Breakthrough at Scientific American

To paraphrase the inimitable Fritz Hollings, with regard to rushing back to the SA fold as many posters here seem to contemplate, “Dere’s too much consumin’ goin’ on out dere”. Or, as a former chief of the Fed said (crudely paraphrased) ” there’s an irrational exuberance in the market”. Shortly before the dot com bust.
Many here, having only recently or reluctantly taken up arms against the monster that is “climate science” are too willing to see the slightest change in the impenetrable wall of media devotion to the religion of AGW as a starting point for negotiation and reconciliation.
Forget aboudit. Judith Curry has conceded nothing to the skeptics. She only says that the non skeptical should allow the skeptical to have a say in discredited media such as SA. If the reactions here are indicative of the larger skeptic world, SA should reap a nice little profit.
Google gullible, people.

I also was considering canceling my subscription because of their dogmatic stance – now I will give SciAm another chance. Reluctantly given their smarmy arrogance and closed-mindedness.

I quit reading Scientific American years ago. I recall that my epiphany came when they carried an article on the horrors of assault weapons (???). As I recall, the article came out while the so-called “Assault Weapon Ban” was under discussion. Anyway, they said something like assault weapons were responsible for the deaths of more innocent people than anything else. As though the dreaded Assault Weapons were capable of independent thought and action. As if the people carrying those weapons weren’t organized and directed by someone or some entity.
The article never mentioned starvation engineered by socialist governments. Some three or four million (Walter Duranty’s estimate at the time was 10 million) were murdered in the Ukraine by Stalin and the method was starvation. It’s cheaper than bullets. Some 39 million were murdered in Communist China just during the Great Leader Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”.
Most of the famines during the 20th Century were caused either by the deliberate action of socialist governments or by the total incompetence of said governments. (I would appreciate any examples that happened in democratic countries.)
I would invite attention to:
The Black Book of Communism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism
The Black Book chronicles the systematic murder of about 100 million people by Communists, Add to that some 25 million murdered by National Socialists and you get a total of about 120 million. However, I would suspect that since the editors and authors of the Black Book were leftists of one sort of another, their estimates were probably “conservative” i.e. low. I have seen other estimates on the order of 170 million.
The SA would have been more correct in presenting COMMUNISM as the number one killer of innocent people.
This was one topic that I knew something about. The Scientific American had published an article that was little more than leftist political propaganda. Furthermore, I realized that I could not trust them on subjects that I knew nothing about-like climate science.
The editors had chosen to make their publication worthless to me.
I would consider reading the Scientific American again. When the entire Editorial Staff apologies to me for betraying the trust I had placed in them when I purchased their publication.. It would be the honorable thing to do.
I am not holding my breath, although (in the context of WUWT) hell might very well be freezing over.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)

Steamboat Jack – I believe there was a serious famine in Bengal (India) late in WW2, caused largely by incompetent government. Although not a democratic country at the time, India was then part of the British Empire.
All the best.

Though having scientific education I always felt common sense is more important. If only because of the many misunderstandings of what science is with the general public. This makes a lot of scientist fall prey to a corruption of their creed, yes they are human first and scientist second. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions shows how the social dynamics may work here. So for many it’s not they are bad, they are “just human”… Part of the problem is, science in itself is overrated. That is, for the general public, in politics, among scientists themselves. There’s a reverence for the word “science” it maybe doesn’t deserve. Yes, there have been many changes because of science, but there is no scientific argument to claim science is good, or bad, for that matter. So to adhere to science itself in the end… is a creed. You cannot substantiate your adherence to this creed with scientific fact. But you don’t have to. You’re entitled to your creed! I am!
Having given up on mainstream publications like NG and SA a long time ago (“clearly going too commercial”), I love reading WUWT. Yes, there will always be people parading with “science”, but also always people trying as good as they can applying the scientific method. Maybe not use this words “science” or “scientific” as some magic wand you just have to wave to impress others. Just stick to the proven method patiently. The facts will always win in the end.

SA must be desperate (or not) they are even sending free issues to old subscribers.
But to resubscribe two requests:
1- Editorial apology for insulting our inteligence at least on 20 issues.
2- 5 year free subscription for everybody.

