This tiff started because of this story by Tom Nelson yesterday, followed by this today. This post is my first involvement as all this happened without my involvement or comment until now. I don’t even care that I wasn’t mentioned, but I do care when I’m libeled.
I have just one thing to say to you, Mr. Zivkovic:
Prove your assertion of “gaming” led to an undeserved win, or retract it and issue an apology.
Perhaps it doesn’t occur to Mr. Zivkovic that Scientific American’s readership is on decline, just like those opinion polls that show people thinking AGW is a serious problem. People are getting turned off to SciAm partly because of ridiculous and hateful things like this being said on the part of the current crop of of writers and editors running SciAm.
And they wonder why people don’t like the magazine like they used to.
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About Bora Zivkovic
Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), Bora was always interested in animals and nature. His studies in veterinary medicine were interrupted by the 1990s war in the Balkans, when he arrived in the USA. He went to graduate school at North Carolina State University where he studied how bird brains measure time of day (circadian rhythms) and time of year (photoperiodism). He started ‘A Blog Around The Clock’ in 2004. He teaches introductory biology to non-traditional students at North Carolina Wesleyan College, organizes the annual ScienceOnline conference, and edits Open Laboratory – the annual anthology of the best writing on science blogs.
Smokey says:
July 16, 2012 at 7:07 pm
> The only really good thing about Scientific American was Martin Gardner’s ‘Mathematical Games’ column.
Yes, Soma Cubes, Pentominoes, hexaflexagons (Richard Feynman was instrumental in early studies!), John Conway’s “game” of Life, and Mr. Matrix rank among my favorites.
In all fairness, there are a number of people who are lifelong fans of C.L. Strong and Jearl Walker’s The Amateur Scientist.
> It’s been downhill at an accelerating pace ever since.
It’s flattening out as it gets closer to the zero asymptote. Or are you doing this on semi-log paper?
Wiki has a page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amateur_Scientist which continues the story with Shawn Carlson and then:
Perhaps 2001 is the year of the second step down.
Anthony, I don’t think you need to sue. This thread has done plenty of negative advertizing for Bora and his once precious magazine. Google will do the rest.
Like the 100+ others here, I was once an avid subscriber who would hold his nose at the obligatory political piece that lead off the issue. Stopped in the early 90’s when the useful yield ceased to be worth my time.
I still have some scraps, particularly the one on Paterson Worms and the trap-door cypher.
First, a toast toast once great magazine!
I too am a former subscriber. SciAm’s descent into mediocrity is a huge loss to us all.
Let me mention a counter-example — a magazine which started down the CAGW road but got straightened out fast. Their readership jumped on them hard and they got the message. It’s “The Bent” — the quarterly publication of Tau Beta Pi (the Engineering Honors Fraternity). Since their readers are members, not just subscribers, their voice may have carried more weight.
I can’t provide a link to the original article (nor to the massive collection of letters to the editors it spawned) but I can give you a link to their math puzzles, which you fans of Martin Gardner might enjoy.
http://www.tbp.org/pages/Publications/Bent/BTs.cfm
I stopped reading New Scientist and scientific American when i realised it was political propaganda. It was always pro-global warming, devoting massive spreads to irrelevant statistics, invalid inferences and outright inaccurate premises or otherwise known as lies. There was also a massive pro-vaccination push as well, hyping up swine flu as the next global catastrophe. While not coming from a purely anti-vaccination standpoint I nevertheless recognise the suppression of adverse effect statistics and the refusal to address harmful ingredients in some vaccines like Gardasil that contribute to the side effects. There is also the suppression of the proven scientific fact that 911 was a controlled demolition and thus an inside job. Popular Mechanics wrote the most unscientific, irrational, flawed article attempting to debunk 911 controlled demolition I’ve seen in a while.
Lets take significant man made global warming. There is zero evidence supporting it, ZERO! Yet there is overwhelming evidence against it:
The Earth has been warming steadily for 300 years, well before humans could’ve had any impact, and cooled for the past 8 years. As the climate has been steadily warming naturally, independent of human influence, then of course the hottest days are going to be at the end of the record!!! So claiming the hottest days/years being evidence of AGW is a fallacy.
The fact is there has been no warming for 15 years!!!!!!
The medieval Warm period was warmer than today. CO2science.org provides comprehensive collation of studies around the globe and has found it was hotter. Temperatures have been steadily increasing since a period called the Maunder Minimum, a mini-ice age straight after the MWP. The steady upward trend since shows no human signal as man had no heavy industry then. The incline from the 70s to ’98 is repeated many times in the past, even before the turn of the centurey and thus is not significant or unique in any way.
