A CASE OF ACADEMIC DISHONESTY

Dr. James Hansen of NASA reports a clear case of dishonesty on the part of a global warming "skeptic."

The Global Warming Debate
By James Hansen — January 1999

(excerpts)

I have argued in a recent book review that some "greenhouse skeptics" subvert the scientific process, ceasing to act as objective scientists, rather presenting only one side, as if they were lawyers hired to defend a particular viewpoint.


In late 1998, I was asked to debate the well-known greenhouse skeptic Dr. Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia. I summarize here some key points in the debate, "A Public Debate on the Science of Global Warming", held at the New York Hilton, Nov. 20, 1998, and organized by the American Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology. A copy of my entire contribution may be downloaded as a PDF document.


I agreed to participate in this debate with Dr. Michaels after learning that he had used (or misused) a figure of mine in testimony to the United States Congress.



But when Pat Michaels testified to congress in 1998 and showed our 1988 predictions (Fig. 1) he erased the curves for scenarios B and C, and showed the result only for scenario A. He then argued that, since the real world temperature had not increased as fast as this model calculation, the climate model was faulty and there was no basis for concern about climate change, specifically concluding that the Kyoto Protocol was "a useless appendage to an irrelevant treaty".