One of the many differences between science and religion is that science is almost completely unconcerned with what any individual scientist believes, no matter how famous. Religions, of course, are typically built around famous individuals, like, say, Mary Baker Eddy, and what they believe. Sadly, these days, journalism — even at once-great newspapers — also appear to care more what one individual believes than what scientific observation and analysis actually tells us.
Last week I wrote about how a physicist named Hal Lewis who doesn’t know the first thing about climate science resigned from the American Physical Society because he doesn’t know the first thing about climate science. I debunked the laughable — and unintentionally ironic — post by “former television meteorologist” Anthony Watts comparing Lewis’s words of resignation to “a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door.”
Only anti-science disinformers believe scientific views are no different from religious ones, that a letter from a non-climate-scientist (particularly one who hasn’t bothered to learn the first thing about climate science or talk to actual climate scientists) would carry any weight at all, let alone lead to a major new science religion of Lewisism (Wattsism?), since, of course, that’s not how science works.
I never would have imagined in a hundred years, though, that the once respected Christian Science Monitor would publish a piece by Watts that opens with this pure anti-science headline and subhead (and picture of Martin Luther):
Climate change ‘fraud’ letter: a Martin Luther moment in science history
Esteemed physicist Harold Lewis is calling global warming the ‘most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen.’ His resignation letter could mark the unraveling of one of the great scientific mistakes in history and the beginning of a needed reformation of the scientific community.
In this 1872 painting by Ferdinand Pauwels, Martin Luther nails his “95 Theses” to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany on Oct. 31, 1517.
Just As an aside, I spent many years in Boston, headquarters of CSM [and I particularly loved to visit the awesome Mapparium, which provides an amazing perspective on our planet]. It was a highly respected institution, and, of course, famously founded by, well, here how the CSM puts it:
The Monitor’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy, explained our mission this way: “To injure no man, but to bless all mankind.”
While we may not land on the doorstep or in the inbox of all mankind (though we’d like to), our aim is to embrace the human family, shedding light and understanding with the conviction that truth is the beginning of solutions. This conviction has served our readers and story subjects well over the years, winning us seven Pulitzer Prizes and more than a dozen Overseas Press Club awards.
Mrs. Eddy’s statement contains another distinguishing feature. The purpose of our journalism is to “bless” not “injure.” That is central to how we cover the news….
- And we make a point of resisting the sensational in favor of the meaningful.
Not in this case. Of course, Eddy founded Christian Science. As Wikipedia notes, “Christian Scientists believe that sickness is the result of fear, ignorance, or sin, and that when the erroneous belief is corrected, the sickness will disappear.”
What makes the publication of this op-ed so absurd is that the American Physical Society had already officially responded to and debunked Lewis:
There is no truth to Dr. Lewis’ assertion that APS policy statements are driven by financial gain. To the contrary, as a membership organization of more than 48,000 physicists, APS adheres to rigorous ethical standards in developing its statements. The Society is open to review of its statements if members petition the APS Council – the Society’s democratically elected governing body – to do so.
Dr. Lewis’ specific charge that APS as an organization is benefitting financially from climate change funding is equally false. Neither the operating officers nor the elected leaders of the Society have a monetary stake in such funding. Moreover, relatively few APS members conduct climate change research, and therefore the vast majority of the Society’s members derive no personal benefit from such research support.
On the matter of global climate change, APS notes that virtually all reputable scientists agree with the following observations:
- Carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere due to human activity;
- Carbon dioxide is an excellent infrared absorber, and therefore, its increasing presence in the atmosphere contributes to global warming; and
- The dwell time of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is hundreds of years.
On these matters, APS judges the science to be quite clear. However, APS continues to recognize that climate models are far from adequate, and the extent of global warming and climatic disruptions produced by sustained increases in atmospheric carbon loading remain uncertain. In light of the significant settled aspects of the science, APS totally rejects Dr. Lewis’ claim that global warming is a “scam” and a “pseudoscientific fraud.”
Additionally, APS notes that it has taken extraordinary steps to solicit opinions from its membership on climate change. After receiving significant commentary from APS members, the Society’s Panel on Public Affairs finalized an addendum to the APS climate change statement reaffirming the significance of the issue. The APS Council overwhelmingly endorsed the reaffirmation….
