The Emperor’s New Climate: Is Global Warming Real?
By Duncan Maxwell Anderson

.....(extract from http://www.crisismagazine.com/february2004/feature1.htm).

I’m shocked by the lengths some scientist-believers go for the global warming cause, and I mention this to Patrick J. Michaels—a climatologist, professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, and author of The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air About Global Warming.

Michaels is surprised that I’m surprised.

He says: “No one in Washington gets large grants by saying something isn’t a problem. Meanwhile, the $10 billion thrown at climate modeling research in the last 15 years was wasted.”

I protest, “Where’s their concern for the truth? Some of these guys are worse than the politicians!”

“I believe you guys in the Catholic Church have a concept called original sin,” Michaels explains. “Picture this: It’s 1992 and there’s a hearing. Senator Albert Gore says he thinks global warming is a serious issue, and do you think it would be worthwhile to spend $1 billion or so studying it? No one is going to speak up and say it’s an overblown problem. If he did, all his colleagues would take out their knives and throw them into his back before he could leave the hearing room.” The result is a theory of impending doom that’s hard to test, since the proof is 100 years away. In the meantime, you could argue that it has become a form of welfare for liberal scientists.

Michaels is fond of bringing in Thomas Kuhn’s thinking from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: Scientists have created a global-warming paradigm for themselves that benefits them—as a cause and as a livelihood. They won’t easily be dissuaded from it. According to Kuhn, scientists tend to resist new information that upsets their paradigm till a new paradigm from a new generation finally supersedes it. In the meantime, when their hypotheses don’t work out, it’s typical to see them come up with more and more complicated explanations and lash out personally at their critics.