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January 1, 2024

A popular saying is that those that don’t believe in God will believe in anything. Global warming provides and excellent reason for making an effort to believe in God, or at least in Judeo-Christian ideology that is the basis of our civilization.

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Global warming religion originates in well-financed scientific organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The scientific basis of the catastrophe theory is junk science made to seem authoritative by dressing it up with lengthy reports based on dubious computer models. These organizations and scientists greatly benefit from rivers of government money and bask in the prestige that comes from being credible-seeming prophets.

The junk science is bad, but the camp followers in the media and environmental non-profits are far worse. They amplify the junk science claims into hysterical predictions of imminent doom. The climate science establishment mostly sits on the sidelines, the members abdicating their responsibility as public servants and apparently happy with ignorant exaggerations of their scientific conclusions.

In 2005, when I retired, I took up the study of global warming. I joined the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. I went to their annual meetings of both organizations. I exhibited posters and went to the AGU annual climate change banquet in San Francisco Chinatown. I attended Gordon Research Conferences that related to climate change. These conferences encourage open discussion by requiring attendees not to quote other attendees. I made every effort to build relationships with climate scientists.

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At one Gordon Conference a former insider at the National Science Foundation stood up and said that the NSF was corrupt in various ways, for example directing grants to their friends. You could have heard a pin drop. Nobody defended the NSF and nobody agreed with the critic. They all pretended to be turtles. Presumably most of them had pending grant applications or plans to submit applications.

As President Eisenhower said in his 1961 farewell address about government support of science: “the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”

Although I was deeply invested in studying the science, the friendships with climate scientists were the most helpful aspect of my study. Very few establishment climate scientists openly depart from orthodoxy. But plenty of climate scientists doubt the orthodoxy but are afraid to speak up.

The orthodoxy is that the atmospheric climate models can predict the future and that we face a catastrophe caused by burning fossil fuels. This is obviously a leap of faith. There are many models from different science groups and they disagree with each other. According to a well-known climate scientist, their outputs do not “correspond even remotely to the current observed climate.” Models are evaluated by simulating past climate to see how well the model can track it. This is analogous to creating a mathematical model of the stock market that tracks past ups and downs and then applying the model to try to predict the future. This doesn’t work well as evidenced by the fact that there are not hordes of stock market forecasters that are billionaires. The problem is that fitting the past with a model is often an exercise in curve fitting that has no predictive power about the future.

Academic life is in varying degrees oppressive. Scientists go through a long apprenticeship starting as graduate students. Although climate science strives to be like physics with well-defined rules and principles it doesn’t work out that way due to the complicated nature of the Earth’s climate. Climate science is more like medicine than physics. The senior authorities or high priests of climate science have converged on the doomsday view. Doomsday works for them. Contradicting high priests is not a good way to get ahead.

A consequence of the intellectual oppression in climate science is that there are no early career mainstream climate scientists that are public critics of the orthodoxy. If one should emerge, he would be looking for a new line of work very quickly.