The publication this week of a paper titled ‘Expert Credibility in Climate Change’ in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences will certainly do nothing to raise the credibility of the authors, those attempting to defend the paper in the media, or climate science itself.
The paper itself is junk science. It attempts to define climate scientists by their belief in global warming as a potential disaster and then attempts to see just how expert they are by looking at how many papers they’ve published and how many times other scientists cite those papers.
The project failed miserably, getting incorrect names, scientific specializations and numbers of citations. Scientists all over the internet are having an ‘I’m Spartacus’ moment, saying that if they are going to get lumped into the skeptic camp, at least the study could have accurately got their names and number of publications correct.
Spencer Weart, author of The History of Global Warming, rejected the paper decisively, saying a first reading showed so many defects that the paper should never have been published. He was not alone.
The second worst thing about this paper is the evil it has the potential to unleash. In the course of preparing this paper, the authors collected the names of signatories to various petitions regarding global warming. Some of them were of a skeptical nature. Some were pretty innocent–saying that the signatories agreed that there was no consensus on global warming’s ultimate effects and scope. But now, this list exists in one place and has a title on it–and no matter how they pretty the title up, it’s essentially ‘Damned Global Warming Denialists Who Should Never Get a Job or Get Published Ever Again.’ And that is how it will be used, despite the pious protestations of some who don’t want to be around to see the dirty work get done.
But by far the worst thing about this paper is what it will do to Professor Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, listed as co-author of the paper, and the man who eased this garbage into print by virtue of being a member of the NAS (which meant he could publish without peer review).
Stephen Schneider has authored or co-authored more than 450 papers (although the data used for the study says 683), mostly about climate change, and he is an expert on the subject.
Schneider started his career boldly. Back when scientists were actively trying to prevent the threat of nuclear war, a group of them (including my personal favorite communicator of science, Carl Sagan) advanced the concept of Nuclear Winter, saying that a nuclear war would result in a prolonged period of blocked sunlight, destroying agriculture and meaning that the survivors would envy the dead. Very dramatic picture and their campaign was effective politics.
But Schneider found the data (and my hero) was wrong, and showed that what had been called nuclear winter would in fact be more like nuclear autumn. Going against the mainstream and many respected scientists, Schneider made his bones.
He did it again. In 1971, he co-authored a paper that suggested that aerosols could cool the atmosphere enough to usher in the next ice age, although he was clear that it would take a lot of time. But by 1976 he had come to the conclusion that CO2 would not only counteract the aerosols, but that it was warming the atmosphere.
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He’s a real life Dr. Robert Stadler, for those who’ve read “Atlas Shrugged”.
Life without ethics, honor, integrity (whatever you wish to call it) is a real waste of time. To endorse something that you “feel” is right is frequently just as bad as endorsing something that you know is wrong. Unless you “know” what you’re talking about, you’re usually speaking jibberish and killing your reputation. A scientist who only applies the rules to his work, is no scientist.
cause de jour. whatever keeps the grant money flowing.
Skeptic Student writes:
“There was a time when I believed in AGW (the melting glaciers on Nat Geo, etc. were pretty convincing to a teenager), and I believed that we had to take cautious action. Once I began to inform myself about the facts, I became less convinced …”
“I’d only recently convinced myself that I don’t have to worry about posting my name to my views. It’s very commendable that some of you can wear this skeptic badge with courage and pride, but I have to pass.”
A young relative of mine works at a university in town and she has asked me not to send her anything climate science related to her university email but send them to her personal email as that if someone in her office saw (for want of a better term) an anti-CAGW reference or article in her email she could lose her job.
Is this the America we want?
I agree, this is the most sinister use of science I have ever seen. Will any discrimination on the basis of being a skeptic breach anti-discrimination laws? Where are ALL scientists stepping forward in solidarity saying “today we are all skeptics”.
The only antidote is solidarity and the light of day –
Someone needs to start a web page where scientists can list any discrimination they experience. Making this public may make people think twice before maliciously rejecting papers or cutting funding. Patterns of discrimination will quickly emerge.
To weed out unjustified complaints based on just bad research, the same website could offer volunteer independent peer review to document quality of rejected papers, projects or careers.
“cohenite says:
June 25, 2010 at 5:04 am
carrot eater, your comments are disingenuous;”
Worse, cohenite. He knows what he does is particularly vile and it excite him.
———————————————
bunny, eh?
As if Hefner would ever let you near the place. You’re just old and freaky.
>> Robert says:
June 25, 2010 at 5:31 am
It says in the article this was a Cold Winter in the Northern Hemisphere? Are they kidding or something? Canada had its warmest winter on record by far with temperature anomalies being positive 10 degrees in many high latitude regions. Just because the US and England were cold doesn’t make the whole northern hemisphere cold… Canada covers more Land than both combined and the entire country as a whole had its warmest winter whereas only parts of the United States were cold. <<
First, the point the author was making was that CAGW has taken a credibility hit in the past 9 months. The bulk of the world population experienced a very cold winter. Whether or not the northern hemisphere was warm or cold doesn't matter as much in that regard as whether or not the people who's opinions drive the politics were warm or cold. Schneider is, after all, mainly a political animal.
Secondly, the fact that you cherry picked an unimportant part of the article to criticize shows that you totally buy into the CAGW dogma, to the point where you feel an obligation to defend the publication of a blacklist. As others have pointed out, it's not the threat to those on the list that is most troubling (although that's a concern) but the implied threat to any young scientist who dares question the CAGW dogma.
