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.
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Me thinks, that many of these comments, should have been made over at SCI-AM, where they will do the most good. Here it is nice and safe for skeptics to post, but mainly falls on the ears of the already converted. No risk – No gain.
Just because realists have given up their subscriptions (I gave up mine years ago) to Sci-Am does not mean commenting should cease. Rabid warmists, have had their way, for a long time, because most scientists have abandoned submitting comments, when their subscriptions lapsed.
Since it is now populated by laymen, it is even more important to ensure the skeptical voices are heard. Who knows, maybe it will steer the rag back towards the scientific method instead of popular propaganda. They surely are aware of their plummeting subscriptions and may be scratching their heads, to explain it. Let’s tell them. GK
Anthony….how about a compiling the list and forwarding it to SA to show them the loss to their readership? I recently wrote to ProSci about their Global Warming hate piece…all hate and no debate!
The same can be said of the Royal Society for Protection of Birds. So I cancelled my sub in 2011.
In High school I kept up with the events via SciAm as a major paradigm shift occurred wrt continental drift. It was a major event for me, and that plus books on evolution in the house sent me down the road to being a scientist. I gag when SciAm and NatGeo go into advocacy mode. Just because you know about the science does NOT mean there is only one solution to a problem, or even that a solution (ie policy) exists that does not cause more harm.
Ok, let me get this straight. An editor for Scientific American trash talks a popular science blog and its subscribers. What’s the possible benefit to his employer by alienating another few hundred thousand science interested potential customers?
Brilliant marketing.
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Hanoi G says:
July 16, 2012 at 10:55 pm
Blather, blather, blather….
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Gane Fonda, is that you?
John Doe says: July 17, 2012 at 3:47 am
John, sometimes it worries the hell out of me that in the global warming debate I am on the same side as people like you. 🙂
Hanoi G says: July 16, 2012 at 10:55 pm
Aw, c;mon Anthony, do you think it is a good idea to let young teenagers comment in here? There is enough going on already without kids chanting from the sideline.
I note that he “attended” and “studied”. No mention of graduating. Apparently he was out-thought by his subject matter.
_______
Sounds very erudite, albeit a bit verbose. But your tower of scholarliness collapsed with “tow the party line” instead of “toe”. Sad, really.
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I’m quite sure Jane’s brother is Peter. Who’s “Gane”?
Put his pic side-by-side with a Dodo. Caption: Separated on hatching?
That’s a seriously naive suggestion. To the political 5th Columnist in the 4th estate, the message is the medium and no deflection or dilution can be countenanced.
They knew there was no downside. Anyone smart enough to follow WUWT isn’t stupid enough to buy SciAm.
Why am I not surprised that when someone calls you (Anthony Watts) on your BS that you and your seemingly mindless followers resort to personal attacks? Is your position really that tenuous? It sure seems like that is the case.
[REPLY: Five posts and five moderations. I agree with Evan, “guttersnipe”. When you have something to contribute you’ll get some respect. In the mean time, we’ll consider ourselves told off good and proper. -REP]
Nothing to add, except that I too used to be a SciAm reader. I dropped it in the mid ’80s, due to numerous moves and general interference of life. I picked it a copy at a friend’s house a few years back, and thought I’d got hold of a copy of Omni — the “science” magazine put out by Penthouse some years back. It was dumbed-down, its research and conclusions filled with holes that even I could see, and it seemed like every aspect of science suddenly had to do with global warming. I’ve read through — or tried to read through — several issues since, only to throw them down in disgust.
I too mourn a once-great publication.
What constitutes non-traditional students?
I’m also curious why someone with a biology background considers someone whose background is meteorology as pseudo-scientific, particularly if the subject matter is climate.
Omni….heh, good comment.
Brian H says:
July 17, 2012 at 10:40 am
Brian, Hanoi G
Slow today?
Jeff Mitchell said (July 16, 2012 at 4:03 pm)
“…I would simply ask for a retraction. I have mixed feelings about asking for apologies because most of the apologies I see in print aren’t sincere. I don’t know what the point of an apology is if they don’t really mean it. The retraction is important though since if it isn’t forthcoming, someone may use that comment since it comes from a writer from a well known magazine…”
Problem with issuing a retraction in their magazine, is that no one would see it.
Reg Nelson said (July 16, 2012 at 3:49 pm)
“…Two years ago they conducted a survey of their subscribers and their opinions on AGW. The results are quite interesting…”
This was the interesting part:
“…A new survey of reader opinions comes to some remarkable conclusions. Although the journal itself cleaves to the old orthodoxy on Warmism, it’s clear that its readers take a different view, and by a very wide margin. More than 6000 have responded, with nearly 20% claiming PhD status. More than three quarters (77%) believe that current climate change is caused by natural processes. More than two thirds (68%) think we should do nothing about climate change, and are powerless to stop it. No fewer than 90% think that climate scientists should debate their findings in public (they are notoriously reluctant to do so), while 83% believe that the UN-IPCC is corrupt, prone to group-think, and has a political agenda…”
And, in true warmist fashion, any link to the results of the survey is hard to find.
