Reposted from Popular Technology with permission
Skeptical Science: Too Inaccurate for Joe Romm
In March of 2012, the climate alarmist website Skeptical Science had their forums “hacked” and the contents posted online. In these it was revealed that Skeptical Science was found to be even too inaccurate for fellow alarmist Joe Romm of Climate Progress,
“Just got this email from Joe Romm: You must do more post vetting. More errors are creeping into posts and it will start making people like me wary of using them.” – John Cook [Skeptical Science], December 2, 2011
This was met with both admission and denial,
“…I somewhat agree with Romm. There does seem to be a perpensity of us towards producing masss volumes of articles when I feel sometimes we should be spending more time critiquing.” – Robert [Skeptical Science], December 2, 2011
“I am pretty much done reading Romm. His knee-jerk attacks on anything remotely contradictory to his own narrative as “flawed” are irksome in the extreme.” – thingsbreak [Skeptical Science], December 3, 2011
“I don’t care for Romm either, […] For the sake of accuracy, we can afford to wait until the heavy hitters have weighed in, we don’t have to pretend to an authority we don’t have.” – neal [Skeptical Science], December 3, 2011
“Romm is waspish and curt, […] but I have noticed that SkS tends to run into trouble when we do our own analysis.” – Albatross [Skeptical Science], December 3, 2011
“I think our own analysis needs to be vetted externally or by those absolutely qualified on the subject matter prior to being put out there.” – Robert [Skeptical Science], December 3, 2011
“Romm was the one to rubbish the Schmittner study. He got burnt. Tough titties.” – Rob [Skeptical Science], December 3, 2011
“Maybe Romm is getting a touch jealous of SkS’s rising fame.” – Rob Honeycutt [Skeptical Science], December 3, 2011
References:
From the Skeptical Science “leak”: Interesting stuff about generating and marketing “The Consensus Project” (Tom Nelson, March 23, 2012)
Skeptical Science hacked, private user details publicly posted online (Skeptical Science, March 25, 2011)
Alarmism or Not? Joe Romm and the ‘Crying Wolf’ Dilemma (Watts Up With That?, May 1, 2012)
D Böehm… Really? If I demanded evidence from Anthony you think his response would be to say, “Okay, my job is to make you happy so here’s what I have.”
Mr Böehm, it’s not a concern to anyone at SkS whether or not you believe this was a hack or not. You can believe what you like, it really makes no difference as to the reality of the situation. So, no one is going to divulge any more private information to you than was already made available in the hack.
All I will say is, take my word for it or don’t. I can tell you with absolute certainty that it was a hack.
richardscourtney… The quote that you’re posting from John was made well before any research was performed. John was speculating at that point, and of course when something like this happens the first thing one does is blame yourself. It took some time to piece together what actually happened.
Again, believe what you want. It really makes no difference.
Rob Honeycutt’s comments are a good example of why SkS has its own category on the sidebar. He claimed to have “absolute certainty” that SkS was hacked.
But with his feet held to the fire, Rob Honeycutt could not produce. If he was not trying to bluff, he needs to post evidence showing with ‘absolute certainty’ that SkS was hacked — keeping in mind that Cook privately admitted that the most likely explanation was a mistake on his part. Publicly, of course, it is a different story. Of course. It’s SkS.
John Whitman said… “What evidence do you offer that it was not an internal security issue exploited by one or more members of your venue’s squadron?”
We checked. It wasn’t.
D Böehm… I never claimed that I would provide absolute certainty for you. I am saying that I was involved in the research after the hack and I have personal certainty that it was a hack, and I am absolutely certain of it. For you… You can choose to accept my words or dismiss them. It’s totally up to you. It’s not my responsibility to make you happy.
= = = = = =
Rob Honeycutt,
It is irrelevant for you to say “take my word for it or don’t” at a venue like WUWT where the default intellectual setting is more like trust only after verifying first. So, without you providing directly the evidence requested by D Böehm, your word simply does not contain any epistemological merit.
