Joe Romm and Al Gore share one thing in common besides being paid for blogging, writing, and making opinions on climate to scare the dickens out of people: they don’t understand what journalism is supposed to be about. Not only that, Joe shows his own bias and hyprocrisy compared to how he dealt with Climategate emails a year ago:
Joe Romm at Climate Progress 11/21/2009:
Note: No, I’m not thrilled with reprinting part of an illegally stolen e-mail, but this was in Wired and has been confirmed by the author and actually deals with the science.
Joe Romm at Climate Progress 12/15/2010:
Kudos to Media Matters for unearthing this story from the anti-earth folks at Fox News. See also the Politico story, “Fox editor urged climate skepticism.”
He seems thrilled to publish such a “stolen email” now, when it suits his cause. And of course, he puts the Fox News email front and center, but you won’t find him doing that for any of the climategate emails, lest he scare the flock.
And here’s what he’s all bent out of shape about, this passage from the Fox News “illegally obtained” email, bold mine.
…we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.
Gore writes on his blog today:
“Fox News has consistently delivered false and misleading information to its viewers about the climate crisis. The leaked emails now suggest that this bias comes directly from the executives responsible for their news coverage.
Heh, a year ago Gore wouldn’t even read the emails from CRU, and got caught with his foot in his mouth: Al Gore can’t tell time – thinks most recent Climategate email is more than 10 years old
Of course, there’s no mention of his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, being hauled into court in Britain and found to be “false and misleading”.
There’s also no mention of the CRU emails on Gore’s blog, the entire month of November last year, even after major media outlets such as the New York Times had reported on it. He was sure to wish everyone a “happy Thanksgiving” though. In fact it took Gore a full month, until Dec 18th, 2009 to make any mention of it at all, and then it was only a sideways glance, by reporting on a favorable story (for him) in Politico.
And let’s not forget this story, where Al locks our reporters from his presentation, and is even bold enough to put up a sign to that effect: Gore to press: Stay Out!
It seems to be a pattern with Mr. Gore: Journalists pan Gore secrecy
Neither Al or Joe seem to get what journalism is supposed to be about. Here’s a clue.
The Encyclopedia of American journalism, By Stephen L. Vaughn, page 38, says:
A “core journalistic value”.
As Lachlan Markay at Newsbusters writes:
So Sammon instructed staff to incorporate the most basic tenets of science and journalism – skepticism and political neutrality, respectively – into their reporting on contentious scientific issues with tremendous political implications. And this is a problem?
Only if you are MediaMatters, Joe Romm, or Al Gore.
If you want some fun go read the comments at Huffpo. Take extra blood-pressure meds before you start reading.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-gore/post_1436_b_797323.html
Did you know that you can’t even call a good looking woman a “Fox” now without incurring the wrath of leftists? What is the world coming to?
Romm notes “the anti-earth folks at Fox News.”
Really. How much denser can he get?
So they have a problem because they found proof that Fox executives are requiring Fox to be “fair and balanced”? And the problem is……?
and this from Gore that locks reporters out, all reporters…….
In the topsy turvy world of AGW true believers, skeptics are evil and telling both sides of a story is wickedness through and through.
Does anyone wonder why Romm is rightfully considered the biggest jerk in the blogosphere?
REPLY: Actually your comment is misplaced, I know from experience there are far worse people. – Anthony
To me this shows how scared the warmists are of what is happening and that is very encouraging.
If you object, criticise and spin against what are correct and proper editorial instructions to journalists to report objectively then in doing so, as Al Gore and Joe Romm have done, it is a tacit admission that there is much you want to hide and don’t want anyone to see.
If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear – and they seem to fear simple truth and fact.
Who’s Al Gore?
Yeah, no way do they want fair and balanced. Hell, no. They have had it all their way with the media for decades. I expect they will tout this as an example of the “denialist misinformation campaign”.
h/t to Bill Sammon for pointing out to his team what every one of them should have already been practicing for years. I hope other media bosses are doing likewise.
Okay Al, get an Interview with say, Greta Van Sustren in NYC on January 20th,
Prepare for Kennedy and LaGurardia to be shut down and the city shut due to snow….
How is a modern-day journalist supposed to report differing viewpoints on the same subject! Its just so much more efficient to stick with one view, the ‘crusade’ view— http://www.thestar.com/news/sciencetech/environment/copenhagensummit/article/735124–star-joins-global-climate-crusade
What’s new? That’s how totalitarian green ideologues behave.
No debate but dictate = dictatorship
http://notrickszone.com/2010/12/14/silence-of-the-greens/
OT but these are worth looking at:
http://www.wkyc.com/news/local/news_article.aspx?storyid=164226&catid=49
Water, winds encase Lake Erie lighthouse in ice
I see this as sign that the CAGW scam is now going into its death throes.
Anthony, thanks for the consistency and the razor wit with which you skewer all those who cannot permit scientific unknowns and scientific discussions. Our world is safer and more truthful because of your efforts. Health and best wishes to you and your family.
My comment on Climate Progress in case it gets lost:
Apparently we overlooked these “Fox” beings.
Coordinates please.
The Borg
A few days ago NPR used accurate and objective phrasing in a report on the Cancun failure. It caught my attention and switched on my mental tape-recorder because the even-handed phrase was so completely unexpected:
“…once it became clear that there would be no overarching deal to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that have been linked to global warming.”
The standard media template would have been “…gases that cause global warming.”
Will Algore now attack NPR for following Fox? I doubt it.
I don’t know why Fox gets so much static anyway. Most of its people are hard-line Greenies. Shep Smith is just as screechy as Joe Romm on the subject.
Fox News “endorsed” by Gore and Romm. Works for me.
[snip, as much as I got a chuckle out of your labeling of the two, I’d be just as bad as they are if I allowed such an ad hominen comment – Anthony]
The post sums it up well: AGW doesn’t want both sides of the story told.
Why?
Because when both sides of the story is told…AGW loses.
Heh. This is good, actually. Let the world see Media Matters spew its “bombshell” e-mail to show the world how totally insane the whole global warming mania has become. And there is no better person than Al “Chokra” Gore to go to bat for Media Matters [double heh]!
Meanwhile, here in western New Hampshire, it’s about 10 F with snow on the ground, and I have my CO2 belching pellet stove going full blast keeping me and my family warm. Ahhh…life is good…
Truth, it’s what science needs these days more than anything else. And what about that old saw, seek the truth…
I guess it’s best if you start out to tell lies, you hide the truth.
Sheesh what has happened to science.
When presenting both sides of an issue and promoting impartiality and factual reporting is considered evil, what does that make the clowns who think so? They simply cannot be cast in a good light.
So since when is going to sources and uncovering and reporting the actual facts and not blatantly misleading “controversy” not objective?
If I’m reporting on a resurgence of measles must I try to achieve “balance” by reporting that “controversy exists with respect to the validity of claims that the MMR vaccine may be among the causes of autism”?
If I’m reporting on fossil remains from, say, 100,000 BCE must I report that “controversy exists with respect to the actual age of the the fossils with some citing their interpretation of evidence indicating the Earth’s age cannot be more than about 6,000 years?”
With respect to hypocrisy this characteristic does not look good on anyone. It doesn’t look good on Romm when he uncritically publishes and pushes stolen or hacked Fox News emails having bemoaned the publication of the CRU emails, nor does it look good on skeptics who ludicrously take a phrase such as “it’s a travesty that we don’t” to imply that scientists secretly know that warming has stopped and then cry when Romm takes the quote above to imply that Fox is trying to hide the fact of a warming planet.
Rob Ryan
Reading Romm’s sputtering post on the Sammon matter is all one needs to know about the utter bankruptcy of Climate Progress as a source of science commentary. Romm, who in Alinsky-esque rants continually attacks our host and us as “anti-science” and a threat to the planet cannot stand the time-tested maxims of science never being “settled” and the fact that consensus is a non sequitur in the sphere of science investigation. He is a non-person in my book and should be ignored. Al Gore is not worthy of mention.
Rob, you are hilarious.
i’d feel happier if whoever is involved with the short Fox Extra reports dropped all the alarmist CAGW stories.
yesterday murdoch’s newspapers throughout australia ran with the alarmist coastal maps story, yet today we have ABC including mention of the disclaimer which was not referred to yesterday:
16 Dec: ABC: Council rejects rising sea level forecast
“They’re using all sorts of assumptions that aren’t necessarily accurate in the local conditions.”
Cr Young says council will be releasing more accurate maps early next year.
“I’m concerned that people might take these maps as being really accurate – they’re clearly not,” he said.
“I’d encourage people to give consideration to the disclaimer that precedes the maps – it basically says, ‘don’t rely on these’.”…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/12/16/3094581.htm
anthony, start packing!
15 Dec: Mercury News: Dana Hull: California to adopt ‘cap and trade’ to combat climate change
Taking the lead where Washington has wavered, California on Thursday is expected to adopt the nation’s most ambitious plan yet to curb global warming…
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_16868556?nclick_check=1
Media Matters, Al Gore and Joe Romm all have one thing in common: George Soros.
If Romm wasn’t bought and paid for, and kept on the Soros
leashpayroll, he would be nothing.Same with Media Matters – a 100% Soros-funded propaganda organization.
Al Gore is a little different. He’s part of Big Tobacco, and was Vice-President, and the Democrat nominee who ran against G.W. Bush – and lost what should have been a sure thing: with great name recognition, and a great economy, how could he possibly lose?? Well, for one thing, he couldn’t even carry his home state. Gore is a real Bozo, doubled and squared.
So Albert made globaloney his fallback position. Lucrative for Gore – but at everyone else’s expense. Just like his tobacco farming.
To paraphrase Steve Schneider I can’t accept the validity of redacted memos leaked by people whose values I don’t trust.
“…we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. ”
Even Phil Jones says the earth hasn’t warmed recently, so the fact that Fox wants to treat assertions of warming with caution is eminently reasonable.
“It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.”
And this is controversial because …?
Sorry, if the AGW movement is getting enervated over this there is something seriously wrong with their reasoning skills.
When it comes to good reporting, more people trust FoxNews than any other media. That surely does not mean most people are stupid!
Bill Sammon is fair and balanced, I think.
A former Enron employee’s view on Romm :
http://masterresource.org/category/romm-versus-0bradley-enron/
Who is Joe Romm?
I have issues with all the networks. Every reporter these days is just a talking head spewing his or her spin on the news. No one just reports the news. I prefer the dry old, “he said this, she said that” style of boring background sitting at a table reporting. News men and women these days seem to consider themselves to be the expert on everything they report. Even the balanced reporters have to add their two cents worth. Just report the fricken news. STOP EDITORIALIZING!
Oops some one needs a good old pull on some of Granpas, sipping cough mixture, arthtritis and gout remedy. It’s even been known to fuel the Model T at times.
Aaargh.
Did you know that Al Baby was shining for a while, his stuff was called Silent Spring, him and Mammy Sue, got the recipe from a book.
People are now so scared of it they won’t even use it fer paint stripping.
Yer I know, Back in yer box Jack.
Will anyone be closely following Sammon’s future career path and good health? I hope they will be.
Romm is a warmerholic. He can’t put it down. He’s deliriously intoxicated with bias and hypocrisy.
Pamela Gray:
I prefer the dry old, “he said this, she said that” style of boring background sitting at a table reporting.
Pamela, I’m with you on this. Up to here with chit-chat news.
polistra says:
December 15, 2010 at 6:02 pm
Don’t hold your breath on NPR being either fair or balanced – on anything – any time soon. I’m sure the phrasing you heard was just an aberration. I just got through hearing a report on how wonderful the health care rationing is working out in Britain. They just can’t understand why those horrible right wing rethugicans could possibly refer to such a humane redistribution of scarce health care money as a “death panel”.
The “formula” they quoted sounded an awful lot to me like the one Michael Crichton pointed out that was supposed to calculate the number of planets in the universe with intelligent life. It sounds wise on the surface but as soon as you try to actually apply it, becomes abhorrent.
NPR is an unabashed AGW alarmist cheerleader and I see no sign of that abating.
“Kudos to Media Matters for unearthing this story from the anti-earth folks at Fox News.”
Yes, kudos to Media Matters, George Soros, and all the U.S. haters.
Dis biga bombshell comrades. Soon our
plan to take over will be complete. Climate
science is linchpin to world domination.
Leader out!
What a frickin joke. LMAO
Romm’s claim that “climate science” is settled is absolutely true—“climate science” is a misnomer for “wealth redistribution” that IS settled if you ask those zealots who are pushing to enforce global governance. Now, SCIENCE, on the other hand, ISN’T settled because of the nature of the beast. (These people really should hyphenate their term (climate-science) or maybe even just make a single word out of it (climatescience) so everybody understands it is an insidious political ploy masquerading behind a science banner—similar to the word “hamburger” that really has no ham in it whatsoever. Maybe they could just shorten it to “climsci” so it rolls off the tongue easier and avoids direct reference to “science” altogether, thereby minimizing the confusion.) I’ll give it a try:
To emphasize their self-righteous position as patron monarchs of climsci, I often see double emphasis used, as in this statement by Romm:
Applying the term “illegally” to a Climategate email should be sufficient; adding “stolen” suspends a clear understanding—are we dealing with a double negative here, or are they just trying to drive home the point by tedious (and unnecessary) adjective repetition? (Since I’m not a legal scholar, perhaps there is actually such a thing as a “legally stolen” e-mail. Any suggestions from you experts in jurisprudence?)
Clearly, such obfuscation of standard English is common by those who support climsci.
Hahaha, Fox sure knows how to attract a wider audience: leak an email stating Fox’s intent to be objective, have some of its competitors go ballistic in a public P.R. campaign, and voila! Hasn’t it been proven over and over that demonizing Fox only seems to increase its ratings? So are the CAGW Master Sargents really just trying to hold onto their crazier[?] base and reinforce its condition-response attack dog training through continued practice?
Andy Whorewhole: (SP?) —
“There is NO such thing as ‘bad publicity’..”
For FOX and other public media, this is very true.
GO FOX!
Max
So when Al Gore goes on CBS television with Dave Letterman and says that 6 ft under the surface of the earth it’s one million degress, how do honest thinking people listen to him. He didn’t get a “D” in science for nothing.
I guess the hardest job on the planet are grave diggers, they must have special suits to stand those temperatures.
I wonder how Gore knows that the email was “leaked”?
Indeed: was it leaked or hacked? For the CRU file dump it looks a clear case of the former, although the Norfolk police keeps mum. For this Fox mail it is not clear now.
At 7:17 PM on 15 December, Pamela Gray had written:
It is impossible to avoid subjective bias in the reporting of any factual matter. With this understood, it should be continuously acknowledged that anybody who claims to be presenting “just the facts” without explicitly stating his prejudices is simply lying to you.
Heck, just look at all of these “nonpartisan” or “bipartisan” Web sites – like Snopes.com and the Annenberg Foundation’s FactCheck.org – which make great protestations of dispassionate objectivity but which are in fact overwhelmingly “Liberal” (i.e, progressive-socialist-fascist-leftie) in their not-so-subtle Ministry of Truth functions.
I am content if an information source states its political philosophy explicitly, and strives to keep consistency with that expressed stance. Thus I tend to rely more upon openly libertarian sites – the Cato Institute, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell’s stuff, and so forth – because I know pretty much precisely where these people are coming from and I can with reasonable reliability adjust for their predispositions.
When I’m looking at “social conservative” sources – particularly the religious whackjobs who claim (Allah spare us!) all sorts of divine inspiration and at base predicate everything on an appeal to the ineffable – the grain of salt with which their stuff must be taken exceeds the canonical 65 milligrams by four or five orders of magnitude. Conservatives are almost as bad as “Liberals.”
Not quite, by any means. But almost.
—
Vinny says:
December 15, 2010 at 9:20 pm
“So when Al Gore goes on CBS television with Dave Letterman and says that 6 ft under the surface of the earth it’s one million degress, how do honest thinking people listen to him. He didn’t get a “D” in science for nothing.”