You can read the 2007 APS statement on climate change here (plus a 2010 explication of it). It is rather mild, as such statements go:
Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.
The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.
Because the complexity of the climate makes accurate prediction difficult, the APS urges an enhanced effort to understand the effects of human activity on the Earth’s climate, and to provide the technological options for meeting the climate challenge in the near and longer terms. The APS also urges governments, universities, national laboratories and its membership to support policies and actions that will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.
I had written that Lewis’s Inhofe-esque statement “this is the greatest and most successful pseudo-scientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist,” accuses the scientific community broadly defined of conspiring in deliberate fraud – and not just the community of climate scientists, but the leading National Academies of Science around the world (including ours) and the American Geophysical Union, an organization of geophysicists that consists of more than 45,000 members and the American Meteorological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (see “Yet more scientists call for deep GHG cuts“). Such a statement accuses all of the member governments of the IPCC, including ours, of participating in that conspiracy, since they all sign off on the Assessment Reports word for word. And it accuses all of the leading scientific journals of being in on this fraud, since the IPCC reports are primarily a review and synthesis of the published scientific literature.
A. Siegel of GetEnergySmartNow, who has a great post on this embarrassing episode, asks:
Does the CSM editorial board really stand with those accusing so many scientists, from so many fields, from so many nations of engaging in systematic fraud?
He also quotes a commenter, Eric Grimsrud, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, Montana State University, who writes:
We have here an example of a “perfect storm” of conditions on the waves of which the deniers of CO2′s warming effects will ride as hard as they can. The three elements that created this storm are the “reporter” Mr. Watt, who is in the denier’s camp, Dr. Lewis, who was a respected elderly physicist but not in the field of climate science and the Christian Science Monitor, whose poor judgement in running this “story” surprises me.
While I’ll not waste time trying to understand the motives of the first two elements, I suspect that the CSM indulged in the time-honored newspaper inclination to give equal attention of “both sides” of all issues. Unlike politics or economics, however, in science there comes a point when there are no longer equally valid different views of a given topic. Mother Nature tends to do things either one way or the other. Just as we now know that the Earth is not flat, we also know that it is being overheated by the excess CO2 we are putting into its atmophere.
At DotEarth, blogger Andy Revkin notes that Lewis himself embraced this “pseudo-scientific fraud” two decades ago in his book, Technological Risk:
There’s no law against changing one’s views, of course, but it is doubly bizarre to accuse the American Physical Society — and indeed the entire scientific community — of pseudo-scientific fraud for holding a view he himself once held (on far, far weaker scientific evidence at the time, it must be added).
Lewis’s letter was devoid of any actual critique of climate science, but he offers some of his amazingly uninformed statements on the subject here. Eli Rabett debunked the whole thing here. Lewis asserted “nobody doubts that CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing for the better part of a century, but the disobedient temperature seems not to care very much,” whereas Rabett notes among other things, “The temperatures are tracking the CO2 forcing just fine.” Lewis bizarrely asserts, “people and plants die from cold, not warmth.” Tell that to the folks in Moscow this summer — or Europe in the summer of 2003.
Lewis states:
I know of nobody who denies that the Earth has been warming for thousands of years without our help”¦
This line tells you the author not only doesn’t follow the scientific literature, but that he doesn’t actually associate with or talk to anybody who does.
As Rabett explained, “Well, actually most people who have a clue think that without our contributions the surface would be cooling a bit right now due to the Milankovitch cycles which have reached and passed the warm peak.” Indeed, he points us to the 1980 Science article, “Modeling the Climatic Response to Orbital Variations,” which concludes “Ignoring anthropogenic and other possible sources of variation acting at frequencies higher than one cycle per 19,000 years, this model predicts that the long-term cooling trend which began some 6000 years ago will continue for the next 23,000 years.”
More recent money-grubbing conspirators include those folks at the National Center for Atmospheric Research:
Arctic temperatures in the 1990s reached their warmest level of any decade in at least 2,000 years, new research indicates. The study, which incorporates geologic records and computer simulations, provides new evidence that the Arctic would be cooling if not for greenhouse gas emissions that are overpowering natural climate patterns.
