The quote continues “Some of the most vocal skeptics have done relatively little recent peer-reviewed scientific research on the topic, and some have had their voices amplified via financial support from industries opposed to any government regulation or taxation of greenhouse gas emissions”.

And continues, “Others do have training and experience, at least in some aspects of the wide-ranging issue, and are not bankrolled by industry. But overall, their number represents a distinctly minority position in the ongoing and normal colloquy among scientists about the evidence of climate change and its likely impacts”.

The paragraphs above are taken from the Society of Environmental Journalists website section on “Skeptics and Contrarians” (http://tinyurl.com/komswc). The SEJ choice of words and thought processes disclose their preferences and prejudices of the global warming issues. They also show a remarkable lack of what science is and how it proceeds. These are the self-appointed journalists who view themselves as final arbiters and reporters of what science is. Notice too, that they haven’t provided a single piece of evidence to support their claims. Taking sides and picking winners and losers is not science. They haven’t a clue of what science is all about.

What is remarkable is that a society of Journalists, allegedly intending to honestly report complex issues, has forfeited their professed dispassionate indifference to the global warming issues in exchange for naked advocacy.

• 1. SEJ states “As scientific evidence has accumulated that the planet is warming and that humans are behind it”. This only half correct. Even the IPCC has stated that there has been a slight (~0.6deg C) over the past 100 years. Even that doesn’t begin to tell the entire story of the recent warming, since it began about 300 years ago when the Little Ice Age began to end. This slight warming over the past 3 centuries seems to be a natural reversal of 400 years of cooling between about 1300 and 1700. Humans, coal plants, and SUVs were not behind that temperature reversal at all. Nor were humans behind the 600 or so other warming periods found during the last 1,000,000 years.

The question still remains “where is the evidence which establishes the hypothesis that man-made CO2 global warming causes global warming”? The crucial question after 20 years remains unanswered. There is no evidence showing any relationship between man-made CO2 and climate. The SEJ is operating with unscientific criteria to make these statements and to mislead their members and their readers. Science is driven by evidence, not the pretenses of elitism. Such unscientific criteria include:

a. Appeals to authority

b. Appeals to consensus---consensus is not science, nor is it evidence

c Both the absence and the avoidance of serious debates

d. The use of ad hominem attacks, pejoratives, personal attacks, and dismissiveness as a common, if not required, communications style among the AGW group

e. The erroneous assumptions that only “climate scientists” are qualified to discuss climate, and the many other aspects of the global warming issues.

f. The erroneous assumption that climate science is an exclusive domain of science having nothing in common with other areas. There are many areas in common with climate science which extend and overlap into other sciences and engineering familiar to thousands of other scientists and engineers. It is very much a world of interdisciplinary sciences.

g. Some of these include the numerous common areas of metrology such as surface, balloon, and satellite temperature measurements, CO2 measurements, sea level measurements, and sea surface temperature measurements.

Other areas of climate science shared with other disciplines include the basics of thermodynamics, heat, mass, and momentum transfer, ocean wide temperature differences, salinity gradients, velocity gradients, and an understanding of absorption and emission spectroscopy, gas phase kinetics, chemical reactions, error analyses, statistical significance, and common cause failure analyses.

The SEJ doesn’t recognize as a problem that there is a notable clannishness among the AGW noted by such prestigious people as Ed Wegman (http://tinyurl.com/c45uvv) and William Happer (http://tinyurl.com/d6yp8t) that simply has never been seen in science in 100 years. Most scientists welcome constructive criticism. The AGW lobby reflexively goes into attack mode without providing evidence, answering the questions, along with its friends in the SEJ.

One suspects that if the SEJ existed 350 years ago it would have been calling for Galileo’s execution. We now know that in addition to the Catholic Church, Italian academics of the times (not to mention those at Harvard at the time) also supported the charges of heresy. There still remains among us mindless political forces who still would refuse to look through Galileo’s telescope and see the evidence for themselves.

