - THERE'S MORE!!
Because to be fair - I see in his resignation letter Hal implies that the 200 signatures were just acquired to meet some bare minimum requirement to
bring the proposal before council, because it was "not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list". This
is kind of an odd thing to complain about considering earlier in the letter he complains about getting reprimanded for already having access to and
emailing some portion of that membership list, but whatever - moving on...
Let's see what else Hal and his diligent denier buddies did to get around this injustice and spread the good word:
They had their petition published in the Journal Nature
For those of you that don't know -
Nature is arguably the most prestigious and well known
scientific journal in the world. Science simply doesn't get any more "mainstream" than this.
Their demographics page boasts that the
journal has a print circulation of 50,000+ copies, with a pass along rate of 8. That means over 8 x 50,000 =
400,000 people, mostly scientists,
read it. Meanwhile their unique monthly online readership amounts to
ONE AND A HALF MILLION full fledged practicing nerds.
Publishing in Nature is basically the scientists' equivalent of getting your own ad at the Super Bowl.
...so Hal Lewis can cry me a river over how hard it was to get people to know about his pathetic petition. And none of this even accounts for the fact
it was also put up as an open letter on the internet and blogged, pinged and tweeted across the rabid reaches of the denial-o-sphere.
BUT WAIT - THERE'S EVEN MORE!!
Because if anyone is still holding on to some wicked fantasy that Hal Lewis is just some honest, ostracized science folk hero, trying to make the
truth heard in the face of overwhelming collusion amongst the big bad scientific elite - let me thoroughly squash that for you:
Go back to the Nature link and look at the first author of this epic
petition (the first name under the title, and the one that comes right before Lewis).
Fred Singer is one of the most notoriously well known corporate hack scientists out there in the world of political lobbying.
His sourcewatch page has a detailed rap sheet documenting 20 years of pimping out
his PhD on behalf of Big Tobacco and Oil companies. Look at his body of work:
In 1993, Singer collaborated with Tom Hockaday of Apco Associates to draft
an article on "junk science" intended for publication. Apco Associates was the PR firm hired to organize and direct
The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition for Philip
Morris. Hockaday reported on his work with Singer to Ellen Merlo, Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs at Philip Morris.
In 1995, as President of the Science and Environmental
Policy Project (a think tank based in Fairfax, Virginia) S. Fred Singer was involved in launching a publicity campaign about "The Top Five
Environmental Myths of 1995," a list that included the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's conclusion that secondhand tobacco smoke is a human
carcinogen.
He also stated that he had undertaken consulting work on "perhaps a dozen or so" energy companies. This included work on behalf of oil companies,
such as Exxon, Texaco, Arco, Shell, Sun, Unocal, the Electric Power Research Institute, Florida Power and the American Gas Association.
Singer is one of the classic outspoken climate skeptic "scientists" whose pockets happen to be stuffed with cash from Big Oil and Coal. Ironically he
is also one of the most vocal critics of the supposed lack of integrity in peer-reviewed mainstream science. So what a coincidence that Lewis' name
appears right next to his as co-authors of this petition, and now Hal's crying the same song.
The fact is his resignation letter is nothing but sour grapes and overdramatic grandstanding from a man who got busted and called out on his
delusional crusade on behalf of Big Oil. The facts and the science are completely clear on this, and once again vindicated the TRUE story behind
climate change.
Yet the minions of the internet continue to eat this sort of crap up because they are swallowing it whole from blogs that are set up to deliberately
USE YOU to spread this disinformation.
In the meantime you completely miss the point behind
the real conspiracy hidden within global warming. Stop being their puppet.
edit on 18-10-2010 by mc_squared because: spelling/grammar/typo