I would not have believed this if I didn’t see it in print. It’s another example of the playbook pioneered by the late Dr. Steven Schneider. Bolding mine.
“This is a Sophie’s Choice: If we respond to the moral imperative to raise public awareness and alarm about climate, we have to be deceptive.
If we are committed to truth and scientific accuracy, we have to talk in hedged, caveat-filled, probabilistic language that is utterly ineffectual in reaching and activating a tuned-out public.” -David Roberts, Grist
http://grist.org/climate-energy/hawks-vs-scolds-how-reverse-tribalism-affects-climate-communication/
h/t to Tom Fuller
UPDATE: 11/2/12 On Twitter, David Roberts is claiming that I’ve misrepresented his position, and called me a “hack” for printing this.
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David Roberts | |
| @drgrist | ||
| @wattsupwiththat I called it a “false dichotomy.” You presented it as my view. Don’t blame your hackery on me. | ||
I replied that the article was misleading:
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Watts Up With That @wattsupwiththat | 01 Nov | |
| @drgrist then learn not to write misleading articles | |||
| |
Watts Up With That @wattsupwiththat | 01 Nov | |
| @drgrist if you have a disclaimer, such as should have been with original, happy to add it. Post stays because your wrote those words, notme | |||
| |
David Roberts | |
| @drgrist | ||
| @wattsupwiththat I didn’t do enough to prevent your misunderstanding, so you’re sticking with it? | ||
| |
Watts Up With That @wattsupwiththat | 01 Nov | |
| @drgrist just add disclaimer that you don’t endorse what u wrote in that para to ur article, assuming isn’t insult re: this, I’ll add it. | |||
| |
David Roberts | |
| @drgrist | ||
| @wattsupwiththat It’s not my job to correct your posts. You know it’s wrong & misleading. You can choose to leave it up or not. | ||
From my perspective, it looks more like he’s embarrassed about it after the fact, maybe because he was getting some flak. The problem with his argument is that his “false dichotomy” statement is three paragraphs above the one where he talks about the “Sophie’s Choice” and to me there’s not an obvious statement that he doesn’t believe what he wrote.
My offer is that if he wants to distance himself from that paragraph, he can add a disclaimer or clarification, and I’ll be happy to follow up with that here. I think it is a fair offer.
Why don’t I believe him about his “Sophie’s Choice” paragraph as not being his view? it has a lot to do with statements like this:
Grist Magazine’s staff writer David Roberts called for the Nuremberg-style trials for the “bastards” who were members of what he termed the global warming “denial industry.”
Roberts wrote in the online publication on September 19, 2006, “When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.” (http://gristmill.grist.org/print/2006/9/19/11408/1106?show_comments=no )
Source: http://epw.senate.gov/fact.cfm?party=rep&id=264568
When a person has tendency to make such hateful and outlandish claims, one tends to believe that he’d make another similar claim, especially since he has not retracted his Nuremberg claim.
If Mr. Roberts does not believe what he wrote about “Sophie’s Choice” I’ll happily issue a correction here if he makes a caveat, disclaimer, or clarification to that effect on his own article.
Roberts just ripped off Mein Kampf:
“The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly. ”
http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/people/DocPropa.htm
Oh, one more thing (if I may borrow that old Lt Columbo line): Grist’s Dave Roberts actually quoted Al Gore as saying essentially the same thing about scary scenarios back in 2006 in an answer to his 6th question in this article http://grist.org/article/roberts2/
” … Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis. … “
“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
–Bertrand Russell
Wow!!!! That Grist link is a visit to the nut house!
Just read the whole article at Grist.
Then the doorbell rang announcing the first of the trick-or-treaters, just in time to break the spell and erase from memory, the words that inexplicably only moments before had held import.
They disappeared with the first ghouls of the night, never to be considered again.