Rob Honeycutt, I think you are actually using the infamously non-rational mythos shown by CRU’s Phil Jones. You know, the mythos in the CG1 email from Phil Jones to Warwick Hughes were Jones says; “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”.
Are you (or John Cook) withholding evidence because you know we will be analytically critical of such evidence? Well, we surely would subject any evidence you provide to highly critical analysis . . . guaranteed.
John
I am enjoying Rob Honeycutt’s backing and filling. His climbdown is amusing, because when his bluff was called, he folded.
Rob needs to understand that WUWT is the internet’s biggest and “Best Science” site. That means evidence-free assertions are treated like evidence-free conjectures. CO2 causing catastrophic AGW is an evidence-free conjecture. When someone asks for evidence, there is the same kind of backing and filling.
“We checked. It wasn’t.” heh They exist in their own bubble, don’t they? ☺
John Whitman… That’s perfectly fine. You can interpret the whole exchange any way you wish. I clearly see things very differently than you.
Rob Honeycutt says:
September 26, 2012 at 4:27 pm
We checked. It wasn’t.
= = = = =
Rob Honeycutt says:
My response to your comment is the same as my previous comment to you about D Böehm’s reasonable request to you for evidence.
To paraphrase/highlight what I said in the previous comment:
“Your word is irrelevant unless you provide evidence first. On an open venue it is normal to trust only after verifying with evidence first. : )”
“Looks like you are deploying the infamous Phil Jones non-rational mythos shown in the CG1 email he sent to W. Huges. You know, when Jones says to Hughes; “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”.”
Please direct us to the evidence originally requested by D Böehm. It is a reasonable request.
John
Bishop Hill has some 160 called-out comments from the SkS secret echo chamber. Very telling:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/3/26/opengate-josh-158.html
As the owner of a SKS I object to that abbreviation for these phoney skeptics, as the one is an honest piece of engineering and the other a bunch of fools, who now exposed are here to lecture WUWT on ethics and demanding we “Take their word”. Its like someone said during climate gate, integrity is like virginity, you only lose it once.
The many authors of SkS articles who have posted here and might be reading this thread would regain credibility in the future if they adherred to what the SkS website purported to be as its original purpose in the first place.
But you all have a long way to go to regain credibility from our side. Its going to take some time of showing actual objective evidence and not editing people’s comments after the fact for example. Otherwise, … well … you will be on the right hand side of the links as an untrustworthy website. Maybe you don’t care if that is the case or not. But you really should.
ROFLMAO!!! Do you expect anyone to believe your lies anymore Rob?
http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/09/skeptical-science-censorship-of-poptech.html
That is not called “editing” that is called properly marking where things have been omitted from the quotes, none of which changes the context of what was quoted. It is not like it was “Romm [insult]” followed by an omitted (just joking). What is doing a “my computer”? Is that one of the computer illiterate terms you learned at SkS or is that what you call using the file manager of your operating system? Joe Public will simply learn that what is quoted is word for word from the SkS forums (I was even nice and fixed some spelling errors for you guys).
Notice there has been no denial of what was said.
Richard, Honeycutt had some kind words to say about you too,
Poptech, I think the readers of this discussion can understand that doing a ‘my computer’ involves searching through folders using Windows Explorer.
Anyhow, the bottom line is that you have gone through a whole stack of private correspondance, searching it for what you deem to be the juicy bits, and then even editing most of those, presumably to make them seem even juicier than they were, in an attempt to show what exactly? That people say a few strong things in private that they wouldn’t say in public? In this case, that some SkS authors don’t agree with Romm’s brand of climate communication (while others do)? What on earth do you expect? Get a few dozen climate scientists in a bar discussing politics and you would soon find major differences – it’s normal for people to hold a range of views.
FWIW here is my comment from that thread, quoted in full:
“Typical Romm brevity in that message! All the ones I have from him are in exactly the same style…. anyhow, hopefully he will draw attention to specific issues. Yes there will be occasional errors – most peer-reviewed papers contain a few. However, I tend to agree that SkS should be careful not to act in haste – as Tom suggests, a deadline mentality is not required.
