Guest post by Verity Jones
If some of Michael Mann’s followers think that prominent skeptics belong in a special circle of hell (see ‘Mannte’s Inferno‘), here’s news for them. The Nine Circles of Scientific Hell*, as proposed by Neuroskeptic blogspot, are likely to be well populated with climate scientists (*An excellent post from 2010 recently published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science). CAGW alarmism seems to think ‘the end justified the means’ and supporters have gone to extraordinary lengths to defend or justify highly dubious actions.
Image Source: Neuroskeptic Blogspot
If Hell is for the unrepentant and those who try to justify their sins, where might such individuals meet their end? In Dante’s Inferno the sinners in each circle face a punishment for all eternity that befits their crimes. What punishments might be meted out in relation to climate (other than the generic ones suggested in the original post)? With a little help from Josh, and a suitable sound track, let me take you through the Climate Scientists’ Road to Hell.
But let’s begin with the repentant. These brave souls have seen the light and thus have avoided Hell but face Purgatory, where they toil in reparation. One scientist who has dared to speak out is Judith Curry. Her Climate Etc. blog is one of the few places where sceptics mix with believers and she has developed a reputation of giving no quarter to those who step over the line on epistemological attribution. Mark Lynas might also get a pass for his willingness to criticize the IPCC for its renewables report with a conclusion that owed more to Greenpeace than science.
First Circle: Limbo
According to Neuroskeptic:
“The uppermost circle is not a place of punishment, so much as regret. Those who have committed no scientific sins as such, but who turned a blind eye to it, and encouraged it by their awarding of grants and publications, spend eternity on top of this barren mountain, watching the carnage below and reflecting on how they are partially responsible…”
Reserved for those who observe the mess that climate science has become, subservient as it is to politics, and wonder whether redemption and a return to a true science-serving path is ever possible. Despite this they remain silent and do not speak out even in defense of others. This place could be full to bursting, such is the influence of the Hockey Team of reviewers and the carrot of climate-related funding.
Likely Denizens: hamstrung journal editors and others for whom keeping jobs has been more important than truth; reviewers who wanted to keep in with the Hockey Team; scientists fearful of having papers rejected; funding agencies (NSF, RCUK); many IPCC reviewers who quietly, but uncomfortably, toe the line (let’s hope more start to speak out). Also found here would be The Royal Society, AGU and the world’s various scientific bodies. They deserve to be castigated for following their own financial interests at the expense of science, or alternatively, simply being fooled. Scientific method anyone? What happened to insistence on testing and evidence?
Second Circle: Overselling
“This circle is reserved for those who exaggerated the importance of their work in order to get grants or write better papers. Sinners are trapped in a huge pit, neck-deep in horrible sludge. Each sinner is provided with the single rung of a ladder, labelled ‘The Way Out – Scientists Crack Problem of Second Circle of Hell”
Well where do we start? Another level full to bursting. The whole climate ‘movement’ is based on overselling uncertain science, turning it into a world-threatening catastrophe.
Who deserves to spend eternity here? The IPCC most definitely, and in particular its political aides responsible for the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) which rides roughshod over uncertainties; a vast swathe of alarmist climate scientists; Richard Muller for promoting BEST in advance of peer-review; University press departments who will happily spin a story on any finding way beyond its original significance; Tim Flannery for PR and wild statements; the late Stephen Schneider for his encouragement of climate science to oversell the science “So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”; Al Gore for An Inconvenient Truth; Bill McKibben for connecting the dots. I could go on.
Third Circle: Post-Hoc Storytelling
First we were told winters would be warmer and wetter: according to UEA’s David Viner “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,…”. Then, just when we had forgotten how to build snowmen in Britain, snowy winters returned with a vengeance. Now we have the explanation “warming makes winters colder“.
In fact those who tout weather-as-climate alarmism in general will reside here, of which the most recent example is probably Superstorm Sandy – a wimp beside the New England Hurricane of 1938. James Hansen blamed Climate Change for the Russian heatwave of 2010 and US drought; NOAA disagreed publishing an article that it was “well within the bounds of natural climate variability”. Here also we have Al Gore for “Dirty Weather” along with Bill McKibben and Joe Romm. Basically, take an extreme weather event and blame climate change for it in the media. No matter that others speak out to counter this propaganda – the damage is done.