Just listened to “Climategate Revisited”. It didn’t push a specific agenda and was surprisingly fair to the sceptics – and even the warmists sounded reasonable. In particular, and knowing (from bitter personal experience) how easy it is to distort a recorded interview, Andrew Montford (Bishop Hill) and Steve McIntyre were allowed to come over well. Amazing for the Beeb.
David Roberts’ concluding paragraph is almost as bad. Who needs scientific facts when you have “the language of emotion and association”? Is he talking about science here or his religion?
“That’s what persuades and motivates people: not the clinical language of science, but experiences and emotions and associations. Of course communicating scientific facts is important too, but it’s not the primary need, nor the standard by which other communications should be judged. What scolds often do is interpret the language of emotion and association through the filter of science. That’s neither helpful nor admirable.”
Yes, let’s put emotion about science. What could possibly go wrong?
What part of this are people simply not getting.
Empirical modeling began in the late 17th century with Newton who used the Ra/Dec system as a basis for his absolute/relative time,space and motion that nobody really understood,not then and not now.I understand what he tried to do and why it never worked and it is now front and center as meteorologists may wish to explain Sandy from specific meteorological and astronomical background while those pushing a social/political agenda want to generalize modeling without considering why it grew so large,why it took the track it did and why its flooding was more devastating than had the East coast been at a different point in its daily cycle or the moon at a different point in its lunar orbit.
Simply put,modelers insist that one rotation of the Earth falls out of step with one 24 hour day so that such things as daily rotational and lunar inputs into the tides go out of kilter,in other words the devastation of Sandy was due to the time of landfall when the East coast was at a particular point in its daily rotational cycle and the moon at another position.
For goodness sake,read this and this alone,from NASA –
“The Earth spins on its axis about 366 and 1/4 times each year, but there are only 365 and 1/4 days per year” NASA
With the failure of Marxist/Leninism, the elite needed to find a new ideology to help them impose their will on the proletariate. People like Roberts are scum.
Or David Roberts could stick with what he’s already doing, which is to deliver deception truthfully.
Note to the morally bankrupt Mr. Roberts: In neither statement can a “moral imperative” be justified.
But be careful—how have you determined there is a “tuned-out public”, Mr. Roberts? Maybe they’re onto you and the nefarious games you and your ilk play! If that’s the case, what you propose will just drive the public farther away and the “moral imperative” is achieved–perhaps even strengthened.
Just not yours.
David Roberts is asking a question. Here is the full quote:
He then shows how it is possible to communicate a third way, to convey a ‘moral imperative’ without being ‘scientifically inaccurate’.
” … we have to be deceptive. …”
So what else is new? The data has all been “adjusted” to the point that I wonder if any real data can be salvaged from this era. To what point? To create a problem that only a world government of tyrannical powers could enforce a solution for. After the fall of the USSR, the collectivists all became “green”.
Someday, this madness will befuddle young students studying this time period. It will be crazier than Tulip mania.
Not only is it unsurprising in this context, but in the history of the “Western Intellectual” – students of Rousseau, Shelley, or Tolstoy would have no trouble recognizing the principle.
The “grand rewrite of reality for the sake of X” goes back at least to Plato, probably much farther.
And it’s pernicious and destructive every time, and yet never loses it’s glamour.
clipe says:
October 31, 2012 at 1:52 pm
Heads – up. “Climategate Revisited” about to start. No proxy needed.
21:00 – 21:30 UTC-5
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/player/bbc_radio_four
clipe says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
October 31, 2012 at 2:03 pm
oops 21:00 UTC
Was thinking of the upcoming clock chane from EDT
Edit
Was thinking of the upcoming clock change from EDT
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the MSM treatment of “hurricane” Sandy, which basically fizzled about the same time as the HMS Bounty sank. They point at the resulting Frankenstorm and say: See how HUGE the HURRICANE is!!!! Those with no idea about what constitutes an actual Hurricane lap this up like spaghetti sauce.
