Global Warming: A First Look

This week I read a Facebook post headlined, "Top Scientist Resigns Admitting Global Warming Is a Big Scam." The post consisted of a letter of resignation from the American Physical Society by Hal Lewis, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

This post doesn't qualify as "fake news," but it certainly falls short of being the whole truth. Here are some reasons why:

1. This post is not "news" because the letter was written more than six years ago and the original post came from September 29,2015. Maybe this simply shows that nothing ever really dies on Facebook.

2. Hal Lewis 87 years old when he wrote his letter, and could only be described as a "top scientist" within his specialty, the field of nuclear reactor safety, in an earlier era. He had no special training in climate science. The American Physical Society from which he resigned is only tangentially related to climate research.

3. In 1990, Hal Lewis wrote Technological Risk in which he affirmed global warming by saying, "all models agree that the net effect of increasing greenhouse gases will be a general and global warming of the earth; they only disagree about how much. None suggest that it will be a minor effect, to be ignored while we go about our business. Reducing the effects, including significant sea level rise, would require global cooperation and sacrifice now, to avert something far in the future, and a conjectural something at that. There is no evidence in human history that is in the cards, but one can always hope."

4. The main critique in his letter of resignation is that science has been corrupted by the "trillions of dollars" driving the "global warming scam." This is a bizarre accusation akin to seeing The Sierra Club as the giant, Goliath, and Exxon as diminutive David. Following the money in the global warming debate leads you to the climate change deniers and the fossil fuel industry, not to climate science researchers.

6. The only evidence to support his claim of global warming as a scam is the work of Andrew Montford, whose book, The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climate Gate and the Corruption of Science, was described by critics as a favorite of the oil industry and the tabloids, but of little interest to climate scientists because of its inherent flaws.