Global ice levels are normal and sea levels have not risen significantly for 60 years.Sea temperatures according to the ARGO buoys deployed years ago show no increase! there goes the ‘hidden warmth’ theory of the Alarmists.
Also climate models and IPCC predictions vastly exaggerate warming, they overstate CO2 levels, and exaggerate climate sensitivity forcing equations for CO2. They propose a fictional runaway feedback effect as the CO2 heats up the oceans which then release more CO2 into the atmosphere in a vicious circle. While this feedback does happen to a certain extent, not only is CO2 a lesser greenhouse gas in terms of contribution, the greenhouse effect is counterbalanced by other factors.
The IPCC admits that GHG warming alone without feedbacks will account for no more than 1 degree over the next century. Empirical data shows feedbacks to be zero to negative otherwise we would have seen much more warming due to the CO2 than we have. There are negative feedback variables that the IPCC has vastly understated or ignored. For instance, the climate models vastly exaggerate upper tropospheric water vapour leading to understated Outgoing Longwave Radiation, and thus vastly exaggerating warming.
In reality, Increased cumulonimbic convection and humidity creates more return flow subsidence and radiative mass sinking, leading to less upper tropospheric water vapour. This leads to more OLR escaping and thus less warming.
The models also ignore or understate low level clouds resulting from increased humidity that reflects radiation back to space and cools the planet. The albedo effect resulting from cloud cover corresponds to cooler periods in the climate record.
The mid tropospheric hotspot that should be there according to the IPCCs greenhouse gas warming contribution projections is NOT there, proving the IPCC’s models incorrect.
Lindzen (you might have heard of him, one of the the top climate scientists in the world) has studied the climate for 40 years and has plotted the satellite data that shows that Outgoing radiation goes UP with surface warming, NOT down as the IPCC suggests.
Sea acidification is also complete rubbish as even if all the CO2 in the atmosphere was dissolved in water it would not even come close to approaching a neutral PH, let alone acid.
Corals, crustaceans and other life forms flourish with more CO2.
Add to that all the data tampering and manipulation, for example the Darwin tampering, the elimination of weather stations from higher altitudes, the attempted removal of the mediaeval warming period, and the bullying of scientists who didn’t support the AGW scam, in other words the bullying of scientists with a least a shred of conscience and morality and you have a 100% certainty that AGW is a scam.
I keep hearing how scientists and bloggers are committing “slander” or “libel” and cries to “sue the bums!” and similar sentiments. Anthony Watts, I dare you to sue him. I double dare you. I suspect you are making vague and empty threats to rouse the troops to your side. Prove me wrong. Sue him. Let’s see how far it gets. Or will all those nasty ole’ scientists and their nasty big government silence you with huge wads of cash backing their legal defense? If you really have a case and a half-way decent lawyer you should win hands down. What’s really stopping you?
REPLY: Well, you first have to send a demand letter. AFAIK there isn’t an “insta-sue” website where you can file such things the same day, yet. If he takes it down, no problem, if he remains boneheaded, like you, then maybe there’s a case.
I generally don’t take legal advice from anonymous whiners, so I’ll put your further complaints/advice in the flaming bit bucket of death and handle it how I choose. – Anthony
SA has unfortunatley gone the way National Geographic did, and substituted facts and evidence for advocacy. I grew up with many repeat subscriptions to the latter, but not any more. Its all political nowadays. If I wanted to read biased political-based studies and articles, Ill read Huff&Blow or the NYT.
So send your demand letter. What are you waiting for? Either do it or quit whining.
REPLY – Too bad the word “guttersnipe” has fallen out of fashion. (But you still get your say without being deleted. “Unlike certain other sites.”) ~ Evan
Thanks for that link. I always enjoy articles where the enemy within self-identifies themselves for all their neighbors to see. The article is exactly as the title suggests, a sweetness and light attempt at herding the sheeple to welcome a pack of wolves in democratic sheep clothing. So just on a hunch I skimmed the 400+ comments to look for the subject of this thread and yep, our hero that fled the Serbian conflict is of course cheerleading totalitarianism for the entire world instead …
Our hero reappears later to vent about skeptics, naturally throwing around the “D” word for all that will listen …
How on Earth does this blog get published under the SciAm banner is beyond me. Even considering how far they have fallen as a journal, you would think there is someone there with institutional memory and an iota of self-respect.
Stopped buying the thing some time ago.
getting tired of the standard of articles being printed, I and my young (12 years old) son finally wrote a letter to the editor of SciAm a couple of years back carefully and respectfully detailing the myriad of physical errors and mis-reporting in an article on Scramjets.