Now being discussed quietly around the world is the obvious widespread bullying of the AGW on a global scale. They seem to be defending, quite unprofessionally, what they view as their own scientific turf and their own entitlement programs, all of which are richly funded with billions of research dollars annually. This institutional bullying would seem to be fertile territory for the SEJ to investigate, but being committed to the bullies in the first place, it can’t.

The AGW lobby owns entire issues, who gets funded, and who don’t, who get published, and who don’t, who gets the acclaim, and who gets the scorn. The AGW enjoys huge popularity and favoritism among the media and the Society of Environmental Journalists. The AGW also has wide support in Hollywood as well as among those experts in the fine art of photo-shopping climatic disasters and floods into the streets of New York.

• 3. The SEJ also states “Some of the most vocal skeptics have done relatively little recent peer-reviewed scientific research on the topic”. This statement contains a number of irrelevant and erroneous assumptions to bolster its own global warming prejudices. These include:

a. The assumption that there are not major editorial biases at the major journals such as Science, Nature, Scientific American, New Scientist, etc. As a reader of most of these and a former subscriber to some of them, there most certainly are biases in editorial policies at these journals.

This doesn’t mean that good and worthy material don’t appear in them, but it creates such doubt in the knowledgeable reader’s mind that one doesn’t know any more whether he is reading the truth or not. Lots of papers written by the realists never have seen the light of day at these journals because of these editorial biases.

Such biases have been editorial practice at these journals for decades as we learned in the DDT issues of the 1970s (http://tinyurl.com/m2uj9o). One also suspects that an investigation of these biased journalistic practices are beyond journalistic tastes at the SEJ.

b. The assumption that anyone who has not published papers in climate science journals is unqualified to make comments is fallacious. Climate science is highly multi-disciplinary, and many science and engineering disciplines overlap the fundamentals of climate science. Climatologists weren’t the first to measure temperatures, CO2 concentrations, sea levels, or count polar bears. They weren’t the first to consider thermodynamics, mass, heat, and momentum transfer, vapor phase kinetics, and vapor phase spectroscopy. Nor are they the first to consider data quality, model validations, error analyses, instrumentation, use of quality standards from National Institute for Science and Technology (NIST), common cause failure analyses, and more.

c. They weren’t even the first to master the very dense mathematics of computer modeling. McIntyre and McKitrick, who discovered, with little cooperation from the authors, the stunning scientific fraud of the Hockeystick graph (http://tinyurl.com/awwva), demonstrated that. This means that people in many science and engineering disciplines can offer serious and worthy criticism of the details of climate science where such skills apply.

d. It is worth noting that Al Gore is not a scientist, nor a lawyer, nor a pastor, yet his scientific credentials are never challenged by the SEJ. Nor are the credentials of Dr. James Hansen, an astronomer, not a climatologist. He too gets by without these criticisms. Being on the side of the bullies has its benefits.

• 4. The SEJ states that “…some have had their voices amplified via financial support from industries opposed to any government regulation or taxation of greenhouse gas emissions.” This is largely irrelevant in that it implies that any recipient of such money would have to accept the script of the donor as gospel. The largest recipient of funding by far is the AGW lobby itself which receive billions annually from the government agencies and foundations. In one instance Dr. Jim Hansen was the recipient of $250,000 directly from the wealthy wife of a presidential candidate.

• 5. The SEJ’s belief that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

We observe that the SEJ arrogates to itself the role of judge, jury, and hangman in choosing for its members its preferred winners and losers in climate science. This is unfortunate for the SEJ, for journalism, and is a major disservice to its readers. The pretensions of science at SEJ need to be recognized and corrected.

Science does not advance by quoting what one believes or what anyone asserts, what someone says whom you recommend or prefer, or outcomes you prefer. It advances only with evidence that is properly collected, reviewed, discussed, and replicated.

Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., is a nuclear scientist and a science and energy resource for Hawaii Reporter and a science analyst for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, is retired and now lives in Eastern Washington. He has nearly 40 years experience in the energy field. He has also taught chemistry and energy at the University level. His interest in the communications of science has led to several communications awards, hundreds of speeches, and many appearances on television and talk shows. He can be reached via email at mailto:mike@foxreport.org

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