Dirty Rotten Climate Scandals

Shakespeare’s monster, Caliban, dreamed of clouds opening to show riches ready to drop upon him.

Climate scientists don’t have to dream about it – honors, awards and cash prizes rain down in torrents.

Other scientists try to help humanity, but while climate scientists may kid themselves and others that they share that goal, their practical intent is to raise energy costs and harm nations’ energy efficiency via renewables.

While they posture as planet-savers in white coats, some of them pocket awards of half-million dollars, even a million, and notch up more career-enhancing medals than a North Korean general.

A couple of local prizes are the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science ($A250,000) for ex-President of the Australian Academy of Science Kurt Lambeck last October, and in January UNSW Professor John Church pocketed an $A320,000 half-share of the 400,000 Euro BBVA Prize.

Both have done science work of international repute and their reputations in their specialist fields are deservedly high. However, Lambeck is a long-standing smiter of “deniers” and Church propagates via the ABC such lurid scenarios as this:

“… if the world’s carbon emissions continue unmitigated, a threshold will be crossed which will lead to the complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet. This, with melts from glaciers and ice in Antarctica, will lead to a sea level rise in the order of seven meters.”

There are many mickey-mouse awards in Australia for climate science and I’d be amazed if any post-doc climate person hasn’t won a gong.

It’s particularly obnoxious that even schoolkids are incited to compete for climate awards by regurgitating climate doomism.

On the global stage, my tally of warmist cash awards to US climate doomsayer Paul R. Ehrlich is about $US2.6 million. For the climate scare’s originator, ex-NASA scaremonger James Hansen, about $US2 million.

These rewards are not for getting anything right – their doom deadlines have proven to be utter tripe.

If you’re a climate scientist you can blot your copybook horribly but the prizes keep coming. You might not have heard of California’s Dr. Peter H. Gleick, but read on.

He’s been creaming it with prizes lately, $US100,000 from Israel’s Boris Mints Institute in April for the “Strategic Global Challenge of Fresh Water” and the Carl Sagan Prize last year for “researchers who have contributed mightily to the public understanding and appreciation of science.”

He’s scored more than 30 honors and awards all-up including a $US500,000 MacArthur “Genius” award for 2003.

Nice work, Gleick, but you’re the same man who in 2012 raided e-documents from the minor skeptic thinktank Heartland Institute.

Its CEO Joe Bast said that Gleick “impersonated a board member of the Heartland Institute, stole his identity by creating a fake email address and proceeded to use that fake email address to steal documents that were prepared for a board meeting.

He read those documents, concluded that there was no smoking gun in them, and then forged a two-page memo.” Gleick denied forging the document.

The forgery, among other fabrications, showed Heartland receiving $US200,000 from the Koch brothers’ Foundation when the reality was a mere $US25,000, and even that sum was actually for a health-care study.

Gleick confessed he committed the thefts because he believed Heartland was preventing a “rational debate” on global warming, even though he had refused a Heartland invitation to a fee-paid after-dinner debate shortly before he stole the documents.  Gleick said:

“…in a serious lapse of my own professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received … materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name…I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues…My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists .., and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless, I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.”

As for Heartland being “well-funded”, its budget that year was $US4.4 million, of which, maybe a third went on climate work, funding one conference, a blog, and half a dozen climate reports.

That compares with, say, WWF’s current budget in the US of $US230 million (Heartland’s, $US6 million), or the Australian Conservation Foundation’s current $A14 million.

The ironies about the much-honored Gleick didn’t stop there.

In 2011 he was founding chairman of a science ethics committee of the 60,000-member American Geophysical Union (AGU) and he immediately resigned membership when outed by Heartland.

AGU president Mike McPhaden issued a toe-curling statement. The global community of earth and space scientists, he said, had:

…witnessed the shocking fall from grace of an accomplished AGU member who betrayed the principles of scientific integrity.

In doing so he compromised AGU’s credibility as a scientific society, weakened the public’s trust in scientists, and produced fresh fuel for the unproductive and seemingly endless ideological firestorm surrounding the reality of the Earth’s changing climate.

His transgression … is a tragedy that requires us to stop and reflect on what we value as scientists and how we want to be perceived by the public… It is the responsibility of every scientist to safeguard that trust.

This has been one of the most trying times for me as president of AGU… How different it is than celebrating the news of a new discovery … These rare and sad occasions remind us that our actions reverberate through a global scientific community and that we must remain committed as individuals and as a society to the highest standards of scientific integrity in the pursuit of our goals.