Its a real shame as they did, and can do better if only they tried.
I still hold a few of super SciAm reports from the good ole` days, especially the one from original Woods Hole report about finding the Ozone layer hole
Scientific American has been going downhill at an ever-increasing rate since the demise of ‘The Amateur Scientist’ and Martin Gardner’s mathematical column. R.I.P.
And who is Bora Zivkovic? Is he a brave warrior for truth, definitively cutting down Anthony’s position on AGW by producing strong, unequivocal evidence for the IPCC BS he’s swallowed? Or is he ‘just another’ rent-a-gob oozing bile and innuendo? I know what he looks like.
Envy is the sincerest form of flattery…
Scientific American was one of very few Western magazines allowed in the former Soviet Union — and even reprinted there in Russian translated version.
In America, I was a subscriber for a year or two, then wrote a letter to an editor about their leftist bias, and dropped the subscription. I never click on their articles on the Web.
I am surprised that there has been so little mention of New Scientist (AKA the ‘Guardian Science Supplement’ – well at least by me) here, perhaps it is just not considered a science publication at all any more. The biggest dissapointment for me however is Nature, unlike Scientific American, which is a popular science magazine aimed at the educated layman, Nature publishes original research of significance and quality. I usually see Nature papers on line, so was shocked when I saw the political nature of the editorial pieces, which to me seem completely incongruous in a journal.
I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised that pretty much all of the scientific establishment has moved leftwards, academic science is largely funded by government and supra-governmental agencies so it is not a big shock to see that they are supporters of more of the same. I bet the scientists here are much more likely to have a commercial background.
Also not surprising that blogs like WUWT are popular – the views expressed here have little or no access to other media, so no need to invoke ‘gaming’ to explain it.
Final point – civil litigation is a mugs game entirely for the purpose of enriching lawyers, strictly for those with much more money than sense.
Many comments here remind me of a scientific journal in The Netherlands I once subscribed to. For several years it was a source of valuable information but then we ( the readers) got a questionnaire about what we wanted to be the content. I considered this an ominous sign, telling that the editors had lost sight or that the owner forced them to do this. Within a year the chief editor was replaced and the journal became filled with all kinds of silly human interest items. The circulation numbers went up and the journal became a succes item you could find in the super market among other Ladies Magazines. The only thing that did not change was its name. SciAm seems to be hijacked in a similar way. The old journal does not exist anymore and now people like Zivkovic operate under the once famous name. Well, nothing lasts forever, and the disappointed readers should look for a real scientific journal as its successor.
SA was my third grade Christmas Wish in 1959 and I cancelled my subscription about five years ago due to its Warmists politics. Science is lessened by lack of debate.
So i go look at mr zivkovic, and find the following two tweets, in order of posting:
Bora Zivkovic @BoraZ
Battling antivaccinationists at FreedomFest http://bit.ly/OLe1cs
Using zombies to teach science http://bit.ly/O5Oiwb
I have nothing to add.
tomwys says:
July 16, 2012 at 11:17 am
“John Renie was the last Si-Am Editor worthy of the title. The magazine has yet to recover.”
30 year SciAm subscriber here. Let it lapse once several years ago to protest the liberal advocacy couched as Science but missed it too much and didn’t let the lapse go for long.
John Rennie led the decline with obsessive Darwinian evolution advocacy. This naturally progressed into global warming advocacy. Once you decide you’re going to move from supporting experimental science to advocating narrative science there’s only two narratives in science that a great many readers might be interested in – evolution and global warming.
I remember once Rennie was at a confab where Bill Gates and the president of Intel Andy Grove were in attendance. Rennie walked up to a small group that Grove was talking too and asked if Intel were concerned about how creationists were poisoning science and how that would effect the quality of new scientists and engineers emerging from America’s universities. Grove looked at him like he was someone who just farted in church and said “We don’t perceive that to be a problem we need to be concerned about.” Rennie was visibly flabberghasted that that technology industry titans didn’t give a damn about Rennie’s campaign to blackball God in public schools.
Anyhow, De Christiani (or whatever her name is) who took over when Rennie was fired (not long after the Grove incident, by the way) continued carrying the torch in the war against God. That’s what this is all about. Global warming and evolution aren’t so much about science they’re cause celebre’s in the academic-atheist war against religion.
