I had not thought to look into the site but after a cursory review, I saw this article. I was not surprised given the a priori commitments and backers but would be interested to hear a brief take from anyone more knowledgeable. But before you dive in, read the following excerpts:
“Foundationally, the issue of climate change involves a deep-seated worldview conflict. As we said earlier, Christians should be concerned about ecology and we do have a duty to care for the environment. However, the fake, anti-Bible deep-time evolutionary history of planet Earth, based on naturalism (the belief that nature is all there is), feeds into a radical environmentalist ideology”
“the radical, activist leaders apparently want to undermine the economies of the West”
" The above examples reveal either deliberate fraud or incredibly sloppy, blinkered thinking with extreme confirmation bias (seeing what you want to see). It is hard to know which it is at times. Scientists can be affected by an emotional desire to fit into their peer community, to keep the research grants rolling in, and also a common human desire to prefer bad news to good news—to ‘fear the worst’ or a ‘prophet of doom’ mentality. There can also be political motivations.
The decline of the Christian ethos in western society, is undoubtedly a major factor in the proliferation of fraud in science generally, which is evident in both evolutionary studies as well as climate science. There is even fraud in experimental science, such as medical drug evaluation, and hard sciences such as physics, but in these areas fraud is much more likely to be uncovered as experiments are repeated."
If anyone has the time/stomach, that would be awesome. A tl:dr is sufficient
I took a look at the link through to their article on proliferation of fraud in science. It contains this paragraph:
Most of the known cases of modern-day fraud are in the life sciences. In the biomedical field alone, fully 127 new misconduct cases were lodged with the Office of Research Integrity (US Department of Heatlh & Human Services) in the year 2001. This was the third consecutive rise in the number of cases since 1998. This concern is not of mere academic interest, but also profoundly affects human health and life. Much more than money and prestige are at stake—the fact is, fraud is ‘potentially deadly’, and in the area of medicine, researchers are ‘playing with lives’. The problem is worldwide. In Australia misconduct allegations have created such a problem that the issue has even been raised in the Australian Parliament, and researchers have called for an ‘office of research integrity’.
These are valid points. Scientific fraud can and does kill people as they rightly point out. However, look at the number of misconduct cases they cite for the year 2001: 127.
Let’s put that in perspective.
According to this report, there were 6.9 million scientists and engineers in the USA alone in 2016, accounting for 4.9% of the US workforce. If just one in ten of these were involved in scientific research (as opposed to, for example, railway engineers), and if that number had doubled since 2001, then we would be looking at one incidence of scientific misconduct for every 2,700 researchers.
The article says that claiming scientific fraud to be an anomaly is “Darwinist.” But that’s nonsense. It’s nothing to do with “Darwinism.” It’s simply a matter of basic maths.
So, yes, scientific misconduct is a serious problem because it can and does kill people. For that reason, 127 incidences are still 127 too many. But those levels are far too small to cast any doubt on the scientific consensus about the age of the earth, evolution, or man made climate change, as they try to make them out to do.
At least they admit the existence of the greenhouse effect:
What they fail to mention is residence time. Water vapor stays in the atmosphere for an average of a few days to a few weeks. Water vapor can’t drive long term climate change. Instead, water vapor is at equilibrium with temperature. CO2 is different because it can stay in the atmosphere for decades, and this is what causes it to drive long term climate change.
CMI also acts as if there is some spurious correlation between CO2 and temperature. This is obviously not the case. The greenhouse effect is very real, and CO2 is a very real greenhouse gas. When you increase the long term concentration of a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere you will trap more heat. This isn’t an unfounded correlation, like the unsupported correlation between vaccines and autism. Rather, there is a very well known and well understood mechanism that results in warmer temperatures.
On a whole, the CMI article is schizophrenic. At one moment they are arguing against the very idea of doing science, and the very next moment they are trying to argue that CO2 isn’t causing global climate change because such and such scientific study says so. They need to decide if science is trustworthy or not, and then we can talk more about the science behind climate change.