My research was attacked by thought police in journalism, activist groups funded by billionaires and even the White House.
By
ROGER PIELKE JR.
Updated Dec. 2, 2016 7:04 p.m. ET
Much to my surprise, I showed up in the WikiLeaks releases before the election. In a 2014 email, a staffer at the Center for American Progress, founded by John Podesta in 2003, took credit for a campaign to have me eliminated as a writer for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website. In the email, the editor of the think tank’s climate blog bragged to one of its billionaire donors, Tom Steyer: “I think it’s fair [to] say that, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538.”
WikiLeaks provides a window into a world I’ve seen up close for decades: the debate over what to do about climate change, and the role of science in that argument. Although it is too soon to tell how the Trump administration will engage the scientific community, my long experience shows what can happen when politicians and media turn against inconvenient research—which we’ve seen under Republican and Democratic presidents.
I understand why Mr. Podesta—most recently Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman—wanted to drive me out of the climate-change discussion. When substantively countering an academic’s research proves difficult, other techniques are needed to banish it. That is how politics sometimes works, and professors need to understand this if we want to participate in that arena.
Flashback: Meteorologist Anthony Watts on ‘adjusted’ U.S. temperature data: ‘In the business and trading world, people go to jail for such manipulations of data’
Watts: ‘Is history malleable? Can temperature data of the past be molded to fit a purpose? It certainly seems to be the case here, where the temperature for July 1936 reported … changes with the moment’
Updated Feb. 8, 2015: ‘BREATHTAKING’ ADJUSTMENTS TO ARCTIC TEMPERATURE RECORD. IS THERE ANY ‘GLOBAL WARMING’ WE CAN TRUST?
Satellites: Warming pause continues & 2014 not the hottest
UK Telegraph on new climategate: ‘Fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever’
By: Marc Morano – Climate DepotJanuary 10, 2013 1:40 PM with 912 comments
Related Links updated February 8, 2015:
Flashback: Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels: ‘The raw temperature data is continually adjusted to show more warming’ – PATRICK J. MICHAELS and PAUL C. “CHIP” KNAPPENBERGER: U.S. temperature ‘history has been repeatedly “revised” to either make temperatures colder in the earlier years or warmer at the end’ -‘A major and ongoing federal effort has been to try and cram these numbers into the box imposed by the theory that gives the government the most power—i.e., strong global warming.’ – ‘Please be advised that this history has been repeatedly “revised” to either make temperatures colder in the earlier years or warmer at the end. Not one “adjustment” has the opposite effect, a clear contravention of logic and probability. While the US has gotten slightly warmer in recent decades, compared to the early 20th century, so have the data themselves. It’s a fact that if you just take all the thousands of fairly evenly-spaced “official” weather stations around the country and average them up since 1895, that you won’t get much of a warming trend at all. Consequently a major and ongoing federal effort has been to try and cram these numbers into the box imposed by the theory that gives the government the most power—i.e., strong global warming.’
NOAA’s National Climatic Data center caught cooling the past – modern processed records don’t match paper records – ‘The average state temp records used in current trends analysis by NCDC do not reflect actual published records of such as they appeared in Monthly Weather Reviews and Climatological Data Summaries of years past…looked at entire years of data from 1920s & 1930s for numerous different states & found that this ‘cooling’ of old data was fairly consistent across the board…Is this purposeful mendacity, or just another example of confirmation bias at work?’
Rewriting Their Own Temperature Past At The National Academy Of Sciences: ‘Massively altered temp history since their 1975 report. They have eliminated most of the 1940-1970 cooling’ – ‘If they didn’t tamper with the data, there is no global warming since 1940.’ – In 1978, NOAA reported 0.5C global cooling from 1960-1965. NAS has almost completely erased that.’