CP posts tend to have quite a few typos in them indicative of the haste in which they are sometimes knocked out, but yes it is a breaking news site. I like the place on that basis.”
Bombshell! Errors can occur and taking one’s time reduces the risk – Joe was quite correct in that respect. And now, I am going fishing. Happy cherrypicking!
Poptech:
re your comment at September 26, 2012 at 10:39 pm.
Yes, and that is trivial compared to some of the lies about me on the web.
I provide information, and – as this thread shows – the truth often hurts the likes of Honeycutt.
Richard
John Mason,
Without pulling on waders and stepping into the rest of the discussion, you need to learn what ellipses are: an English style form indicating the text is an excerpt for which there is accompanying text which may, or may not, be relevant to the excerpted text. Excerpting is not editing, nor does it speak to context. Context is derived by the placement of the excerpt in situ in relation to the text associated with it (and the reason for ellipses in the first place). Ellipses require a prior rendition of the full text portion to be excerpted to be available, either directly, or these days, by hyperlink.
Editorial style practice requires the use of ellipses tomaintain contextual relevance, by indicating the excerpted, quoted material lies within the context of additional (but not necessarily related) material.
In blog/electronic text use, ellipses are placed with or without square-bracket delimiters as a courtesy to the reader that the quote is an un-edited excerpt and may not stand alone. In style practice, it’s normally appropriate to include enough of the related text to maintain the context, although naive users or users with an agenda may not do this. It’s common practice to bold the key portion of the excerpt that will be the focus of the subsequent discussion, though not required. Ellipses are three consecutive periods when within the body of a sentence, four, when they form the last part of sentence.
A strikethrough is an edit. Words removed without ellipses are edits. Excerpts bounded by ellipses may import a contextual edit, although that should not be the intent of the user, and are intended to be used to highlight the salient content of the referenced material as an editorial convenience.
If discussion of climate science is to proceed without any agenda but truth, participants need to be scruplulous about written technique, otherwise all that is happening is a colloquial conversation, useless to most everybody as far as discerning truth is concerned.
e.& o.e. 🙂
Let me see if I understand what Dr. BJ Honeycutt and “Cook the discussion” are really saying here.
They know it was a sophisticated hack that was collecting information for a long time.
They know it wasn’t by a SkS insider as the hacker wasn’t sophisticated enough to be a SkS insider who concealed their identity.
How was that determined? By the same people who determined Climategate couldn’t have been brought about by an UEA-CRU insider?
Seems to me there are only two reasons to conclude it wasn’t a SkS insider:
1. There are no SkS insiders smart enough to hack, or to merely fake a hack with their access, nor do they know anyone who could do such even when given the insider’s access.
2. The “security” was so poor that the pool of those who could exploit it was so vast and deep, the sheer numbers alone made the possibility of it being an SkS insider negligibly small.
Actually it is incoherent and makes no sense. “My Computer” is either a desktop icon on certain versions of Microsoft Windows or a system folder in Windows Explorer. You cannot do a “My Computer”. I pointed this out to further demonstrate the abject computer illiteracy of team SkS.
The fact that multiple key SkS team members are posting here is testimony to the fact that these are very embarrassing to the facade you guys like to show at SkS. Again I would like to point out no one is denying that these comments were said, instead you get hand waving attempts at damage control and lies that the comments were “edited”. As I already stated the context of the statements do not change because of what was omitted.
Your comment was not that interesting which is why I did not quote it. Don’t worry though there is much, much, much more to come.
John Mason sir, you are pathetic.
Mason says:
“…people say a few strong things in private that they wouldn’t say in public…”
Misdirection. In the case of SkS, what was said in private was completely different from what was said in public. Their public assertions contradicted their private admissions. The public and the private SkS comments cannot both be correct, therefore one of them was dishonest. Which one?
Common sense tells us that what was said in private was what they believed. The public statements were nothing but spin — a nicer term than ‘lies’.