[lbo-talk] Ward Churchill responds to U. of Colorado investigation]

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sun May 28 23:37:55 PDT 2006


On Sat May 27, jthorn65 wrote:


> If the left is looking for a "Churchill of the right" to go after it is
> Dr. Patrick Michaels, Professor of Climatology at the University of
> Virginia.

[And the next day, here you go. It's not entirely about Michaels. But it's a start.]

The New York Times

May 29, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

Swift Boating the Planet

By PAUL KRUGMAN

A brief segment in "An Inconvenient Truth" shows Senator Al Gore

questioning James Hansen, a climatologist at NASA, during a 1989

hearing. But the movie doesn't give you much context, or tell you what

happened to Dr. Hansen later.

And that's a story worth telling, for two reasons. It's a good

illustration of the way interest groups can create the appearance of

doubt even when the facts are clear and cloud the reputations of

people who should be regarded as heroes. And it's a warning for Mr.

Gore and others who hope to turn global warming into a real political

issue: you're going to have to get tougher, because the other side

doesn't play by any known rules.

Dr. Hansen was one of the first climate scientists to say publicly

that global warming was under way. In 1988, he made headlines with

Senate testimony in which he declared that "the greenhouse effect has

been detected, and it is changing our climate now." When he testified

again the following year, officials in the first Bush administration

altered his prepared statement to downplay the threat. Mr. Gore's

movie shows the moment when the administration's tampering was

revealed.

In 1988, Dr. Hansen was well out in front of his scientific

colleagues, but over the years that followed he was vindicated by a

growing body of evidence. By rights, Dr. Hansen should have been

universally acclaimed for both his prescience and his courage.

But soon after Dr. Hansen's 1988 testimony, energy companies began a

campaign to create doubt about global warming, in spite of the

increasingly overwhelming evidence. And in the late 1990's, climate

skeptics began a smear campaign against Dr. Hansen himself.

Leading the charge was Patrick Michaels, a professor at the University

of Virginia who has received substantial financial support from the

energy industry. In Senate testimony, and then in numerous

presentations, Dr. Michaels claimed that the actual pace of global

warming was falling far short of Dr. Hansen's predictions. As

evidence, he presented a chart supposedly taken from a 1988 paper

written by Dr. Hansen and others, which showed a curve of rising

temperatures considerably steeper than the trend that has actually

taken place.

In fact, the chart Dr. Michaels showed was a fraud that is, it wasn't

what Dr. Hansen actually predicted. The original paper showed a range

of possibilities, and the actual rise in temperature has fallen

squarely in the middle of that range. So how did Dr. Michaels make it

seem as if Dr. Hansen's prediction was wildly off? Why, he erased all

the lower curves, leaving only the curve that the original paper

described as being "on the high side of reality."

The experts at www.realclimate.org, the go-to site for climate

science, suggest that the smears against Dr. Hansen "might be viewed

by some as a positive sign, indicative of just how intellectually

bankrupt the contrarian movement has become." But I think they're

misreading the situation. In fact, the smears have been around for a

long time, and Dr. Hansen has been trying to correct the record for

years. Yet the claim that Dr. Hansen vastly overpredicted global

warming has remained in circulation, and has become a staple of

climate change skeptics, from Michael Crichton to Robert Novak.

There's a concise way to describe what happened to Dr. Hansen: he was

Swift-boated.

John Kerry, a genuine war hero, didn't realize that he could

successfully be portrayed as a coward. And it seems to me that Dr.

Hansen, whose predictions about global warming have proved remarkably

accurate, didn't believe that he could successfully be portrayed as an

unreliable exaggerator. His first response to Dr. Michaels, in January

1999, was astonishingly diffident. He pointed out that Dr. Michaels

misrepresented his work, but rather than denouncing the fraud

involved, he offered a rather plaintive appeal for better behavior.

Even now, Dr. Hansen seems reluctant to say the obvious. "Is this

treading close to scientific fraud?" he recently asked about Dr.

Michaels's smear. The answer is no: it isn't "treading close," it's

fraud pure and simple.

Now, Dr. Hansen isn't running for office. But Mr. Gore might be, and

even if he isn't, he hopes to promote global warming as a political

issue. And if he wants to do that, he and those on his side will have

to learn to call liars what they are.



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