No doubt about it, the storm was a whopper. A century whopper, even. And it had ‘the highest storm surge’…unfortunately aided by a full moon tide. But was Sandy still Sandy? No. it was a monster made of several components that coincided. Had the Nor’easter not been there, Sandy was likely even less of a no-show than the much-vaunted Irene, another no-show hurricane.
SandySpawn was even touted as being the product of HAARP…notwithstanding the colossal planning needed to make a two-bit hurricane and an unseasonable Nor’easter collide over New Joisey. But that topic is treading on WUWT thin ice, so [snip]. Regardless, the storm and its high-profile Manhattan target became Grist for the misinformation mill. There is a lot of damage, both to infrastructure and truth.
It is a fact that very few things in the world are absolutely certain. It is also my experience that we scientists come across as bumbling idiots when they try to be honest and express this uncertainty to a cynical public who express everything in black and white.
Tibor Skardanelli says: October 31, 2012 at 2:40 pm
We are mocking the guy but he describes the academic reality. Scientists feel compelled to comply with moral responsibility: the Oppenheimer syndrome. This is why many of them follow the warriors of the good against evil, they fear to be among those who knew but did not say nothing. I do not know how it is in America, but I can certify it is the case in Europe. Leftists used this feeling of culpability to impose their point of view, it is the well known gramscist strategy: take control of culture if you want to take the power.
What is expressed here is the ideological base of the principle of precaution: if you are not 100% sure your acts do not have bad consequences do nothing.
You hit the nail on the head, identifying Gramsci. The Gramscians and Fabians are alive and well here in the states. The whole ‘problem’ with a Marxist Revolution in Western Europe and Amerca was identified by Gramsci nearly a century ago: The Proles will never engage in violent revolution due to the fact that they are so well off. Therefore, undermine the foundations of culture, and take a few generations instead of a few years. I’d say they’ve been very successful on both sides of the pond.
True believers are just amazing. It has always been so, but it is sooo astonishing. They just never learn.
Actually “Sophie’s choice”, in the novel and the movie, has a simple solution.
Save the older child, since that one has had more time, effort, and other resources already expended.
In the case of research the choice should also be simple; the truth, as it is, without embellishment or distortion.
Punch drunk. Keep thumping people about the head with incipient climate cataclysm whilst at the same time blaming them for it with the one hand and grasping at their wallets with the other. All but the least intelligent will begin to detect a fish like smell.
I simply cannot help but feel the hand of orchestration masquerading as climate alarmism. The overall purpose? Maybe to engineer a shift from fossil fuels to ‘sustainable’ renewables, to create a generic currency – that of energy – and certainly a world order consistent with UN Agenda 21.
Here, the end justifies the means. This is a religious crusade. The free market is the heretic.
[snip]
I believe the philosophical term for these people is consequentialists. The trouble is they have set themselves up as arbiters of who should be told the truth and who should not and not to put a fine point on it, who the hell are they to decide that?
Gerald Kelleher says:
For goodness sake,read this and this alone,from NASA –
“The Earth spins on its axis about 366 and 1/4 times each year, but there are only 365 and 1/4 days per year” NASA
Sorry – I’m not clear on why that’s a problem. It’s pretty obvious that the 24-hour day has to take into account the change in the relative position of the sun to the earth from one day to the next. A full 360-degree rotation isn’t going to match up with a full 24-hour day. I haven’t bothered to calculate it, but I see no reason to doubt that statement.
As for the rest of what you say, that’s a different matter…
Is there one intelligent person here who can manage to associate one rotation of the Earth within a 24 hour period with the massive daily temperature fluctuations between daytime highs and night time lows because apparent nobody else can –
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/JennyChen.shtml
That value up there is not just an enormous error,it conceals something much more relevant to this era and specifically generalized modeling,we did not create the error but maintain it.
How do you explain to people stuck in a conceptual rut that our era can’t even account for the daily temperature rises and falls let alone planetary climate ?.
“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche