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.
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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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Apart from their pretenses, what was ever “scientific” about these lying, thieving bastiches?
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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.