But Lewis knows not a single person who denies the earth has been warming for thousands of years.
Let me end where I began. Watts says of Lewis, “he’s no lightweight, and he’s well respected in the field of physics.” So what? “Einstein himself is well known for rejecting some of the claims of quantum mechanics” even though Einstein actually helped establish some of the foundations of quantum mechanics. So what? It turned out Einstein’s intuition was wrong. That’s why science isn’t built around what individual scientists believe, no matter how famous. In this case, Lewis isn’t even a climate scientist.
The Christian Science Monitor should retract this op-ed, apologize for it, and publish the APS response. Here is their contact page.
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Exceedingly disappointing.
Depressing, but I don’t see any way out of this.
The fact is, cargo cult science is now thoroughly entrenched in media and culture; to anybody not knowledgeable in the underlying science, it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish between reporting which is a distilled, simplified for mass consumption version of a vast body of underlying research and data, and the faux sciencey-sounding reports which ape the real thing but are just a facade pasted over a vacuum.
Barely anybody in any of the many branches of media seem to be able to tell the difference, and present both as contrasting “viewpoints” of equal value, with the presumption that the “real answer” must, at the very least, be somewhere in between the two.
I think I’m just going to go and have a beer now. Or several.
What is most alarming here is that instead of getting someone with a scientific background to comment on the resignation, they instead turned to someone with none.
One of many decent institutions of journalism to shoot itself in the foot covering climate science.
I have to say that I think that we have lost the battle, at least in the short term and probably in the longer term. Humanity as a species seem to be attracted to a particular notion of how the universe works, which is basically that vast forces, often inimicable, control everything that happens. From the perspective of early humans, this is reasonable: the world was intrinsically hostile and often seemed to be out to get them.
We now have the situation where millions of people around the world believe the wildest of conspiracy theories. Some of these people are quite intelligent. Good science is becoming seen as simply another theory among many, with no particular claim to validity.
The internet has helped create this situation, as now there are no generally respected gatekeepers of information. All authority is suspect, and so everyone is an authority. The weird thing is that it is those who call themselves conservatives who have helped in the attack on these respected gatekeepers. Conservatism used to be about respecting such institutions unless there was reasonable grounds to doubt them.
I know that this is not yet the case for the majority of topic or the majority of people. But it is a future that I profoundly fear. We must become conservatives, in the old sense, and we must bring the public with us on this. If we do not, then we will not win the battle on climate change.
Comparing the resignation of Dr. Lewis to the posting of the 95 thesis of the door of the church at Wittenberg is ludicrous, insane, preposterous, absurd, bizarre and a host of other superlative terms. I thought a few days passing would allow him to come back to reality. It seems as if he is living in an alternate reality. How anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of science and the history of Christianity could make this comparison is inexplicable.
This appears to be a case of a media outlet striving for ‘balance’ on the subject of climate. The problem they make is twofold. First, instead of deciding to print an article from a credible source (perhaps because there are none, perhaps because someone is actively reaching out to the media to press them to print their side) they choose a non-credible source to print. The second mistake is that they don’t even bother to publish a piece on the science, instead choosing to cover a non-event that isn’t concerned with the science–because, let’s be honest, a non-climate scientist resigning from the APS over climate science is, at best, a non-event.
This is what happens when media organizations try to give ‘balance’ where the facts don’t warrant it.
“people and plants die from cold, not warmth….Tell that to the folks in Moscow this summer — or Europe in the summer of 2003.”
Or Pakistan, China, Brazil, Portugal, Vietnam, Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, Singapore, Oklahoma City, Nashville, Mississippimi etc etc
http://www.google.com/search?q=flood+death
How can I trust American products since it’s obvious a large portion of Americans do not acknowledge the science they’re based on?
The irony of turning a resigning scientist into a religious martyr is deeply ironic. Clearly, the appeal here is not to scientists (for whom Galileo would have been the canonical martyr) but to religious fundamentalists. The goal is not to convince other scientists to take Lewis seriously, but to isolate and demonise the APS and science itself.
