Guest essay by Brandon Shollenberger
It’s nothing but laundering lies. The authors don’t come out and directly say anything untrue, but they intentionally create and promote misunderstandings to inflate the importance of their work.
It’s rampant dishonesty hiding behind a fig leaf of deniability. This is how I recently described Cook et al’s PR campaign for their recent paper.
I didn’t intend to follow up on this comment, but this morning I saw a quote from Dana Nuccitelli that was impossible to resist:
We were always careful to say that while the survey involved 12,000 abstracts, the 97 percent consensus was among the ~4,000 abstracts that took a position on the cause of global warming (plus the roughly 1,400 of 2,100 self-rated papers taking a position). And we were careful to point out that the consensus was that ‘humans are causing global warming.
Nuccitelli says he and his co-authors always used a particular phrasing when describing their results. I must admit, that is true. They’ve always managed to say “humans cause global warming” with the implicit qualifier of “some” (that they knew nobody would pay attention to). It’s obvious they knew the limitations of their results and didn’t want to be accused of lying. So when someone said:
Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous. Read more: http://OFA.BO/gJsdFp
They obviously knew this wasn’t supported by their work. So what did they do? Did they correct it? No. They promoted it. Time, and time again, they promoted this tweet despite knowing it was a grossly inaccurate description of their work. How could they be careful to always describe their results accurately then promote gross inaccuracies about their results? Simple. They aren’t lying if they aren’t the ones saying it.
That’s it. That’s their strategy. They say things like, “Humans cause global warming” knowing most people won’t realize they’re meaning “some amount of global warming.” When someone misunderstands them, they promote that misunderstanding. They then tell us they “were careful” not to say untrue things themselves. For example, from the same link as the tweet from “Barack Obama”:
Ninety-seven percent of scientists say global warming is mainly man-made but a wide public belief that experts are divided is making it harder to gain support for policies to curb climate change, an international study showed on Thursday.
The important thing to realize is they did this very carefully. They intentionally used wording that could be easily misunderstood then promoted misunderstandings that arose from it. In other words, they laundered lies.
As a note, the piece Nuccitelli’s quote comes from has a great deal that’s wrong about it, including the fact the author completely misrepresented my communication with him. Try to ignore that for now. Cook et al’s rampant dishonesty is far more important.
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There does seem to be a certain amount of dishonesty in that paper, but it IS the promotion that counts, isn’t it? All the CAGW proponents use the “97% of all…” line. This paper was deigned to push that and the author’s knew full well what the proponents would do with it.
Love the Blackboard’s remark, “I tried. I tried to be generous. I tried to find some technical issue for why John Cook’s latest survey would not produce a random sample of the 12,000+ papers in his database. I tried to find some innocent programming mistake we could all understand….”
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/i-tried/
And this is what they push as hard science and then they call us “deniers” for pointing out that it’s nothing more than BS.
Half truths are more dangerous than lies…
CAGW is a great example of obscurantisme in all its aspects.
How dare you question us, we know better.
Deliberately writing obscurely, to hide intellectual vacuousness.
Appealing to emotion.
What difference can it possibly make now? Damage is already done. That lie has gone around the earth twice. Used even by the POTUS.
“97% of scientists agree” based on a survey of 4000 papers and they managed to get the president to say it, goes to show it’s all about the message and not looking at the study. This has done no end of harm for science and humanity.
At the end of the day, there is AGW and CAGW.
Most sceptics accept there is some AGW, but that it is not quantifiable due to the myriad factors involved. In any event, it is of minor importance compared to the impact of cyclical changes in the Sun’s energy output.
and the Earth’s orbit. In other words. It is a mildly interesting phenomenon.
CAGW, on the other hand, is a figment of imagination in the minds of the scientifically challenged.
AGW is a non problem, while CAGW is a hoax. So much for climate science.
I find that most in the media & the public affected by them always say “97% of scientists”, including the president, not of “actively publishing climate scientists”. Of course even that is tendentious, since 75 out 77 cherry picked individuals responding to questions worded so that even most skeptics might assent to them is gross opinion survey malpractice, designed not to discovery anything but to provide an easily spread advocacy sound bite.
Yes indeed. And the truth is only just now getting its boots on. However the truth has very big boots. And those who promoted the lie are now in for a kicking.
David, the difference is this: most people aren’t advocates one way or another. They fall somewhere in the middle. It’s one thing to be wrong, everyone is wrong sometimes. It’s another thing to be a liar and to try to sell a lie and to insist people accept a lie. Once those people in the middle realize that these arguments aren’t just mistakes, but outright lies, they will turn on the alarmists. Once they lose their credibility, they’ll never get it back. I’m convinced the reason the people are beginning to turn against this nonsense now, and they are, is because of all these ridiculous positions and predictions which get more and more outlandish. That’s what turned me.
The goal for us is to expose these people as liars. Give them all the rope and hang them. This will be the next round in this fight. They must be exposed as liars who intentionally lie. Look how far the “climategate” thing went. That didn’t have much media support at the time, but once it got out it began turning people. Support for global warming was nearly unanimous ten years ago, now I’d say a full one-third of people think it’s nonsense and many of those who support it only do so as a “fad issue.” For politicians they shouldn’t try to attack the science of global warming, they need only attack what these alarmists want to do: carbon taxes, etc. We’ll always win that fight, even now. With more exposes showing that these alarmists are intentionally lying or misrepresenting data or facts (there were two such incidents this week) the people will turn against them altogether.
Hey Brandon, Disagreed with the wisdom or a recent post, but this hits the target nicely imvho.
