More joy over one Righteous who repents

Or more accurately recants, and since in this case David Evans is recanting the quasi-religious warble gloaming orthodoxy he himself has helped spread in recent years he's put himself in the position of an apostate and heretic.

I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic.

...

The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.

Yowch. Do go and read the whole thing, and look in the comments for the stock dismissal (by a University of Queensland music lecturer as it happens - related expertise is as always something demanded of only one side) and comments that links provided by sceptical commenters go to shills for Big Carbon. The pachyderm in this particular cubicle is that Evans was until recently the exact opposite: a shill for the chairs, research departments, QUANGOs, government departments, politicians, 'charities', campaign groups and, let's be blunt here, industries that depend on warble gloaming. There's a metric shit tonne of money involved, about an order of magnitude more than the relative trickle the ecolytes complain Big Carbon give to sceptic researchers, so for some years I've been thinking of these vested green interests collectively 'Big Eco'.* Make no mistake, warble gloaming is a massive, massive business, run in no small part with your money. And David Evans freely admits to having been a part of it.

I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train ... was once an alarmist...

And his mini-bio states his Big Eco credentials for the record:

David Evans consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modelling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products.

And he's not the only heretic in town. Although he's still convinced that we're cooking with greenhouse gas Moonbat has seen the light blue glow of Cherenkov radiation on nuclear power, as have others on both that and killer tomatoes.

The activists now say that by opposing nuclear power they encouraged the use of polluting coal-fired power stations, while by protesting against GM crops they prevented developing countries from benefiting from a technology that could have helped feed the hungry.
Mark Lynas, a campaigner who has been a member of action groups on GM foods and climate change, said the environmental lobby was losing the battle for public opinion on climate change because it had made too many apocalyptic prophecies and exaggerated claims.
He said: "We have got to find a more pragmatic and realistic way of engaging with people."
Stewart Brand, an American activist and former editor of Whole Earth Catalog, said: "I would like to see an environmental movement that says it turns out our fears about genetically engineered food crops were exaggerated and we are glad about that."

And Brand's quote finished with a brutally honest piece of self criticism.

"Environmentalists did harm by being ignorant and ideological and unwilling to change their mind based on actual evidence. As a result we have done harm and I regret it."

Which is intellectually honest and a position we should respect, but like George Monbiot, and unlike David Evans, many are still unwilling to re-examine their position on warble gloaming. Even their support of nuclear power now is largely because it's low carbon compared to coal and oil fired generation and, in George's case, because an earthquake and tsunami hitting a fairly elderly nuclear power station didn't do anything like the sort of damage he'd feared. It's fair that they're questioning some of their cherished beliefs but why not the biggie? Why is carbon dioxide induced catastrophic warble gloaming still sacrosanct for so many people?**

Still, one more of us and one less of them, eh.

H/T Watts Up With That.


* Compared to Big Oil/Carbon the term really ought to be something like Absofuckinglutelyginormous Eco but it doesn't exactly trip off the tongue.

** Modesty should prevent me from mentioning that I began to question by indoctrinated beliefs in warble gloaming years ago when someone drew my attention to the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period, which had both been strangely overlooked by those that had 'informed' my views up to that point. If the case for warble gloaming was so solid, I was asked, why not bring them up and then explain how they fit into the theory? Since I couldn't offer any answer my belief took a hit, and when they tried to write both the LIA and MWP virtually out of history as local northern/western European phenomena - despite no shortage of evidence that both were global - it was like finding out not only that Santa was really my mum and dad but that they didn't even dress up. It all fell apart from there on and I've questioned ever since, believing little and distrusting much, especially prevailing opinion, until it's argued to my satisfaction. Think of it like jury service - if the briefs and their expert witnesses can't boil it down into something a reasonably bright and well educated layman can understand and simply rely on 'trust us, humanity is guilty, honest' then we should give them the flick and presume innocence.
Modesty should prevent me mentioning it, but since I just did modesty can go take a running jump.