Claims of human caused global warming began with a deception and the pattern continues. It appears a new response of climate scientists caught in malfeasance has evolved as the original deception fails. It’s called self-victimization that Wikipedia defines as;
“the fabrication of victimhood for a variety of reasons such to justify abuse of others, to manipulate others, a coping strategy or attention seeking.”
James Hansen, 71 years old and director of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), produced a recent example. Going to Scotland for another speech, he played the victimization card now familiar to IPCC affiliated and Climatic Research Unit (CRU) people, like Director Phil Jones who claimed he considered suicide after the emails were leaked. Hansen played the card in October 2011 when he said,
“Climate sceptics are winning the argument with the public over global warming.”
His latest comments are an expansion and suggest political tunnel vision rather than scientific awareness. Here are his comments (H) with my commentary (B).
(H) “There is remarkable inconsistency between the scientific story and public story,”
(B) True, but it’s a result of IPCC strategy designed to distort the difference. They produce a Science Report, which virtually nobody reads or can understand, months after they release the grossly distorted Summary for Policymakers (SPM).
(H) “The science has become stronger and stronger over the past five years while the public perception has gone in completely the other direction. That is not an accident.”
(B) Again true, but not because the public are stupid or misled by the skeptics as Hansen arrogantly infers. There was a campaign to block the normal scientific method whereby the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis is subjected to attempts by scientists to disprove it. Now, despite the blocking, evidence and failed predictions prove the hypothesis is wrong. As said, “…if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period.”
(H) “There is a very concerted effort by people who would prefer to see business to continue as usual. They have been winning the public debate with the help of tremendous resources.”
(B) Totally untrue, but characteristic of self-victimization. “Manipulators often play the victim role (“poor me”) by portraying themselves as victims of circumstances or someone else”s behavior in order to gain pity or sympathy or to evoke compassion.”
Hansen is saying failure is not their fault: they’re victims of a small unethical self-serving group backed by equally unethical self-serving agencies. Oil and energy companies are the favorite target, but it’s laughable when compared with money spent by government agencies promoting the IPCC version of global warming. As Joanne Nova notes,
“Thousands of scientists have been funded to find a connection between human carbon emissions and the climate. Hardly any have been funded to find the opposite. Throw 30 billion dollars at one question and how could bright, dedicated people not find 800 pages worth of connections, links, predictions, projections and scenarios? (What’s amazing is what they haven’t found: empirical evidence.)”
There is “empirical evidence” but it’s identified by skeptics despite efforts by government funded agencies and environmental groups to block, deny, and discredit with personal attacks.
Hansen was central to the deception about global warming when he took it from behind the scenes of the UN bureaucratic machinations into the political, public, and mainstream media spotlight. His June 1988 appearance before a US Senate Committee at which he claimed he was certain that human CO2 was causing global warming, was an orchestrated event. The maestros of the deception were proud of what they did. It parallels Hansen’s actions and reflects the end justifies the means mentality of politically driven climate science.
Director’s of the drama were Al Gore and Timothy Wirth. In a 2007 PBS Frontline documentary Wirth said,
We knew there was this scientist at NASA, you know, who had really identified the human impact before anybody else had done so and was very certain about it. So we called him up and asked him if he would testify.
Then they took actions that explain why people distrust and despise most politicians.
We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it.
The interviewer asked Wirth;
Did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?
What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room.
Since that first deliberate deception Hansen has tried to confirm his claim that;
“the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe, with a high degree of confidence, a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.”
He has failed to prove the claim or even counteract proof that it’s incorrect. His efforts include arrests for public protests; giving testimony at a trial in England on behalf of Greenpeace protesters; tampering with data; claiming, falsely, he was “muzzled” by the Bush White House; and claiming climate change was morally comparable to slavery. His political activism recently prompted 50 fellow NASA scientists and engineers to sign a protest. It’s a disgrace he hasn’t been challenged for behaviour unacceptable for a bureaucrat and possibly in violation of the Hatch Act.
Facts contradicting the hypothesis increase, predictions are consistently wrong, corruption of the process are revealed almost daily yet Hansen blames a massive conspiracy driven by non-existent funding. He infers the public are being bamboozled, but the polls demonstrate they are not as stupid as Hansen apparently believes. It appears his self-deception matches his self-victimization.