These guys again?
Excerpts from: Climate scientists plot to hit back at skeptics
Donations to buy ad on climate change
by Stephen Dinan
Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach” to gut the credibility of skeptics.
In private e-mails obtained by The Washington Times, climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of “being treated like political pawns” and need to fight back in kind. Their strategy includes forming a nonprofit group to organize researchers and use their donations to challenge critics by running a back-page ad in the New York Times.
“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails.
Some scientists question the tactic and say they should focus instead on perfecting their science, but the researchers who are organizing the effort say the political battle is eroding confidence in their work.
“This was an outpouring of angry frustration on the part of normally very staid scientists who said, ‘God, can’t we have a civil dialogue here and discuss the truth without spinning everything,'” said Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford professor and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment who was part of the e-mail discussion but wants the scientists to take a slightly different approach.
The scientists have been under siege since late last year when e-mails leaked from a British climate research institute seemed to show top researchers talking about skewing data to push predetermined outcomes. Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the authoritative body on the matter, has suffered defections of members after it had to retract claims that Himalayan glaciers will melt over the next 25 years.
…
In a phone interview, Mr. Schneider, who is one of the key players Mr. Inhofe cites, said he disagrees with trying to engage in an ad battle. He said the scientists will never be able to compete with energy companies.
“They’re not going to win short-term battles playing the game against big-monied interests because they can’t beat them,” he said.
…
“What I am trying to do is head off something that will be truly ugly,” he said. “I don’t want to see a repeat of McCarthyesque behavior and I’m already personally very dismayed by the horrible state of this topic, in which the political debate has almost no resemblance to the scientific debate.”
Not all climate scientists agree with forcing a political fight.
“Sounds like this group wants to step up the warfare, continue to circle the wagons, continue to appeal to their own authority, etc.,” said Judith A. Curry, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Surprising, since these strategies haven’t worked well for them at all so far.”
She said scientists should downplay their catastrophic predictions, which she said are premature, and instead shore up and defend their research. She said scientists and institutions that have been pushing for policy changes “need to push the disconnect button for now,” because it will be difficult to take action until public confidence in the science is restored.
“Hinging all of these policies on global climate change with its substantial element of uncertainty is unnecessary and is bad politics, not to mention having created a toxic environment for climate research,” she said.
…
Paul G. Falkowski, a professor at Rutgers University who started the effort, said in the e-mails that he is seeking a $1,000 donation from as many as 50 scientists to pay for an ad to run in the New York Times. He said in one e-mail that commitments were already arriving.
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George Woodwell, founder of the Woods Hole Research Center, said in one e-mail that researchers have been ceding too much ground. He blasted Pennsylvania State University for pursuing an academic investigation against professor Michael E. Mann, who wrote many of the e-mails leaked from the British climate research facility.
…
In his e-mail, Mr. Woodwell acknowledged that he is advocating taking “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach” but said scientists have had their “classical reasonableness” turned against them.
“We are dealing with an opposition that is not going to yield to facts or appeals from people who hold themselves in high regard and think their assertions and data are obvious truths,” he wrote.
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Read the entire article at the Washington Times
”””’Allen Ford (14:37:37) : Willis and John Whitman”””
Dark Lord,
Do not punish me severly because my name was spoken with yours. I am not worthy enough.
I hope the punishment is only something like I have to buy you beer & bites in a hot venue with your henchettes prancing sprighly about? I hope?
John
@ur momisugly Bruce Cobb (05:27:27) :”Fire at will.”
Absolutely the moment, see the post on the Swedish data …
Duke of Wellington: The whole line will advance.
Lord Uxbridge: In which direction your grace?
Duke of Wellington: Why, straight ahead to be sure.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUtzMBfDrpI&hl=en_GB&fs=1&]
10 cm fresh snow in Germany. We thought spring had wrrived with the first of march but no.
The TAZ, socialist-green central newspaper here, says even silly things like the recent cold spell are now used to discredit the global warming science. Oh how proud these watermelon people are to be so learned as to be able to discard their own sensual experiences when it contradicts their religiion.
It doesn’t look good for them. Terminal delusion if you ask me. ESF syndrome, i like that word.
To Judith: So you say Schneider is slightly less mad than Ehrlich. Well, Kunststueck, as we say in German, or – no big deal. Schneider is more cynical and manipulative than Ehrlich. Ehrlich seems to be simply delusional, an outright madman. He seems to believe the rubbish he says. His mind must be completely devoid of ratio. Maybe hashish? He seems to be living in 1968.