“Robert says:
June 25, 2010 at 5:31 am
It says in the article this was a Cold Winter in the Northern Hemisphere? Are they kidding or something? Canada had its warmest winter on record by far with temperature anomalies being positive 10 degrees in many high latitude regions. Just because the US and England were cold doesn’t make the whole northern hemisphere cold…”
We had this a lot of times, i keep it short: Europe: cold, Mongolia: cold, Siberia: cold, China: cold. All NH. Go figure. There are places in the world that don’t speak english as their first language. Even in the NH.
A good place to learn about such places is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World
just a thought……
Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman met near the end of the Civil War. They came to a conclusion, especially Sherman, that the only way it would end is if the North decimated the resources of the South. So Sherman went on “Sherman’s march” through the South. He burned Atlanta (though his troops went beyond his orders and burned more than he said). His troops tore up the railroads, heated the rails to red hot and bent then into bows (they became called “Sherman bows”) so they couldn’t be usable again. They destroyed factories. They burned crops.
The South had no resources to carry on. The war could have lasted decades if not for it.
So I’m thinking that the climate models have to be destroyed on tv with so everyone can see models are flawed. Some global warming scientists may have to be exposed on tv for their bad science and embarrassed. And the IPCC reports may have to be completely dismantled publicly to end all this.
But maybe the cooling weather with longer, colder, snowier winters will do the work for us. Looking at the poll numbers maybe that is happening already.
just a thought
Hard to believe that a scientist has stooped so low – seems he’s been corrupted by $cience.
Slate has a very solid rebuttal to the PNAS paper.
http://www.slate.com/id/2258088/
As I pointed out on Tom’s site, Schneider is the kind of person who will argue that nuclear power isn’t green by assuming nuclear power causes a global thermonuclear war every 30 years and adding in the CO2 from all those burning cities.
These guys warm their feet with bottles filled with hot air, that´s why they have their feet cold and their heads hot, too hot for thinking properly.(*)
(*)Air volumetric heat capacity=0.001297 joules per cubic centimeter
Water volumetric heat capacity=4.186 joules (3227 times that of the air)
It does not matter how many “chemicals” you put into the atmosphere, as long as it is a gas, its volumetric heat capacity will be far less thant that of water.
Chances are you would get an atmosphere like Saturn, very, very cold.
And….CO2 is transparent, it is not black as you thought. Look yourself at a mirror while exhaling, do you see any black gas going out from your nostrils/mouth?
Carrot I think the issue is the combination of the list WITH the assesment of what constitutes “expert”.
using grey literature to establish expertise in peer reviewed literature.
using non experts to establish experthood.
hey, it climate science
Tom Fuller,
When this list was made, did you start talking about blacklists?
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateReport
Summarizing, once again, what it made me upset from the start, was that stupid theory of the atmosphere “saving heat”through any “greenhouse effect”. In Svante Arrhenius time the trouble was the high contamination of cities with SOOT (carbon dust), which eventually was cleaned up. In every case, COMMON SENSE says, that if we contaminate any atmosphere with, say, SO2,CO2, carbon particles, CH4, H2S or whatever, we will end isolating the surface from sun rays and having a very,very cold temperatures. I don’t care if a bunch of post normal physicists believe it and show it with elegant equations. It is not possible.Period.
Think the following: How did you do your breakfast TODAY?, What did you use for heating up your coffee?…Come On!, did you do it with a hairdryer?
The EPW issued a whitelist, showing scientists who think for themselves.
This….”toilet paper” is intended to provoke revenge, hate, violence from the innocent and naive people who have been convinced till their bone marrow itself of the mantras they have propagated as a the CREED of the New Religion of Gaia/ecology/Environmental Conscience/Green ethics, etc.,etc. against human targets .
That’s hilarious. So if Morano makes and trumpets a list of sceptics, it’s a whitelist, and nobody’s talking about yellow badges or the nefarious purposes for which such a list could hypothetically be used. I see.
No. You don’t see.
I find it unfortunate that so many have focused on the list as a “blacklist”. It’s not that it can’t be used as such. It can. So can many other lists. But it distracts from what, IMHO should be the main focus.
The method of compiling the list and producing the paper is incredibly shoddy and that’s where the focus should be. Discredit the methodology and the significance of the list goes away.
Should also note that the paper was peer reviewed, but that the author apparently gets to pick the reviewers. The final result is pretty much the same as no peer review.
Smokey,
So what exactly is it, that I don’t see?
The point is that if somebody out there was motivated to somehow persecute sceptics, and wanted a list to go off of, then that person could have been doing so for quite some time. Because sceptics have been busily making lists of themselves. The person could use the Morano list, for example.
So it just doesn’t make any sense, when somebody else comes along, and combines a few pre-existing lists of names, to suddenly start talking about how this will enable all sorts of horrible things. The Morano list could be used the exact same way, if somebody were so motivated. Yet that’s an issue that Tom Fuller has chosen to highlight, and stand by.
‘Damned Global Warming Denialists Who Should Never Get a Job or Get Published Ever Again.’
Sue for loss of earnings.
In my field of research, scientists compete to get studies to publication and openly debate findings in proper forum. That’s how scientific inquiry is advanced.
Building and publishing lists of who is on what side of the debate with the intent to blackball, smear, or defame is so grade-schoolish and a professional embarrassment to anyone who engages in such brattish behavior. It is indicative of someone who has too much play time built into their grants to engage in serious work.