A senior scientist at NASA has announced in the New York Times that he has terminal cancer. This is sad.
What’s sadder, though, is that he has chosen to exploit his personal tragedy for the purposes of promoting climate change alarmism.
Here is how Piers Sellers (pictured) – acting director of NASA’s Earth Sciences division – begins his New York Times article:
I’M a climate scientist who has just been told I have Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
This diagnosis puts me in an interesting position. I’ve spent much of my professional life thinking about the science of climate change, which is best viewed through a multidecadal lens. At some level I was sure that, even at my present age of 60, I would live to see the most critical part of the problem, and its possible solutions, play out in my lifetime. Now that my personal horizon has been steeply foreshortened, I was forced to decide how to spend my remaining time. Was continuing to think about climate change worth the bother?
At the risk of being ungracious to the terminally ill, the correct answer to that question on any number of levels is “No.”
But Sellers disagrees. He uses that intro as an excuse to spout the usual litany of nonsense so beloved by the climate alarmist establishment – “steady accumulation of evidence”, “climate change is real”, “computer models”, “unforeseen, disastrous events” – expecting his audience to receive it sympathetically because, hell, he’s got terminal cancer and if he says something is important it jolly well must be, right?
Sorry, but no. Sellers’ cancer says no more about the validity of global warming theory than Einstein’s having shagged Marilyn Monroe says about the validity of his theory of relativity.
Interesting biographical details and personal tragedy have nothing to do with the scientific method. (Well, not unless it’s Francis Bacon killing himself while experimenting on a frozen chicken).
I’m genuinely surprised that NASA thought it was at all a good idea to publish this emotive piece. I shouldn’t be surprised if it alienates more people than it persuades. After all, if climate change were really such a desperately important, scientifically proven issue, it certainly wouldn’t need moving pleas from dying men to push its cause. The facts would speak for themselves.