I’m picking up clues to start my own doomsday cult from him, i think it might be a good busíness model.
RE: JonesII (12:09:14) : “How fool I am! I didn’t realize from the beginning that this can be a real Prime time successful SOAP OPERA: ‘Ugly Deniers make scientists cry'”
I can almost imagine Dr. Costella’s ‘Climategate Analysis’ being produced as a play in the round with the principals seated at their desks in a circle around a stern Muse of Science seated high on a pedestal in the center.
I hope they go and do what is described in the Article……..It will blow up in their face just like alll their Alarmist BS has to date. These guys really do not have a clue do they?……….Low keyed and engaging discussions is what may sway people their way. What they have in mind will be a disaster, guaranteed…John…
And this is the ‘good’ doctor Woodwell:
Dr. George Woodwell, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, is a global warming fanatic whose stated beliefs indicate that he abhors human beings in general, and whose zealousness in this cause leads him to bend the truth. Woodwell works closely with John Holdren at the Woods Hole Research Center, which Woodwell founded and of which Holden is a director.
To get the flavor of Woodwell’s views: In a 1996 interview, he proclaimed: “We had an empty world that substantially ran itself as a biophysical system, and now that we have filled it up with people, and the sum of human endeavors which is large enough to affect global systems, it no longer works properly.”[8] He attributes climatic changes and warming to “the crowding of people into virtually every corner of the Earth.” “How will his plan for a 50 percent cut in [carbon dioxide] emissions happen?” the interviewer asks. Woodwell says it will require “a concerted effort on the part of the scientific and scholarly community; the public will have to be sufficiently enraged….” He stresses that the scientific community is going to have to exert pressure on the government to act.
Woodwell’s 1989 article on global warming in Scientific American was illustrated with a drawing that showed seawater lapping at the steps of the White House.
Another example of his “bending” the truth: During the environmentalist campaign against DDT, Woodwell wrote a technical article for Science magazine in 1967 purporting to show that there were 13 pounds of DDT per acre of soil. He neglected to mention, however, that he measured the soil at the spot where the DDT spray trucks washed down! This detail came out in the official EPA hearings on DDT in 1972, but neither Woodwell nor Science magazine issued a retraction.
http://geoplasma.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!C00F2616F39D0B2B!996.entry
Willis Eschenbach (01:08:33)
Well now the gloves are really going to come off.
I like the idea of us skeptics taking out an ad in the NYT. It would absolutely kill them to print it. We could advertise good sites to read like this one. I’d be happy to kick in a few Benjamins.
GAG…. I think I will hide my college degrees under hobbies the next time I am job hunting. I certainly do not want anyone to realize I am a ….GASP…. scientist. /sarc
These idiots are doing all science a major disservice.
As for my funding, don’t worry, I don’t work for big oil. I work for the other evil Big Pharma.
@Willis Eschenbach ‘First, my thanks to all the prospective henchdudes and henchbabes out there,’
If you gonna be political correct anyway it’s dude and dudette. Although I think most every one prefer babe, like even babes dude. Come to think of it, the best result is always gained by calling a babe by their true designation: God damn valkyries — and since it’s like calling a dude Rocky, run like hell.
JimAsh (09:05:15) :
“That further taxes and trading schemes will not spur innovation but will squash it.”
To those already established in the business, that might be a feature and not a bug.
M. Simon (17:01:33)
HAH! Little do the fools realize that Willis the Merciless wears thirty pound Steel Gloves Of Death™ that allow me to punch my way through even the thickest Clouds Of Scientific Obfuscation™. They never come off … which admittedly is kind of a drag when I’m working with Q trying to assemble my Miniature Ingenious Mechanisms of Evil™. In fact, this is the third “Q” I’ve worked with, I tragically lost the other two in what the Evil Overlord Occupational Safety and Health Act folks called “industrial accidents” … yeah, OK, so I neglected to inform them about the Gloves, it didn’t seem relevant. So?
But it’s worth it overall, because with my SGOD™ I don’t leave fingerprints when I’m shoplifting my secret supplies to make my MIME™ … or stealing stuff for my breakfast … that whole “well-funded” thing is kind of an exaggeration, but don’t tell anyone, OK? After the whole CRU thing, I’m kinda jumpy about this ultra-top-secret information being revealed to my enemies …
Rhoda R (11:40:02) :
Willis Eschenbach
You wanted henchmen and I’d like to volunteer. Someone suggested ‘henchpersons’ for those of us of the other gender – but that’s cold; ‘henchwomen’ is better, but frankly I like ‘wenchhenchmen’ best. Can I be one of your wenchhenchmen?
