The Redhunter

To take just one example, we have the resignation letter of Professor Hal Lewis, in which he takes to task American Physical Society of which he had been a member for sixty-seven years (h/t neo-neocon, a former Democrat who has one of the few truly must-read blogs). Here are a few key excerpts:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago)....

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d'être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it.

Obviously the good professor is only one person, and one person doesn't prove the case... yada yada yada. So please don't waste pixtels making that comment. But you can't dismiss ClimateGate, as some environmentalists I know have tried to do by calling it a "tempest in a teapot." I rather think that Professor Lewis was right; it exposed the AWG crowd for what they really were.

From all that I have read my bottom lines are these: One, AWG is at best unproven, and the warmers use so much politically correct intellectual terror to enforce their orthodoxy that in the current situation we can't get at the truth if we tried.

Two, the measures promoted by the AWG crowd are so extreme that they must be instantly dismissed regardless. The Kyoto treaty was a nightmare. Cap and Trade is a travesty. Environmentalism in general has a totalitarian bent. I am somewhat involved in fighting their extreme measures where I live, so I know a bit of what I write. Protect our air and streams, yes. Adopt extremist environmental proposals, no.