Richard Muller may be deserving of this circle for saying that he was a sceptic when he wasn’t, and for saying that the BEST results had converted him to alarmism when he had been in that camp from the start.
Greenpeace also gets a place here for their renewables reporting. As Mark Lynas put it –
“Whilst the journal-published version looks like proper science, the propaganda version on the Greenpeace website has all the hallmarks of a piece of work which started with some conclusions and then set about justifying them.”
Fourth Circle: P-Value Fishing
“Those who tried every statistical test in the book until they got a p value less than 0.05 find themselves here, an enormous lake of murky water. Sinners sit on boats and must fish for their food. Fortunately, they have a huge selection of different fishing rods and nets (brandnames include Bayes, Student, Spearman and many more). Unfortunately, only one in 20 fish are edible, so they are constantly hungry.”
Matt Briggs will appreciate this one and no doubt can suggest some misdemeanors.
On the basis that flawed use of statistical analysis also lands authors in this circle, we might find a certain Dr Eric Steig here, still arguing his side, having smeared warmth from the West Antarctic Peninsula across the continent as an artefact of his analysis.
A recent sinner here would be Dr Vaughan Pratt of Stanford University and his execrable post Multidecadal climate to within a millikelvin on Judith Curry’s blog, in which he claimed to have matched Hadley Centre temperatures (which have error bands around +-100 milliKelvins) to within “a few milliKelvins”. See Mike Jonas’ criticism Circular Logic not worth a Millikelvin on WUWT.
Of course the poster child for p-value abuse has to be a recent paper that links heat waves and birth defects. Willis takes the authors to task in “Keep doing that and you’ll go blind” while Matt Briggs also damns it (as is deserved). Really, some authors (and reviewers) need a common sense check.
Fifth Circle: Creative Use of Outliers
According to Neuroskeptic: “Those who ‘cleaned up’ their results by excluding inconvenient data-points are condemned here. Demons pluck out their hairs one by one, every time explaining that they are better off without that hair because there was something wrong with it.”
Climate scientists like to do things a little differently; sometimes the outliers are more useful than the bulk of the data.
The ultimate example of the use of outliers in climate science has to be the Yamal hockey stick, where one tree came to represent the entire global temperature (see also: here).
Sixth Circle: Plagiarism
Miscreants in the Sixth Circle of Hell should be forced to sit while unable to move or speak and repeatedly watch others being lauded in their place for their work, stolen and used without attribution.
Copygate produced bluster over plagiarism of a book (by Raymond Bradley) by Edward Wegman’s report to Congress investigating hockey sticks before it was shown that Bradley had copied captions from a 1976 book, also without citation. Eventually Wegman was “slapped on the wrist” for ‘extensive paraphrasing’ and ‘poor attribution’. But lack of attribution seems common enough in climate science. Kevin Trenberth was caught out by Steve McIntyre and quietly added citations, while Anthony Watts handled attribution oversight by Matt Menne and NOAA in an exemplary manner. At blog level Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate has certainly incorporated information without acknowledgement, probably out of pettiness as Steve McIntyre suggests.
See also Donna LaFramboise’s post highlighting uncomfortable parallels between text in a chapter of the IPCC Second Assessment Report (1995) and a book by the lead author.
Seventh Circle: Non-Publication of Data
Phil Jones and colleagues at UEA CRU, and Michael Mann/UVa get star billing here for their determination to avoid FOI requests. Non-archiving of data counts too, but perhaps the most insidious example is the disappearing data from the Polar Urals enabling the perpetuation of the hockey stick sham. The story is well covered by Andrew Montford’s The Yamal Deception:
“… [Steve] McIntyre discovered that an update to the Polar Urals series had been collected in 1999. Through a contact he was able to obtain a copy of the revised series. Remarkably, in the update the eleventh century appeared to be much warmer than in the original – in fact it was higher even than the twentieth century. This must have been a severe blow to paleoclimatologists, a supposition that is borne out by what happened next, or rather what didn’t: the update to the Polar Urals was not published, it was not archived and it was almost never seen again.”