Well, you’d be rather amazed to follow co2insanity’s advice (below) and go see all the people who actually do believe every word he says. If the Huffpo posters on that story represent ‘average’ Americans, the country is doomed. I must, must, believe that they are not.
co2insanity says:
December 15, 2010 at 4:57 pm
“If you want some fun go read the comments at Huffpo. Take extra blood-pressure meds before you start reading.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-gore/post_1436_b_797323.html
Mountain meet molehill?
There is nothing in the email which suggests or hints at bias is there? In fact the email is a perfect example of how journalistic integrity and independence should be common place but is in fact becoming ever rarer. MSM outlets like the BBC for example have been proven to show incredible bias and prejudice and has been closely working with and for the propagandists of CAGW alarmism.
Unlike the biased BBC Fox news is the essence of impartial reporting, but Fox news is hated and despised by leftists simply because it brings real impartial news to the viewer and probably why Fox news is far more popular with people who require their news to be impartial and genuine and true.
Fox news is a spanner in the works of the leftist dominated press, the lies and deceptions spun by the likes of the BBC and others can only give the illusion of reality if no other news outlet leaks the actual truth. With the majority of the MSM stitched up by the alarmist CAGW cult just one real honest news outlet can destroy the entire edifice.
In a normal rational honest world the email is the essence of reason and represents the best of impartial journalistic endeavour but in the warped world of the fabricated consensus it represents something else altogether. The truth is the enemy of the lie, reason is the enemy of prejudice, impartiality is the enemy of the consensus. No wonder Fox news is so popular then? People demand real news delivered in a fully impartial manner and little wonder then that the biased propaganda outlets hate Fox news.
And consider this: the phrase “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” is an accusation against skeptic scientists, seen spelled out across the screen in red letters in Al Gore’s movie, and it is essentially responsible for the anti-skeptic career of book author Ross Gelbspan – but the phrase comes from a 1991 memo that is never seen in its full context, see: “How an Enviro-Advocacy Group Propped Up Global Warming in the MSM – A Nov 2 Election Connection” http://bigjournalism.com/rcook/2010/11/02/how-an-enviro-advocacy-group-propped-up-global-warming-in-the-msm-a-nov-2-election-connection/
At 9:39 PM on 15 December, AntonyIndia had written:
One of the less appreciated factors in the Climategate event was the way in which the Norfolk police officials publicly stated – early and often from 17 November through the rest of 2009 – that they were in hot pursuit of the “hacker(s)” responsible for this heinous violation of the Climatic Research Unit’s property and privacy, and would be dragging in the perpetrator(s) Really Real Soon Now.
Er, has anybody heard anything from the Norfolk law enforcement folks about getting their hands upon a suspect in this case? Any suspect? A material witness, maybe?
No? Jeez, the malefactor(s) musta done a D.B. Cooper. How sad.
Of course, it couldn’t have been an inside job; some fed-up-to-the-gills C.R.U. staffer who had watched Professor Jones and his conniving buddies scheming to defy U.K. law (doesn’t “FOIA” kinda coincidentally look like an acronym for “Freedom of Information Act”?) and aggregated all that stuff explicitly to fulfill compliance with the FoI requests lawfully submitted by the various skeptics who were trying to make some sense of how the
thievingfraudsconcerned climatologists had come up with their predictions of anthropogenic climate catastrophe….Nah. Couldn’t be something like that. And the sturdy protectors of law and order will be dragging in that outside hacker Real Soon Now.
—
JPeden says:
December 15, 2010 at 8:27 pm
“Hahaha, Fox sure knows how to attract a wider audience: leak an email stating Fox’s intent to be objective, have some of its competitors go ballistic in a public P.R. campaign, and voila! Hasn’t it been proven over and over that demonizing Fox only seems to increase its ratings?”
Great observation, and I think you’re probably dead on. A very convenient ‘leak.’
And now, if they are really as clever as a fox, they will be genuinely balanced, with guests from both sides, and the usual one-sided networks will obviously look biased by comparison. The debates shall speak for themselves. Imagine one between, say, Romm and any serious sceptic. Great drama potential.
Of course, none of the usual AGW suspects would ever go on Fox, or in any serious broadcast debate, would they?
At 4:57 PM on 15 December, co2insanity had written:
Hardly necessary. I did discover, however, that if you want a post on this subject stricken immediately from this scumbucket site, all you have to do is mention the word “Climategate.”
Anathema, apparently. Poor bastiches. I could almost pity them were it not for the fact that my Sicilian nature desires something lingering and agonizing – involving boiling pitch and iron tongs – before I’m done with them.
—
This article is subterfuge.
While the call for even handed reporting by Fox news is laudable and to be encouraged, it has not done itself any favours by being outrageously biased in it’s reporting on other matters. Unfortunately while we continually see biased reporting on climate change, the uniformed see the call by Fox for even handed reporting on an issue as having the same validity as Robert Mugabe calling for more openness in politics.
We had a sharp political journalist in Australia in the 1970’s. Unlike the rest of the Canberra press who were acolytes of the political left, and still are, Alan Reid was heard to say, ‘never get too fond of the animals in the zoo.’ /-;
Fox seems to get back what it sends out. It sends out clueless 24/7 commentary with very little real news and people that watch the station actually believe the commentary to be news. Fox is an entertainment station that pulls in the Jerry Springer style ratings for that reason. Anyone that takes the prime time lineup on fox as news is clueless about reality and should seek mental health care.
Actually in this case the Fox position is consistent with the Scientific Method and the Philosophy of Science in that there is always a debate in science. So it’s perfectly fine for Fox to officially counter the notion that climate science is settled.
Science is never settled… there is always room for improvement.
Heck chemists just redefined the atomic weights of ten basic elements on the periodic table! Not just changing the value to more accurate but now each of those elements has a RANGE of possible values for variations of the element.
Science moves on and debate and skepticism is the OFFICIAL STANCE of Science!!! If you don’t get that then you don’t get the Philosophy of Science and you’re being political rather than scientific.
Oh, and there is a serious scientific debate over the wild catastrophic claims of climate scientists and media manipulators like Al Gore.
On a different point a Facebook friend commented:
”… it is imperative for our country to get off of our addiction to oil and promote renewable forms of energy. Our infrastructure is based around coal and oil which is why they are fighting tooth and nail against the switch” – Stan A.C.
It will likely take hundreds of years to develop the alternatives to hydrocarbon fuel sources. CO2 isn’t a problem, it’s an essential part of the carbon based life cycle of Earth. Co2 is an essential plant nutrient. The current atmospheric levels of CO2 (~391 ppm) is dangerously low from a geological record of ~8,000. Commercial greenhouses operate at between ~900 ppm to ~1,400 ppm of CO2 on purpose to grow food bigger and faster. CO2 is a green life nutrient and most plants flourish with more CO2 (some won’t use anymore but most will). To be against CO2 is to be against green life.
It’s entirely ironic and deeply disturbing that the “green environmentalists” are against the very life cycle that makes life on Earth possible!!!
Only the sharpest eye, the keenest nose, the quickest ear and the fleetest toes
Can ever outfox the Fox
Only the stoutest arm, the bravest heart, with a magic charm and a good head start
Can ever outfox the Fox
Those who try to tangle with my daring do
End up at the angle that herring do
(They hold their head
like every dead herring do)
Only the sprightliest sprite, the nimblest elf, a wicked old witch or the devil himself can ever outfox the Fox
Whenever they try to find me
They find me where I am not
I’m hither and yond, I’m there and gone, I’m Johnny-not-on-the spot!
I’m out on a limb they think!
I’m down on the ground in a wink
My enemies say “Gadzooks! It’s spooks!”
Shivering in their socks
They know that they’ll never, I’m far to clever
They’ll never outfox the Fox!
The Fox
There’s only one of me
Till suddenly there’s two of me
When two is what you see of me
Gadzooks!
Three of me
That’s the proper score of me
Three of us is the core of me
And we can tell you-
Woops!
Sorry, four of me
There’s one of me, two of me, tree of me, four of me, five six seven
Sorry, no more of me
Each as strong as ten are we
Very stout hearted are we
We’re off to fight all wrong
And we’ll right it
Right or wrong
The planet is warming, that is what all the measurements show (temperature, sea level, ice mass, snow extent, etc.) and it is supported by all the observations (changes to growing seasons, migration patterns, etc.) Anyone who disagrees with that fact is wrong, not objective.
