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Dale & Laura McIntyre's avatar

Dear Roger, I wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal requesting a correction to their article in yesterday's paper. This article parroted the National Climate Assessment uncritically to claim that extreme weather events are increasing and, at present, are putting food supplies and our "way of life" in peril. I used your data to show that floods, hurricanes and tornadoes are not doing any such thing. Wildfires are down over 90% since the 1930's, and this year's bountiful corn crop set a new record for bushels harvested. I plan to keep protesting about such claptrap. But sometimes, the torrent of climate scare stories has reached such a volume that I feel like a man with a teaspoon trying to turn back the tide at the Bay of Fundy.

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Sharon F.'s avatar

I was working in federal R&D when our representative came back from a USCGRP meeting and said something like “ there’s going to be big bucks, bigger than we’ve ever seen” and being R&D folks we said “but everything has some relationship to climate” visions of dollar signs dancing in our heads. And pretty soon every proposal had climate somewhere.. and so I wonder, because most scientists who get funded by climate megabucks are not modelers, if that’s part of the reason 8.5 was accepted and folks can’t let go; that most climate research needs projections and most groups are not able to generate their own (nor downscale). It’s not exactly “corruption” on the part of scientists, they need to go where the money is.. but the path from “lotsa bucks” to “shifts in research direction” to “climate affects everything” to a way of looking at the world that can’t be questioned.. even in its tiniest part (see your work, even the recent Patrick Brown kerfuffle) looking back looks kind of inevitable. A kingdom built on projections with the king disciplines being modelers and the rest of us toiling in their fields. But I’m thinking big infusions of bucks to USCGRP is where it all started.

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