Just over a week ago, a quiet revolution became front page news for most of the climate science blogs and newsgroups on the Internet: the visible, forceful, and very surprising resignation of Dr. Harold Lewis from his 67-year membership with the American Physical Society.
Here are some excerpts of that resignation letter:
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.
…
In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
…
Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago.
…
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends. – Hal Lewis
I run www.wattsupwiththat.com, “…the world’s most viewed climate website” according to Fred Pearce, science writer for the Guardian Newspaper (UK) and the New Scientist magazine, and I felt that my readers deserved a description of this event worthy of what was happening behind the scenes.
I wrote: This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door.
That turned some heads, and some people questioned why I would write such a thing. I admit, it is rather profound, but so is this resignation.
Most people don’t know who Dr. Hal Lewis is. He’s a quiet man, and he hasn’t sought publicity in his career. He was a student of Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, and was active in the field of nuclear power plant safety, where being wrong has grave consequences. He’s an emeritus professor of physics and a former department chairman at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and he worked with noted climatologist Stephen Schneider when he chaired a 1985 task force on nuclear winter.
In short, he’s no lightweight, and he’s well respected in the field of physics.
Dr. Lewis and 260 other members of APS signed a petition, and battled within the organization, following the rules, in an attempt to get the APS position statement on global warming considered for revision. The effort was ignored, stonewalled, and rebuked. After years of trying, he finally had enough.
Dr. Lewis must have been wrestling with his conscience for a considerable time before concluding that this was his only option.
And like Martin Luther, with all other options extinguished, he publicly nailed his letter to the door of the organization that had become so entrenched in its own consensus that it couldn’t even address the concerns of its own members.
Martin Luther’s brave act started the Reformation of the Catholic Church. Dr. Lewis’ act could very well begin the reformation of climate science.
Mr. Watts operates the most visited blog on climate science in the world, www.wattsupwiththat.com now with over 57 million visits. He has spent 30 years on air in radio and television as a weather forecaster, and still does daily radio broadcasts. In 2007, he founded the surfacestations.org project, which with the help of volunteers nationwide found that only 1 in 10 of the weather stations used for monitoring climate in the USA met the government’s own standards for station siting quality. He also operates a weather technology business, embraces energy efficiency with solar power on his home and drives an electric car.