By Harold Ambler
A new editorial in Nature is startling for what it reveals, especially the fact Paul Ehrlich is a go-to figure about how hard scientists have it when it comes to media access.
Ehrlich is an individual who became an international celebrity by spinning one frightening story after another (about the death of the oceans, for one thing) who maintains, with a straight face, that he and his fellow scientists have an unfair disadvantage in communicating their side of the climate debate.
He is quoted by Nature as saying, regarding the aftermath of Climategate and the fact that skeptic scientists are finally getting a hearing,:
“Everyone is scared shitless, but they don’t know what to do.”
People often forget: Goliath, right before the end, sensed that something was amiss.
For, ironically, among the most pervasive myths attending global warming is the one pitching David against Goliath, in which those touting the risks of damaging climate change are cast as David and Big Oil is Goliath.
The story requires observers to ignore the facts: Media, most scientists, and governments the world over have spent and received so much money on their version of events that they have collectively become Goliath. Observers must ignore, too, the reality that skeptic scientists maintain their intellectual freedom at significant risk. Funding routinely dries up; tenure is denied them; ad hominem attacks of the most vicious variety are launched against them from the Ivory Tower of academia, from the studios of multi-billion dollar news organizations, and from the bully pulpit of government.
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They have no plan but to try to stonewall it, and that plan ain’t working.
Credibility is like virginity – once it’s gone, you don’t get it back.
The Comic IPCC AR5 will be beaten to the post as the next climate comic a climate novel called ‘Solar’!
From the UK Telegraph
‘…McEwan is about to publish a new novel, Solar, about global warming. It tells the story of a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist, Michael Beard, who stumbles upon a way of producing energy that promises to solve the world’s energy crisis. It contains McEwan’s customary mixture of a page-turning narrative drive, perceptive characterisation and acute observation. But, more unusually for him, it is also very funny. As he demonstrated with Amsterdam – his satire on the subject of moral responsibility, and the novel that won him the Booker Prize in 1998 – McEwan is no stranger to sardonic humour. But Solar could rightly be described as his first comic novel.
McEwan says he had been thinking of writing about climate change for some years, ‘but it just seemed so huge and so distorted by facts and figures and graphs and science and then virtue. I couldn’t quite see how a novel would work without falling flat with moral intent.’ The key was finally turned in 2005 when he was invited by the environmental group Cape Farewell to join a group of artists and scientists on a trip to Svalbard, a group of Norwegian islands in the Arctic Ocean….’
I think it’s not based on Nobel-prize winner Gore as he cut out the science middle man and figured out how to make cash to solve the world’s energy (peak oil) crisis!! Patchy Moral’s book doesn’t count as it’s theme is more Climactic than climatic!
…and Anthony: some information from the EU referendum. They have been asked to plant a tree due to the scientific finding on the carbon footprint of a blog!
‘…The aim is “to raise awareness of the carbon emissions resulting from the use of the internet – specifically of blogs. A blog with 15,000 visits a month has a yearly carbon dioxide emissions of 8lb.”……’
If the best thet the Anthropogenic Climate Change lobby can come up with for a reboot is the author who, in The Population Bomb said that in the mid-70’s millions would die in worldwide famines and Americans would be dying on average in their 40’s, I think they should definitely be worried.
Sen Boxer: We use the gold standard CRU data.
Reporter: Sen Boxer you know that CRU said they faked their data?
Sen Boxer: Oh we don’t use the faulty CRU data, we only use the NASA data.
NASA: We know our data is faulty — We only use the CRU data.
Sen Boxer: ……
David didn’t have the President of the US, The United Nations, the press, a Nobel Prize, and a $100 million supercomputer on his side.
“Everyone is scared s***less, but they don’t know what to do.”
The irony of this statement is that it has been Ehrlich, Hansen, Schmidt, Jones, Mann, Santer and their ilk who have been scaring the public s***less about global warming for nearly 20 years!!
Climate scientists don’t know what to do?
How about if they performed science, and stopped being data-distorting activists.
Ehrlich has shown over 40+ years in public life that you can’t go far wrong by doing the opposite of everything he says, so it is encouraging to see him pitching in on the side of the AGW doomsters.
People often forget: Goliath, right before the end, sensed that something was amiss.
I just went and read again I Samuel 17, and I don’t see how Goliath knew at all what was coming. You don’t give the AGW folks enough credit – they know they’ve messed up, bigtime.
Three things I have learned from the AGW controversy:
1. You can trust science but you can’t trust “scientists”.
2. If a scientist says, “Trust me”; don’t.
3. Trust, but verify.
Another idea for climate “scientists”: they could start by reading this review of Montford’s “The Hockey Stick Illusion,” and then read the book.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/03/the-case-against-the-hockey-stick/
Steve Goddard (08:43:43) :
David didn’t have the President of the US, The United Nations, the press, a Nobel Prize, and a $100 million supercomputer on his side.
He’s got better. He’s got T R U T H.
“If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their trust and esteem”. Lincoln
“Everyone is scared shirtless, but they don’t know what to do.”
Yes, that’s probably true. They’ve already have had the best PR money can buy and still continue to enjoy it. Still, regardless of all of the positive press, they’re losing the hearts and minds of people. They’ve tried the “let’s become more shrill” trick. They’ve tried the appeal to authority trick. They’ve perfected the “ad hominem” attack. Still, they see they’re losing the argument. They can’t really “press the reset button” and start all over, they know what they’ll find and won’t be able to explain why information put out originally was knowingly misleading. Mike Mann, for example, can’t suddenly put forth a graph that shows a MWP and less of an incline at the end and say “Eureka!!! I just figured out bristle pine cones don’t make good temp proxies!!!” That would be tantamount to not only admitting the skeptics were right, but also malfeasance and incompetence as a scientist. How many are in the same boat? Every shrill psuedo-scientist advocate that attempted to alarm the world into action. It would probably be more merciful if we simply started the trials today. Then, they could probably garner some sympathy.