Within three weeks of Gleick’s confession, I kid you not, water tech company Xylem awarded him a “Water Hero” award.

Thereafter he won a Lifetime Achievement Award from a  Silicon Valley Water Group (2013), was honored by the Guardian newspaper in 2014 as a world top-ten water guru, and in 2015 he received the Leadership and Achievement Award from the Council of Scientific Society Presidents.

The same year he received an Environmental Education Award from the Bay Institute. The major Carl Sagan and BMI Prizes followed in 2018 and 2019. Transgressions by warmist scientists are soon forgotten and readily forgiven.

While the Gleick case is one of horror, other climate-award material goes into the comedy file. The Climategate emails exposed two of the climate world’s top “experts”, Phil Jones and Mike Mann, horse-trading for new honors for themselves, via reciprocal recommendations.

Jones, at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, ran the HADCRUT4 global temperature data series underpinning the IPCC warming scare.

He managed to literally lose raw data (failure to back-up) and hid incriminating emails subject to FOI demands.[1] Michael Mann authored the infamous “Hockey Stick” paper used as a logo by the 2001 IPCC report as proving current warming is CO2-caused and unprecedented in the past 1000 years.

Mann’s paper also managed to ‘disappear’ the Medieval warming[2] and the 300-year Little Ice Age to 1850.

Mann’s skeptic foe, Mark Steyn, published an entire 320-page book, A Disgrace to the Profession comprising rejections of Mann’s findings, not by skeptics but by orthodox climate scientists. [3] 

Here are two climateers at work. (emails from 4/12/2007). Mann to Jones:

By the way, I am still looking into nominating you for an American Geophysical Union award; I’ve been told that the Ewing medal wouldn’t be the right one. Let me know if you have any particular options you’d like me to investigate…

Jones selects his own award:

As for the American Geophysical Union—just getting one of their Fellowships would be fine.

Mann then lets Jones know that he (Mann) himself happens to lack a Fellowship of the AGU and adds in brackets, “(Wink)” to inspire Jones to do something about it. (pp105, 118).

The matey honors system at the AGU continues to this day.

The selection committee last year for the AGU’s annual $US25,000 Climate Communication Prize (won by Mann last year) included prominent warmists Katharine Hayhoe, Stefan Rahmstorf, Richard Somerville, and Kevin Trenberth.

Recipients included the same Katharine Hayhoe (2014), Stefan Rahmstorf (2017), Richard Somerville (2015)  and  Kevin Trenberth (2013). A network clearly operates.

Winners Gavin Schmidt (2011), Mann (2018) and Rahmstorf (2017) jointly contribute to their realclimate.org blog. The AGU seems aware of incestuousness and has these unusual guidelines for the prize-winner selection:

Nominators and potential nominees…are urged to restrain from contacting members of their respective award selection committee while the AGU nomination and selection process is in progress…Persistent or frequent contact on topics related to the award nomination could potentially be viewed as an attempt to influence…

In the big global league, climate bureaucrat Christiana “Tinkerbell” Figueres, who oversaw the 2015 Paris pseudo-agreement from her UN perch, staggers under the weight of honors.

They include the  Shackleton Medal, the Grand Medal of the City of Paris, the Legion of Honor, the German Great Cross of Merit, the Guardian Medal of Honor, the 2015 Hero of El Pais award, the Global Thinker Award, Four Freedoms Award and the Solar Champion Award from the woke folk of California.

Quite a haul considering she still can’t distinguish between weather and climate. She achieved perpetual quotability with this ripper from  February 2015, in an official UN press release:

This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.

A Champagne socialist from the top end of town in Costa Rica, she views a halt to growth in the West with equanimity:

“Industrialised countries must stop growing — that’s fine. But developing countries must continue to grow their economy in order to bring their people out of poverty…”

Paul R. Ehrlich, now 87, has been showered with lucrative prizes. He has spent the past 50 years making horrific predictions about planetary and human doom.

None of these have remotely been fulfilled, such as his 1969 prediction of disastrous global famine by 1975, requiring compulsory birth control via sterilizing agents in food and water.

As a close-to-my-home example, he gave an address at Perth’s Murdoch University on October 2, 1985, concluding that unless Western countries went into wealth-sharing with the Third World, there would be lethal consequences for civilization such that “the handful of human beings that survive the resultant collapse may, if they are lucky, be able to eke out a livelihood hunting and gathering.”

He warned that by 2000, we could have a billion people perishing from hunger, with those famines leading in turn to a thermonuclear war that “could extinguish civilization.”

He continues to this day to be sought out by the media for yet more doomsday mayhem.

Read full post at Quadrant Online