The Climate Controversy

Those readers interested in the climate change issue will find the following two items to be of interest. The first is a chart (Go here for a more readable version) that shows the fluctuations in global temperatures over the last 4500 years:

It appears that temperatures are correlated with solar radiation and volcanic activity and that a decrease in the former coupled with an increase in the latter triggers a cooling period. Contrary to popular belief we're currently in such a cooling period and, when compared to historical trends, our recent warming has been relatively mild, and the current mean temperature of the earth is completely unexceptional. The second link is to a letter written last fall by a prominent physicist named Hal Lewis explaining his reasons for resigning from the American Physical Society. Lewis wrote:

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession (in the 19th and early 20th centuries) was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists....

....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.

Lewis goes on to support his allegation that money and politics have had a corrupting effect on climate change research.

So, is the data represented by the above chart wrong? Is Lewis just a malcontent? Or are we for political reasons being led to believe that there's a catastrophe imminent when in fact there is not? If we are being misled then why? Who benefits? We can be sure it won't be the average guy like you and me.

Thanks to Joel for the link to Prof. Lewis' resignation letter.