This is a row screencap from this Twitter page: http://twitter.com/scio11
It comes from the January 13-16th, 2011 Science Online conference held in the Research Triangle Park in Durham. Details at these URL’s
You can also follow us on Twitter – either the hashtag #scio11 or our official account @scio11
This is the session under which those words were uttered:
“LESSONS FROM CLIMATEGATE”
“You guys have got to start fighting back” is the message many climatologists are hearing in the wake the slanderous attack on their integrity that has been called Swifthack, or Climategate. But for many scientists, fighting back means publishing a really good paper in a reputable journal. That doesn’t cut it anymore. How should scientists and their communicator allies go about planning a strategy?
Panel:
Tom Peterson, Chief Scientist, NCDC
James Hrynyshyn, journalist, Class M — or Chris Mooney (he’s been invited)
Josh Rosenau, NCSE
(James Hrynyshyn)
– One thing to think about for this panel would be getting someone who has experience organizing successful campaigns. With the GOP promoting the idea of Congressional hearings on the “fraud” of global warming this discussion should involve strategies for countering their smear of climate scientists for political purposes.
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Bishop Hill points out that:
The talk of ninjas and knife fights is interesting in the current atmosphere. (Tom Peterson is a scientist at NCDC. Some may know him for his work on urban heat island effect).
I’ll say. It’s far more than Peterson’s UHI papers. For those that don’t know, Dr. Thomas Peterson is the keeper and publisher of the most important surface temperature data set in the world, the Global Historical Climatological Network (GHCN):
Note the references at the bottom. The genesis of GHCN comes from this paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society:
And in case you don’t know, the GHCN data is the primary component of the NASA GISS GISTEMP surface temperature database, the most cited by media in the world:
from http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/sources/gistemp.html
So in summary:
We have the NASA GISS Chief Scientist, Dr. James Hansen calling for civil disobedience and the Chief Scientist of NCDC and keeper of the worlds most important surface temperature dataset, Dr. Thomas Peterson, saying things like “its a knife fight”. These two people have the most influential roles on climate data on the planet. Their words cause me to question their ability to be unbiased scientists.
Add that to NCAR’s Dr. Kevin Trenberth’s recent diatribe where he calls concerned citizens of the United States “deniers” in a preprint for a public address, while at the same time attempting to reverse the null hypothesis about human induced climate change….and they wonder why the public trust of climate science is going down the toilet?
Two points of advice, fellas:
1. Don’t forget who you work for, the U.S. Taxpayer.
2. You’d all do better to keep your mouths shut, your public utterances are embarrassments.
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It’s not a knife fight. A knife fight is reserved for some kind of dirty fighting and swaying public opinion.
This is science. Science doesn’t need knives, PR campaigns, or awareness conferences. Data supports hypotheses and conclusions are drawn from the data. The data speaks for itself. Only in obfuscating the data would you use publicity and PR, and only when the data supports ideas that do not conform to a political belief.
The sad thing is Joe Public will never hear this…it’s only us “deniers” will pick up on this and as we all know we don’t matter.Never mind as the old saying go’s “give em enough rope and the’ll hang them selves”, tis our only hope until the MSM pick up there balls and start doing proper investigative jouralisim.Won’t come from the BBC thats for sure not while the likes of Richard Black are there enviromental reporters,he can’t even face postings on his blog which report/post the truth
tried posting the NIWA court case (fasle temp record) and it was removed due to being off topic,so are most of the posting, but mine got picked up….
But while WUWT fight the good fight there’s always hope of a break through, who knows might this year.(ClimateGate Part 2 more emails to come)maybe this is reason behind the rants from these clowns. There bricking it.
Cornered and desperate. No way out of the trap they laid for themselves.
Better strike another match, go start anew, because it’s all over now Baby Blue.
I don’t know what the “scientists” are fighting for but I am for fighting against driving the cost of food and energy up without any measurable payback. Remember, the cost of energy ultimately affects just about the cost of everything, and has.
The only effect of increased CO2 in the atmosphere that I am confident about is that it is a component of the worldwide increase in crop yield over the last 50 – 60 years and IMO that is a positive, not a negative. So why the rush to curtail that?