Gore writes on his blog today: “Fox News has consistently delivered false and misleading information to its viewers about the climate crisis.”
Ahh, the pot calling the kettle black.
The ignorance of liberals and their media and blogs never ceases to amaze me….
The liberals have tried this same thing, tried to tell people how un-biased they are.
No one fell for it, and it shows in their ratings.
Fox leaks an email, that anyone in their right mind could only interpret as “positive”, and the liberals do their best to make sure even more people know about it……..
As a rule, people tend to think that everyone has a certain level of intelligence. Without realizing that there are some really stupid people.
Why in this world does anyone pay attention to a group of people that are really that stupid?
Joe Romm and Al Gore’s response to Fox News’ editorial policy is beyond parody.
The concept and practice of investigation, accuracy and balance in reporting are central tenets of journalism. If you do not practise them, you are not a journalist but a PR man – an apologist for a particular point-of-view.
John Pilger recently fronted a television programme in which he examined the distorting effect of embedding reporters with the military. This is what we are seeing today in the mainstream media, where editors and journalists are ’embedded’ with the CAGW lobby.
Anthony, I know I have alerted your readers to the situation at the BBC elsewhere in this blog but it is relevant to this thread – David Jordan, the lead author of the new BBC editorial guidelines, has explained that when it comes to climate change, the word ‘impartiality’ has a different meaning to the dictionary definition.
In a shameful episode of Newswatch from November 29th – at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00vjxv3/Newswatch_29_10_2010 –
Jordan told Raymond Snoddy: “If both sides of the debate were to be reflected it would give the impression that both sets of views were equal and we don’t have to approach impartiality in climate change in that way”.
Snoddy just let it pass and I suppose he is just picking up his BBC cheque. But for me, who trained as a journalist in the late 60s and became a fully-qualified senior journalist in 1970, it was a moment of abject humiliation for BBC journalists everywhere. They have been left in no doubt by their masters – they are NOT to be impartial when it comes to reporting global warming issues.
The reason that this is particularly important is that the BBC is a public service broadcaster in the UK. It is funded by the taxpayer and many members of the public believe that it presents accurate, honest and balanced reports.
When I asked Richard Black, the BBC’s Environment Correspondent, on his Cancun blog, if he would report on Climate Depot’s updated report (‘Shredding the climate consensus myth’) one of his supporters criticised my request as “threatening”. He later apologised and admitted that it was not actually threatening but he considered it “insulting”.
This is where Joe Romm, Al Gore and all the other blinkered warmists sit. It is not that they do not understand what journalism is all about. They understand it very well, and fear it.
There has been a failure of mainstream journalism in the UK and the USA with regard to global warming. Just as the skeptical scientists keep the walarmists honest by exposing sloppy research and publishing accurate data, we non-scientists must continue to challenge inaccurate, dishonest and unbalanced coverage of global warming issues by reporters who are ’embedded’ with the CAGW lobby.
Faux says:
December 16, 2010 at 2:20 am
The same could be said of any 24 hour news network, and a lot of the other news organizations as well. True skepticism and uncomfortable leaking is dead. No reporter takes any risks reporting anymore. They’re all in it for the weekend and would never say anything on-air that might upset a boss, a sponsor, or a interviewee. Those “investigating” and reporting on the news these days are out to gain influence themselves and you can’t gain influence if you very presence is making everyone you talk to uncomfortable talking to you, including your boss.
The sad thing is, with the world connected as it is, there is actually a lot of stuff going on that would be interesting to Americans and that real reporters would be making valuable careers on reporting in a non-editorializing fashion.
The world has not warmed in any statistically significant way since around 2000. I’m not wrong, and I’m not biased in saying that. Retract your bias and zip your fly please.
So, which one of these following guidelines should be denounced immediately as delivering “false and misleading information.”?
a) We need to offer up scary scenarios and downplay any hint of uncertaintity that may exist, or
b) we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.
I rest my case.
I think you’ve completely missed the whole point of the issue.
This email was leaked by a recipient, because I suppose this is vile and someone decided to slip it out as a favor to the world. In contrast, the 13,000 UAE emails were stolen by hackers paid by radical fundamentalist think tanks, fossil fuel companies, or both.
Speculation? Yes. Truthy? Very. Falsifiable? Are you up to the challenge?
REPLY: Assuming you know all the inside details of both, and can verify them, go ahead. So far even the Norfolk police have not been able to establish theft or leak. So if you know more than them, by all means lay your cards on the table.
P.S. Oh, and “because Joe Romm says so” isn’t acceptable evidence. – Anthony
This calls for a connect the dots exercise.
Joe Romm is funded by George Soros; as are Media Matters, Huffington Post, and NPR. Soros is a front man for an international statist cabal that promotes anti-fossil fuel measures for self gain and to gain control of energy production and consumption globally. The UN IPCC, and captive scientists and research organizations are among their many agenda promoting proxies.
Obama’s approach to energy promotes the Soros initiatives. Soros is heavily invested in Petrobas, the Brazilian oil company, and numerous alternative energy companies, and carbon trading exchanges. Obama has closed the Gulf and coast waters to oil and gas exploration and development. He has added to the off-limits federally controlled lands where oil and gas exploration and mining are prohibited. The consequences include grater dependency upon foreign oil imports; and promotion of alternative energy subsidies and development and carbon trading.
Obama is Soros’ puppet. The John Podesta, head of the Center for American Progress, that founded and manages many of the Soros funded organizations, actually pulls the strings. Although Obama is bright enough, he lacks the worldly experience, knowledge and is way too lazy to have developed and executed his political agenda. Moreover, he cannot stay on message without his teleprompters. He is a highly disciplined, radical socialist with a gift for rhetoric.
Getting back to the subject of reliable news sources, I find it interesting that almost all of the mainstream sources of honest and balanced journalism are owned by Rupert Murdoch. That should trouble the Democrats that are regular readers of this blog. Traditional news sources have become willing promoters of the “big lies”.
Anderlan says:
December 16, 2010 at 9:47 am
==================================
good Lord, are you guys losing that bad?
Paddy,
“Soros is a front man for an international statist cabal that promotes anti-fossil fuel measures for self gain and to gain control of energy production and consumption globally.”
Soros is eighty years old. Unless he possesses the elixir of eternal life, then you would have to ask, why bother?
How to shoot yourself in the foot (without the aid of a firearm)
1)Find yourself an unambiguous statement.
2) Aggresively assert that it states the antithesis of what it actually does say.
3)Put your thoughts together with the Statement, on your website and let others read your interpretation of the statement. Job done.
What you should have done was not comment.
I am so glad that you did, because your comments will help to persuade those people who are currently sitting on the fence to off the fence.
Any guess as to which side of the fence they will come down on.
After watching today’s Electricity Market Reform Statement on BBC Parliament, (video – http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_commons/newsid_9293000/9293372.stm; and DECC text – http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/news/emr_os/emr_os.aspx) warmists such as the majority of Westminster MPs, and those protesters mentioned in this blog, really need to ask themselves this very basic question…
“On those days when the air feels ‘muggy’, ‘close’, or ‘humid’ (use your preferred term), do you think it’s due to a temporary increase in the concentration in the air of water vapour or carbon dioxide.”
Sometimes I really feel like slapping those people, especially Chris Huhne.
A friend who is a noted climate journalist would object that there can be “false balance.” One doesn’t invited a member of the Flat Earth Society to a panel discussion of space exploration.
However, given the increasing body of peered reviewed critiques of the current temperature record and of the “hockey stick” paleoclimate, invoking claims of “false balance” seems increasingly untenable. These are not flat earthers, these are published authors.
Re: FOX GATE E-mail
This is the 3rd time I’ve submitted this comment to Climate Progress Dec 15 spot # 36 so where is it??
I now note that Climate Progress has some kind of a block that wont allow me to submit any comments from my E-mail what the hell are the afraid of, it’s a pathetic narrow minded form of censorship, and make me start to wonder what your true intentions are. I’m TOTALLY PEED OFF. And will not support any site that won’t take reasonable comments.
Joe, do you edit out comments that don’t fit in with your views or tweak your nose?
Man up and open up these comment pages!
I’ve never seen removal or editing of comments on skeptic sites unless they are over the top and mine certainly don’t, you should not be afraid of fair criticism.
