Posted: 08/22/2005
Commissars of Climate Change Strike Again
Another Prestigious Scientist Resigns Due to Theology of Global Warming
DALLAS (August 22, 2005) – Another prominent and respected scientist, Roger Pielke Sr., has resigned from an important government panel citing political bias built into the process of researching climate change. Pielke is also the Colorado state climatologist and professor at Colorado State University.
“Just like the Commissars of the old Soviet Union, activists in the scientific community brook no dissent in the ranks,” said NCPA Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett. “They suppress findings that are at odds with their dogmatic view of climate science.”
Pielke resigned in a letter to the head of the Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), citing a recent article in The New York Times as the “last straw.” He complained not only that certain aspects of a CCSP report had been leaked to The Times, but also that another committee member was surreptitiously circulating a chapter to replace the one for which Pielke was lead author.
Referring to other CCSP members in an entry on his blog, Climate Science, Pielke noted that “…they, inappropriately, vigorously discourage the inclusion of diversity of perspectives on the topic of the CCSP report in order to promote a narrowly focused topic which has a clear political agenda.”
Pielke’s resignation follows several other major disputes about the “theology” of climate change:
- Respected hurricane expert, Chris Landsea, resigned from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), charging that its leaders overstated the influence of global warming on hurricanes for political purposes.
- Author and physician Michael Crichton’s book, State of Fear, published earlier this year, echoed his Commonwealth Club lecture that environmentalism has become the religion of Western elites.
- In a recent editorial in The Wall Street Journal titled, “The Theology of Global Warming,” former Energy Secretary James Schlesinger noted “concerns about objectivity of the international panel (IPCC) of scientists that has led research into climate change.”
- John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, who is also co-author of the IPCC report said of a recent dispute about global warming in Science Magazine that the debate about climate change has become more political than scientific.
“It’s time for all points of view to get a hearing in academic journals and by peer review. Refusing to acknowledge dissenting views undermines our knowledge base, especially when science is the basis for formulating public policy,” Dr. Burnett added.