@ur momisugly Steve Goddard (08:43:43)
– Good point Steve!
Perhaps a simple count of articles for and against AGW tabulated over the last 10 years might prove the 10:1 ratio and other trends mentioned in this article….
Michael Mann invokes precisely this analogy in Randy Olson’s softball interview on TheBenshi:
RO – When the story of Climategate broke, the climate skeptics were all over it from Day One with articles linked on The Drudge Report and Fox News. But the science community took days or even weeks to offer up official responses. Don’t you think there’s a problem with quickness of response?
MM – I do. I think that unfortunately this is sort of a classic David vs. Goliath type battle. The science community isn’t organized — it doesn’t have a single politically driven motive, as the climate change deniers do. It’s not organized, it’s not well funded in terms of public outreach in the way that climate change deniers are funded by the fossil fuel industry.
Read it here. I think MM needs to reread the book of Samuel.
What caught my attention in this graph showing the “Roman Warm Period” and the “Medieval Period” is how well those phenomena track with, first, the Qin and Han dynasties in China, and secondly, with the Tang and Sung dynasties—arguably the two greatest periods of social and cultural growth in Chinese history.
David hit Goliath between the eyes. The seat of knowledge, the true meaning of Scientia. What are the first five stones, the pieces of evidence? Here’s my take:
(1) faulty surface stations records
(2) unacknowledged UHI c**p
(3) faulty selection of faulty proxies
(4) faulty CO2 ice core measurements
(5) Goliath gaming the system – Climategate
I still want to see the measurement of CO2 in ice cores challenged. I’m still certain that Jaworowski was all too correct, and that this is why he, like the MWP, got hammered. See my introduction to his work
Why pay for a full page NYT ad when Nature will give you ink for free? Too bad Nature picked the wrong one to quote—it’s like using the Chicago Cubs as a model of success in the World Series.
We really need to demand that to pony up with the science they claim is so settled.
We need the basic papers, not their “settled” conclusions. They have to present real science!
“Where’s the beef?”
I like the way you guys use a biblical metaphor here. Of course, it means absolutely nothing. We are in the 21st century with an open, modern scientific process that accepts only the good science that first gets published and then survives the test of time as other research builds on what has been learned.
Observers must ignore, too, the reality that skeptic scientists maintain their intellectual freedom at significant risk.
“intellectual freedom?” Risk? Please — you guys are free to write and publish whatever you want. What you are really referring to here are those few scientists (and many amateurs) whose writings are just plain wrong and cannot get the audience they want, because of the process I describe in the first paragraph.
It’s said that the attempted coup by a handful of ex-soviet military generals in the early 90’s (an attempt to stop the USSR from folding) failed due primarily to their being unable to control access to information. A coup can work if the word doesn’t get out quickly (do the job while everyone is confused.) Knowing this, they shut down local phones, but failed to account for (illegal!) Ham radios. The world saw their machinations, and in realtime. This was a huge factor in their failure, if not *the* factor.
Similarly the Ehrlichs of the world are hobbled by their POV which assumes a central control of the flow of information. The internet and sites like this are the great equalizer. Wm Connolley (sp?) et al practice this approach with wikipedia. Increasingly, people are turning away from this and receiving their news and info from other sources. The media outlets are losing money and can’t seem to figure out that like Ehrlich, they handicap themselves.
The modern David has the internet and WUWT. Stupid, slow, sluggish, brute force Goliath will always lose to a smarter, tech equipped David. Isn’t that the real biblical lesson anyway? Progress and technology are symbiotes.
It’s worse than anyone at AGW thought
http://www.gallup.com/poll/126560/Americans-Global-Warming-Concerns-Continue-Drop.aspx
Paul Ehrlich is a go-to figure about how hard scientists have it when it comes to media access.
The Big G, is beginning to come to grips with what this all means. To his great credit, leading the way is the Chairman of Australia’s independent Public Broadcasting Network, ABC:
“The lack of moral and scientific integrity shown by the IPCC serves only to reduce clarity and increase confusion, disappoint believers and give fuel to doubters. It has frustrated policy makers, and as polling now shows, it has clearly weakened public belief in climate change and devalued respect for science in general.
In defending the indefensible, Mr Gore, university vice-chancellors and those in the media, do a disservice to the scientific method and miss the point that no matter how noble your work, your first responsibility must always be to the truth.” Maurice Newman, Chair ABC Networks
And now even stalwart Guardian George Monbiot re peer review and publishing:
“If scientists want people at least to try to understand their work, they should raise a full-scale revolt against the journals that publish them. It is no longer acceptable for the guardians of knowledge to behave like 19th-century gamekeepers, chasing the proles out of the grand estates.”
David would feel well at home with WUWT.
Here’s a comment I posted over at the site of the article:
————
[earlier poster]: “I wonder if we could tabulate the press article numbers – for and against AGW – over the last 10 years.”
In the US, “The Reader’s Guide to periodical Literature” would give a good estimate, although it covers only 50 publications (I think). There is also an online pay site that scans many newspapers, http://www.newspaperarchive.com . And there is another pay site, whose name I forget, that carries articles from numerous mid-size magazines.