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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Colds and flu, take echinachea.
Peterson is probably in non-stop cold sweats that Inhofe will demand an audit of GHCN and its data integrity.
How does a scientist, who sees himself acting in a knife fight
deal with mistakes he or better a sceptic finds in his data, publications or his methods ?
Deal with the career or job application of a young scientist with some dissenting views and on the other side with a dumb guy, who beyond that perhaps may be good in knife fighting ?
Deal with a sceptic paper submission he may be entitled to review ?
Deal with reports or interviews he is entitled to author for the public or other authorities ?
This is disturbing to say the least. I don’t know how this person can continue to be part of the public service.
Dave Springer:
I’m far from convinced this chain of events was without external cause or purpose. The probabilities for all we observe being due to serendipity simply beggars belief.
Are you familiar with the Weak Anthropic Principle? It is an intractable form of circular reasoning …
That said there are many parallels between the politics of selling random evolution….
1) The rare random mutation that produces a more effective duplicator (than its competitors)
will likely be duplicated more often (than its competitors)
2) What follows is not random, but weighted in favor of differential reproductive success.
Dave Springer says: January 16, 2011 at 7:24 pm
Dave, I’m with you in spirit (haha!) but I would word it differently.
First, I use the word “scientism” to describe the situation where belief and unbalanced emotional responses replace Scientific Method, while the output is purveyed as science. That’s my use of the word, but I’ve heard others use the word the same way.
Second, I (and I think others) always take “religion” to mean something where belief takes precedence over testable and tested knowledge. Having said which, I have a passionate love for true Scientific Method as you do. In my case, this is because I know with every fibre of my being that truth matters, truth works, truth heals, and discovery of truth is what Scientific Method is about, at root. Also I like the fact that Jesus is reported as saying his own work was to bear witness to truth (the evidence: John 18:37) – notwithstanding what the Church has done, Inquisition and all.
Having said which, I have no desire for these words to spark a religious discussion here. It’s too off topic.
Politics, and in general, debates of any kind, have always included the idea of “Them’s fight’n words!” Does that cause weak and mentally ill minds to turn them into reality? No. The weak and mentally ill mind will do that all on its own. If the world were filled with peace and tranquility with nary a single harsh word or portrait, the human mind, ill with whatever attacks it, will think dark thoughts and carry out dark deeds.
On the other hand, will poorly reasoned, and god forbid ill-thought, policies meant to squeeze the populous into controlling, restrictive and austere measures bring revolution? Yes. Sometimes peaceful, sometimes rancorous, and sometimes violent.
Dr. James Hansen calling for civil disobedience
The problem with that is it only works for those NOT in power. Clearly with most of the media, and virtually all of the western governments, the AGW crowd is IN control. So they will be protesting themselves.
Khwarizmi says:
January 17, 2011 at 1:34 am
“2) What follows is not random, but weighted in favor of differential reproductive success.”
Mutations are random. Natural selection is to a great degree. The fittest can and often are killed by random events that have nothing to do with fitness relative to peers. In the interest of brevity I reduced RM+NS to random evolution. Regardless, the numbers just don’t work out. I suggest picking up a copy of Michael Behe’s “The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Evolution”.
http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Evolution-Search-Limits-Darwinism/dp/0743296206
The focus of the book is on the real world. Perhaps the best experiment we have to what RM+NS can accomplish is in one of the most widely studied and prolific organisms on the planet P.Falciparum (the malaria parasite). It’s a eukaryote with a completely sequenced genome of approximately 27mbp. It reproduces enough times in a single infected person to sequence through all possible single point mutations. Every year in toto in all infected people it sequences through all possible dual point mutations. It reproduces more times in one year than all the reptiles in history. It is under intense selection pressure from both natural environment (such as ability, or rather inability, to survive through a temperate winter and sickle cell hemoglobin mutation), and from an assault of various man-made drugs. It’s response to these selection pressures, both successes and failures, are quite predictable given a well known baseline single point mutation rate, size of genome, number of opportunities, and gene modifications required to overcome the obstacles.
The bottom line of what P.Falciparum has and has not been able to accomplish with an order of magnitude more opportunities pales in comparison to the genetic modifications in the chain of evolution from reptiles to mammals. So what we observe in the evolution of P.Falciparum makes perfect predictable sense and what we imagine took place in the evolution of reptiles into mammals becomes preposterous.
