On Friday, March 21, 2014 12:28:18 PM UTC-5, Ray Keller wrote:
**http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-L...ming-Consensus

American Physical Society Sees The
Light: Will It Be The First Major Scientific Institution To Reject The Global
Warming 'Consensus'?The American Physical Society (APS)
has signalled a dramatic turnabout in its position on "climate change" by
appointing three notorious climate skeptics to its panel on public affairs
(POPA).

They a

Professor Richard Lindzen, formerly Alfred P Sloan Professor of
Meteorology at Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a highly regarded
physicist who once described climate change alarmism on The Larry King Show as
"mainly just like little kids locking themselves in dark closets to see how much
they can scare each other and themselves."

John Christy, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University
of Alabama in Huntsville, who has written: "I'm sure the majority (but not all)
of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing
catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most
of the warming we see."

Judith Curry, Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric
Sciences at Georgia Tech, a former Warmist (and still a self-described "luke
warmer") who has infuriated many of her more extremist colleagues by defending
skeptics and by testifying to the US House Subcommittee on the Environment that
the uncertainties in forecasting climate science are much greater than the
alarmists will admit.

As Anthony Watts has noted, this is news guaranteed to make a Warmist's head explode.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/2...g/#more-105692

The reason it's so significant is that it comes only three years
after one of the APS's most distinguished members - Professor Hal Lewis - resigned in disgust at its
endorsement of what he called "the global warming scam."


...US physics professor: 'Global warming is the greatest
and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long
life'

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University
of California, Santa Barbara. Here is his letter of resignation to Curtis G.
Callan Jr, Princeton University, President of the American Physical
Society.

Anthony Watts describes it thus:


This is an important moment in science history. I would
describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the
Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this
letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.

It's so utterly damning that I'm going to run it in full without
further comment. (H/T GWPF,
Richard Brearley).


Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical
Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet
uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower
warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was
then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that
changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As
recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a
contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there
were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure
on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and
is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled
by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki
Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was
proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight
committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence
in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from
both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth,
and the money flood has become the raison d'être of much physics research, the
vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers
of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride
at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am
forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the
Society.

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.
Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read
the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the
facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can
read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a
definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of
this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along
with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject
to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then
President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the
e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of
important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal
purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been
designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change
was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly
not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So
a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding
marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word
incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this
one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never
troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety.
(They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison
word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no
one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but
approved a far longer "explanatory" screed, admitting that there were
uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the
original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also
contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments,
as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed
that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are
serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the
reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news,
and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It
was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its
enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science;
other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that
is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the
necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical
Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific
issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also
a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the
signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We
conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and
described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into
the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to
accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to
run a poll on the members' interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment.
You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your
yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of
affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more
expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal,
and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot.
(Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague
petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this
exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition
to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked
committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful
petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to
suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims.
Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture,
since it is always risky to discuss other people's motives. This scheming at
APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some
have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be,
but I don't think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what
Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of
dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to
exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics
Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the
global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing,
and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot
have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old
saying goes, you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is
blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I'm not going to explore at just which
point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a
careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an
academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no
longer represents me, but I hope we are still
friends.
Hal

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of
California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board,
chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member
Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President's Nuclear
Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor
Safety
Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman
of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW
II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip
a Coin (about decision making)

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abstinence—it is not a word