A leading skeptical scientist has reported that seven shots were fired at his workplace during the weekend’s Earth Day and March for Science events — likely as a threat and warning.
Dr Roy Spencer, meteorologist and noted climate skeptic at the University of Huntsville, Alabama, reports at his website that the shots were aimed at the office of his colleague and fellow sceptic, Dr John Christy:
A total of seven shots were fired into our National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) building here at UAH over the weekend.
All bullets hit the 4th floor, which is where John Christy’s office is (my office is in another part of the building).
Given that this was Earth Day weekend, with a March for Science passing right past our building on Saturday afternoon, I think this is more than coincidence. When some people cannot argue facts, they resort to violence to get their way. It doesn’t matter that we don’t “deny global warming”; the fact we disagree with its seriousness and the level of human involvement in warming is enough to send some radicals into a tizzy.
Our street is fairly quiet, so I doubt the shots were fired during Saturday’s march here. It was probably late night Saturday or Sunday for the shooter to have a chance of being unnoticed.
Maybe the “March For Science” should have been called the “March To Silence”.
Campus and city police say they believe the shots were fired from a passing car, based upon the angle of entry into one of the offices. Shell casings were recovered outside. The closest distance a passing car would have been is 70 yards away.
Both Spencer and Christy have long incurred the wrath of climate alarmists for the work they do debunking the junk science behind the global warming scare. What they have shown is that the “global warming” recorded by accurate satellite measurements is considerably less dramatic than that shown on the heavily adjusted earth surface temperature datasets preferred by climate alarmists.
Christy has made himself especially unpopular by testifying in Congress last month that the climate establishment is corrupt and untrustworthy and that a Red Team needs to be created to correct false “Consensus Science.”
I’ve often stated that climate science is a “murky” science. We do not have laboratory methods of testing our hypotheses as many other sciences do. As a result what passes for science includes, opinion, arguments-from-authority, dramatic press releases, and fuzzy
notions of consensus generated by preselected groups. This is not science. I noticed the House passed an amendment last year to de-fund the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC.) We know from Climategate emails and many other sources that the IPCC has had problems with those who take different positions on climate change than what the IPCC promotes. There is another way to deal with this however. Since the IPCC activity is funded by US taxpayers, then I propose that five to ten percent of the funds be allocated to a group of well-credentialed scientists to produce an assessment that expresses legitimate, alternative hypotheses that have been (in their view) marginalized, misrepresented or ignored in previous IPCC reports (and thus EPA and National Climate Assessments). Such activities are often called “Red Team” reports and are widely used in government and industry.
This is not, it would appear, a message that those in the Climate Change industry — sometimes known as the Climate Industrial Complex or the Green Blob —want to hear. Especially not the more extreme elements, it seems.
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