Eighth Circle: Partial Publication of Data
Michael Mann gets a nomination for this circle for telling the story but not the whole story in Nature. Of course Phil Jones and Keith Briffa are condemned here too by Phil Jones’ email:
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Gergis et al, deserve a mention for prescreening of data (see subtitle “Screening Fallacy” here); selection of proxies in this manner constitutes partial publication – by only publishing the data that fits the presupposed relationship. Partial publication could also be construed from the paper’s subsequent withdrawal – it partly made it.
Ninth Circle: Inventing Data
The ultimate crime. Inventing results, or publishing such erroneous and/or contrived data that the results constitute fraud near as dammit, comes pretty close too.
Stephan Lewandowsky is an offender here for “an article relying on fraudulent responses at stridently anti-skeptic blogs to yield fake results“.
Peter Gleick lands himself in this circle too. Luboš Motl summarized it as published a guest post by Eric Dennis Selling your soul for a narrative: understanding the Gleick fraud:
“This fraud did not involve any aspect of his own research, but was purely ideological in nature, directed against the Heartland Institute, […]. Gleick impersonated a Heartland board member in order to obtain confidential documents including the institute’s donor list. He proceeded to combine this material with a fabricated strategy memo, […] and send the package anonymously to media organizations for the purpose of outing the donors and undermining future contributions.
Only after himself being outed as the source of these documents by the detective work of a non-catastrophist blog contributor, Gleick fessed up and thereby cemented his career self-sabotage. “
Worthy of a Gleick Tragedy indeed.
Finally, if we total up the work done by Michael Mann and IPCC collaborators in producing, perpetuating and defending the Hockey Stick graph, clearly he has done plenty to earn a spot here for eternity. It is a lot more than just ‘hiding the decline’ – see a History Of How The Hockey Stick Was Manufactured; How to Make a Hockey Stick– Paleoclimatology (What they don’t want you to know) and consider what Climategate, and FOI uncovered. If you are still in any doubt, review maps and graphs from Jo Nova’s Fraudulent hockey sticks and hidden data that make it clear ‘just how brazen the Hockey Stick fraud is’.
I like to think of Mann and his IPCC cohorts marooned in a ship frozen into the Arctic ice at the pole waiting in vain each year for the summer melt to bring an ice-free Arctic thus enabling the release of their ship. In the meantime they are forced to use their own analytical methods to analyze large quantities of data. If the method can produce anything other than a hockey stick they will escape, but it never does – all data run through the programme produces hockey sticks – even data from telephone directory.
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Terrific!
Isn’t there a corner of Hades reserved for the incestuous pal reviewers committing various nefarious acts of collusion? Even though the alarmingly huge crowds of the catastrophic climate polemic faithful destined to enjoy many of the levels shown above will already make Hades crowded.
Of course, while the Hades bound will probably be more comfortable amongst all their climate faith blinded friends. Then again who will they shriek horrific destinies to then? Or will the fuzzy Mckibbies begin scaring the Manniluddites or the Gleick-magnons, perhaps they’ll even poll the Lewdandumowskys? Don’t forget, there are no Nobel prizes in Hades!
Once upon a time, a co-worker asked me in an aside, “What if, the after life is everything that we’ve ever done to others is done to us, forever?” Can one imagine plants forever lying about cores of Manniacal? Or perhaps
The living hoaxters already experience their own little hell. The true believers face their delusion of a dystopian future where the only ray of sunshine would be their crowing of “I told you so!” and the profiteers deep down know that the day will come when it all comes crashing down on them, that they may realize it too late and be left holding the bag for their smarter brethren who’ll sell them out for political gain and plea bargains to avoid prison.
The last level will be reserved for the rest of us should the ideas of folks like Mann etc, for CO2 reduction get adopted by policy makers. Steve Milloy’s “Green Hell” is where these folks in the other levels will lead us if they are not opposed.
Nice post Verity.
The good news for the CACAs is that redemption is possible, by simply confessing what they have done, and actively working to get the truth out about climate instead of spreading lies. I hear someone’s been building ratholes for them to help them climb out of what must be a tough situation, so that should help.