I’ve noted this before, but I’ll point it out again. Watts’ “95 theses” comment bears a striking resemblance to Baron von Monckhofen over at Climate Scum: “Now I’m almost like Martin Luther, who had 95 theses against the Inquisition.” (Comment made on 9th September, well before Watts’ post – is Watts using Climate Scum as a template?) Parody is no longer possible.
As a freelance writer I contributed op-eds and dozens of other stories to The Christian Science Monitor from 1980 through 1998 and have great affection for the publication and feel Joe has treated it very kindly and accurately.
That said, Anthony Watts’ op-ed submission is an absolute disgrace.
It would be laughable if the stakes of the subject were not higher than about all others combined. Watts has everything almost exactly backwards.
Martin Luther was 33 when he posted his 95 Theses that led to confrontation with the Pope and Holy Roman Emperor who had him excommunicated and if not for the revolt and support of German princes, would almost certainly have had Luther tortured and killed.
Harold Lewis is 87 and faces no threat whatsoever for resigning from a professional organization. As far as I can tell Lewis has not published in any respectable scientific journal for decades, and has not worked in atmospheric science in 25 years, and then only on the very different problem of nuclear winter.
Luther was confronting the heinous and theologically indefensible act of the rich buying their way into heaven (Jesus on this very subject: As if) and the Western World’s monolithic institutions.
Lewis is in lockstep with the powers that be including virtually everyone in the oil, gas, coal, automotive and most other industries that run most governments, especially ours.
Lewis in not a Galileo in any sense. Galileo was the one doing the science. Lewis is refuting the work of all the atmospheric physicists and chemists, biologists, glaciologists and all other scientists who have devoted their lives to understanding climate change the best they can. Lewis has done and especially is doing none of this science.
Increasingly in his later years, Martin Luther was horribly anti-Semitic, something completely indefensible.
Lewis claims all the science of global warming is a fraud, but as one DotCommer commented, his own assertions about global warming means that he would have been party to such a fraud when he admitted the science of global warming two decades ago.
Imagining that there’s a conspiracy going back to Arrhenius in 1896 and Tyndall half a century before that now including thousands and thousands of many of the world’s best scientists from more than 130 nations and including the 18 largest national scientific academies and countless scientific organizations is simply lunacy in the extreme.
That Anthony Watts wrote this steamer on his blog is not surprising, but that The Christian Science Monitor would publish it is simply mystifying, and everyone involved should be deeply ashamed.
All those involved should heed Luther’s brief introduction to his 95 Theses, when he spoke of learning the truth.
The truth is what all the most credentialed and conscientious scientists are seeking. Lies and hideously inappropriate comparisons like those of Watts are not sincerely seeking truth, but merely wishing to hide it with endless specious arguments such as this one.
Listen to your Founder, who synthesized genuine science and spirituality better than anyone.
And listen to Martin Luther, who in the first of his 95 Theses told us to repent. In your case, that should start with a retraction.
I’ve emailed CS Monitor as suggested:
“This hyperbolic, hysterical screed is representative of the growing anti-science, conspiracy theory-laden nonsense that fills the internet. It is not science. It is not remotely credible.” etc.
Joe, perhaps this is an opportunity to pen a response? Make use of their desperation for ‘balance’ and eviscerate Watts and his anti-science drivel.
I won’t say that the current anti-science trend is purely American, but both the leaders and citizentry of most other countries in the world are not so strongly of the opinion that “experts” must be wrong. This attitude may accelerate our countries decline.
Quite surprising. I haven’t read the _Monitor_ in a year or so, but when I did, I was impressed with its superior reporting and editorials on the climate issue. It gave much more coverage to the climate/energy issues than say, the NYT, and took the science seriously both in the way it treated climate stories and in its editorial policy.
Make Big Oil and Big Coal pay for public service announcements clarifying to the American people that climate change and global warming are real and are happening now and will drastically affect all future generations. The cost would be part of a fossil fuel ‘extraction tax’. If these PSAs became commercial ads to be show on commercial TV repeatedly, MSM will see a new cash flow and support these measures to become law.