Another example of when SciAm did this was when it briefly hired my good friend Forrest Mims to write the Amateur Scientist column in 1990. Mims is a bit of a hero figure in the personal electronics and computer industry and is a citizen scientist of some renown. Mims is also a devout Christian who believes this world was created by God. Someone at SciAm evidently discovered that Mims was not an evolutionist and terminated him after just a few columns. Shameful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Mims#cite_note-40
Hanoi G says:
July 16, 2012 at 10:55 pm
Perhaps I’m blind or something, but I don’t see a threat from Anthony, vague, empty, or otherwise. All I see is a demand that a journalist live up to his profession’s ideals.
Well, that and another example how any post about SciAm releases a flood of comments from folks to whom SciAm was once a vital part of their lives.
I guess it didn’t make to Hanoi or wherever your mailbox was when SciAm was great.
Walter Horsting says:
July 17, 2012 at 3:19 am
> SA was my third grade Christmas Wish in 1959 ….
I’m impressed at how many people here read SciAm when they were children. I shouldn’t be, I suppose. There’s a set Questar telescope owners who drooled over Questar ads in SciAm and Ski & Telescope when they were children int the 1950s and finally bought the scopes in their 40s and 50s when they could finally afford it.
At least Questar maintained their quality.
My sad SciAm story: As a child in the late 1970’s, I asked for and received a SciAm subscription. What a wonderful magazine. In high school, I spent so much time perusing old issues that one day, I got called out of class by the school librarian, who, knowing my love of the magazine, gave me three large boxes of back issues to take home. (I still have them)
Fast forward to the late 80’s (I’m in college) and I noticed an “agenda” sneaking into more and more issues. What happened to the raw, hard science magazine I used to love? Soon after, I cancelled my subscription, and mourn the magazine to this day.
Is there any magazine (or webzine) out there that currently comes close to the love of real knowledge and science that SciAm used to have? This is not a rhetorical question.
Ok. . . reading this thread, surely not a scientific survey, but at last count we have 146 responses, with a large majority of them stating that they were former subscribers of Scientific American for dozens of years, or multiple decades of years. Many/most of us started reading as boys, having been given subscriptions as gifts by parents, or grandparent. . . many/most of us are now in our 50’s or 60’s in scientific, engineering, or other technical fields and remember fondly our love for the magazine. . .and this has brought back memories, I agree also with the comments about Discover Magazine, and National Geographic following the same path as Scientific American. I too had subscriptions to those magazines, which I allowed to lapse due to their allowing increasingly political commentary to infect the writing.
There surely is a desire for untainted scientific writing. The comments here, and the success of this blog surely represent a market for that writing. I’m guessing many/most of us here. . . and thousands like us who know nothing of the WUWT blog, would jump at a magazine in the genre of the Scientific American writing of the past, and we are in a position in life with disposable income where we might subscribe to a ground floor effort to make such a magazine possible. . . or in any respect I know that I would.
Could this blog somehow be the foundation for such a magazine?
REPLY: Watch the skies – Anthony
Jeremy Poynton says:
July 16, 2012 at 1:33 pm
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2012/07/warmist-american-blog-editor-bora.html
gives “Service Unavailable – Error 503″
Not for me; took me right to the page.
Jim Masterson says:
July 16, 2012 at 4:42 pm
>>
chris y says:
July 16, 2012 at 12:24 pm
<<
I canceled my subscription to SciAm for the same reason. Although, I don’t agree with Lomborg as a general rule, at least his book has more facts on one page than SciAm does all year.
Nature and Science are going the same way. I’m about to drop those subscriptions too.
____________________________
Another commenter pointed out that SciAm is now under the Nature umbrella. That explains a lot about the content.
I started receiving a FREE subscription to Nature Climate Change last year. Two things have struck me since:
1. The most important articles in NCC are immolated by WUWT, ClimateAudit, Pielke Sr, Pielke Jr, several weeks before my copy shows up in the mail. This is a really remarkable development in climate science.
2. Almost every article makes policy recommendations. This is content for what is purportedly a science magazine.
I expect the shark-jump tipping point arriving any time now, which will trigger my letter to NCC requesting that they cancel my FREE subscription. To save the planet.
Hanoi G says:
July 16, 2012 at 10:55 pm
I keep hearing how scientists and bloggers are committing “slander” or “libel” and cries to “sue the bums!” and similar sentiments. Anthony Watts, I dare you to sue him. I double dare you. I suspect you are making vague and empty threats to rouse the troops to your side….
Your real name wouldn’t be Fonda now, would it?
Hanoi G says:
July 17, 2012 at 12:22 am
So send your demand letter. What are you waiting for? Either do it or quit whining.
This is Anthony’s blog. It thus follows he can “whine”, if that’s what he’s doing, as much as he wants. If you want to carry on whining please go away and start your own blog elsewhere.