by Steven Mosher
In the last episode of “Craven Attention” I recounted some of the things Greg Craven said during a panel discussion after Oppenheimer’s lecture of the role of scientists. [GC33D The 2010 Stephen Schneider Global Environmental Change Lecture (Webcast)Moscone South, Gateway Ballroom, Room 103, 1345h–1440h Scientists, Expert Judgment, and Public Policy: What is Our Proper Role? Presented by M. Oppenheimer, Geosciences, Princeton University]
Greg seemed to take issue with my characterization of some of his comments.
I have no problem with analysis and criticism of my presentation, but I do feel strongly that the facts of it be correctly conveyed, as I have already been significantly misquoted. I expect that you do not appreciate having your statements mischaracterized or misquoted either…
But I believe some of your characterizations of what I said to be misrepresentative. You are of course free to give your assessment of my presentation, demeanor, or state of mental health. But everyone in the debate says “look at the facts and let them speak for themselves.” I ask that you do the same thing and limit yourself to quoting my actual words, criticizing them and myself as you will, without taking upon yourself to characterize what I said. I am painfully aware that I am a pathological overtalker and can’t be succinct to save my life.
I do not expect you to agree with my words or me. But I do expect you have the discipline and principle to convey the speech accurately, rather than settling for your interpretations and summaries of what I said (as you did in the “Basically it goes like this…” set-out). I’m sure that you’ll agree that characterizing your opponent’s words yourself does no service to forwarding the discussion.
And he seeks to vindicate himself by posting a transcript of the episodes.
And my remarks have already been mischaracterized and misquoted, to further malign the AGU. In the interests of accuracy and truthful reporting, I will post an audio file and transcription of my presentation as given at www.gregcraven.org as soon as I can.
He has now posted a transcript of a different presentation he gave earlier in the day. Huh? Strangely the audio that produced that transcript is still not available. The problem is my piece covered a different episode. He posted a transcript of the meeting at 1020 AM on the 15th and I covered the panel that followed Oppenheimer who spoke at 13:40-14:00. Still, we can note some things and see if it’s possible that I got the gist of what Craven was saying correct. That is, by looking at the first transcript we can see that my characterization of the second speech is not implausible. Let’s just say the second presentation was a good model for the first.
First lets note this. The Craven who cares about being misquoted had this to say; take special care to note his definition of the meaning of communication below:
my message to you now is that you must stop communicating as scientists. You must begin communicating as citizens, as a father, as a mother, with whatever feelings are in your heart, with your fears, speak to them of your hopes, let them know about your befuddlement at the divergence. And tell them frankly, forthrightly, sincerely, about any terror that you are ignoring…..
You say you want to have an effect on the public? If you trod a journey at all similar to mine, think, visualize, take five minutes to meditate on the impact it would have if you took off your goddamned scientist hat for just a moment, and put on your citizen hat. And said frankly to the public through the largest mouthpiece you can: “As a scientist, here’s my understanding. As a citizen, here’s my hope, my vision. And as a mother, here’s my contingency plan, here’s my lifeboat.”….
If you obliterated your comfort zone and the hard line of purity of your scientific sensibilities–that you do cling to, with the faith of a god–and you actually went forth as an actual advocate, a sentiment normally anathema to the constitution of a scientist, imagine if you went out into the fray bearing your heart, with your emotion and the authority of your understanding as your weapon. For what you’ve been giving them as a scientist up to now is information, and with that increasing divergence between public and scientific opinion…
You must stop selfishly pursuing your pleasure in finding things out. To be frank: f*** your research. We. Need. You. I know I am almost certain to outrage you with my impertinence and the audacity of my message. And my word choice, for substituting ‘f*** for ‘screw’. [Mild laughter.] And that’s the lesson you must absorb into the fiber of your being, for the meaning of communication is not what you intend, or the information. The meaning of communication is the response it elicits in the listener. And that’s where we have failed. So while you may be likely to forget the details of my rant, you will always feel the emotional aftertaste of it. And that is the purpose of communicating the science of climate change to the lay public. To give them an emotional aftertaste.