These people have got themselves into a situation from which they cannot extract themselves without massive loss of face. All those failures to predict supposedly settled scientific phenomena (like the floods here in northern Australia – many pundits were predicting ongoing drought), all that taxpayer funding, all that media (self)dramatisation, all that impatient demonising of ‘denialist’ opponents, all that stonewalling over Climategate, and often, all that attempt to convert the issue into a Mooney-Oreskes type political campaign for the trendier parts of politics. There is only one hope for the climate science community – go right back to square one. Have a conference with the leading people – including ‘heretics’ like Lindzen and Spencer. Nut out exactly what is solid knowledge and what is fad. Get some solid credible risk evaluation (not alarmism competitions) and possible responses in case AGW really is a problem (put nuclear on the table for a start). Do what NASA and the IPCC should have done but didn’t. And leave ideological or partisan politics trendy or otherwise at the door.
These guys are on the government payroll and are making comments like this. As government employees they also had to sign the below Oath of Office supporting the Constitution of the United States and the federal government.
From the Office of Personnel Management
I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
5 U.S.C. §3331
All of this talk of knife fights and couch warfare is exactly the sort of talk that will make the incoming Republicans even more determined to derail the AGW gravy train.
Can you imagine Inhofe doing anything other than smile at this?
The “researching nukes” comment sounds like a compliment to us skeptics. Most of us are doing our homework in digging into this issue, whether it’s the science or the politics behind it.
It always was a knife fight..
Science has been mugged by the anti-capitalist movement in its war against capitalism. It may lose this battle but the war will continue. Will I ever trust a scientist or science again? I will always make up my own mind. A PHD is meaningless. Nowt but a piece of paper.
When your lost and can`t find democracy among the corruption.
Find the answers and guidence from T Jeffersson.AGW is the new state religion.
Jeffersson:
“Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the ‘wall of separation between church and state,’ therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.”
John Kehr says: “…I wonder in the end if these people believe their own BS or if they are just pushing a fossil fuel free future? I have always tried to reconcile the facts and I just don’t understand how intelligent people that look at the data reach their conclusions. Is it only political for them or do they actually believe their own BS(?)”
Their belief in nonsense is protected from reality by a subconscious gatekeeper that fends off cognitive dissonance. Their inability to do science anymore is driven by collective and individual messiah complexes.
“The GHCN is a database of temperature, precipitation and pressure records managed by the NCDC and the Carbon Dioxide Analysis Information Centre.”
It would seem that with the very limited association of databases, the causal relationship of carbon dioxide concentration on temperature is inevitably a given fact and there is little chance of modifying the perceptions of these “Climate Scientists” charged with being keepers and soothsayers of the record.
If it has assumed such an important responsibility to be the keeper of the above climate record, should not the GHCN also be keeper of the database of short term , decadal and multidecadal climate patterns, such as the PDO, the AMO, the AO and ENSO cycles along with a record of the sun’s activity including irradiance, sunspot count, cycle length and even cosmic ray intensity, coupled with a record of the earths radiation balance or the earths changing albido in terms especially of it’s cloud cover?
If it collated all this information into one super database, albeit that its principal database on the temperature record is so heavily corrupted with UHI, perhaps these so called “scientists” might be able to formulate somewhat more objective theories on the reasons for climate variability.
Until that happens, little old CO2 will remain that evil polluting molecule which will eventually destroy civilisation.
What use is a knife against Occam’s Razor?
Dave
So they’ve had decades and billions of dollars to convince us of their AGW nonsense. The sceptics don’t get funded. Yet they’ve got a knife and the sceptics have nukes! Go figure.
It always was about politics, not science. We can keep to the high road, but if we don’t understand their underlying motivations, their actions will seem bizarre.
Politics it is. For government, they get control. For scientists and bureaucrats, they get money and a little fiefdom. No doubt, for too many people like Hansen, ego is a big deal. Politicians know how to manipulate people like that to get what they want.
So we can decry that bad science, but it doesn’t matter. People like Hansen are playing to the gullible and to the politicians. To paraphrase Will Rogers, we have the best scientists money can buy.
You would think big corporations would fight back, but they are happily raking in cash from new markets created by regulations. If they rock the boat, the regulations will change, and they will lose their effective monopolies.
