Prof. Michael Oppenheimer, a U.N. IPCC lead author, is in the news defending his wrong climate predictions made in 1990 and being embarrassed by the unearthing of a 2000 article in The New York Times.
See
"Maudlin Michael Oppenheimer the Propagandist on his unused sled in 2000: 'Oppenheimer even had a tear-jerking personal angle on the 'absence of snow' in modern winters.'"
Oppenheimer (omichael@princeton.edu), one of the media's most cited man-made global warming proponents, is quite simply transforming into an activist first and a scientist a distant second.
Oppenheimer's most recent “scientific” paper on climate's impact on immigration has been roundly trashed. See
"Propagandist Michael Oppenheimer Shredded."
Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton, was also a paid partisan of the environmental pressure group Environmental Defense.
He served as an adviser to former Vice President Al Gore on his 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth,” and he has consistently defended the accuracy's of Gore's film. “On balance, he did quite well — a credible and entertaining job on a difficult subject,” Oppenheimer said of Gore's film in 2007.
Oppenheimer's political activities easily overwhelm his “scientific” advocacy. He actively campaigned against President George Bush in 2004 and, like NASA's James Hansen, publicly endorsed Sen. John Kerry for president.
Oppenheimer was affiliated with the partisan group “Scientists and Engineers for Change” and the green group Environment2004 financially bankrolled in part by the Heinz Foundation where Teresa Heinz-Kerry serves as the chairwoman.
Environment2004 put up billboards in Florida mocking President Bush in the final months of the 2004 presidential election.
Oppenheimer personally donated to the group, which was so partisan it encouraged visitors to their Web page to “get involved” in defeating President Bush by playing a game called “Whack-a-Bush.”
In addition, Oppenheimer was a co-founder of Climate Action Network.
Oppenheimer appeared with Hollywood activist Leonardo DiCaprio and Gore's movie producer Laurie David on Oprah Winfrey's talk show and shared the stage with climate activist Joe Romm at a Center for American Progress press conference in December 2009 urging U.N. action on climate change. University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke Jr. has condemned this type of
“stealth” political advocacy.
To be fair, many of today's prominent skeptics and warmist scientists have known political or ideological leanings. For an interesting take, see
"Slate Mag: 'Many Republicans have come to believe that mainstream science is corrupted by ideology and amounts to no more than politics by another name.'"
But what sets Oppenheimer in a league of his own, is his willingness to bend science and spin his previous climate predictions or “scenarios” into a scientific pretzel. Oppenheimer is sadly doing all he can to discredit climate science and himself.
A Dec. 30, 2010 Fox News article featured a series of “botched environmental forecasts” from the past. Given that the article featured “botched” forecasts, it is no surprise the
article featured Oppenheimer's dodgy climate “science” prominently.
"[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots . . . [By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers," Michael Oppenheimer, published in "Dead Heat," St. Martin's Press, 1990.
Oppenheimer told FoxNews.com that he was trying to illustrate one possible outcome of failing to curb emissions, not making a specific prediction. He added that the gist of his story had in fact come true, even if the events had not occurred in the U.S.
"On the whole I would stand by these predictions — not predictions, sorry, scenarios — as having at least in a general way actually come true," he said. "There's been extensive drought, devastating drought, in significant parts of the world. The fraction of the world that's in drought has increased over that period."
That may be in doubt, however. Data from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center shows that precipitation, rain and snow, has increased slightly over the century.
Amazingly, Oppenheimer now says his “scenarios” had “in fact come true” because “there's been extensive drought” in “significant parts of the world.” This sort of logic is a manifestation of “climate astrology” where anyone can essentially say “many bad things will happen in the future” and Presto! When bad things happen (as they always do), you declare yourself a sage!
Oppenheimer has now solidly morphed into a practitioner of non-scientific methods.
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