Vincent Gray advises me via email:
Dear Folks
I have been a subscriber to the “Scientific American” for as long as I can remember. I have been bitterly disappointed at there persistent embrace of the climate change fraud and the publicity they have given to its promoters.
I have still kept subscribing for the occasional genuine scientific articles.
I just received the issue for November 2010 and I almost fell off my chair at two of their articles. They now admit for the first time the sceptics might be right and they invite discussion on their website.
The first article, page 8 entitled “Fudge Factor” tells of a scientist who always found the results which fitted theory when they did not, how this sort of thing happens all too frequently and includes a sentence questioning whether proxy temperatures measured from tree rings are not an example..
The second article, page 58 has a full page photograph of Judith Curry, Climate Heretic who has been consorting with the likes of Chris Landsea, Roger Pielke Sr, Steven McIntyre and Pat Michaels, who has doubts about the entire IPCC process. I had noticed her intelligent letters on the various blogs.
There is a diagram showing how ridiculous the Hockey Stick becomes when you put in the uncertainties.
I have only just finished reading this so I have not so far commented, but I thought you should know that when a magazine like the “Scientific American” permits free discussion on climate change it must mean the beginning of the end.
Cheers
Vincent Gray
==========================
Direct link to Judith Curry’s article:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-heretic&page=1
Sounds like pretty small beer from the SA, judging from the elucidation in the comments above; nothing to rejoice over.
How’s Science News doing? I decided not to renew my subscription after they ran an idiotic article by a ‘science reporter’ on sea-level rise in the Maldives, which did nothing but cite CAGW talking points.
/Mr Lynn
pesadia says:
October 23, 2010 at 1:48 pm
It will be interesting to see if these articles affect their sales.
… and this, I think, is what is going on here. Sceptics among the magazine buying public are outnumbering believers.
I’m not a scientist so it is with a degree of trepidation that I address this learned group.
I did study history and know that the Medieval Warming Period was real in both Europe and in some Pacific waters. The “Hockey Stick” dissembles and cannot be supported. My state attorney general should pursue his investigation of Michael Mann if only to determine whether he has used his AGW tactics before. I am not impressed by the arguments about AGW since even I know that more than 90% of the atmosphere is water vapor (which makes the Earth habitable) and that C02 (also a gas necessary to life on Earth) is merely a trace gas. My reading (of learned individuals such as those who post in this milieu) tells me the Earth has warmed and cooled on multiple occasions through the ages and that CO2 increases generally follow warming, not the reverse. I believe Al Gore, Mann, Holdren et all, are shameless
snake oil salesmen.
Hmmm. Maybe they will consider someday that “dark matter” (mentioned on their cover) and “dark energy” are also fudge factors invented to force a broken theory to match observations?
For almost 30 years I subscribed to SciAm, then about 5 years ago I retired. I needed to cut costs and by that time the magazine had been on the climate-warming, disaster bandwagon for sometime. It was a no brainer; I stopped renewing and decided that the public libary would provide me with their publication. For a year or two I took it home to read. Now I don’t.
I doubt that the editor and the publisher has changed its orientation much.
Scientific American disappoints.
gavin.
“To be or not to be” that is the question: It is a matter of choice that the whole media faces: Whether they accept their fate and die because of lack of clients, or….make an urgent recheck of the real world and publish what the real public (CLIENTS) wants. However, chances are, that if ideology is really funded by tax money it can last keeping its head interred in the sand, while you have some money left in your now almost empty wallets.
But, REJOICE!, here in WUWT, we have been announcing: We are living in really interesting time, just keep along with Don Quixote Watts´, Lord of Wattsupwiththat, knightly fight against the windmills of old. Buy more popcorn!
……if they were to publish real science, they would have troubles finding it in the same known places…. 🙂
It would be refreshing for them to buy some WUWT posts.
Glad to hear it. Over the last several years I have begun to feel increasingly like we are living in a surreal world of massive group think like one of the scary science fiction novels of the 60s. However, The British Royal Society, the American Physical Society, and not far behind the American Chemical Society, have recently had major defections in their ranks over the ‘debate is over’ nonsense. One of the more embarassing holdouts, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, just put out a feeler on how scientists could better communicate with the public. Perhaps losing the ridicule and opening serious debate might catch on.
I stopped reading Sci Amer for good when their editor suggested that colleges discriminate against Kansas? high school grads because the State School Board of Kansas voted, for one year I think, to include creationism in the high school curriculum.
Think about that.
Of course, Kansas scores higher on the std tests than the more progressive states of NY and California, but, details, details.
Sci Am was leftist back in the 1960’s. I recall reading a glowing article on how Chile was beating inflation by indexing. Think about that.
Then, the article by economists saying that the govt should directly create jobs, not the private sector, because govt sector jobs were of higher quality. Think about that.
Even in 10th grade, I knew that stuff was crap. I was raised on a farm. I understood more about economic reality than those PhD’s writing in Sci Am.
The proper response to these publications should be to shun them. They have disgraced themselves. Just sold themselves and science out. Let them go out of existence.
Slightly off-topic, but: I more or less stopped reading SciAm in 1998 or 1999, after what I recall as a ridiculous article on Y2K. If I’m remembering correctly, the article laid out worst-case and best-case scenarios, along with a call for funding correction efforts by government and industry in order to stave off disaster. (Sound familiar?) The best-case scenario predicted widespread outages for 2-3 months after 1 Jan 2000.