Re: FOX GATE E-mail
Either the people who read this website can’t read or I’m not getting what the so-called Foxleak is about. I believe the earth is warming, but the comments and story are so out to lunch! By posting this Foxleak email that says nothing positive or negative about the climate, is an act of desperation.
Media matters and Joe have made us look like a bunch of neurotic, historical climate change alarmist idiots, waiting to pounce on FOX for what any rational human being would consider a fair and well balanced e-mail!
The Fox email you posted.
“We should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.”
By all means attack FOX for any other news story or leaning but this is fodder for the skeptics making us look like losers and quite rightly so.
Ok, go and get mad at me I’m only the messenger.
Paddy,
Soros has done a great deal to free former Red (Commie, not GOP) Bloc states from under the thumb of Moscow. He can’t be all that bad.
Glenn Beck honestly pointed out this as a prelude to defaming him. An overthower of governments he called him, as if overthrowing corrupt and illegal puppet regimes is a bad thing. (Can Beck viewers be all that stupid?)
Chip, I don’t think enervated is the word you’re looking for; might be better off with exercised…
At 12:18 PM, Vince Causey had observed that:
This raises the question of how George Soros has structured his inheritance. Corporate entities – such as foundations – are effectively immortal, and Mr. Soros wouldn’t be the first manipulative megalomaniac plutocrat to devise a postmortem scheme to keep on shoving the little people around to suit his perverted power lust long after he is meat for the worms.
Might be nice to see what folks knowledgeable about the financial world perceive of Mr. Soros’ “giving” activities. Anybody got a sniff of such scheming on the part of this arrogant wannabee puppet master (and I’m explicitly trying for the Robert A. Heinlein connotation in usage of the expression)?
—
—
Kevin MacDonald says:
December 16, 2010 at 5:02 am
The planet is warming, that is what all the measurements show (temperature, sea level, ice mass, snow extent, etc.) and it is supported by all the observations (changes to growing seasons, migration patterns, etc.) Anyone who disagrees with that fact is wrong, not objective.”
OK how many times have we been through this. The climate has warmed and cooled many times over the past 4.5 billion years. There is no proof at all that the present minor warming trend is due to humans. So what can we do about it? In fact even Phil Jones admits it hasnt been warming in the past decade so maybe it’s over by now? Go study some science.
Anderlan says:
December 16, 2010 at 1:28 pm
Paddy,
Soros has done a great deal to free former Red (Commie, not GOP) Bloc states from under the thumb of Moscow. He can’t be all that bad.
Glenn Beck honestly pointed out this as a prelude to defaming him. An overthower of governments he called him, as if overthrowing corrupt and illegal puppet regimes is a bad thing. (Can Beck viewers be all that stupid?)
Beck is not that stupid, Anderlan. Put up or shut up.
Anderlan says:
December 16, 2010 at 1:28 pm
“Soros has done a great deal to free former Red (Commie, not GOP) Bloc states from under the thumb of Moscow. He can’t be all that bad.”
Anderlan,
Soros has done a great deal to line his own pockets. That is his sole and soul motivation. He is a many mega-buck ‘Robber Baron’, from the classic mold. If overthrowing a Soviet bloc state regime or breaking the Bank of England can create massive gains in the currencies, commodities or stocks that Soros has invested in, he will pursue it. He has no altruistic motivations, beyond the illusions provided by the necessary stage props of a wolf in sheeps clothing.
Today, he funds a myriad of front groups within the US, manipulating both public opinions, commodity prices, currencies, and economic markets to reap further huge investment gains. There is more than sufficient verified evidence of his interlocking webs of corruption and manipulation to refute your ad hominem allegations of ‘stupidity’. Crying “Wolves!” when you can readily see the hunting pack approaching is the survival duty of every citizen.
Let’s keep it ‘Fair And Balanced’, eh?
Whats up with that, well quite alot actually, but il stick at one point, and it is this, reporting and journal-ism are to different things all together, reporting is based on facts around the globe of concern or otherwise.
Anybody can be a journalist, lol. its a course full of ego and agender-ism
Well I’d be just delirious if Joe Romm, and Al Gore would enlighten the rest of us as to just who it was that “stole” whose e-mails.
As near as I can tell; nobody has been fingered as having done the deed. So just what the hell is Romm raving on about ? Show us the evidence (data) Joe.
John F. Hultquist says:
December 15, 2010 at 5:29 pm
“Who’s Al Gore?”
he used to be the future… hehehe.
You want to talk about bent reporting… I watched a BBC report last year about how the ice was melting on the antarctic peninsula, after interviewing researchers dressed in moonboots, 3 inch thick parkas and goggles. (because it was so warm, presumably) the reporter, in his final sentence, mentioned that there was a volcano erupting under the ice (Mount Erebus ?), and the researchers were not sure if it had anything to do with the melting… I think I can see the flaw in your research there guys…
Fox readers are misinformed according to the Toronto Star… (Known to many Canadians as The Red Star…
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/908391–watching-fox-news-leaves-viewers-less-informed-study-finds
Watching Fox News leaves viewers less informed and more prone to believing misinformation, according to a study conducted by the WorldPublicOpinion.org at the University of Maryland.
Fox News viewers were more likely to incorrectly believe that the stimulus package had caused job losses (12 points more likely), that the health care law would worsen the deficit (31 points), that most scientists did not agree climate change was occurring (30 points), that the economy was getting worse (26 points) and that it was not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points).
Sure. We believe you. Millions would not though…
Yeah, and did you see how biased those questions were? I could easily cook up a bunch of questions these so-called liberals (i.e., look up “liberal” in the dictionary and apply the exact opposite meaning) would get wrong, correlate it to CNN viewers and claim CNN rots the brain.
The only thing this FOX “study” shows is how bogus the authors are.
evanmjones says:
December 16, 2010 at 8:47 pm
Yeah, and did you see how biased those questions were?
See: Opinion Polls: Getting the results you want
Mr. Minister strikes again!
“Yeah, and did you see how biased those questions were? I could easily cook up a bunch of questions these so-called liberals (i.e., look up “liberal” in the dictionary and apply the exact opposite meaning) would get wrong, correlate it to CNN viewers and claim CNN rots the brain.”
In what sense did the Fox news viewers get those questions wrong? All of their answers seem reasonable to me, with the Obama one being the most debatable. .. just because their answers disagree with left-wing dogma, that doesn’t make them wrong.
(Of course pedantically speaking I’m sure that most scientists do believe that climate change is occurring, since everyone but the most extreme warmist knows that change is what the climate does. But I’m sure most of them read ‘climate change’ as ‘Climate Change’, i.e. human-induced global warming, which is a very different question.)
Jeremy says:
December 16, 2010 at 6:52 am
The world has not warmed in any statistically significant way since around 2000. I’m not wrong, and I’m not biased in saying that. Retract your bias and zip your fly please.
I didn’t say anything about statistical significance, so that’s a straw man fallacy.
Also, it does not follow that, because HADCRUT did not show statistical significance at the 95% confidence level last year, that there is not any statistical significance, so that’s a non sequitur. There was statistical significance at the 87% confidence level at that time and two other records, GIS and UHA, were at the 95% confidence level. HADCRUT has since reached the 95% level itself, so as well as being a straw man and a non sequitur your statement is just flat out false.
Finally, statistical significance since 2000 is a red herring. The climate is too noisy a signal to get any reliable trend data from a single decade in isolation. The last 3 decades have each been warmer than the one preceding it, that is a clear climate pattern and for Sammond, or anyone else, to deny it is, as I said earlier, wrong, not objective.
So, you are wrong. Three logical fallacies and one error in a single sentence. If I were to extrapolate that over your life I might conclude that any attempt finding your own elbow would result in a scatalogical nightmare, but, as I’ve already pointed out, drawing conclusions from too little data is not wise.
Some years before Hansen et. al. began their colossal “man-made global warming fraud, filker Frank Hayes came out with a wonderful parody song titled “There’s a Hole in the Middle of It All” (to the tune of the old children’s favorite “There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea”) which pokes fun at theoreticians trying to leverage “biiiiiillions and biiiiiiillions {suitable Carl Sagan pronunciation here, of course] from the book contract and the TV show with the government funding for looking for the nothing in the void where the Bang caused the hole in the middle of it all.”
