Below are excerpts from a story by Paul Roderick Gregory, in Forbes, plus an examination of how desperate the website SkepticalScience seems to have become in the way they treat professionals.
Excerpts from Forbes:
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Three recent events have brought the controversy over climate science back into the news and onto my radar screen:
First, Ivar Giaever, the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, resigned from the American Physical Society over his disagreement with its statement that “the evidence (on warming alarmism) is incontrovertible.” Instead, he writes that the evidence suggests that “the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.”
Second, the editor of Remote Sensing resigned and disassociated himself from a skeptical paper co-authored by University of Alabama Climate Scientist Roy Spencer after an avalanche of criticism by “warmists.” His resignation brings to mind Phil Jones’ threat to “get rid of troublesome editors” (cited above).
Third, the New York Times and other major media are ridiculing Texas Governor Rick Perry for saying that global warming is “not proven.” Their message: Anyone who does not sign on to global warming alarmism is an ignorant hayseed and clearly not presidential material.
What lessons do I, as an economist, draw from these three events?
First: The Giaever story starkly disputes warmist claims of “inconvertible evidence.” Despite the press’s notable silence on such matters, there are a large number of prominent scientists with solid scholarly credentials who disagree with the IPCC-Central Committee. Those who claim “proven science” and “consensus” conveniently ignore such scientists.
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Second: As someone with forty years experience with peer reviewed journals. I can testify that the Remote Sensing editor’s resignation and public discreditation of Spencer’s skeptical paper would be considered bizarre and unprofessional behavior in any other scholarly discipline.
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Third: The media is tarring and feathering Rick Perry, we now see, for agreeing with Nobel laureate Giaever and a host of other prominent scientists. I guess if Perry is a know-nothing Texas hick (or worse, a pawn of Big Oil) so is every other scientist who dares to disagree with the IPCC Central Committee. Such intimidation chillingly makes politicians, public figures, and scientists fearful of deviating one inch from orthodoxy. They want to avoid Orwell’s “watching their comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.” How many are willing to shoulder that burden?
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Read the entire piece here.
For a recent example of “watching their comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes” one needs to look no further than Dr. Roger Pielke’s attempt to have a dialog with the oxymoronically named website “SkepticalScience.com”. Bishop Hill described what happened there as self immolation, Shub Niggurath lists it as A dark day in the climate science debate.
Whatever is is, it’s the worst example of climate ugliness I’ve seen this month, though not the all time worst (see the “corrections” at the end). It is surprising though, that for a website that recently won the prestigious national Eureka award in Australia, that they’d have to stoop to this level of juvenile behavior reminiscent of Animal Farm, cited by Paul Roderick Gregory in his Forbes article.
Strikeout of opposing commentary, especially that of a professional scientist writing something that doesn’t even appear inflammatory or off topic (since he’s responding to another commenter), is so “grade school”.
Can you imagine the howling that would ensue if I did the same thing to NSIDC’s Walt Meier when he posts something here I might disagree with?
From my perspective, while I once said that John Cook was at least “civil in his discourse with me”, and for that reason I gave Skeptical Science a place on my blogroll. I’m rethinking that now after seeing this latest ugliness.
One thing Shub Niggurath said caught my eye:
More recently however, the tone at [SkepticalScience] has turned shrill. The main proprietor John Cook, who is a climate change communication award winner, apparently approves. These changes have especially been noticeable after a certain ‘dana1981′ – likely referring to the author being born in 1981, began his contributions to the website.
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And to top it all, in their narrow and monomaniacal attempts at interpreting Roger Pielke Sr’s blog posts, the readers/moderators and authors including ‘dana1981′ were completely blinded to the fact, that one of them – ‘dana1981′ – had in fact, carried out the very same thing they so vehemently denied.
That reminds me of something I once said about the Internet:
Anonymity breeds contempt
I wonder if Cook will rise to the level of respect that the Australian National Museum has granted him with their Eureka award and fix this mess “dana1981” has created, or will he turn a blind eye and take one for “The Team”? I’ve done my part to be reasonable and adopt suggestions, the ball is now in John Cook’s court. Ironically, in the attempt to muzzle Dr. Pielke and have him acquiesce to demands, they handily proved his original point.
The way defenders of climate science are acting these days, it does indeed beg the question Can We Really Call Climate Science A Science?
h/t to Kevin Hearle for the Forbes article
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Climate science as practiced by “consensus” scientists is pseudo-science in service of an ideology, and thus more akin to lysenkoism. It is anti-science on steroids.
