I’ve seen lots of quotes this week, many surrounding the Gleick Fakegate affair.
This one stands out.
From John Horgan at Scientific American who asks:
Should Global-Warming Activists Lie to Defend Their Cause?
He writes:
I’ll give the last word to one of my students. The Gleick incident, he said, shows that the “debate” over global warming is not really a debate any more. It’s a war, and when people are waging war, they always lie for their cause.
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Wow, so another (once respected) science publication is hoisted on its own petard. Sad to see the continued damage these people (certainly no longer real scientists) are doing to science. I wonder when the rest of the science world will speak up. The world has figured it out but these folks have not yet. Tick tick tick…
“Should Global-Warming Activists Lie to Defend Their Cause?”
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That’s all they have.
algore quotes: “We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”
“It is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations.”
“On the Judith Curry update ‘oh the ironing’
A you must be pressed for time”
Smooth!
————————-
….. or maybe he was just … ahem… Board
_________________
Silly! I have more pressing issues.
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Now you’ve got me creasing up with laughter
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That may be in starch contrast as to what was meant.
Latitude said:
February 24, 2012 at 5:20 pm
Anyone know if Gleick had a cat?
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Cats are smart – a Cat would have run away from him.
Gore and Schneider don’t (or in Schneider’s case, didn’t) have a problem with lying to promote the cause; in fact they openly admitted to that.
Gleick at least recognised that lying was wrong, and attempted to apologise, even though he did so while still shooting at his opponents.
John Horgan lost me when I read his book The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age. Frankly, he is superficial and I am not in the least surprised by his remarks in the head post.
Lying has never been accepted as a valid weapon in science wars, only in political wars – which AGW clearly is.
Humanity, please take note. The magazine Scientific American has declared war on those who express scepticism about AGW. You have been warned.
If it is a war, then so be it.
The global warming industry is like Iran’s nuclear weapons development program: something fundamentally wrong, very expensive, not needed and surrounded in a web of lies, but which needs to be dismantled immediately.
Brian says:
February 24, 2012 at 5:18 pm
I respectfully disagree. You haven’t considered the thousands of people around the world who have starved to death or died of disease because of the $Billions that have been (mis)spent trying to persuade them their problems are caused by CO2.
How much sense does that make? Well, absolutely none.
Tell someone who has lost a child or brother or sister that they died so we can all feel a little bit better about CO2. Precious little.
It simply boggles the mind, doesn’t it?
So yes, it is a war where people kill one another. And the (preventable) deaths of thousands of children from hunger or disease is the absolute worst war there is. Nothing else comes even close.
You’re over thinking. The professor quotes a student who made a correct observation. It really doesn’t need (or support) a lot of analysis.
Sometimes the truth is really simple and just shines through. (ie. Partisans lie.) Leave the convoluted logic to the warmists. People can recognize fertilizer by its smell.
“Peter Gleick, a global-warming researcher and environmental activist,” –John Horgan
“A researcher is somebody who performs research, the search for knowledge or in general any systematic investigation to establish facts.” –Wikipedia
“one who is aggressively active on behalf of a cause.” –Webster
So, a global-warming researcher and environmental activist would be someone who performs research on behalf of the global-warming cause?
The really, really shocking thing to me, the post-modern (or “post-normal”) thing, if you will, is the ease with which some activist scientists and professionial journalists, many from highly respected newspapers and academic journals, are sliding seamlessly into the concept of a strategic propaganda “war”. There seems to be an unprecedented, (to science reporting at any rate) cynical and premeditated rationalising away of the need for absolute integrity – and surely many of these intellgent disseminators of “information” to the public realise the shaky moral ground they are treading!
A naively well-intentioned, but nevertheless determined and chilling, campaign to foist a bastardised ethics of “relativity” onto the public discourse has crept into the output of numerous mainstream newspaper publishers, broadcasters and scientific institutions. The rationale, as in actual war, seems to be the usual, “we dare not trust the dumb, sedentary public to see sense”, therefore we must fight (real or imagined) fire with fire. The result: lying, deception, economy of truth, denial that there is real debate, are all necessary to do what must be done!
One of the many ironies of this whole affair is that the Heartland Institute is basically unknown on this, the European (yes, I am up early!), side of the pond. Apart from doubts thrown up by the odd winter cold snap, all UK mainstream media, for example, stay decidedly on-message about Global Warming. The fact that, in the face of this, the likes of Suzanne Goldenberg at the Guardian and Richard Black at the BBC insist on spinning dubious articles portraying the Gleick affair as a heroic/tragic tilting of the lance at some demonic, world-threatening institution is simply bizarre. It smacks of a dishonest desperation that the handily sewn-up mainstream message not be allowed to drift in the public consciousness by a single percentile.