You might imagine small agencies and counties would fight back. Nope. They are seeing grant money washing away all resistance to green projects. Bought and paid for cheap.
In the end, it comes down to blogs like WUWT, trying to get the word out to people. People need to know what all this green crap is going to cost them. And it isn’t just money. It also will be perhaps complete loss of privacy, security, freedom, and our dreams for the future. Informing people of this unacceptable cost is the only way we can fight back and win.
How long will it take you to learn you are passing a whore house, and there’s no love going on inside ?
Mann has no chance in a knife fight.The reason he can’t back away is because of his stonewalling of his own making.
http://tinyurl.com/4qgr5wz
Interesting to note is panel member Jason Rosenau.
This cat is the propoganda minister at the Nation Center for Science Education (NCSE) a.k.a. National Center for Selling Evolution.
The primary modus operandi for this NGO is preventing public school teachers from speaking critically left-wing bandwagon science/dogma in the classroom. They’ve also been involved in getting professors in public institutions black-balled for failing to preach the consensus dogma.
This is a new phase in the propoganda war. Watch for disciplinary actions against science teachers in K-12 to begin for any of them that have to audacity to question CAGW tenets in front of their students.
The calls for an honest debate are far too late. You cannot have an honest debate with ideologues. Matt Briggs has a good web site on statistics (link in sidebar), and the major point I have learned is that every statistical analysis starts with a model. All you can do with the statistics is adjust parameters within the model to make that model fit the data as well as possible. This tells you nothing about the validity of the model. It might be totally bogus. The only test for the model is to make predictions for data that you have not yet seen. If your predictions fail, the model is no good.
The warmists have predicted that snow in New York and the UK would become a rare event. There was only 1 chance in 20 of another cold, icy winter in the UK. Little risk in not having large stocks of salt, grit, and deicing chemicals on hand. In Australia they predicted the drought will continue so keep the reservoirs as full as possible.
Epic Fail. The only debate that should take place is should we fund someone else for climate research or just save the money? I say, save the money as there is just too much mischief whenever the politicians get to pay for the answers they want. Now we are starting to see the results of the warmists failed CO2 model as the bodies pile up at an alarming rate.
Is that KEVIN Trenberths evil twin brother?
REPLY: No, just how I say Kevin when I have a head cold. Fixed thanks, – Anthony
It goes without saying that the behavior of Hansen, Peterson, and many of their colleagues does not fall within the range of normal or expected behavior on the part of scientists. Scientists are interested in the science and sharing the science. Nor does it fall within the norm for government administrators, except for the high-level offices that are all too often politicized. This behavior demands serious scrutiny. I recommend that everyone send a letter of complaint to Congressman James Sensenbrenner, Congressman Darrell Issa, and Senator James Inhofe.
“We’re in a knife fight”.
These people are public servants. They take 2 weeks off for paper cuts.
I feel sorry for these men. Many of them were and have been academics life long. Having been in that form at least in the United States they have been protected from many of the better forms of education. During studies exempt from military duty/draft, basically exempt from dismissal once reaching tenure, Protected while in government employ. I do wonder what will happen when the money runs out. It will as we all know. John Q. Public when we run out of money quit spending. I think that the government has just been given a message that we are out of money and to quit spending. This climate study in its current form has done nothing to understand the cause of climate change. (not disputed, it has for as long as the earth has been.). They certainly haven’t been helpful in the purpose of learning ways to cope with the change when it does occur, in fact their tact has been most unhelpful by denying the funds to those that would try to mitigate the effects of change what ever it brings.
For this one day they will be brought to account. Either in this life or the next.
Bill Derryberry
These guys, I can’t use men or scientist anymore to describe them, must really hate their feet, cause they just keep blowing them off. In their case knives might be safer but I suspect they won’t be able to resist trying hari kari. Every outburst made on their behalf or by themselves is amazingly destructive to their belief, are they hoping for an insanity plea?
Here is a list of whats required for this knife fight
* Josh
* A Couple of criminals labelled NCDC holding small knives labelled “Homogenize” and “UHI”
* Anthony Watts in a Crocodile Dundee suit with a really really big knife labelled “Blogosphere”
You get the rest, “that’s not a knife” and all that