Toward the close of that song – purportedly the voice of a theoretician trying to peddle a bowl of soup cooked out of damned thin broth – there’s use of a wonderful phrase commonplace in the sciences:
Some years before Hansen et. al. began their colossal “man-made global warming fraud, filker Frank Hayes came out with a wonderful parody song titled “There’s a Hole in the Middle of It All” (to the tune of the old children’s favorite “There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea”) which pokes fun at theoreticians trying to leverage “biiiiiillions and biiiiiiillions {suitable Carl Sagan pronunciation here, of course] from the book contract and the TV show with the government funding for looking for the nothing in the void where the Bang caused the hole in the middle of it all.”
Toward the close of that song – purportedly the voice of a theoretician trying to peddle a bowl of soup cooked out of damned thin broth – there’s use of a wonderful phrase commonplace in the sciences:
.
Okay. Now, let’s fast-forward to consideration of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) fraud and the comment posted by Kevin MacDonald at 5:19 AM on 17 December (after first with glorious idiocy declaring that “I didn’t say anything about statistical significance, so that’s a straw man fallacy“:
.
.
Okay. Now, what we have in the “Cargo Cult Science” of the AGW fraudsters is a frenetic prediction that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide caused by human combustion of petrochemicals has a puissant effect upon atmospheric heat trapping, and thereby significantly causes the planet earth to heat up.
So significant is this effect – according to the squawking, squealing, “Gimme Bucketloads of Government Money or We’re All Gonna Die!” charlatans posing as climatologists – that unless emergency steps are taken to curtail carbon dioxide emissions by punishing shivering householders with horrendous “carbon taxes” so that the poorest folk in the northern hemisphere wake each winter morning to find their toothbrushes frozen solid, “We’re All Gonna Die!” because of horrible “climate disruption.”
Jeez, all this insistence upon “significance” and yet we get from one of these Chicken Little types an attempted snerk about “statistical significance” being so negligible that bringing up an inconvenient truth about lack of statistically significant warming over the course of the most recent decade is nothing more than the logical fallacy of the straw man argument.
How that should be, of course, this commentator doesn’t really explain in any valid sense, does he?
Here’s how it works. The AGW hacks and blunderers proposed the hypothesis that as man-made atmospheric emissions of CO2 have been sustained since the beginning of the First Industrial Revolution, the global temperatures have risen. Not as high as during pre-industrial climate optima like the Roman Warm and the Medieval Warm Periods, of course, but there weren’t thermometers around during those eras, nor government grant funding to aggregate temperature datasets, nor computers with which to duplicitously cook up “hockey stick” graphs, and, besides, they didn’t have the warm-and-fuzzy kumbaya social consciousness of good, Gaia-loving people like our Kevin MacDonald, so whatever might have happened all over the planet during times like the Roman Warm and the MWP really doesn’t count, and talking about it is just a “straw man fallacy” and Kevin really doesn’t like it, and so there.
Now, assuming the theory holds (remember that?), the AGW-pushing pork-sucking Confused Wool predicted parlous planetary horrors of all kinds (epidemic insect-borne diseases, swamp-the-Empire-State-Building floods, dinosaur-killing asteroid strikes, all that kinda stuff) because the Earth’s atmosphere is significantly sensitive to the megatons of carbon dioxide released by human activities involving the combustion of fossil fuels and petroleum fractions.
And by any reasonable estimation (and radioisotope analysis of the carbon in atmospheric CO2 bears this out), during the past decades the rate at which anthropogenic atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have been increasing is a bunch higher than it had been during the preceding three decades about which Kevin MacDonald whines so noisily.
So assuming the theory holds, there should emphatically not have been any stabilization or decrease in the global temperatures recorded over the past ten years or so. Those temperatures should have gone way to hellangone up, right?
Those temperatures did not go up. There was no statistically significant response – hell, there was no goddam response at all – to whacking great increases in human-caused levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide during the past ten years and more.
That, dear reader, blows the guts right out of the “global climate disruption” gonifs’ great big fraud and leaves folks like our Kevin MacDonald standing there gazing dumbly down at his eviscerated entrails muttering “Straw man…. Gotta be straw man….”
—
Damn, I hate HTML errors. Mr. Watts, would you please delete my 6:45 AM post? Thank you.
Tucci78:
Did you write that rant, or is it a quote from somewhere? If the latter, you failed to give attribution. You don’t want to expose Anthony Watts to threats of copyright violation, do you?
The crux of the matter is temperature records. No matter how persistently or profanely (“hell, there was no goddam response at all“) anyone asserts that the world’s temperature is not rising, the records are there to prove them wrong. Even Fox News commentators will wind up with egg on their faces for clinging to the delusion that gradual warming is not happening.
As for the rest of it: We know that CO2 in the atmosphere partially blocks Earth’s heat from escaping into space. We know that there is roughly 40 percent more CO2 in the atmosphere now than there was 200 years ago. From carbon isotope ratios, we know that extra CO2 comes from fossil fuels. We know strengthening sunlight is not the cause. We know it’s not volcanoes. Therefore, human activities are causing the warming.
It’s worthwhile arguing over how bad the effects of climate change will be, and what should be done about the problem. But arguing that there is no warming, hence no problem, is nothing but a waste of time.
“Jeez, all this insistence upon “significance” and yet we get from one of these Chicken Little types an attempted snerk about “statistical significance” being so negligible that bringing up an inconvenient truth about lack of statistically significant warming over the course of the most recent decade is nothing more than the logical fallacy of the straw man argument.”
You’re not big on comprehension are you? This specific point is a red herring, not a straw man. The straw man was the introduction of significance in the first place, it was not a postition I was defending because it is not germane to this posting.
“So assuming the theory holds, there should emphatically not have been any stabilization or decrease in the global temperatures recorded over the past ten years or so. Those temperatures should have gone way to hellangone up, right?”
Not neccesarily, as I already stated the climate signal is too noisy to get any reliable indication of trend from a single decade. You’re basically just repeating the same red herring I’ve already addressed, only you were much more long winded and wearisome getting to the point.
“That, dear reader, blows the guts right out of the “global climate disruption” gonifs’”
Herein lies the problem with employing logical fallacies; faulty conclusions.
Kevin MacDonald says:
“Herein lies the problem with employing logical fallacies; faulty conclusions.”
So your conclusion is that ‘global climate disruption’ is a fact?
.
Chris Winter,
Enough with the threats about copyrights, unless you have some credible evidence. Do you?
And as far as the climate warming, the climate warms and cools. We’re at the tail end of emerging from the LIA. Sure, more CO2 has a slight effect on temperature, but the effect is beneficial. Crops can be grown at higher latitudes. Other than that, it’s a non-event.
Michael Mann, of the debunked Hokey Stick chart [which attempted to erase the LIA] tried to scare people with his discredited chart. But the fact is that the temperature rise has been anything but scary.
Warmth is good. More CO2 is both harmless and beneficial. And $6 billion every year being shoveled into climate “studies” is a strong motive to exaggerate the scare.
Smokey says:
December 17, 2010 at 9:03 am
So your conclusion is that ‘global climate disruption’ is a fact?
No, my conclusion is that Bill Sammon is wrong to tell his staff that they cannot assert warming as a fact. Everything else I wrotw was just pointing out where people had failed to address that conclusion.
At 8:09 AM on 17 December, Chris Winter had addressed me thus:
.
.
Tsk. Of course I wrote it, schmucklet. Made that stupid “in the comments box” HTML error, too. You’re not familiar with my previous posts on this site, are you? Well, that’s your loss, not mine.
The key temperature records (NASA GISS, HadCRUT, etc.) have – of course – been taken under the control of the global warming fraudsters over the past thirty years or so (regard the wonderful Climategate Timeline aggregated earlier this year as well as the Mosher Timeline), enabling them to cherry-pick surface temperature station records (making the records drawn from stations maintained at higher altitudes and latitudes magically “disappear” from consideration while emphasizing the readings taken from thermometers “sited next to a lamp” in locations sustaining urban heat island [UHI] effects).
