The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has published a letter entitled ‘No need to panic about global warming’ which opines that “There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to “decarbonize” the world’s economy” and “Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet.” The letter is signed by 2 meteorologists and 14 other scientists. Here is another letter signed by 255 scientists making the case for human-induced global warming and published in Science in 2010. This letter allegedly has been submitted to, but rejected by the WSJ. Boing Boing claims that it has also been drafted in response to the WSJ piece but this is obviously wrong since the Science letter has been around since 2010. The 16 scientists who got their letter published by the WSJ accuse the “international warming establishment ” of pushing science into ‘the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union’. Wow! This rhetorical trick is so incredibly audacious that it deserves to be immortalized as the “Lysenko move” and included into the standard weaponry for academic spats, next to reductio ad absurdum and skeletons in the closet. Who is gonna be the next victim?
Research Design Matters