Apologies for the lack of posts over the last couple of weeks but I’ve been busy interviewing for the job of chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It’s not the money and the jet-setting lifestyle that attract me – no, I lie: they attract me a lot – so much as the freedom it will afford me to behave as wantonly and disgustingly and shamelessly as I like with few apparent consequences and next to no media scrutiny.
It’s almost as if the mere fact of being a prominent climate change believer is such a powerful get-out-of-jail-free as to render you immune to all criticism, let alone appropriate punishment for your bad behaviour.
Here are a few examples of the kind of thing I mean.
Dr Rajendra Pachauri – former chairman of the IPCC
(Alleged) sexual harassment; rank hypocrisy; greed; baseless smearing
So finally it looks as if the bearded railway engineer, yogic, and writer of soft pornography has met his match: he has just been forced to resign his position at TERI (a sort of jumped up, environmentalist think-tank-cum-business) having been accused of a string of offences including “molestation, stalking, sexual harassment and criminal intimidation.” But why did it take so long? As I’ve reported here, there has long been more than enough evidence to justify kicking this man out of his job as head of the world’s most powerful climate change organisation – everything from his promulgation of the “glaciers to melt by 2035” myth to his dodgy dealings with golf courses – yet for years he managed to cling on by his fingernails. If he’d worked for the Heartland Institute or he were Christopher Monckton, his career would long since have been destroyed by the media. Instead, it turned a blind eye, presumably because he was on the “right” side of the argument and fitted the right ethnic profile.
John Cook – President Obama’s favourite inventor of climate factoids
Dishonesty; fabrication; smearing; promulgation of junk science (notably the false “97 per cent Consensus” claim); identity theft
John Cook is an Australian blogger who runs a website called Skeptical Science whose raison d’etre is to rubbish skeptics (or as I’d spell them, sceptics). His hobbies include dressing up in Nazi uniforms and identity theft (he has just been exposed as having impersonated online a sceptical scientist called Lubos Motl). I pass no judgement on such activities: I like a chap with a bit of hinterland. But I do think the seriousness with which his dodgy papers and articles are treated by everyone from the left-liberal media to President Obama is somewhat misplaced. And that when a man of his predilections accuses someone else on Twitter of being “creepy” it does make you wonder when he last looked in the mirror.
Peter Gleick – President (and co-founder) of environmental think tank the Pacific Institute
Dishonesty; identity theft; smearing; document faking; libel
Gleick is the high-minded environmental crusader who famously used deception in 2012 to trick some documents out of the Heartland Institute in order to expose it as the evil tool of the satanic Big Oil funded industrial lie complex. He failed, not least because the only evidence of nefarious intent he could unearth was a document which he had fabricated in which he had the Heartland Institute planning a secret campaign aimed at “dissuading teachers from teaching science”. Having been exposed – but only on the internet: his behaviour went almost unreported in the MSM – Gleick issued a cursory, crocodile-tear mea culpa and soon after got his job back. In environmental circles he remains as respected as he ever was. Indeed, his credibility, as far as the greenies are concerned, seems to have been burnished by the incident.
Michael Mann – Creator of the Hockey Stick; inventor of Mann-made global warming; Nobel Prize “winner”
Indefatigable promulgation of junk-science; vexatious litigation; data-fiddling; bullying
Never in the field of heroic non-achievement has a scientist achieved such prominence on the basis of so little. Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick – once the IPCC’s single-most-promoted piece of “evidence” for the threat of man-made global warming – has been repeatedly exposed as a worthless fabrication. Yet despite this – and all those Climategate emails revealing “Mike’s nature trick” to “hide the decline” and showing him to be an intolerant thug by no means averse to trying to destroy the careers of scientists or journal editors who dared to disagree with him – Mann still has tenure as director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State and still commands high fees on the lecture circuit. In almost any field other than climate science, certainly if he worked in the private sector, his failures would have surely have got him fired by now.
David Suzuki – Canada’s Al Gore
Dirty Old Man; greedhead
For a man who consistently strives to take the moral high ground over his denier opponents, David Suzuki is guilty of some pretty impressive chutzpah. Just read Donna Laframboise‘s damning account of a visit he made to publicly-funded, not-for-profit school: not only did he charge the institution $30,000 plus tax but his bizarre “rider” for the event included the demand that he should be protected by a bodyguard of attractive female students. I’m not necessarily arguing that his creepy lechery ought to be a reason for ousting him from his position as Canada’s go-to rent-a-quote on environmental issues. What I’m definitely saying is that if had been a Canadian on the other side of the argument who behaved like this – Mark Steyn, say; or Steve McIntyre, Ezra Levant, Terence Corcoran, Peter Foster, or whoever – they would have been afforded no such leeway. Their careers would be toast and they’d probably be facing some kind of law suit.
This rogues gallery list is by no means comprehensive. Among other names I could have included, had I had the stomach for it, are those of Stephan Lewandowsky, Al Gore, Tom Steyer, Phil Jones, James Hansen, and so on and on ad nauseam.
It all reminds me a bit of an incredibly depressing Russian art movie I saw recently called Leviathan, which depicts a world so utterly corrupt – from Putin-crony politicians to venal orthodox priests to bent coppers – that most people have given up even to make a pretence at striving to be honest or decent any more.
Something similar has happened over the years and decades to the climate change industry. Almost everyone is on the make or the take, in one way or another; the science is so dodgy that manipulation and fabrication have become the norm; the financial stakes are so high and the positions taken so entrenched that nobody has any option but to close ranks and try to shut down valid criticism by whatever means necessary. In this kind of climate venality thrives to the point where it becomes almost the norm.