———————
Surely for economy of syllables, henchwench would sound better. Please count me in.
Willis Eschenbach (17:40:40) :
We need to get your agent to talk to my agent about negotiating a marekting promotion and rights agreement for those most awesome evilnesses and their corresponding action figures and accessories. Any further progress on the Eruptive cloud dohickies? We do need to complete the promotion on those before the IPCC and company can get the EPA to regulate dihydrogen monoxide emissions, at least until you reveal yourself as the World Lord and Master we know you to be.
Sure, sure Stven Schneider deserves some credits, he’s the one appearing on “In Search of… The coming Ice Age” hosted by Leonard Nimoy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tokbiZW3gVY
Willis,
Thanks for the laugh, I always enjoy your writings.
I salute you with my cup of hot cocoa,
A wench dudette
Tenuc (02:45:08) :
Their action from these CAGW nutters reminds me of the Beatles 1973 album ‘Band on the Run’.
Tut tut! Let keep WUWT comments accurate!
“Band on the Run” was not by the Beatles. Try Paul McCartney with Wings! Tsk!
😉
Willis The Merciless:
Post normal science is one of the big villains in the climate science story…
Yes, the dirty little secret is that the IPCC’s Climate Science is Postnormal Science, and you also can see where it fits in Schneider’s schema as PNS – in the outermost layer or realm of control.
No doubt people like the UEA’s Mike Hulme and probably Ravetz want to abandon the IPCC merely because it has exhausted its usefulness as a Postnormal Science vehicle, so that another mechanism must be constructed to folllow.
I’d instead suggest to the Postnormalists that it is they who have exhausted their usefulness as pretenders to science and therefore should officially form a Church or Cult, but doing that would probably constitute an admission that the Postnormalists themselves are not in fact smart enough – of course, by virtue of their own self-annointment as such – to rule the World.
Or, if things are just so “uncertain”, I guess they could always catch a ride on the next Comet, you know, just to be postnormally “certain”.
Unless somebody has been off the planet for the past several years there are precious few people who haven’t already formed an opinion on AGW. An attack ad in the NYT to protect the AGW theory will be about as effective as angry monkey throwing dung.
Resorting to attack ads reveals just how desperate these climate scientists are. They see their control of the media’s message rapidly slipping away from the halcyon days of lead stories trumpeting their dire predictions of climate disaster. Now the only predicted disasters are the credibility of climate science itself.
How the mighty have fallen.
More inane utterances from these so-called top climate researchers:
Paul “Population Bomb” Ehrlich, Stanford Professor of Biology, who uttered: “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” And, “We’ve already had too much economic growth in the US. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure.”
The same Paul Ehrlich who erroneously predicted that: “60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000.”
Finally, the same one who was asked how accurate were the findings of scientists who claimed that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki that nothing would grow there for 75 years, when confronted with the fact that melons were growing the next year, replied: “I think they are extremely robust. Scientists may have made statements like that, although I cannot imagine what their basis would have been, even with the state of science at that time, but scientists are always making absurd statements, individually, in various places. What we are doing here, however, is presenting a consensus of a very large group of scientists…”
Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Biology, lead author of many IPCC reports, who in 1989, said: “… we are not scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
Skepshasa (11:57:01) :
” steven mosher (09:13:01) : I’ve not made much of schneider’s role in climategate. Perhaps it’s time for a focused article.”
Yes please!
I had never heard much about Schneider until I saw the Copenhagen press conference where they were trying to shut down that guy asking uncomfortable questions. Isn’t the nature of science being confronted with uncomfortable questions and dealing with them out in the open?
Well since you asked, here is a start:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2010/03/inconvenient-question.html
Some one should take out a tiny three line ad on the same day that says:
Show us the data,
show us how you measured the data,
show us the code.
Or better yet, every body take out a three line ad that says the same thing.
Tim Clark, although Schneider is listed as a professor of biology, his doctorate is in plasma physics.
He has no academic training in biology or climate science or, for that matter, computational modeling, which has been his supposed area of research interest for the past 40 years.
Also, he holds multiple appointments across departments at Stanford. Stanford regards him as more than a biologist.
Rather than demonstrating that he is the most comprehensively competent, talented Renaissance man of all time, all this is just evidence of his place in pathological science. And of the juvenile silliness of the Leland Stanford, Jr., University science schools.