By Andy May
When researching my next book, I found an interesting deception on the Intelligence Squared website. This is the organization that hosted the famous global warming debate on March 14, 2007 on the motion “Global warming is not a crisis”. The late Michael Crichton, Professor Richard Lindzen (MIT, now retired) and Professor Philip Stott (University of London, retired) discussed the proposal. Dr. Brenda Ekwurzel from the Union of Concerned Scientists, Dr. Gavin Schmidt from NASA and Professor Richard Somerville from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The debate took place at the Asia Society and Museum in New York City. Your auditorium seats 258, and I assume all seats were occupied. The audience was interviewed about the claim before and after the debate. According to the verbatim transcript of the debate (one of the tabs in the “Intelligence Squared” link above), Moderator Brian Lehrer announced the results after 1 hour 37 minutes:
“And now the results of our debate. After our debaters did their best to influence you, they went from 30% to the movement that global warming is not a crisis, from 30% to 46%. [APPLAUSE]
01:38:58
Against the request went from 57% to 42% … [SCATTERED APPLAUSE, MOANS] And “undecided” rose from 13% to 12%. The hardcore ambivalent are still with us. [LAUGHTER] Regarding the change of mind, the proponents carried the day and congratulated the team on the motion. “
You can also hear the debate and results on an NPR recording.
Gavin Schmidt was deeply embarrassed by her clear defeat in the debate. As Anthony Watts wrote in 2018, eleven years after the debate, Schmidt was so demoralized and defeated that he still did not speak to skeptical scientists like Dr. Roy Spencer would be on stage. Schmidt said debates are not worthwhile regardless of the outcome. That’s pretty shocking to hear, the debate is at the heart of scientific research. If you don’t discuss your points, you’re not doing any research.
As you can probably imagine, I was almost knocked to the ground when I clicked the Intelligence Squared tab on December 28, 2020 to view the debate results. This happened after I listened to the debate and read the minutes. Under the tab on December 28th and still there on January 6th, I read the winner who was against the motion after the debate, down 89%! Someone with access to the Intelligence Squared website had radically changed the results from a victory for the climate skeptics to a victory for the alarmists. You may still be able to see this when you go to the website. I wrote to you about this error on December 28th and got no response.
As noted by Wim Rost, the Wayback machine shows that the correct results were displayed on the December 15, 2016 webpage as you can see below. Use this link to browse the Wayback machine yourself. Be patient, it will take a while for the calendar to appear.
The website as it existed on December 15, 2016 according to the Wayback machine.
There is certainly no excuse to lie about the outcome of this famous debate, but someone did.
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