Jennifer Marohasy

IT used to be common for global warming activists to claim that anyone who disagrees with them must be in the pay of “big oil” – remember Al Gore said this in his documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.   More recently the accusation has been that anyone who disagrees with them doesn’t understand the science and therefore does not have an informed opinion.

Marc Morano, the communications director for the Republicans on the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, has made collecting and collating the names of dissenting scientists something of an obsession.  Last December he launched an updated report in Washington claiming, “Over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe challenged man-made global warming claims made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Al Gore.”

Yesterday Mr Morano added a particularly high profile scientist to this growing list, Dr John S. Theon. [1] 

Dr Theon is the former Chief of the Climate Processing Research Program at NASA Headquaters, and a former Chief of the Atmospheric Dynamics and Radiation Branch, and a former boss of Al Gore’s chief scientific advisor James Hansen.

Dr Theon has been very public and upfront in “his coming” out declaring that “climate models are useless” and more: 

“My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit … Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy.”

I would prefer that people made up their mind about global warming on the basis of the science – the evidence – but I increasingly understand many find it difficult to even read a simple graph and draw their own conclusions from this information. 

It seems that many people are inevitably influenced by the qualifications of the person making particular claims irrespective of the available evidence.  Furthermore, to quote David Evans, formerly of the Australian Greenhouse Office, it is difficult for the truth to emerge when only one side is properly funded.  So, I understand that it is increasingly important that Mr Morano encourage authorities like Dr Theon to speak out. [2]

Thank your Dr Theon for providing a clear opinion on this most controversial and emotionally charged issue. 

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Notes

1. Marc Morano, James Hansen’s Former NASA Supervisor Declares Himself a Skeptic, January 27, 2009. http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=1a5e6e32-802a-23ad-40ed-ecd53cd3d320

2.  David Evans, Trading Carbon as a Belief. December 22, 2008.
“Lack of diversity in science funding has been a major problem since government took over funding science in WWII. Science is like a courtroom – protagonists put forward their best cases, and out of the argument some truth emerges. But if only one side is funded and heard, then truth tends not to emerge. This happened in climate science, which is almost completely government funded and has been dominated by AGW for two decades.”
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2008/12/trading-carbon-as-a-belief/