Guess they didn’t want anything that would threaten the consensus.
But they did have a reason the poll turned out the way it did: WUWT.
From here: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2010/11/17/do-80-percent-of-scientific-american-subscribers-deny-global-warming-hardly/
“…Readers of the Wall Street Journal may have been surprised by an editorial that appeared Tuesday. We editors at Scientific American certainly were.
In his opinion piece, techno-utopian intellectual George Gilder takes California’s Silicon Valley to task for its green initiatives to create jobs. At one point, he makes this sloppy claim:
“Republican politicians are apparently lower in climate skepticism than readers of Scientific American, which recently discovered to its horror that some 80 percent of its subscribers, mostly American scientists, reject man-made global warming catastrophe fears.”
First, fewer than 10 percent of our subscribers are scientists. Second, the 80 percent climate denial number is not to be believed.
For that 80 percent figure, I’m guessing Gilder relied on a poll that we created for an October 2010 article on Judith Curry (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-heretic). Question number 3 in particular asked visitors, “What is causing climate change?” The poll results show that 77.8 percent responded “natural processes”; only 26.4 percent picked “greenhouse gases from human activity.”
Ignore for the moment that this poll was not scientific (nor was it meant to be) and that it was open to all who have access to the Internet, not just to our subscribers, as Gilder implied.
Rather, the big problem was that the poll was skewed by visitors who clicked over from the well-known climate denier site, Watts Up With That? Run by Anthony Watts, the site created a web page urging users to take the poll (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/26/take-the-scientific-american-poll-on-judith-currry/).
It sure worked. Our traffic statistics from October 25, when the poll went live, to November 1 (the latest for which we have data on referrals) indicate that 30.5 percent of page views (about 4,000) of the poll came from Watts Up. The next highest referrer at 16 percent was a Canadian blog site smalldeadanimals.com; it consists of an eclectic mix of posts and comments, and if I had to guess, I would say its users leaned toward the climate denier side based on a few comments I saw. Meanwhile, on the other side of the climate debate, Joe Romm’s Climate Progress drove just 2.9 percent and was the third highest referrer.
So we were horrified alright—by the co-opting of the poll by Watts Up users, who probably voted along the denier plank. In fact, having just two sites drive nearly half the traffic to the poll assuredly means that the numbers do not reflect the attitudes of Scientific American readers…”
I like that last phrase – “…the numbers do not reflect the attitudes of Scientific American readers…”
This post proves that. It appears that most of the readers of WUWT gave up reading Scientific American years ago.
henrythethird says:
July 16, 2012 at 1:16 pm
Scientific American – Total circulation (2012) 476,867.
They could probably double that number by posting their articles here. Of course, we do have standards…
LOL! 🙂
I’m afraid your comment went over my head. I assume you are referring to Marshall McLuhan’s work, but am not sure what you are getting at. Please expound a little, for us oldsters, with less jargon, if you can. GK
former subscriber as well.
“””””…..henrythethird says:
July 17, 2012 at 3:24 pm
Reg Nelson said (July 16, 2012 at 3:49 pm)
“…Two years ago they conducted a survey of their subscribers and their opinions on AGW. The results are quite interesting…”
This was the interesting part: “””””
Pretty funny Hank3. You mean they didn’t want to hear the opinions of people who think for themselves, and do their own background research ?
And it does seem they are aware that their readership has dwindled, as folks who don’t subscribe to their propaganda, also no longer subscribe to their mag.
As for “green”, and silicon valley “creating” green jobs; common sense says if it is creating jobs it ain’t green. True green advances would imply greater efficiency, and less use of resources including energy, and that would mean elimination of jobs.
And “shovel ready” jobs would be [the] least green of all.
Part of pursuing that pleasure, was renewing subscriptions to popular magazines such as Scientific American, The New Scientist, National Geographic and Nature. For each of those magazines, and some others, I reached a point where I realised they no longer dealt in big ideas, and the truth to be told, no longer even dealt in science. They’d dumbed down to touchy feely mysticism, a weird sort of political correctness and agenda-driven articles and papers. One by one, as the renewal dates arrived, I cancelled the subscriptions.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/the-decline-of-popular-science-journals/
Pointman
Obvious, and I was just attempting to share a double-flip tease. Sorry you couldn’t follow it.
Yes, MM turned inside out. McLuhan said the nature and existence of the medium was the most important thing, not the message-content (and so was itself its own most important content). But for the leftist infiltrators of the mass media, their repetitive assumption-content and editorializing of news and analysis is the whole point. They regard the tool itself and the subscribers with disdain, and share none of their values.
So attempting to inspire them to improve intellectual quality or to appeal to the subscribers on their own terms is a lost cause. Those values are simply invisible and negligible to them. The propaganda campaign is all.