I speak, by the way, as one who has no love for lobbyists, especially right-wing lobbyists, but as someone who is aghast at the erosion of informed, honest reporting and the creeping contamination of advocacy journalism and activist science. That a lobbying organisation (of questionable influence) may put a slant on their side of the debate, is and always will be problematic in the corriders of power (though hardly new or surprising), that supposedly ethical journalists and scientists see this as a call to arms and feel a duty to slant the facts in a contrary direction in the name of realpolitik, is a road to ruin.
I don’t know how old your student is but, if they’re as old as you expect a student to be, then they’re wise beyond there years.
In the embeded photo on John Horgan’s Scientific American referenced article there appears to be a cooling tower spewing a dark cloud. Lighting effects make it appear really nasty. It this is in fact a cooling tower that cloud would be only water vapor. If that is the case would this be a subtle form of perhaps ‘fibbing’ to imply a source of pollution. Not directly stated but suggestive to the uninformed. Maybe it could answer his own question. Would that answer be that any form of deception to any degree is OK in his view?
How about it Horgan, I’ll await your response. I’m sure you are aware of this thread but I doubt you will respond.
peter_ga says:February 24, 2012 at 6:44 pm
” Would it have been ethical to lie to and practise (sic) identity theft against the Nazis…?”
*******
The World At War documentary contains an interview of a German woman, an anti-Nazi Adventist, describing having to lie to the Gestapo in order to save her neighbor from arrest. She recounts complaining to her husband that she felt bad for having lied. Her husband responded that dictatorships turn everyone into liars.
The Soviets collapsed under the weight of the lies that grew so blatant they could not be ignored.
William Shakespeare had human nature pegged all those centuries ago: “Oh what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive.”
What should we think of the likes of John Hokum, who retains deniability by passing the buck to a student, rather than be considered a mendacious twit himself?
pjoenotes says: “I like this on the Sci. Am. article: “About the Author: Every week, John Horgan takes a puckish, provocative look at breaking science.”
That’s supposed to be pucky-ish.
Scientific American outed itself from the scientific method long ago, in its despicable treatment of Bjorn Lomborg. Much like the current AGW cult, it stationed itself above mere truth, scientific inquiry and open debate, and banished Lomborg from its pages to prevent his replies to the intellectual assassains whose slanders of him SA had invited.
The carbon footprint arising from the efforts of earning money for a subscription to SA should give the editors pause, to consider what their mission on this earth really is.
The understatement of the week should go to the Guardian:
“Some embraced Gleick as a democratic hero, others worried that he had lost the moral high ground ,,,”
All is being smothered in far too many words.
Lies equate to rot.
Rot must be totally eradicated (cut out and burned) if all is not to be destroyed.
I think it is far too late already. The planet has been soundly trashed.
Geoff Alder
Insufficiently Sensitive says:
February 24, 2012 at 11:19 pm
“Scientific American outed itself from the scientific method long ago, in its despicable treatment of Bjorn Lomborg.”
That is correct! I would NEVER buy S.American.
Ok, they’re going into the trap. Horgan says, it’s OK to lie when you believe in The Cause, the Grauniad says Gleick’s a hero, Horgan says it’s a war and people lie in wars (and do all sorts of other nasty things, like blowing up stuff).
We might expect more sneaky attacks, phishing and lies from would-be heroes. BUT the good thing is: They will lose more of their credibility each time.
“Wait in your front door and you´ll see the corpses of your enemies passing by” (chinese proverb).
RockyRoad says:
February 24, 2012 at 9:52 pm
“I respectfully disagree. You haven’t considered the thousands of people around the world who have starved to death or died of disease because of the $Billions that have been (mis)spent trying to persuade them their problems are caused by CO2.”
That is exactly right, and that is exactly the point Lomborg (a warmist) was making since the Skeptical Environmentalist, arguing that more life years can be saved for the same amount of money with about anything remotely useful but by fighting CO2. Making him about the only warmist I know capable of logical thought, empathy and realism. Doesn’t mean there aren’t others but I don’t know them. And THAT got him in hot water with Pachauri, SciAm etc., imagine that. All he was arguing for was a different allocation of resources.
So, they treated him exactly the same way they treat any total non-believer in warming or people who even deny the existence of a greenhouse effect.
Somehow, the IPCC warmists are completely uncapable of rational debate even when a person like Lomborg only slightly deviates from their bloc opinion.
OR, another possible conclusion would be: By arguing for a different allocation of resources, Lomborg touched on the TRUE core of the IPCC warmism, which is NOT about CO2 or the climate but about power and money, and how to redistribute it.
And THAT leads to the conclusion that Gleick misunderstood his own movement. He had this nice cosy enviable EPA-funded existence in beautiful California and all he would have to do would be droning on on Twitter and Forbes and youtube ’til Kingdom come and he would have lived happily ever after… his problem was that he believed the lie of his own movement – that it’s about CO2; don’t they clue their own people in? Don’t they have initiation rites or something?
It’s only a war because the alarmists refuse to debate the subject. Their preferred method is name calling.