36 Comments

This is dynamite. Thank you, Roger, for an essay which brings to mind Emile Zola's J'Accuse in the Dreyfus Affair.

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Bravo to you Roger. Your critique is devastating. THB is indeed THB.

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It appears that the National Research Council is setting themselves up for violation of their "guardrails" set out in their Stratic Plan. Their selection of participating organizations is unlikely to result in:

• Seek the truth in conducting the work of the NRC but acknowledge uncertainties

presented in the evidence.

• Remain nonpartisan and evidence based to continue to serve as a neutral, objective

source of advice.

• Honor the charter and applicable laws.

• Manage and disclose conflicts of interest. The NRC must carefully consider and

manage any conflicts of interest—actual or perceived—in its volunteers, staff, and

sponsors.

https://www.nationalacademies.org/documents/embed/link/LF2255DA3DD1C41C0A42D3BEF0989ACAECE3053A6A9B/file/DB4DC1F0F8C6D4707DAA110A4790523122A000124DB5?noSaveAs=1

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Well done, Roger. You might have gone further and used the concept of Social Benefit of Carbon, as is described in an essay by Ken Gregory of the Friends of Science: Social Cost (Benefit) of Carbon Dioxide from FUND with Corrected Temperatures, Energy and CO2 Fertilization. https://friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/Social%20Cost%20of%20CO2-June11.pdf

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Dr. Who in 1977 may have said it best: “You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views”

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8 hrs agoLiked by Roger Pielke Jr.

When I was a younger man, I was contemplating going to law school as a career change. I met with a professor at a law school I was considering to discuss which direction to given my science background. I initially thought patent law. But he suggested environmental law. He said it was an area with a never ending source of litigation, a very lucrative area. I went another direction, but never forgot his advice.

Follow the money. You’ll find lawyers behind this that see this as a never ending source of riches. No matter the impact (negative) on science.

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I am a strict Falstaffian - "The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers." (Henry VI, Part 2)." Every solution to every problem that lawyers try to solve involves making more work for lawyers. Would that we poor struggling scientists had the same craft unity.

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author

Interesting ... law was on my radar screen at some point while I was contemplating grad school. Would have been a very different path.

I've got no problem with any of these scientists or groups working with lawyers or in support of litigation.

The failures of scientific integrity at NAS are the problem here.

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Don’t disagree. But I think if you dig, you’ll find a greed motivation behind this. I’ve seen it in other lawsuits (for example the Microsoft lawsuits).

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I did the opposite - did law and have more recently studied and graduated with a masters in climate change. I'll do a separate response on this issue. It is live here in New Zealand whereby a senior 'mainstream' scientist is referring a gov't working group to Extreme Event Attribution studies, as 'evidence' of climate change, in contradition to the IPCC's consistent messaging and the 'not-much-to-see-here observational record.

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9 hrs agoLiked by Roger Pielke Jr.

Dr. Pielke ==> Maybe we could just admit outright that WWA and their collaborators are simply intentionally cooking up 'evidence' to fed to lawfare in support of their favored political policies. WWA must know that their methods are questionable and would never ever pass a strict disinterested peer review, especially from statisticians.

The very idea that the National Academies would participate in such a perversion of science is -- I struggle to find a word strong enough -- beyond appalling.

Have they no shame? No self-awareness? Not even a sense of self-preservation?

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Darn, I can't remember the details. But see the PNAS publishing some Russian sourced fiction about nuclear safety (health effects?) as if they were reviewed, valid papers and refusing to take them down. The author was a known charlatan.

Point is, bad actors at the NAS are nothing new. It's terrible.

Happy for someone with a better memory to supply the details.

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author

Well, I start with a belief that these folks are sincere in their beliefs and work.

The evaluation of scientific claims does not believe on what any of us think about motivations.

In this series we will get into the scientific claims at play here.

That said, we are in agreement about what is most - beyond appalling - which is a very nice characterization. What in the world is the NAS doing here?

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I hesitate to use the word "creepy" too often in one day, but...

"Climate activists who experience massive burnout, outrage, and grief"

This is much deeper than describing the need to decarbonize. I don't know exactly what it is but it's not about science.

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9 hrs agoLiked by Roger Pielke Jr.

"The first public meeting of the NAS Attribution committee will take place a few weeks from now. UOn that agenda is a litigator from Sher Edling, LLC, a firm that is litigating almost two dozen climate cases that depend up claims of extreme event attribution.⁶ Somehow, that litigator’s role as a counsel-of-record in these various lawsuits was left off of the NAS public meeting agenda.

The second sentence starts with 'UOn' - maybe 'Upon'?

If the word is 'Upon', then it is incorrect, as persons are not 'on' agendas'. Maybe "Upon that agenda is a briefing from a litigator..."? Also "depend up claims" should probably be "depend on claims"

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author

That was supposed to be just On

And in a rare event, several others got that one first!