Your role, your job–the one we have assigned you and gladly supported–has always been to stand on the hill overlooking the bloody battlefield and give reconnaissance and convey information about what’s ahead. But there comes a time in the last stand for every single support troop, no matter how far removed, to pick up a weapon, come down into the fray, and fight to the death for what they stand for. To charge into the face of annihilation itself and fight with their teeth, tearing out the jugular of their enemy with their bloody mouth if they have no weapons left. That time is now.
If you do not believe that, if you do not feel that, I challenge you to be intellectually honest–that part of you that you hold up as better than any other profession, and I support you in that opinion–you are the only rational thinkers on the planet. Beware, psychological research shows that people don’t generally make decisions rationally. If you don’t agree with this–that this is the time to radically challenge your comfort zone, and your traditional mores of never letting feelings or opinions on policy pass your lips–I’m not going say “If not now, then when?” I’m going to say: detail an operational definition of a test to test whether a situation would merit that extreme action or not. Come up with the characteristics. And then I defy you to compare them to the situation now. If you do that, forget everything I’ve said. I absolve you. That’s all I ask. But if your intellectually honest operational definition tells you that the time is now. . . .
These snippets are from his earlier speech. However, in the panel after Oppenheimer’s talk he gave a similar version of the “comfort zone” challenge. The “emotional aftertaste” I was left with after I forgot the details of his second rant was this:
Craven took charge again and argued the “if not now, when” argument.Basically, it goes like this. As a scientist you have to decide at some point that enough is enough. You have to put your scientific commitment to the discipline of doubt aside and “blow past” your boundaries. Say what you feel, not what you can prove….
Steve Easterbrook, thankfully, asked the only intelligent question. On one hand we have Oppenheimer telling us take care when going beyond our expertise. On the other hand we have Craven, saying “blow past” your boundaries. Oppenheimer tried to paper over the difference, and Oreskes, who seemed to be shooting me looks as I sat there laughing, agreed that there was a difference between these views. Craven, breaking his promise again, read what he had been scribbling. Some sort of challenge to climate scientists that he promises to post.
I apologize if I got it “wrong,” but on Greg’s view my emotional “aftertaste” IS the meaning of what he said. I guess those years of studying Stanley Fish and Roland Barthes came in handy. Personally, I want scientists to keep their science hat on at all times. Others can panic without any practice or education. To be fair to Greg and to present his argument a bit more precisely and rigorously he seems to want scientists to speak emotionally about policy while retaining their objectivity in science. Except, for the ” f*** your research part” which is a bit hard to square with things. Craven thinks scientists research because they take pleasure in it. Removing doubt and uncertainty is an equally likely motivation. So there he seems to be saying they should put their desire to remove doubt and uncertainty aside in favor of passion. Oppenheimer’s point, on the other hand, was this: as an expert you have a problem. People make take your positions on policy to be expert scientific opinions, when they are not. And my point would be this. The passion for policy is part and parcel of the problem of trust in climate science. For Craven, the “understanding” drives the passion. But for many of the people that need to be convinced the displays of passion undermine trust in the science. That’s their emotional aftertaste.
Oh dear. I feel badly for him. What a most unfortunate moniker:
craven |ˈkrāvən|
adjective
contemptibly lacking in courage; cowardly : a craven abdication of his moral duty.
noun archaic
a cowardly person.
DERIVATIVES
cravenly adverb
cravenness noun
ORIGIN Middle English cravant [defeated,] perhaps via Anglo-Norman French from Old French cravante, past participle of cravanter ‘crush, overwhelm,’ based on Latin crepare ‘burst.’ The change in the ending in the 17th cent. was due to association with past participles ending in -en
Isn’t Craven simply a hgh school teacher and not a real driver of any real global warming science? Let’s leave this guy alone, he seems a bit disturbed and not worth your time…
Amen, Mosher. It seems to me that many liberals operate under Craven’s paradigm all day. What you feel is more important than what you think, if you think at all. I love my kids, and love raising them. I also enjoy my time with my adult colleagues as we spend time solving problems sansemotions, and fortunately for a profit. I suspect Craven has never experienced the emotion of meeting a payroll, maybe the emotional aftertaste of not being sure you could do it at first would allow him to think more dispassionately.
