Wednesday, February 2, 2011

More Global Warming Fiasco

Recently Dr. Hal Lewis, a prominent member of the American Physical Society (APS), resigned from his society membership.  You can read all about it here at the Telegraph.  Note his reason:

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.

Wow.  Those are strong words.  He goes on to explain that in the aftermath of ClimateGate, nothing was done by the APS.

The APS followed up with a response to his resignation letter here.

Dr. Lewis, and colleagues Dr. Roger Cohen and Dr. Will Happer, responded to/deconstructed their response here with an addendum by Dr. Cohen.

Now, the resignation of a high profile member, and support from a few colleagues, does not in and of itself indicate something wrong with the system they seek to separate from, though it is suggestive.  There are plenty of respectable quacks out there, let alone respectable people, who simply become disenchanted, causing an unjustifiable separation from something more flawed than previously realized.

However, the follow-up deconstruction by Dr. Lewis hints to me that here is a man who is acting fairly out of a relatively reasonable assessment of the situation and is reasonably justified in his criticism and denouncement.  I think this is just one of many instances of a pandemic in this country of corrupt political and economic entities who seek control and wealth by manipulation and scare tactics.  This calls for a mindset of critical realism instead of the naiveté so rampant in this country.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.