(Like the anti-smoking ads.)
Pitting Big fossil fuel against MSM might be an outcome. Oh well.
Bad news when the Science Monitor turns into the Anti-Science Monitor.
Look Out: Anthony Watts’s ego will be so inflated by this that I suspect he now will claim he’s been published in a “science” publication.
I was contemplating getting a subscription to CSM as the only news source left worth reading. Instead I’ve now deleted their link from my computer. It stays deleted unless I read on this site that they appologized for printing unscientific sensationalism. I mean what’s next? Batboy stories?
I don’t understand the religion of Christian Science. Is there a reason to assume that Christian Science, despite its name, is on the same page as hard science? Why do we assume that a faith-healing religion is a friend of physics?
Joe wrote: “Here is their contact page.”
I’ve already submitted a response.
Good comments today.
Watts doesn’t know history any better than he understands climate science. Unlike Martin Luther King Jr., Martin Luther made numerous violent and apocalyptic statements, leading to murders and massacres by his followers. The ultimate outcome came 100 years later, when Protestants and Catholics faced off for the Thirty Years War. Germany and surrounding areas were depopulated, as warring Catholic and Protestant princes ravaged the countryside.
While I am glad that I wrote a response (and glad you saw it worth quoting), in my frustration and outrage, you have put together a more thoroughly devastating response. Thank you.
An issue: does the traditional media have any shame, any shame at all, for how its ‘faux and balanced’ coverage ends up so utterly deceiving the public? It isn’t, as you are well aware, a new issue.
Sigh … is it worth having CAP staff reach out to see whether CSM would give you 600 words? There are arguments for and against.
Americans are scientifically illiterate and completely ignorant of the sublime enlightenment principles upon which our country was founded. What a deadly duo.
The press, rather than educate, panders.
Hence, we are doomed.
Almost everyone listens occasionally to their authentic self (what Jesus called “the children of God”) and often to their ego self (what Jesus called “the children of men”).
We are each reading this and all else in part because of Luther’s feeling that everyone needed no intermediary to God such as a priest, but could listen to God directly, especially as spoken through the spiritual interpretation of the Scriptures. So Luther is as responsible for soaring literacy rates throughout Europe and later much of the rest of the world as anyone, especially with his painstaking translation of the Latin Bible into German that inspired the King James Version of the Bible and most other translations.
Also his own marriage (and he appears to have been a quite devoted husband, listening to his wife like John Adams later would, something not as common during his day) led to the marriages of all Protestant clergy. Having all your finest scholars be celibate as all Catholic priests and monks were instructed to be is not what you want for your gene pool.
Luther was also one of history’s finest hymn-writers, all this relating to what appears to be incredible initial sincerity about his spirituality.
That’s what happens when one listens to his or her authentic self.
Listening to his ego self, Luther’s Protestant reformation could have been much more of a social reformation as well, but his siding with the German princes who defended him from Roman wrath encouraged the putting down of a peasant revolt that killed around 200,000.
The worst listening to his ego self led him to virulent attacks against Jews (oddly his life was the inverse of Saul’s who became the Apostle Paul in this way), especially in the last three years of his life. While some scholars say his attacks were religious and not ethnic, Luther’s genuine moral authority in so many other areas gave credence to the antisemiticism of the Nazis when they of course deserved none. This Nazi opportunism meant that Kristillnacht, the 1938 beginning of physical violence against Jews, was not entirely coincidentally (it was mostly Hitler’s response to the assassination of a German embassy official in Paris by a young Jewish German-born man) on Martin Luther’s birthday.
That shows that everything we think, say and do matters infinitely more than we can ever know.
Every molecule of CO2 in the fossil fuels we burn has an effect on our collective and cumulative atmosphere infinitely more than we know, just as every molecule of pollution contributes to the ozone that is killing plant life (a hypothesis developed largely in the comments on this blog by regular Gail Zawacki at Wit’s End) and every molecule of pesticides contributes to honeybee colony collapse disorder and the loss of other key pollinators.
And so every decision made by each of us matters, including the poor and very occasional lapse of judgment made by the editors of The Christian Science Monitor in publishing this absolute tripe by Anthony Watts.