His attitude is consistent with the IPCC mandate – we already know that global warming is caused by people, so now we need to generate the science arguments to convince the people that it is bad and we need to make a lot of very serious changes in how the world is ruled to mitigate those effects. The job of the scientists is to support those political efforts.
Now Mr. Craven is saying that the science part is done and the scientists need to get down in the pit with the activists and push their science.
Problem is, they didn’t get the science right, and the real scientists who looked at what they did have poled all sorts of holes in it, so now they have a problem. The lawyers have a saying: “When the law goes against you, pound on the facts; when the facts go against you, pound on the law; when both the law and the facts go against you, pound on the table.” AGW is at the table pounding stage.
If you need to swear then you’ve lost already. Debate rule #1
My emotional aftertaste after reading the transcript of the earlier meeting (and to borrow his use of full stops between words):
Greg.Craven.is.stark.raving.mad.
(to be fair he does admit it in the talk)
I am actually physically sick at this political assassination of the tenets of science. To paraphrase Mr Craven: “[/snip]“.
[Such vulgarity is unwarranted, unnecessary…. bl57~mod]
Yes, this stuff is mostly interesting as evidence of serious mental disturbance. It is quite extraordinary that these people are invited to engage in public nervous breakdowns at what are supposed to be science conventions. You were wrong to laugh, by the way. The guy suffers from a quite serious condition. He needs help.
No offence intended, but simple observation of Craven’s behaviour and comments leads me to the conclusion that he is seriously mentally ill. He should be disuaded from making an exhibition of himself in this way.
“I suspect Craven has never experienced the emotion of meeting a payroll”
I suspect he’s doing exactly that with this idiocy. And I’m sure he delights in getting it reposted and discussed as much as possible, as that adds to his validity, at least in his mind.
JimB
“Craven Attention, The Prequel”
“A prime example of how science is distorted by – likely well meaning – scientists or science educators. Deliberately or not this video is a masterful piece of propaganda pretending to be science. Credits are due to Greg Craven, the master propagandist who appears in the video.”
http://pathstoknowledge.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/when-scientists-fail-to-present-all-the-known-facts-including-the-ones-that-contract-their-hypothesis-they-become-propagandists-and-bad-scientists
“If you don’t agree with this … I’m going to say: detail an operational definition of a test to test whether a situation would merit that extreme action or not. Come up with the characteristics. And then I defy you to compare them to the situation now. If you do that, forget everything I’ve said.”
When I’m trying to find an analogy for something that is life-or-death, I usually use a medical analogy. In medicine, an extreme case would be having to amputate a leg to save your life. I certainly wouldn’t undergo an amputation for a condition which no-one had ever been diagnoes with before, where the doctors had not been able to predict the progress of my illness to date (warm winters turning into cold winters). What’s more if the disease was only going to have a serious effect after a few decades, I’d wait for more research before I took drastic action – especially if I discovered that not all doctors agreed with the “consensus” view.
Can I forget everything he’s said?
diagnoes = diagnosed (sorry)
rxc says:
December 30, 2010 at 12:49 am
—————
AGW is at the table pounding stage.
__________
That about sums up Craven’s speech.
There would seem to be several inconsistencies between the apologia sent to Mr Mosher and the Mea Culpa posted by Mr Craven at Prof. Curry’s blog, “Climate etc”.
I am not certain that the continuous relationship between Mr. Craven and the AGU is in their best mutual interests as it is possible that both Mr. Craven’s health and the reputation of the AGU could be adversely affected.
Mosher: “For Craven, the “understanding” drives the passion. But for many of the people that need to be convinced the displays of passion undermine trust in the science. That’s their emotional aftertaste. ”
Exactly, and those “many people” are right to distrust the science of those “passionate” scientists. I would argue that this “passion” often borders on an ideological obsession. The world should be transformed.
