Circling the Wagons

Physics Group Splinters Over Global Warming Review

The scientist who will head the American Physical Society's review of its 2007 statement calling for immediate reductions of carbon dioxide is Princeton's Robert Socolow, a prominent supporter of the link between CO2 and global warming who has warned of possible "catastrophic consequences" of climate change.

..."It is Socolow whose entire research funding stream, well over a million dollars a year, depends on continued alarm over global warming," says William Happer, a fellow Princeton University professor and head of the Happer physics lab who has raised the question of a conflict of interest. The reason: the ostensibly neutral person charged with evaluating a statement endorsing man-made global warming is a leading proponent of precisely that theory whose funding is tied to that theory.

Wait, it gets better!

Hal Lewis, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara who has been an APS member for 65 years, says that he asked both the current and incoming APS presidents to require that Socolow recuse himself from a review of this subject, and both refused.

That means the review will be "chaired by a guy who is hip deep in conflicts of interest, running a million-dollar program that is utterly dependent on global warming funding," Lewis says. In addition, he points out that the group charged with taking a second look at the 2007 statement, the Panel on Public Affairs, is the same body that drafted it in the first place. That, "too has a smell of people investigating themselves," Lewis says.

And the warmers wonder how people could ever doubt! When a company's books are called into question by the shareholders, the audit isn't handed over to the people keeping those books. Instead, the shareholders (and the SEC) demand an independent audit. For years, what most skeptics (and many climate scientists!) have called for is just such an audit, in the face of substantial evidence that the AGW "books" are at least slightly cooked.

Yet what we have seen over and over again, and what is on full display in the HCRU dump, is the "circle the wagons" mentality that shuts out all independent scrutiny of the details in the "books."

Instead, the response is to try to shoot those darn Injuns.