GLOBAL WARMING: A SCIENCE-RESEMBLING ACTIVITY DONE IN BAD FAITH

Mark Steyn comments on the latest idiocy  of Michael Mann and gets feedback on the "science" of global warming.

"Happer explained that his beliefs about climate change come from his experience at the Department of Energy, at which Happer said he supervised all non-weapons energy research, including climate change research. Managing a budget of more than $3 billion, Happer said he felt compelled to make sure it was being spent properly. 'I would have [researchers] come in, and they would brief me on their topics,' Happer explained. 'They would show up. Shiny faces, presentation ready to go. I would ask them questions, and they would be just delighted when you asked. That was true of almost every group that came in.'

"The exceptions were climate-change scientists, he said.

"'They would give me a briefing. It was a completely different experience. I remember one speaker who asked why I wanted to know, why I asked that question. So I said, you know I always ask questions at these briefings ... I often get a much better view of [things] in the interchange with the speaker,' Happer said. 'This guy looked at me and said, "What answer would you like?" I knew I was in trouble then. This was a community even in the early 1990s that was being turned political. [The attitude was] "Give me all this money, and I'll get the answer you like."

"Happer said he is dismayed by the politicization of the issue and believes the community of climate-change scientists has become a veritable 'religious cult,' noting that nobody understands or questions any of the science.

"He noted in an interview that in the past decade, despite what he called 'alarmist' claims, there has not only not been warming, there has in fact been global cooling. He added that climate change scientists are unable to use models to either predict the future or accurately model past events.

...

"'[Climate-change theory has] been extremely bad for science. It's going to give science a really bad name in the future,' he said. 'I think science is one of the great triumphs of humankind, and I hate to see it dragged through the mud in an episode like this.'"

The Happer interview avoids all the clutter and disputes about the climate data and the complicated models. Instead, it provides a telling **sociological** observation. (At least it strikes one physicist -- me -- as sociological! It's all about understanding pretty obvious behavior among other humans.) I think Happer's observation is damning of the adherents' community and is consistent with the picture that "Climategate" seemed to reveal.

Of course Happer's experience with those "climate-change scientists" was around 1990, so his observations presumably weren't of Michael Mann, who attained prominence only late in that decade. But his experience was consistent with the thesis that, in this arena, we're not really talking about science at all. Instead, I call it "a science-resembling activity done in bad faith.