In 2007 scientist James Hansen joined with other scientists and evangelicals to save the planet. In their “Urgent Call to Action,” to George W. Bush, Nancy Pelosi, congressional leaders, and national evangelical and scientific organizations they called for immediate transformation of the world:
“We declare that every sector of our nation’s leadership-religious, scientific, business, political, and educational-must act now to work toward the fundamental change in values, lifestyles, and public policies required to address these worsening problems before it is too late. There is no excuse for further delays. Business as usual cannot continue yet one more day. We pledge to work together at every level to lead our nation toward a responsible care for creation, and we call with one voice to our scientific and evangelical colleagues, and to all others, to join us in these efforts.”
James Hansen has showed that he will use all means, including illegal ones. It is only prudent to assume that these means could include scientific distortions.
Climategate.
Trust in climate science is at an all-time low. Until proper open science is allowed to be pursued about climate, without those doing the research having to toe the party line due to financial and political pressure, the null hypothesis is the only viable option to the CAGW conjecture.
Ha ha – ‘The table pounding stage’ – yep, I like that!
But to my mind, it’s perhaps more of the spoilt 6yr old child’s ‘foot stamping’ and tantrum stage! I am sure many parents will recognise the similarities of behaviour! The child keeps asking, keeps being refused, starts to shout, is then ignored, starts to throw a tantrum and gets sent to his room, screaming blue murder, etc. And we know how difficult it is to reason with a screaming child?
The trouble is, in my day, I’d get a good thwack round the ear – This is, of course, not the ‘modern’ or approved way of child rearing – and look where that has lead us! LOL!
(Maybe thats kind of the same as in modern academia, where old scientists used to ‘put down’ their prodigies? prevent publication, etc – but these days, the young pups are given free reign?)
One day, some of these tantrum throwing, table thumping climate idiots will HAVE to be put in their place!
I think it is important that he should go and see a doctor as soon as he can .the poor fella needs help
Craven is preaching ‘post normal science’. Namely, that science must adapt to the needs of society as defined by people like him and the AGW alarmists.
As a propagandist he is third rate – too patronising and too much invective. Dr Goebbels would have wiped the floor with him.
While I agree with most of the above posters comments, most of the actual content of the OP’s thread was a distinct yawner.
Steven, I really admire your approach and the factual analysis of Greg Craven’s presentations
But do you realize you’re taking on a complete crack pot?
The entire exercise is an absolute waste of time if you ask me.
Craven is simply selling the same true believer endemic to today’s politics…namely if you don’t like the message spin until the lie is what you want and repeat it consistently. Worked for the “death panel” meme in the healthcare debate and the “we cant tax the rich” even though they have the lowest tax rates in history. Let’s not blame Craven for this but look at the bigger picture of a DC that does not function brought on by lies from both sides. The global warming lie is but one – question your news sources people!
Oh, and Anthony, for another lying meme please look at MidAmerican Energy’s investment in wind – 20% of their electricity is now wind, going to 25% and not a rate increase since 1995 and a promise for no rate increases until at least 2014. It can be done, but I guess California can’t do it (only hearty midwesterners can).
This Greg Craven and people and scientists with a mentality like his want to force us to make this world even colder than it already is, less Co2 than it has, to me, NO THANKS!
Warmer is a better world. More co2 makes a better world. More plants, more food, less suffering. Unfortunately, I really don’t think the next degree will ever come in this millennia irregardless of the co2 level, it does all depend on the sun’s output and our distance from it which is going nowhere fast.
I guess the polite way to portray his clear state(ment) he has made sure we know so clear is just “loose marbles upstairs”.
“The meaning of communication is the response it elicits in the listener.”
I joined others trying to debate with Craven when he published a long series of YouTube videos. He was preaching and, as is usually the case with preachers, the more emphatic he became, the easier is was to wedge open the logical holes in his points.
When he became frustrated, many of us were summarily barred from further posting on his threads. Many of us.
It is therefore interesting to hear about communication and what it elicits in the listener. Craven might reflect on this.
Or, rather, no he shouldn’t.
As he has said, his priority should be to spend more time with his family. Give up his emotionally-driven campaign. He will be happier. The scientific arguments will progress more effectively without the minor distraction that has consumed a disproportionate amount of his life.