Watts Up With That?

There’s an eye-opening interview on Grist of Richard A. Muller about the current state of science understanding by presidential candidates, global warming, and alternate energy tech.

Some of the answers are very enlightening. Coming from an avowed environmentalist such as Muller it cements much of what I and many others have been saying for months about Gore’s outright distortion of facts and Hansens selective cherry picking in choosing “his” way to publish the widely cited GISTEMP data set.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the Muller interview:

What’s your take on NASA climate scientist James Hansen?

Hansen I’ve known for many years. He’s a very good climate scientist, but he’s decided to do the politics. I feel that he’s doing some cherry-picking of his own [when it comes to the science]. At that point, he’s not really being a scientist. At that point, you’re being a lawyer. He’s being an effective advocate for his side, but in the process of doing that he’s no longer a neutral party and he’s no longer giving both sides of the issues.

I know you drive a Prius. What else are you doing to reduce your carbon emissions?

My house is lit by compact fluorescent light bulbs. Let me just tell you, though: Suppose I drove an SUV and lit my house with the worst kind of light — I could still be an environmentalist. Al Gore flies around in a jet plane — absolutely fine with me. The important thing is not getting Al Gore out of his jet plane; the important thing is solving the world’s problem. What we really need are policies around the world that address the problem, not feel-good measures. If [Al Gore] reaches more people and convinces the world that global warming is real, even if he does it through exaggeration and distortion — which he does, but he’s very effective at it — then let him fly any plane he wants.

Truth be damned, but hey, it’s OK, Hansen and Gore are saving the planet right? But don’t take my word for it, read it for yourself on the environmemtal blog, Grist. Here is the link.

Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0

As readers of this blog and others such as Climate Audit know, reviewing new ideas, essays, and papers can often progress very quickly with the help of a widely varied readership. But we still wait for traditional methods somethimes, and for the fast pace of venues like this, it can be excruciatingly slow.

A good example is the AIRS satellite data which promised to give us the first satellite derived CO2 measurement with higher resolution and greater global representativity than the land based measurements such as that from the Mauna Loa Observatory. My writeup on AIRS here on July 31st 2008 indicated that they would have a published paper in 6-8 weeks for us to review. It was a molasses-like wait for many, and I got many inquiries about it during that time. Finally, on September 29th, the paper was published, and I featured it here. That 8 weeks was long by electronic media standards, but pretty quick by traditional science journal standards. But that may be about to change.

The idea of peer review via web collaboration seems to be catching on and this article below demonstrates. – Anthony

IN PRE-INTERNET times, peer-reviewed journals were the best way to disseminate research to a broad audience. Even today, editors and reviewers cherry-pick papers deemed the most revelatory and dispatch them to interested subscribers worldwide. The process is cumbersome and expensive, but it has allowed experts to keep track of the most prominent developments in their respective fields.

Peer-review possesses other merits, the foremost being the ability to filter out dross. But alacrity is not its strong suit. With luck a paper will be published several months after being submitted; many languish for over a year because of bans on multiple submissions. This hampers scientific progress, especially in nascent fields where new discoveries abound. When a paper does get published, the easiest way to debate it is to submit another paper, with all the tedium that entails.

Now change is afoot. Earlier this month Seed Media Group, a firm based in New York, launched the latest version of Research Blogging, a website which acts as a hub for scientists to discuss peer-reviewed science. Such discussions, the internet-era equivalent of the journal club, have hitherto been strewn across the web, making them hard to find, navigate and follow. The new portal provides users with tools to label blog posts about particular pieces of research, which are then aggregated, indexed and made available online. Read the rest of this entry »