That’s just one example. There are many others where the opportunities for RM+NS to act are ridiculously too small to accomplish what the fossil record tells us has happened. My personal opinion is that the deck was stacked from the word go – the course of evolution was largely predetermined. Predetermined by what and why is a matter of speculation – there is no data to tell us that but the data certainly do lead us to a conclusion that pure happenstance is such a low probability event it can be discounted in a finite universe.
Lucy Skywalker says:
January 17, 2011 at 2:00 am
“Dave, I’m with you in spirit (haha!) but I would word it differently. First, I use the word “scientism” to describe the situation where belief and unbalanced emotional responses replace Scientific Method, while the output is purveyed as science. That’s my use of the word, but I’ve heard others use the word the same way. ”
I hear ya, Lucy but I don’t give a darn if it’s pejorative or not. If the shoe fits, wear it. It fits me. I tend to believe the universe is a creation not an accident so that makes me a creationist and that’s usually pejorative too but if it fits it fits. Just don’t call me a creationist with a capital C because that doesn’t fit – the evidence doesn’t lead to a bearded sky thunderer but who knows someday it might and if it does I’ll follow it there. I’m agnostic when it comes down to it but I do believe that science is the only means of knowing things and sufficiently advanced science has no boundary in what is knowable. I always keep in mind Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws of prediction:
#1 When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.
#2 The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
#3 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Dave Springer – I have Clarke’s laws as my signature line! They are very appropriate to remember in today’s world.
Dave Springer
“I suggest picking up a copy of Michael Behe’s “The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Evolution”.”
There are some who like a mystery for the sake of mystery, while others like a mystery for the challenge it presents. The former send mystics to enshrine the mystery in enigma and dogma, while the latter send detectives.
Behe has built a career from trying to find a deity particle in DNA or the folds of a protein, and he is clearly in the latter camp. It is most unlikely that I will read his book.
His comparison of simple prokaryotic evolution to complex eukaryotic evolution is invalid, since eukaryotes have a significant advantage conferred by meiosis.
Also, a biology text you previous recommended failed to undermine or even address the point I made regarding methane-fueled life.
I concur with Lucy that evolution is a straying from the topic into potentially volatile territory. It’s a topic I enjoy, however. The post on hydrothermal vents was one of my favorites.
If scientists like Dr Peterson and the others involved in Climategate are so anxious for the rest of us to respond to their warnings in the ways that they believe we should, then why such apparent nonchalance about the research of their colleagues on black carbon and its large role in the Arctic melt.
Their colleague Drew Shindell and others showed —
that ‘black carbon is responsible for 50% or almost 1degreeC increased Arctic warming from 1890 to 2007’, and that ‘the climate-warming effects of these short-lived pollutants have largely been ignored by scientists and regulators focusing on climate policy’ —-that ‘decreasing concentrations of sulfate aerosols and increasing concentrations of black carbon have substantially contributed to rapid Arctic warming during the past three decades’.
And—“We will have very little leverage over climate in the next couple of decades if we’re just looking at carbon dioxide,” Shindell said. “If we want to try to stop the Arctic summer sea ice from melting completely over the next few decades, we’re much better off looking at aerosols and ozone.”
Why [ if they genuinely want to prevent warming], are they not all publicly clamouring for the necessary measures to be taken right now—lending their enormous clout to that problem—especially since they use the Arctic melt as their prime evidence for CO2-induced warming, with not a word about the black carbon.
Instead , the burning of forests continues, as do the other practices that produce black carbon—-and the world’s most influential climate scientists remain silent—and also will not post comments on the subject on their blogs.
This is just one of many contradictions that make us wonder if they really do believe in CO2-induced warming —or whether the science is being made to fit the political agenda.
Could it be that they don’t want any of the more- easily-remedied problems fixed, lest they then have nothing to point to in order to maintain the required alarm ?
Pamela;
>:-(
I’ve warned you before. “Populous” is not a noun. It does not mean “Populus”.
Further violations will be met with deadly force. Or SLT.
😉
Hey … [trimmed] Do you [trimmed] know how to read? [trimmed]
[ Yes, we do know how to read. Please read the posting rules about language and insults. Robt]