United States

"It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist."

Here in its entirety is Prof. Hal Lewis' public letter of resignation from the American Physical Society, from GWPF:

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara

To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence---it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

The recent releases from America's NOAA National Climatic Data Center make a convoluted tangle of misinformation that has tripped up almost everyone - including many climate realists.

The confusion starts with NOAA's own website announcing the report at http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100728_stateoftheclimate.html. Here's a snapshot of the page (click to see a larger image):

See the image of the report cover at the top of the web page? That is not the cover of the Report. Now notice the pretty graphic "Ten indicators of a warming world" a bit lower down. That one is not in the Report, it is in the Report. Confused?

It turns out there are actually two reports, and the NOAA web page only links to one of them. At the bottom of the page, below the bit I screen-captured in the graphic, there is a link to "The Report" - which is the one whose cover is shown on the web NOAA page, and which is also the one written by "more than 300 scientists from 160 research groups in 48 countries". But that Report is not the Report that the NOAA website goes on to describe in detail!

There is a second Report, called "2009 The State of the Climate Highlights", which the NOAA web page does not link to (but which you can see here), which is the source of the alarmist statements quoted on the web page, including this one:

Saw this on TheDailyWTF. Too funny to miss.

Two years ago, Wattsupwiththat demolished a crackpot story published on CBS (here and here). As stated in the second article, CBS wrongly attributed the story to Associated Press and then killed it without publishing a retraction.

At some time since, that story has been restored on the CBS site, and here is today's screenshot with a bit of surrounding material to prove the date of the screenshot:

Those who have taken a look at the background materials on this site will know that one of the dangers I see threatening humanity is a widespread psychological malfunction I have called the false religion. This isn't a religion in the old sense, it has no personal god, it isn't an overt competitor with other religions. Indeed, believers in normal religions often are also believers in the core doctrines of the false religion. In fact, because we are immersed in the false religion from birth (it having now taken over as the unofficial religion of the state), we all probably have been suckered by one or another of its beliefs, even if we saw through most of them and even if we later wised up when we looked closely at the evidence.

Perhaps Jung understood it in talking about an expansion of the ego - a belief that the individual, or the human species, has infinitely perfectible nature and powers, instead of being limited, as are all creatures, by the restrictions of our evolution, our environment, and our instincts. The framers of the American Constitution also understood it when they designed a structure that could work in spite of human frailty, rather than gambling on a mass spiritual transformation. So it clearly is a mistake to think the false religion has a single, identifiable manifestation. Human hopes and dreams can outrun reality in a thousand different ways - and how hard it is to reign them in when they are framed in words that uplift the heart and enthuse the spirit, even as they guarantee that the hopes must end in disappointment and tragedy. The false dream can infect any group or any organisation, and it does infect many, all at once. Over the top? Too alarmist? The following video was put together by a black person, Kevin Jackson of theblacksphere.net, so if you want to accuse me of racism for the following, please don't bother. It scares me, and it should scare you too.