I can find no trace of such an article at SciAm’s website, not even a likely title. Am I hallucinating the article, or does anyone else remember such an article?
OT but did anyone notice that the high temperature in the arctic is now hovering over areas of open water. Compare the ice graph and the temperature graph and there is a strong correlation that wasn’t there a while ago but is there now as the “hot” spots shrink.
Good day HollyGlobalWarmingWood,
Today on “As The World Churns”, we see the return of Professor Courage, starring Global Reality star JVC, as the lone challenger of the vicious IPPC. Courage finally overcomes the evilly distorted Sy Fi editor, Virgin Lips, the editor with a global warming hoax to and for everything almost sensationalist science magazine, “Los Ferocy” .
Enters the distress massage therapist from a democrat-liberal challenged state on the US west coast. Wearing her new “real” mink coat which Virgin Lips has for every robust massage therapist he can find, she cracks her knukkles and slides up to Virgin Lips and whispers, “Watch the hannnnds”.
The steps back and says, “You look bad, VIe! What is it Babe?” Asked the Shewolf of the Columbia Gorge.
AAaaaaaaaah! It’s that dog gone Georgian,” screamed Virgin Lips. She’s back.
“She is back with revenge. She got to the board, she got to the Marketeers. I’m. I’mm washed up!”. “It’s over, It’s over,” Virgin Lips cried as his head slipped into the hands set on his calorie filled chest.
“Well, Virgin Lips, I guess that’s that and thanks for the pearls,” as Shewolf walked out the glass, black carbon, double pane, thermal doors.
As she left, Virgin Lips remembers the old song, “Lucille”. As he steps to his wall mirror, he begins to sing, “why did you leave me,…?
What was that name he whimpered at the end? Only the fortune teller’s magic mirror can tell.
We may never know.
Next week on “As the World Churns”, The Professor takes on her peers at Tallahassee University of Meterological Studies.
Don’t forget to program your DVDR for that show. Just ask your kid how it works.
Lucy Skywalker says:
October 23, 2010 at 1:49 pm
“End of the beginning” at the very most IMHO.
But it’s a win. Global warming believers haven’t had a win in a long time.
Good news! But we’ll obviously have to wait much longer for them to sober up about the equally ridiculous theory of cold dark matter so absurdly proclaimed on their cover.
Jimmy Haigh says:
October 23, 2010 at 5:27 pm
Scientific American disappoints.
gavin.
=======================================================
lol
It is a start but when they have the history of adopting the attitude of a doomsday cult, it will take more than a token gesture. Their credibility has been seriously damaged and I wouldn’t take them seriously unless they start doing articles like how stupid the Hockey Stick was and openly apologized for how they damaged science by supporting pseudoscience.
I would not call this a ‘return to science’ for the Scientific American.
Look at the lead story… “Hidden Worlds Of Dark Matter”
Absolute baloney!! ( http://thunderbolts.info/ )
Give with one hand.. take with the other..
As much as I love Judith Curry, God knows she has a good heart and a good mind, I cannot but give credit to the institution where she teaches, Georgia Tech or Tech. My best hypothesis is that Judith learned scepticism from some hard headed professors at Tech. Professor Curry probably discovered that if she wanted some colleagues to converse with her then she needed to ditch the pro-AGW stance. I do not mean to take away from her intelligence or character; rather, I mean to give credit to a first-rate institution of science and technology. Tech has not yet fallen to postmodern science or postmodern scientific method. Let us honor the institution.
I do not see this a break though is the rigid position against skeptics of AGW by the editors of SA. It seems to me this is an article that attempts to discredit Judith Curry as a scientist for looking for scientific truth in the liar’s camp. They describe her as a doubled-minded scientist willing to converse with non-believers. In any religion, this is heresy
I liked one of the comments that compared how amateurs are viewed in astronomy. If this was an astronomy site Anthony would be commended for his tireless work, would be thanked by the greatest in the field and the surface station anomalies would be known as the Watts effect.
Vincent Gray wrote: “There is a diagram showing how ridiculous the Hockey Stick becomes when you put in the uncertainties.”
Looking at the online version, I didn’t see that diagram. Can someone provide a link or perhaps the diagram itself? Or, is there another graph somewhere that closely shows the same information, for our review?
I fully agree with every single word of this. Smart thinking!
“I have only just finished reading this so I have not so far commented, but I thought you should know that when a magazine like the “Scientific American” permits free discussion on climate change it must mean the beginning of the end.”
Cheers
Vincent Gray
The beginning of the end?
Not likely! More like the beginning of ~yet more~ pervasive propaganda, empirical lies, deceits, half-truths, and a whole slew of fabrications predicated upon pseudo-scientific prognostications.
The magazine —and the organization once known for its stringent adherence to scientific principle— has sunk so far beneath the surface of the political seas, as to have become subsumed into the domain of the compromised.
Raising —and re-floating— that grand old lady to her once great stature is seen as a next-to-impossible venture under the current ‘leadership.’
I was an avid reader of Scientific American beginning in 1962. I quit subscribing when the magazine began publishing articles with a political slant rather than scientific. If they are now coming back to publishing hard science, I might re-subscribe.