Great job.
School teachers in the US are moving to a new set of education standards called “Common Core”, it has not approved the science component yet but Math and English Language Arts are in place. They use word problems in math that emphasize CAGW issues like Carbon Footprint, English projects like writing your congressman to advocate for stronger climate legislation, and community organizing 101 as young as first grade. The new pending science standards are already full of Micheal Mann’s hockey stick principles. Who needs truth when you have K-12 and a global progressive propaganda train?
I’ll give you a preview, they focus on consensus, not the scientific method.
http://www.corestandards.org/
It’s how they roll. I’d like to see some focus put on Dana’s recent use of the Marcott ‘scythe’; he would know Marcott himself described the blade portion as not robust, but yeah once it’s out there interpretations roam free.
When someone says or does something essentially dishonest, though within the letter of the law, you can say they are liars, manipulative and purposefully misrepresenting, because he can not tolerate “his” day in court.
When you speak the truth, you can have it shouted from the rooftops during the brightness of noon. When you seek to mislead, you have to speak quietly in dark corners late at night, and use the hearsay of others to promote your work.
Dana, Cook … how far would you go to have your piece dissected in the court of public opinion? All these statements should give you cause, but cause only to worry.
Ian H says:
July 28, 2013 at 6:08 pm
Jorge says:
July 28, 2013 at 6:14 pm
I used to have rose coloured glasses on. I took them off.
From my perspective, and I have been involved in this “debate” a long, long, time, I never dreamed the president would use a blatant lie in promotion of the AGW meme. I know what this tells me. What does it tell you?
All the Universities (meaning our future power brokers and people in positions of control) are holding all the cards for our future. These people regard the general public as “stupid”, so even if the public are aware of the deception, those in power feel they know better than the hoi-polloi. Bureaucrats are wringing their collective hands in anticipation of a carbon tax.
The truth is still getting it’s boots on. It will be written out of history once the victors are in total control.
The boots aren’t as big and powerful as one might hope.
Hm. A bit of formatting appears to have gotten lost/removed as the opening of this was a quote from a comment I made at The Blackboard. It might be better this way though. It just makes the second sentence of the second paragraph sound a little weird.
Alvin says:
July 28, 2013 at 6:24 pm
Local school boards & state textbook buyers need to push back, & IMO some will.
As Monckton so aptly points out, “consensus climate science” sometimes ignores consensus, as in going with Mann’s bogus hockey stick instead of the mountain of evidence for a global Medieval Warm Period, grown ever higher since IPCC embraced Mann, et al.
It is no excuse, when your intent is to deceive, to say, “I didn’t actually lie.” Intent is what matters.
These guys intended to deceive, and in many ways succeeded: At least fooling some of the people some of the time. Where there could have been greater understanding they made understanding less. Where Truth could have been clarified they muddied it. And love?
In order to deceive your fellow man I assume you would have to imagine the deceit was for some “greater good.” You would assume you were wise, and everyone else was stupid, and therefore it was in the best interests of others to suspend their right to become educated, to remove their ability to chose wisely, and to basically dictate their decisions. In other words, theirs is a dictatorship mentality.
What dictators forever fail to see is that, besides denying others freedom by imposing a sort of marshal law, they are denying themselves the viewpoints of others, and accepting a narrow myopia instead. Over and over history shows that the more a despot attempts to gather power, the less powerful his people become, and eventually the weaker his nation becomes, as short-term gains give way to long-term misery.
In conclusion, though fellows like Cook and Nuccitelli may well, in their own minds, twist logic around to a place where they can say, “I deceive others for their own good, because I love them,” under keen analysis it always seems to be that they detest, distrust, and basically don’t love their fellow man.
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I don’t know if I’d say “stupid” so much as “controllable”.
Control the information that people have to form an opinion and you’ve got them.
The first amendment to the Bill of Rights in the US talks of freedom of the press and freedom of (not “from”) religion.
Blogs and sites like WUWT are the present day embodiment of the “small town paper” the US’s Founding Fathers sought to keep free from Government control. (Even the Government they were forming.)
97% of scientists agree with Dr. Roy Spencer that man’s contribution to global warming is minimal.
Stock photos with the stock imprint still in place.
It’s not lies, it’s just shoddy crap.
Unfortunately, the local school boards are either powerless to stop the process or complicit in allowing their Educrat overlords to take away their responsibility in exchange for federal grants and other funding. The 2009 Stimulus started the process, but the effort goes back to the Clinton Administration to nationalize the education of our children. Pearson is the largest publisher behind the new standards, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
If any of you are interested in getting up to speed on this topic, here are some links
http://truthinamericaneducation.com/
http://whatiscommoncore.wordpress.com/
If you have the time, listen to this youtube/podcast/conf call
http://youtu.be/-b-NDZ98QgU
We need honest scientific minds in this effort to protect our children.
“The important thing to realize is they did this very carefully. They intentionally used wording that could be easily misunderstood then promoted misunderstandings that arose from it. In other words, they laundered lies.”
*
Yes, and then they laugh all the way to the bank.
Perhaps warmist would recognize the deceit here: Take a poll result which shows 90% of the population of the US favors supporting our troops and then argue that anyone opposed to any presidential escalations in overseas conflicts is outside the consensus. The next step is to generalize from this to the basic understanding that you can’t identify a broad consensus and the use it to marginalize views within that consensus.
I like to refer to the 97% lie as a bait and switch scheme. Most people connect this to con men. I believe many people can relate to this better than just calling them dishonest.