Professor Robert “Bob” Carter RIP

Robert Merlin “Bob” Carter (9 March 1942 – 19 January 2016) was an English palaeontologist, stratigrapher and marine geologist who is perhaps best known as a prominent Australian climate change skeptic. He was professor and head of the School of Earth Sciences at James Cook University from 1981 to 1998.

Gurglars emailed me on Sunday about the Obituary:

ODT 5.3.16 (page 32)

[click to enlarge]

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Then I heard from Mick (Douglas Field) on Monday:

You will have read the obituary (ODT Saturday) to Bob Carter who died in January this year. As you know he was a prominent sceptic re climate science and was more or less bannished from James Cook University in Queenslamd. You wll also know of his strong connection to the University of Otago.
Chris Monckton (The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley) has written a rather charming piece of music that he has called Bob Carter’s Peal. It was originally written for piano but it has been modified by the clever people at Edinburgh University (Chris lives in Edinburgh) who made a version with the sound of the bells of Ghent Cathedral.

Go to: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/02/27/ghent-cathedral-bells-ring-out-bob-carters-peal/ Article + Audio

[excerpt]
“Professor Robert Carter of James Cook University, who died in January 2016, has been immortalised in a clock-tune written by one of his friends in the manner of a Turmuhrglockenspielsonatine by the Baroque German composer Johann Sebastian Bach. This poignant but merry tune has been described as “the loveliest bell-tune ever written”. Traditionally, the Classical composers wrote clock-tunes to commemorate the weddings or funerals of their friends.

Professor Robert Carter, a geologist, became internationally famous in the last two decades of his life because he was one of the very few scientists who had the courage publicly to question some of the more extreme claims made by advocates of the apocalyptic theory of global warming. As the reported rate of global warming (even after much ever-upward adjustment of the linear-regression trends on all of the principal global-temperature datasets) continues to be very considerably below the rates that had been predicted, his polite but incisive questioning of what has become a substitute for true religion in the academic world will one day be seen to have been prescient.
Bob Carter was personally distressed by the extent to which the academic world had abandoned the scientific method in the rent-seeking pursuit of ever-larger grants from governments panicked or profiting by the climate scare. His university, which makes much money out of global warming by this questionable method, felt threatened by its leading professor’s heresy. Shoddily, the vice-chancellor, to his eternal shame and to that of his university, presided over the abandonment of all pretense at academic freedom: the university took various frankly malicious steps to Bob Carter’s detriment, the last of which was the withdrawal of his right as an emeritus professor to continue to use the library of the university that he had served so long and so well.
He was deeply distressed not so much by his university’s mistreatment of him in the closing years of his long and distinguished life as by its totalitarian rejection of the essential and formerly sacrosanct principle of academic freedom to dissent from profitable orthodoxy. Despite the university’s petty-minded and self-serving misconduct, he remained cheerfully and determinedly active to the last, attending the UN climate summit in Paris in December 2015.”

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Posted by Elizabeth Kerr