Indeed, the greatest part of what triggered that marvelous FOIA2009.zip archive release on 17 November 2009 was the criminal refusal of Prof. Jone and the rest of the taxpayer-funded thugs at the Climatic Research Unit to release under the U.K. Freedom of Information Act (among other things) the surface temperature datasets they had aggregated under the aegis of publicly-funded research programs.
Most of that FOIA2009.zip release consisted of data files and source code for those duplicitous “hockey stick graph” computer models. The aggregated and wonderfully incriminating e-mails (conspiracy to destroy evidence of fraud and peculation is in itself a crime, y’know) are only a small portion of FOIA2009.zip.
With those data files in hand, it became possible to confirm longstanding suspicions on the part of honest scientists that the “man-made global warming” snake-oil salesmen had been doctoring the data – I believe they called it “enhancement,” right? – and otherwise frenetically trying to keep their blunders and lies from being revealed.
Which is, of course, why Prof. Jones and the rest of the “Hockey Team” struggled so weaselishly to evade those FOIA requests that they cough up their raw data and reveal the programming code behind their “oh-so-sophisticated-you-can’t-possibly-understand-it” absolute kludge computer models.
Gee. Kinda explains why the hacker-y rascal(s) whom the Norfolk police still haven’t been able to catch named the file FOIA2009.zip, doesn’t it?
But the argument has never been about “ow bad the effects of climate change will be but whether man-made carbon dioxide emissions can to any significant extent cause the climate change which the alarmists have been grunting and squealing about over the past thirty years.
Were that the case – y’know; “Assuming the theory holds… – then the past decade ought to have shown global temperature increases in lockstep with the increases in anthropogenic atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
Which was the point I’d made above. You got that, sonny?
And it didn’t happen.
Ergo the theory didn’t hold, and the policy recommendations predicated upon the AGW fraudsters’ bullpuckey are without validity.
Heck, their later applications for research grants are arguably based upon the deliberate presentation of information they knew to be false, and that’s an honest-to-Black’s-Law-Dictionary definition of theft of value by fraud, isn’t it?
Little though I like Republicans, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli seems to be onto something wonderfully valid here.
—
The cult of AGW (or is it Athropogenic Climate Disruption Change, ACDC) is remarkably like the doctrine of Original Sin.
I wonder how long that religion will last and when the established religions will figure out that it is not in their interests to pander to the AGW/ACDC cult?
At 9:12 AM, Kevin MacDonald had asserted that:
.
Given the deliberate corruption of the various global sea and land surface temperature datasets by mendacious AGW fraudsters over the past thirty years or so “cooking the books,” I Mr. Sammon policy articulation simply makes sense.
One of the reasons why I’m personally so much at risk of breaching the Non-Aggression Pledge and doing something dire to the persons of Dr. Michael Mann and his “Hockey Team” is that I’ve spent a bunch of years working in (and writing on the basis of) clinical scientific research, and I’ve got a really, really good idea of how much damage is done in any field of inquiry when duplicitous scum like Prof. Jones and the rest of that credentialed pack of liars involved in the CRU correspondence exposed by Climategate take control of scientific conferences and publications to establish their poisonously invidious confabulations in lieu of genuine and reliable reflections of factual reality.
These guys have led an entire generation of undergraduates, postgrad students, and post-doc fellows down a blind alley and murdered their careers, not to mention the damage they’ve done to the lay public’s perception of dispassionate scientific research. And what they’ve done to the scientific literature in atmospheric physics, meteorology, epidemiology, marine biology and ecology…. Damn.
Those of us working in the profession of medicine have had to hit the “reset” button on a bunch of small but significant issues (if it causes any increase in patient-related morbidity or mortality, Kevin, it’s sure as hell got to be interpreted as “significant” among those of us in the sawbones trade) when we’ve discovered dirty work at the crossroads.
Pharmaceuticals and medical device manufacturers are particularly (and with the highest levels of publicity) culpable of such conduct. Anybody want to discuss Merck’s suppression of safety data in a key study run on their rofecoxib (Vioxx) product which came to light in 2004?
But doctors have done plenty of stupid and wrongheaded stuff that breaches the principles of evidence-based medicine, much of the time for pecuniary reasons, sometimes out of sheer bloody-mindedness. We have a saying to the effect that “For any effective and genuinely innovative measure to achieve acceptance in medicine, an entire generation of doctors must die.” Think “Semmelweis effect.”
Hm. Come to think of it, the Semmelweis effect – described by Grant et. al. in Obstetrics & Gynecology some years ago as the automatic dismissal or rejection of scientific information “without thought, inspection or experiment” – is the prime fault of AGW True Believers like our Kevin, who blank out contrary information in order to cling to their frantic delusions of man-made climate catastrophe.
Hell, no wonder a physician should easily perceive this persistent fatal failing among the warmist bloody fools. It’s something we know to be prevalent in our own profession, and against which we are educated from our first-year course on History of Medicine.
—
Tucci78 says:
December 17, 2010 at 11:02 am
Given the deliberate corruption of the various global sea and land surface temperature datasets by mendacious AGW fraudsters over the past thirty years or so “cooking the books,” I Mr. Sammon policy articulation simply makes sense.
Are all the other metrics similarly corrupted, sea level, ice mass, snow extent, etcetera? How are the “credentialed pack of liars” affecting migration patterns, growing seasons, ocean acidity and such? Global warming is not simply a case of looking at the thermometers.
At 11:53 AM on 17 December, Kevin MacDonald tried to peddle the fantastic assertion that:
.
Hoo, boy. “Global warming,” bubbeleh, is nothing but what is measured with thermometers.
Or does the concept of “warming” escape your appreciation completely?
Number ten of the canonical “Laws of the House of God” (from the novel The House of God” [1978]) reads: “IF YOU DON’T TAKE A TEMPERATURE, YOU CAN’T FIND A FEVER.” The sense thereof is that without maintaining what we like to call the “clinical index of suspicion” (and pursuing such suspicions with reliable observations) you’re going to screw up.
Other physical phenomena – “sea level, ice mass, snow extent, etcetera – are not properly to be considered “metrics” of anthropogenic atmospheric carbon dioxide increase because there is no proof that human CO2 emissions have caused any global warming.
When Hansen et alia began whining about human emissions of CO2 having a greenhouse gas effect on global temperatures back in 1979, I recall my immediate personal impression that this notion was totally preposterous. I looked at his (and his co-religionists’) protestations and figured that they were overestimating the forcing effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide at the Earth’s distance from the sun by about three orders of magnitude. At least.
Remember, Hansen got started on this hobby-horse ride as a planetary astronomer examining the greenhouse gas effect of carbon dioxide on Venus. This is planet Earth. There are differences.
Come to think on it, with the idiotic extrapolation of Venus’ atmospheric physics to apply this cement-headed premise to Earth’s troposphere, how come is it that you “global warming” catastrophists haven’t looked at how the planet Mars has been warming over recent decades?
Jeez, it couldn’t be that massive ball of hydrogen fusing so vigorously one astronomic unit away from us, could it?
One of the things about the global warming fraudsters that really lit up my personal horsepuckey detector back in the ’80s was their studied sweating evasion of even the most elementary consideration of insolation in general and the solar cycle in particular.
That and their squalling rejection of mitigatory geoengineering notions all through the ’90s, when the politicians like Algore were climbing on the fraud for their own advancement. I remember John Martin’s advocacy of the Geritol solution as a way to facilitate oceanic phytoplankton blooms, thereby improving fisheries’ yields and – incidentally – pulling down atmospheric CO2 concentrations so goddam fast that he boasted: ““Give me a half a tanker of iron [oxide dust] and I will give you another ice age.”
My undergraduate degree had been taken in Biology, and had included a whole buncha work in marine biology. Martin made sense from the oceanographic perspective (it’s a big part of the reason why obsolete steel ships like the U.S.S. Oriskany are deliberately scuttled and worn-out streetcars are dumped offshore to create artificial reefs), and his idea to accelerate the process by “salting” the low-iron marine desert areas with finely-divided rust was the perfect way to use massive photosynthetic processes to fix petrochemicals-derived atmospheric CO2 in biomass.
Who the hell needed subterranean “carbon dioxide sequestration” when it could be converted – cheap and easy – first to plankton, and then to seafood on our tables and fish poop on the ocean floor?
