And so it started …

Update(d) March 2024.

This video is about a promotional interview a ‘professional influencer’ called Leila Conners had with ‘climate-scientist’ Stephen Schneider. It contains this crucial time-line:

Climategate -the scandal- started with scientists aligning with activists, like this Leila Conners. Back in 2006 she interviewed climate prophet Stephen Schneider († 2010). In 2018 I wrote a long text about this amazing interview in Dutch. In 2022 I translated it into English and only then the horror really sunk in: a scientist who knowingly chose populism and then managed to become world famous.

I added this table with the time-line thanks to amazing comments on x.com by a very young Belgian Psychologist (!). In reaction on my remark about those “97% of scientists agree claims” he reacted with: “Indeed!!! If only there were really scientific sources of it! Oh wait…” followed by FOUR screenshots. One of these links was dead. From the other three two were identical …
The articles were published via Science.org and via School of Agriculture of the University of Buenos Aires (!). The latter, from Argentine, turned out to be published before at sciencemag.org which turned out to be just another name for science.org …. Well, well.

I printed the articles and while doing that I also noticed that one was published in 2003 and the other in 2004 ….
The author of the article titled The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change was a Naomi Oreskes, Department of History and Science Studies Program, University of California. She has some fame: She is closely affiliated with the U.S. Democratic party and has no objection to being described as an activist…

She wrote the book with the absurd title “Merchants of Doubt”, well, most certainly absurd for a scientist. In it she worte about a “loose-knit group of high level scientists, with extensive political connections” running effective campaigns that misled the public and denied well-established scientific knowledge (sic).

The infamous Al Gore said of the work:

Anyone concerned about the state of democracy in America should read this book.

The other article is from 2003. The authors have backgrounds in National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Center for Atmospheric Research, respectively. It is a curious and especially remarkably pretentious article. The notes, illustrations and comprehensive approach appear impressive at first glance. After reading this populist approach in the introduction, there is already not much left of that:

As human balloon flights around the world illustrate, the air over a specific location is typically halfway around the world a week later, making climate change a truly global issue.

Anything that could be alarming is listed. Not every sentence is equally mendacious or alarming, and some bold claims are harder to fathom and refute than others.
Extraordinarily easy, however, is to check what is claimed about the sun. The word “sun” appears only four times in the entire story. Any change over time of the sun’s influence is completely ignored. It is mind-blowing.

The authors brag about ‘Modeling the climate system‘.

Link to the interview with Schneider by Conners:

Link to the (not very) long EnglishTEXT itself .
Link to the 2021 Vanity Fair article.