In my go arounds with SkepticlScience they snip and delete my posts, That they merely line out Pielkesr’s stuff must be a matter of respect.
@Alan D McIntire September 19, 2011 at 9:09 pm:
That is the quote I know of, but the way I heard it, it had “archeology” in place of “science.”
The point is, as it was in Twain’s day, that there comes a point when the conjecture
a.) is taken itself for being fact, and
b.) far outnumbers the actual facts.
At that point, science falls short and is no longer really science.
Living in Chicago, where there is a “major league” baseball team named the Cubs, I am reminded that in European soccer/football it is not enough to pay your way in. You also have to maintain a level of performance: those teams who end up at the bottom of the “tables” (standings) get “relegated” the next season. Relegated in this case means that the entire team gets sent to the minor leagues, replaced byb an equal number of teams at the top of the tables of the next league below. (But they can even get further relegated, to an even lesser minor league.
The Cubs bought their way into the “major leagues” at its inception in 1901 (the official first season of MLB, as it is called today). They have been at the bottom so many times they should have been relegated long ago.
Now, relegation is not permanent. A team can win its way to the top again, by earning their way to the top of the tables.
It seems to some extent that the science of climatology is (along with archeology) staying in the major leagues simply because science doesn’t use the European sporting way, but the American way: once in the majors, the “team” stays there. (Perhaps astrology once upon a time was relegated, but that time was a long time ago. And ever since, it has been the whipping boy of “science.”)
All I can say is that they (both climatology and archeology) aren’t doing anything to win my vote to stay in the major leagues. What exactly is going to happen, at that point when all the crap science of today’s climatology is found to be utterly wrong? Will the other scientists even do anything? To be consistent, at the least, they will laugh at climatology like they laugh at phrenology, astrology and epicycles. And the flat Earth.
It is obvious by their hubris that the “warmist” climatologists don’t see such a thing as possible. If they did, they would look at their own papers more skeptically and the papers of their opponents as valid counter-evidence, and begin to find out what paradigm can be made to fit ALL the evidence, not just their narrow conjectural point of view.
What scientist ever – EVER – thinks that he has ALL the truth? Not Newton (look up what he wrote about gravity as “action at a distance”, for example). Not Einstein (think “unified field”). Not Darwin, for sure. But Mann & Associates does.
For the grammarians, yes, this:
“A team can win its way to the top again, by earning their way to the top of the tables.”
should have been this:
“A team can win its way to the top again, by earning its way to the top of the tables.”
@spider42 September 20, 2011 at 4:11 am:
In reality, as in the history of it all, the actions taken to clean up our air and water preceded any claims about warming by several years. So, the clean(er) air and clean(er) rivers you are enjoying have nothing whatsoever to do with warmists’ efforts to stamp out carbon dioxide emissions. CO2 is not, as the U.S. EPA has declared, a “pollutant.” Ask the plants about that. CO2 is food for plants (and has, in fact, been part and parcel of your “less polluted places”), so efforts to control it can be seen to be shortsighted, at best. And without an incontrovertible evidential link between CO2 and warming (and non-warming, as the last 10 years have evidenced), any actions are premature, at best. And – in Kevin Trenberth’s words – “correlation does not establish causation”.
So, actual mechanisms must be proven. And partial evidence is not sufficient. We currently have some evidence one way, and some evidence the other way, so in the true sense of the term, “the science is not settled.” And until it is, governments should refrain from establishing policies based on one side’s evidence vs the other side’s evidence. It is the free privilege as citizens in open democracies for one side to push for what it thinks is true, but the other side is also free to disagree. It is also their freedom to ridicule each other, in whatever forms that takes, short of violence. Until Climategate, the only arguments making it into the main stream media was that of the warmists. Climategate showed a bit of why that was such a one-sided affair. It is a far, far healthier intellectual environment since Climategate opened the ears of people to the arguments of the skeptics and the naughtiness of the warmists.
It is the naughtiness of the warmists that is at issue in this post, not whether we should be glad to be breathing clean air. We have the Clean Air Act (1970) to thank for that.
And just how much naughtiness is a discipline allowed, before the rest of science throws them out on their keisters?
Could you please lose the ALL CAPS and (worse) P.U.N.C.T.U.A.T.E.D C.A.P.S? They make your comment UN-R.E.A.D.A.B.L.E.
Must have taken you forever to type it.
/Mr Lynn