I do most sincerely hate you “global warming” scum. Those of you who are not liars and thieves are most assuredly so pathologically stupid that I doubt your eligibility for membership in kingdom Animalia, much less species Homo sapiens.
—
I don’t think people understand the import of that sentence. The advice amounts to saying the existence of the Little Ice Age is uncertain (paleo-data is criticised as is thermometer). It amounts to saying that no decade in the last 150 years can be said to be cooler than the current one without the qualification. It calls into question the proposition that the globe has warmed over the last century. All the data supporting these facts have been called into question by “critics”.
Apply this standard to other sciences, and suddenly it’s not certain that HIV is linked to AIDS, that life has evolved or that smoking is unhealthy. All the above data has been ‘questioned by critics’. Because the recommendation is so wide-ranging, it amounts to calling on Fox journalists to seed any and all commentary on global temperature with doubt, bringing uncertainty to to concepts that educated critics of climate change don’t even challenge (e’g, the 1950s were cooler than the 1990s). The missive is anti-science, not pro-journalism.
Can anyone say what it even refers to? What bit of Fox journalism inspired the note?
At 4:00 PM on 17 December, barry had written:
.
.
Nah. What it says is that the warmist weasels had taken such thoroughgoing control of the global temperature datasets, and had so systematically screwed them up in order to mendaciously support their idiocies and cover up their lies that (as physicist Jefferey D. Kooistra put it about a year ago) “You have NO data!”
Merely a specific effect of the global warming alarmists’ manifold violations of professional ethics, part of their scheming connivance in exploiting the trusted positions into which they slimed so as to manipulate these compilations of observational information to advance their nefarious plottings.
In the field of climatology, Mikey and his “Hockey Team” have so befouled the waters that no responsible journalist may dare drink thereof without careful caveat.
Other scientific disciplines have not suffered the wholesale and concerted breach of public trust that climatology has undergone since 1979, and we are not facing the job of scrubbing our structure clean in order to restore scientific integrity. Honest and properly skeptical men in the fields of atmospheric physics and meteorology and climatology – like Lindzen and Michaels and Spencer and such – certainly have their work cut out for them.
I gotta liken it to debriding a hideously mangled wound after gangrene has set in. All of that nonviable tissue has got to be scissored and scalpel’d away so that what remains factually congruent with objective reality in climatology can be discerned and preserved while the machinations of the CRU correspondents and their co-conspirators is scoured away like the pollution they truly are.
—
At Tucci78 December 17, 2010 at 7:35 am:
Excellent! Precisely! It was all about the statistical significance until it wasn’t about the statistical significance. These scientific clowns just change the rules when it suits their game.
At 5:24 PM on 17 December, David L had written:
.
Apart from their pretenses, what was ever “scientific” about these lying, thieving bastiches?
—
Tucci78 says:
December 17, 2010 at 1:21 pm
Other physical phenomena – “sea level, ice mass, snow extent, etcetera – are not properly to be considered “metrics” of anthropogenic atmospheric carbon dioxide increase because there is no proof that human CO2 emissions have caused any global warming.
Neither I nor Bill Sammon made any reference to the cause of the warming, I’d would think any capable person who had “spent a bunch of years working in (and writing on the basis of) clinical scientific research” would’ve been able to side step such a glaring straw man.
Tucci78 says:
December 17, 2010 at 4:40 pm
Honest and properly skeptical men in the fields of atmospheric physics and meteorology and climatology – like Lindzen and Michaels and Spencer and such – certainly have their work cut out for them.
All men who believe that the world is warming.
In New Zealand, as well? You must surely be aware by now as an informed warmist that long-enduring “official” instrumental data down in Hobbit Land have now been officially abandoned by long-defending authorities on the specific grounds these records were deliberately manipulated by a now-deceased “scientist” who left no record of the basis for those
manipulations“adjustments”, and nobody else can find any defensible foundation to rationalise them.These authorities did not reverse their position owing to a pervasive intellectual rigour by which these public servants assure integrity of temperature graphs peddled as “science” to the locals who pay them and to a world-wide audience of eager warmists like yourself, who are prepared to blindly believe anything supporting their political agenda. These honorable public servants capitulated only after being legally compelled to show cause why the “adjustments” imposed to paint a pretty hockey stick were scientifically well founded — and they absolutely could not.
The original findings of “warming” in New Zealand data have now been thoroughly discredited, and work of these public servants is hereafter firmly monitored under peer-review from the Australian BoM to assure collection and interpretation of instrumental data do not once again go astray. Has this news reached your part of the world?
These are facts. If you wish to dispute them, please be specific. Or, in the alternative….
If you wish to claim “global warming” is not, indeed, global after all (or wish to demonstrate Middle Earth is not actually located anywhere on the globe you believe to be warming), then you have a very tough chore in logically arguing a case laid down by warmistas on the sole claim that a recent, sudden, and indisputable “global warming” effect has been demonstrated by government owned instrumental records since inception. That is factually untrue in New Zealand, as we all now know.
Surely you cannot claim the proxy data supports any claim of warming. Since the 1960’s, it has demonstrated a sharp cooling trend. The inconvenient truth of this divergence remains unexplained by warmistas except the dead-enders who desperately claim it simply must be caused by Man — but no idea just how. All roads, it seems, inevitably lead to Rome in the deranged mind-maps of true-believing climate alarmists. While the evidence of this affliction is obvious to any truly disinterested person, the cure obviously is not.
Seriously, did the OED produce a batch where the definitions of ‘Straw Man’ and ‘Skeptic’ got switched?
No Tancred, not New Zealand, nor any other specific part of the whole, but the whole itself. That is what Bill Sammon referred to and that is what I am responding to.
Your mistake lies in the sweeping generality of your response that “all the measurements” and “all the observations” point to global warming, which is factually untrue. What Sammon said is irrelevant to that point.
New Zealand instrumental data now produce a remarkably flat line after all the mysterious and unjustifiable “adjustments” previously introduced by unknown assailants are removed.
One might think alarmists would be absolutely delighted to learn that recently liberated NZ data offers no confirmation of ongoing climate warming. But one would be wrong. Of course.
The New Zealand record is irrelevant, I was only commenting on the global average, as was Sammon, and unless you have some hitherto unearthed evidence that the world as a whole isn’t warming your entire argument is based on a straw man fallacy.
Either a phenomenon is “global” (as claimed) or it is not. Warmists like to have it both ways, depending on which bold theory they happen to be promoting at any given moment. You will appreciate that disinterested persons may think it odd that a warmist would disown 2007 IPCC “high confidence” and “very high confidence” findings as irrelevant, after being widely touted by warmists as biblically authoritative:
It now appears these purportedly high-confidence assertions are, indeed, irrelevant to reality — but isn’t that the very point you are trying to dodge? If no instrumental warming has actually occurred in New Zealand, then it is logically absurd to argue that “global warming” has not been “global” in extent at any known time during the instrumental past.
Further …
When assumptions of a bell curve distribution are imposed on an inherently chaotic global climate system based on thin and often-compromised instrumental data which is unevenly distributed over only 30% of the global surface (with virtually 100% of all samples taken only over land masses), any calculated “average global temperature” of small magnitude begs for verifiable meaning.
It is well known that proxy temperature data (confidently relied upon as solid evidence of “global warming”) suddenly diverges downward from c.1960, even as instrumental readings continue to climb (along with population and CO2). The famous phrase “hide the decline” describes how key climate scientists agreed to obscure this unexplained and glaring non-correlation in order to preserve a seamless narrative of fear they were promoting to gullible politicians, press, and general public.
Not to suggest these honourable men were being dishonest, of course. Surely not. But it is reasonable to wonder if climate science to date has not had its greatest success as a measure of human credulity.
correction of my error in phrasing:
…should have been:
Tancred says:
Either a phenomenon is “global” (as claimed) or it is not. Warmists like to have it both ways, depending on which bold theory they happen to be promoting at any given moment.
I am not promoting any theory, I am merely iterating a fact; the world is warming. Global temperature is an aggregate of measurments for all regions and an increase in this figure means that the planet has warmed. It does not follow from this that all regions of the planet have warmed.