CSM used to be worth looking at. No longer. I told them so through their comments screen.
The perfidy and evil tactics of the Climate Denial Machine funded by the Brothers Koch knows no limits.
We can expect more and more of this kind of thing to come down the pike.
Watts often cites new information as “the final nail in the coffin of AGW.” How many final nails are there? Most sensible people think final nail means one nail. Watts thinks it is a bag full.
I also commented that Watts is not a meteorologist so I am curious if they will actually correct his title.
Quantifying Scott M’s
> “Watts often cites new information as “the final nail in the coffin of AGW.””
I googled
“nail in the coffin” site:wattsupwiththat.com
and there appear to be 152 of them, about a third (46) of which are the “final nail in the coffin”.
(admittedly it’s an overestimate, since I don’t know how to google just Watts’s posts & his own comments)
I agree with Joe’s “I never would have imagined in a hundred years, though, that the once respected Christian Science Monitor would publish…” – It’s tragic, to see a hard-up Christian org. selling its soul.
Since Ralph Reed surfaced at the first Heartland Conference to applaud the view that dominion over nature extends to the atmosphere .it seems possible the Christian Science editors have been leaned on by such of ttheir brethren in Christ as embrace intelligent design and reject anything that smacks of materialism or relativism. Between K-street and the Discovery Institute , that’s a lot of Sunday School arm twisting.
Would that I could persuade these preterite Republican sheep to return to the Burkean fold , but I fear their theology as unsound as their science
As a CSM subscriber and occasional climateprogress reader, I have to say that the CSM’s climate reporting is generally quite good. I’m not sure why they chose to publish this contrarian op-ed, but their editorial board clearly understands the challenge of climate change, as can be seen in many editorials including the one published the same day as this op-ed: http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2010/1019/The-cold-war-in-clean-energy which mentions the environmental benefits of reducing “carbon pollution.”
Sent in my two cents (and that’s all they’re getting). I agree with A. Siegel and David: Can we look forward to a response in the CSM from Joe, or someone else armed with the rest of the story? Despite it’s breakdown of late, mainstream media still has influence (probably why Watts is reaching beyond the blogosphere), even if that means just propagating confusion with the He-Said, She-Said narrative. The rejection of a well-written, concise rebuttal would look an awful lot like bias instead of “balance”.
If this quote is correct (I found it on a blog and haven’t checked it) it is very ironic:
There is talk of a new astrologer who wants to prove that the earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the sun, the moon, just as if somebody were moving in a carriage or ship might hold that he was sitting still and at rest while the earth and the trees walked and moved. But that is how things are nowadays: when a man wishes to be clever he must needs invent something special, and the way he does it must needs be the best! The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down. However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth.
-Martin Luther
Source: http://easyyolk.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html
CSM reported positively a couple of years on Fred Singer’s opinions.
Lewis’s letter and Martine Luther’s 95 thesis are alike in that none of the content can be proven by observation.
All I can think of is this xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/793/
I probably won’t care about the consequences of my actions when I turn 87, either:
http://lifeinlegacy.com/2003/0726/LewisHarold.jpg
Hal’s little stunt with his public resignation from APS won him some new friends – shortly after, he joined the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming_Policy_Foundation
Not only can he hang out with people like Ian Pilmer (director of 3 mining companies in Australia, and “prominent” global warming skeptic), but the Board of Trustees reads like the British House of Lords: Lord Lawson (Chairman), Lord Barnett, Peter R. Forster (the Bishop of Chester), Lord Donoughue, Lord Fellowes, Baroness Nicholson, Lord Turnbull …
Of course, citing privacy concerns, Director Benny Peiser declined to reveal the sources of funding for the GWPF, located in the same House of very expensive Carlton House Terrace as the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, and down the hall from the Royal Society. Hal Lewis is also not answering questions about any fees paid for his “advice”.
Comparing Lewis’s resignation to Martin Luther is apt since Luther’s great contribution to the religious debates of the day was his assertion of “sola fide” — by Faith alone.
I no longer believe any of these deniers are accidentally wrong or honestly mistaken. They’re scoundrels. And calculatedly so.