And the domino newscloning effect continues…
UPDATE: At 5:30PM PST, it appears SciAm finally realized they’d been had and pulled it.
Of course earlier today, the Guardian and other publications saw the problem and pulled this story:
AAAS withdraws “impossible” global warming paper
Hours later here’s the story still running on SciAm:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-change-crop-shortfall
h/t to WUWT reader “interglacial”.
This just goes to illustrate how one unchecked story, gets into the top science news publications, with apparently nobody questioning the claims.
I guess this means we won’t be seeing this story again until the IPCC publishes its next report.
On Monday I wrote a brief but stern letter to CTV as soon as I saw this load of delusional alarmist fantasy:
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20110118/climate-change-crop-shortages-110118/
CTV runs BS climate stories frequently and has absolutely no ability to assess feedback from climate-literate readers, so it is interesting to see the (to my knowledge unprecedented) update added on Wednesday.
the main problem is the. ,y, give me , x generations belives in this crap the most of the baby boomers and older have some commonsence to weight it up and come up to the fact it is the biggest load of crap of all time
Tom Bakewell said on January 19, 2011 at 4:17 pm:
Such is perfectly understandable on SciAm’s part. Amateurs, lacking appropriate funding and proper support from the official scientific community, do things that are very embarrassing to their professional counterparts. Like authoritatively debunking (C)AGW with a mere laptop.
The global mean temperature data for 2010 is out.
It is 0.475 deg C.
The previous maximum of 0.548 deg C for 1998, 13 years ago, has not been exceeded.
http://bit.ly/f2Ujfn
Global warming has stopped for 13 years, and we continue to count the number of years that the previous maximum has not been exceeded.
The number now is 13!
How many more years is required to declare global warming has stopped?
2? 5? 10?
Sorry if I offend anybody but I stopped buying SciAm when the editorial board was taken over by the girls some years ago. It seemed to be an attempt to be more inclusive or politically correct. When that happened there was a spate of pseudoscience and it all just turned my stomach.
This is from a guy who bought his first copy in 1966 and received each issue with great excitement.
When they brought back some balance into the articles I re-subscribed but dropped out again in 2005 when the AGW propaganda got to be just too much.
Likening it to People magazine is a little unfair to People, they seem to carry a lot of truthful stuff in their articles.
Thank goodness for the Internet in general and WUWT in particular.
The SA article in question seems to have disappeared – the link in the article above no longer works.
I sure miss the Scientific American of my youth.
It used to be reliable and informative.
I’ve put it in the category as Time magazine; arrogant editors trying to tell me I should quit believing my lying eyes and believe them instead.
Smokey says: January 19, 2011 at 7:25 pm
Luther Wu says:
“Take heart, all you catastrophe whipstocking jockeys- SA pulled that one particularly bogus story and gave you this:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=casualties-of-climate-change ”
Thanks, Luther. The first comment following that SciAm article is well worth reading.
Thanks Smokey, that comment is great.
I gave up on SciAm and NG twenty years ago, when they started editorializing instead of reporting. I still get Science News which is all too happy to blather on about climate crap. I’ve half a mind to dump it too but I hate the idea losing the references to so many fields. I’ve read over sixty years worth of SN, in the early 60s I tucked into my dad’s stack of them from the 40s on.
So where can I lay a bet on this prediction? I’ll definately be taking the under.
I’m embarrassed to say I’ve been a long time subscriber of Scientific American. Even though they have infuriated me time and time again with their extreme positions on climate, nuclear power, politics, environment, and on and on, I’ve continued because there were some good nuggets. This year I’ve finally let my subscription lapse.
I think their current editor-in-chief, Mariette DiChristina, is a huge improvement over the previous one, but their regular contributors have become even more extreme. I used to think their skeptic Michael Shermer was on the far edge, but he seems quite mainstream compared to others like Lawrence Krauss and Jeffery Sachs — those guys are the worst of the worst.
MikeEE
Peter Gleick is correct. The Climate Science Rapid Response Team was contacted by more than one journalist two days before the report was made public. These journalists suspected the +2.4C value by 2020 was innaccurate. Gavin Schmidt was alerted to the issue and he immediately contacted the author, Liliana Hirsas, to explain her error. Unfortunately, Hirsas, was either unable to or chose not to stop the presses.
Several scientists also contacted Science Magazine via email before the report was published but apparently that message did not get read quickly enough.