Money vs. science:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/1/

Medical research is not especially plagued with wrongness. Other meta-research experts have confirmed that similar issues distort research in all fields of science, from physics to economics (where the highly regarded economists J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang once showed how a remarkably consistent paucity of strong evidence in published economics studies made it unlikely that any of them were right). And needless to say, things only get worse when it comes to the pop expertise that endlessly spews at us from diet, relationship, investment, and parenting gurus and pundits. But we expect more of scientists, and especially of medical scientists, given that we believe we are staking our lives on their results. The public hardly recognizes how bad a bet this is. The medical community itself might still be largely oblivious to the scope of the problem, if Ioannidis hadn’t forced a confrontation when he published his studies in 2005.

Climate Glasnost! Gotta love it. Let the wall come down!

DitelHead says:
October 23, 2010 at 3:37 pm
Guys; before everybody breaks out the champagne please remember:
If the previous thousand year North Atlantic cycle just repeats itself, with no help from people, then we’re in for another 150 years of global warming! They can continue to tell people who don’t know any better that this warming trend is “unprecedented”. Just try posting a skeptical argument on digg or reddit and see what happens. I very much appreciate the difficult and often tedious work that many of you all have done. I hope you guys are ready for a long battle.
These people have hijacked the legitimate environmental movement. They have hijacked science and many academics are afraid to speak out. They hijacked wikipedia. I think WUWT just had an article about that. There is more going on here than a few scientists trying to get their names in scientific journals. These AGW people are not going to give up without a fight.

Oops, looks like they brought a hockeystick to a gunfight.

Paul Deacon, Christchurch, New Zealand 10/24 @ur momisugly 10:27 ,
Thank you for the information on the famine in Bengal, 1943. According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
the cause seems to be a combination of bad weather, incompetence, focus on the war (the Japanese were right next door and coming fast), and the increasing price of rice which led to hoarding as investment. While Wikipedia certainly isn’t definitive, it seems that it was finally the importation of rice which caused the price to drop and the hoarded rice to come onto the market.
“ Quite simply, although Bengal had enough rice and other grains to feed itself, millions of people were suddenly too poor to buy it.”
James Evans, 10/24 @ur momisugly 10:17
My wife says I can be obtuse and people don’t get what I am saying. So, I will give it another try.
The thesis under consideration is that many publications from the New York Times to Scientific American have been publishing pro-AGW stories. These stories rely on shoddy pseudo-science at best and everything from ad hominem attacks to total fabrications at worst. This particular post advances the possibility that even the Scientific American may be changing for the better.
My contribution was to show the leftist partisan nature of the editorial staff. I believe that they have a leftest agenda as evidenced by the articles they publish. In the article I refered to, they chose to publish one that was both childish and wrong.
We adults know that inanimate object are neither “good” nor “bad”. Hence, characterizing so called assault weapons as the number one cause of death implies that they are capable of independent action. That, of course, is childish. And to say that they are the number one cause of deaths is incorrct.
As far as the varius “isms” go, that issue is no longer in debate. When the Soviet Empire fell, the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution, and Peace accquired copies of millions of files from the former Soviet government. (I believe that Harvard later got another copy) The scope of the files has been described as “everything except the President’s files and the KGB files”. They include the payroll data from the Gulags. They even have a copy of the document that Stalin signed to authorize the slaughter of the Polish POWs, commonly refered to as the Katyn Forest incident.
Anyway, the totals that I described in my original post have been derived from Communist files that are now open to researchers. Those totals are from Communist records. And the number one weapon that they used was not “assault weapons” but starvation. However, I believe that a more accurate statement of the number one cause of deaths of innocent people is Communism.
http://www.hoover.org/
I expect that liberals would never say that all of those deaths were either “good or “bad”. After all, that would be judgemental. In deed, the New York Times likened the systematic murder of millions of people in the Ukrane to the making of an omelet. Me, on the other hand, I find mass murder abhorrent. But that’s just me and my value judgement. You me feel different.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/may/04/russia.usa
http://www.conservapedia.com/Walter_Duranty
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)