From Global Warming Believer To Skeptic

Bradley Fikes writes for the North County Times and The Californian. I think he speaks for many of us who used to think humans were responsible for global warming (back in the 90s I certainly did) but who have come to realize the truth. I don't usually quote entire articles here, but I'm making an exception. Please read it all.

A few years ago, I accepted global warming theory with few doubts. I wrote several columns for this paper condemning what I thought were unfair attacks by skeptics and defending the climate scientists.

Boy, was I naive.

Since the Climategate emails and documents revealed active collusion to thwart skeptics and even outright fraud, I’ve been trying to correct the record of my earlier foolishness. In one of those columns, I even wrote: “And see Real Climate (www.realclimate.org) for global warming science without the political spin.”

In fact, Real Climate was and is nothing more than the house organ of global warming activists, concerned more with politics than with science.

My mistake was assuming only the purest of motives of the global warming alarmists, while assuming the worst of the skeptics. In fact, the soi-disant moralists of the global warming movement can also exploit their agenda for profit.
Climategate jolted me into confronting the massive fraud and deception by top global warming scientists, who were in a position to twist the peer-review process in their favor, and did so shamelessly.

Yet still most media reports desperately minimize Climategate, saying that it doesn’t taint the massive research supporting global warming theory. To them I say, how do you know that? Have you investigated how much of that research was published due to the manipulation of these unethical and fraudulent scientists? Do you know how much research that goes against the global warming activist claims was unfairly suppressed?

Until all this is known, it’s not possible to say with any confidence how much of global warming theory will remain after all the fraud and deceit has been removed. And until climate science is cleaned up, it doesn’t deserve the worship so many in the media unthinkingly give its tainted practitioners.

 See Fike's comments for excellent discussions.