Finally, last night when Scientific American posted the report, several scientists contacted the reporter for that article and within 15 minutes the story was pulled.
Lessons learned:
1) Scientists will point out errors regardless of who makes them.
2) The Food Gap Report, written by a journalist (Hirsas), was not vetted by the scientific peer review process. If more than one scientist had looked at this report it would never have been released.
3) Journalists do have services such as AGU’s Climate Q&A and The Climate Science Rapid Response Team available to them to help avoid making these types of mistakes.
[Question: What true skeptical scientists are on the “Rabid Response Team”?]
Correction: Gavin Schmidt did not directly contact Hirsas although he did provide information to a reporter who then contacted Hisas. Several other scientists did contact her via email and one spoke to Hisas on the phone before the report was released. Sorry for the confusion.
REPLY: Thanks
It’s a hard choice sometimes, between Oprah and SciAm… There are days though, when Oprah has an attractive woman on her show, that she makes it easy for me.
/of course its sarcasm.
There is more “science” in the comments at SA than there is in the rest of the publication combined. it is sad, but mostly because it taints both “Science” and “American” in one phrase.
I have wanted to receive Scientific American for years now, and last year at this time I finally got a subscription. But over the past 12 months there has been so many pages devoted to climate change hype and talk in the magazine that I have decided to let the subscription lapse. I can’t take anymore of it; I don’t just want to pay for it. I’m deeply disappointed. The final issue arrived this month.
Scott Mandia says:
January 20, 2011 at 6:31 am
Scott – thanks for the time line. But you did forget one lesson learned.
4. SA is not a science magazine, but rather a tabloid that happens to post things that have the word science in the article.
Sadly abandoned SA years ago although I occasionally buy astronomy issues. They started to lose it going hysterical with ant-missile defense with many articles proving (sic) that it was technically impossible to destroy an incoming warhead with a missile. Then Carl Sagan’s articles asserting that Iraq’s burning oil fields would bring on ‘nuclear winter’ pre Gulf War One. I do subscribe to Science News which continues to annoy me with their AGW propaganda. Time to start annoying them back with complaints to the editor-in-chief.
Science Diet is a top of the line dog food.
Scientific American is the top of the line for bird cage liner.
From Scott Mandia on January 20, 2011 at 6:31 am:
Thus, given how often the likes of Trenberth, Hansen, Schmidt, and Jones have criticized Mann’s work and his flawed Hockey Stick graph, in numerous peer-reviewed scientific journals, and especially in the IPCC assessment reports… We must conclude they are not scientists.
Thanks for clearing that up.
Even in a cooling world AGW will not give up without a fight.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12241692
“Agencies including the UK Met Office suggest 2011 is likely to be cooler on average than 2010, as La Nina conditions dominate.
The variation between El Nino and La Nina can alter the global temperature by half a degree or so.
But the variations it produces sit on top of a slow, steady warming trend dating back half a century, ascribed to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from industry, agriculture, deforestation and other human activities”
Scott Mandia says:
January 20, 2011 at 6:31 am
“1) Scientists will point out errors regardless of who makes them.
2) The Food Gap Report, written by a journalist (Hirsas), was not vetted by the scientific peer review process. If more than one scientist had looked at this report it would never have been released.”
Uh oh, Scott and his team might cause a shortfall of material for the next IPCC report…
Oh, i forgot: The IPCC isn’t important anymore anyway; the globalists will use the Biodiversity scam now…
Scientific American flipped 180° when a German publisher bought it in 1986.
Since most Germans are hopeless Greens, and since Greens are Lysenkoist watermelons, they ruined the science aspect of Scientific American.
dear Philip Finck
I find it very interesting that the goobermint of Nova Scotia has officially adopted a sea level rise of between 1.0 and 1.4 metres over the next century, that rate of relative sea level rise is clearly preposterous. You mention a government report, is there somewhere one might find a copy of said report?
The Scientific American article is back up again:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-change-crop-shortfall
Will Climate Change Cause Crop Shortfalls by 2020?
Editor’s Note: This story from Climatewire is informed, in part, by a press release that was subsequently retracted by the online news service of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The study itself has not been retracted. It presents an aggressive scenario for future warming under climate change that many climate scientists question. We will publish an Observations blog post later this afternoon to offer more background on the issues surrounding this story.