(Sometimes I can’t resist the opportunity for a little alliteration, even when the subject matter is very serious)
Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a former member of the Defense Science Board; a former member of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards and the President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; also co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; and a former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board.
Here is his letter of resignation from the American Physical Society. Excerpt:
The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. 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.
Read the whole thing. Anthony Watts says:
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. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.
Not sure I would go quite as far as the “95 theses” comparison, but this is indeed a very important letter and points to some extremely disturbing trends in science and in our society as a whole. We need not expect that this will receive the coverage that it should in the dinosaur media, so bloggers should follow Anthony’s advice and help ensure that Dr Lewis’s letter gets fair distribution and discussion.
Always avoid alliteration.
Science sells its soul for sovereigns and silver, as scrutiny and skepticism become certainty, scholarship and stats skewed for success, symposia sanitized for symbol, the search now subjective in service to society.
Harold Lewis is a hero.
Ess – Nice!
It is a very serious subject, so no more joking. A professional organization I belong to invited a climate scientist to speak during the luncheon at a September 2008 conference. I am just a little fish, so instead of protesting that our organization should not give time to pseudoscience, which would have earned me approbation, I privately boycotted the talk (but not the lunch). It was ironic that this group that engages in financial risk management was listening to silly science while the financial system was melting down.
Anthropogenic climate change is dead and just about everyone knows it. What is going on now is just heavily-invested institutions trying to stave off disaster by hoping that the fuss will die down and that the rest of us will just forget it ever happened. Except that we won’t. Ever. Trying to reform deeply corrupted institutions is generally more trouble than it is worth. The good and honest people should just leave and start their own. Since like attracts like, theirs will attract more good and honest people and groups like APS will attract a different kind.
The APS reply, and the reply to the reply, here.