Thanks for the eagle eyes!!

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Great post, Dr. Pielke, thank you. Your thought experiment was very provocative. I took a slightly different tack than most of your readers. One could ask the question, does it matter if the patient is contaminated by e coli, or typhus, and it's answer is a vector having both magnitude and direction.

Noted climate scientist Richard Lindzen has said that “you have to fund science in ways that there are no incentives for promoting things.” But the bitter truth is that money equals advocacy. My risk management instructor taught me that perception equals reality. If you think the guy is from the “other side,” you automatically don’t trust his words, regardless of what evidence he or she might present.

Science should inform a decision, not persuade it. It is the arbiter’s responsibility to incorporate the information provided with direct evidence from other sources before arriving at any conclusions. For example, I look at Piltdown Mann’s “hockey stick” and see yes, the past few decades have seen rapid warming. But then I look at the geologic record and see evidence of enough hockey sticks to supply an NHL team. Life did not cease to exist then, so I conclude it will not cease to exist now; just be different.

Yes, this is a pretty simplistic analogy, but my point is, how science is presented is only half of the problem. The other half is how it is understood. When the public is gullible and looking for a scapegoat for their miseries, they’ll believe the sky is falling if they hear it shouted enough times or accompanied with words like “consensus.” Make you afraid of the problem first, then blame the other guy.

If I were your student, I would answer your thought experiment by saying there would be no change in magnitude of emotion, but there would be a change in direction of that emotion. I would then say to correct the direction (e.g., stop its oscillations between extremes), replace "fear" of climate change with "understanding" of that change.

Climate change is real, as you note every time, but it should not be feared. It seems like science now looks upon it as a disease, something that can be cured or eradicated, like polio or small pox. Many of us are of the age to have seen that happen in our lifetimes. They espouse decarbonization and economic sacrifice vaccines that offering a miraculous cure, as if it would stop the earth from rotating upon its axis.

But climate change cannot be stopped by any NGO donation, agency proclamation or campaign promise. Until we figure that out, scientific contamination on this subject matter will always exist.

My two cents, adjusted for inflation. Did I pass, or fail?

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Never ever trust the government. They are never neutral. You get folks like Fauci who become king and arbiter of their domain by little else but longevity. They are the needed filter to decide what info gets in and what doesn’t. Will a panel, committee etc not connected with government be less influenced if the government isn’t involved. Nothing is perfect. But government intervention assures political truths and not actual truth. I worked for the government for 25 years. Why do we have thousand toilet seats on government planes etc? Because the government is over run with “engineers” who need to produce anything to get a paycheck. One of government’s roles is to the set goals. It is up to the private sector to figure out how. That’s how you get to Space X.

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I agree that a NAS committee with conflicts, biases, and an overt political agenda is in fact INappropriate.

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11 hrs agoLiked by Roger Pielke Jr.

Roger, you do certainly know the Chair of the Committee from you time at NCAR, yes? And you have one of the smartest people on the planet, Tim Palmer, on the panel. I have no problem with any entity funding NAS. I do have a big problem with some being on the committee. And you must not have had much experience with NASA NAS panels of the 1900s and early 2000s where you could identify the recommended instruments by each panel member's interest. So, NAS panels have been also advocacy groups for some time. It doesn't make it right, but it certainly is not unique. They must, however and as you correctly point out, identify those interests and conflicts.

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author

Yes agreed

I'd characterize this particular panel as 1/3 excellent and accomplished scientists, 1/3 political advocates, and 1/3 other

I served on many NAS/NRC committees in the 1990s/2000s and I do indeed remember members of the committee there to advocate for their area of science or instrument. That was science politics, not politics politics. Steve Hilgartner has a nice book on these dynamics.

I do think that what I have documented in this post is qualitatively different though.

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For laughs Google climate change and note how many pages you have to scroll through to find any opposing positions.

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I read a piece this morning that mentioned Climate Change. The piece was about the Biden Harris campaign administration adopted the United Nations Pact for the Future to transform global governance, which introduces the foundations of a world government. Of course the group wants to coordinate all climate goals and policies. The UN certainly not a fair arbitrator of anything especially climate change. The author suggested that Google was somehow connected to this effort.

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11 hrs agoLiked by Roger Pielke Jr.

I am very curious as to the reaction of your students when they discovered the truth after your reveal. Did they actually change their attitude or opinion about the data they were being fed?

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I have been fortunate to have had extremely positive reactions to my courses from my students since I returned to teaching environmental policy to undergrads in 2019. I have no idea if their views changed in any way (nor do i much care) but I do know that many of them developed improved skills of critical thinking and analysis which means I earned my professor salary in those courses.

I will miss this type of teaching, but not for long. In 2025, I'll be teaching a summer honors course at AEI for undergrads from across the country. That'll be fun.

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