That’s unfair. The mountain has come to WUWT, and likewise to some extent to certain other contrarian sites.
It is the job of the media to monitor them, and other sites, or at least to check up on them from time to time. It’s not the job of such sites to market themselves.
And anyway, contrarians have ventured out into the comments columns of the MSM, quoting and posting links to our sites–which is a sort of marketing. And CFACT has sent envoys to IPCC gatherings, where they’ve engaged in attention-getting stunts; Heartland, Climate Depot, SEPP, and the GWPF have engaged in media outreach, and the compiling of various sorts of contrarian “ammo,” etc. Through politicians like Inhofe, this information has made an impact in that the Senate didn’t confirm cap and trade, and that the proportion of contrarians in the US has grown and is much higher here than elsewhere.
However, I understand MH’s frustration that our side’s efforts haven’t been effectual enough. Somehow, contrarians collectively have not “got their act together.” Implicitly, I made many serious suggestions (and a few facetious ones) in my “Notes from Skull Island,” here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/16/notes-from-skull-island-why-skeptics-arent-well-funded-and-well-organized/ I hope someone with resources and/or influence was paying attention.
I also contributed about a dozen WUWT-improvement ideas to a thread Anthony started asking for such feedback, here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/02/wuwt-web-retooling-comments-welcome/ And I’ve posted four or five suggestions subsequently, here and there. I’d repost them to that “retooling” thread, but comments are closed there now, alas.
I also liked Anthony’s other crowdsourcing thread, asking for suggestions for a “Did You Know . . . ” tab that would package tidbits of contrarian data and analysis for easy digestion by our target audience.
There are lots of things that could be done, if our side could only get organized and funded.
PS: The link to the “Did You Know … ” crowdsourcing page is:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/20/dear-readers-your-help-needed-in-fun-crowdsourcing-project/
Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley says: “But there’s a CONSENSUS!” shrieked the bossy environmentalist with the messy blonde hair. “That, Madame, is intellectual baby-talk,” I replied.
Caution, she’s not alone:
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/we_are_science.jpg
V.
@Bill Mckibben The week of jesus’ birth eh? Let’s consider that a moment. Jeus is an English translation of a Greek name. There was no child born in Bethlehem called jesus, not now nor likely not ever. if we accept that there was a child born who later grew up to become skilled in prophecy and preaching ( there were of course, as any theological scholar will know, thousands of such people, after all prophecy was the fallback skill for the feckless. I expect they had a saying similar to “those who can, do. Those who can’t, preach ) then he would likely have been called Yeshua. The English translation of which is Joshua.
It’s not widely accepted amongst scholars that the child who grew to be the subject of the new testament was born close to this week or even close to the year widely accepted by Christian faith. Let’s face it Bill, the people of ancient Galilee and Samaria were not much for calendars. Even the European Julian calendar, had they heard of it, turned out to be a bit of a bust, what with the vernal equinox problem. Our own modern Calendar came some 1600 years later than the alleged birth and I personally don’t trust the catholic church to have cared much for letting facts get in the way of whatever suited their mission to remain in control of the populace Their archiving was just as wanting, being sparse and given to hyperbolic rhetoric, flowery prose and much exaggeration, something Bill, I think you can agree, has sadly continued to this day in the field of climatology. We know little of truth about young Joshua least of all being able to pin down his birthday.
Even if we accept that such a child was born, lived and became the seed of great tales, and even though I personally think the idea of god is a nonsense and that organised religion is the biggest bane of human history and the biggest hindrance to the growth of civilisation today I do believe that there was a living human, possible a combination of a few, who gave rise to the biblical sagas that came centuries after his death, I’d like to think that if he were to return as prophesied then he’d be more than able to spot the deceivers, charlatans and money-grubbers feeding at the trough of climate science today.
Bill dear boy, Verity’s work is a light-hearted piece of fiction, a parody. You Americans love your first amendment rights don’t you? I believe the work is much protected by that act. Unlike recent hate speech coming from Austria which is not protected but prohibited in most of the Western world, even being a crime in Austria since 2010 ( I’m still considering a police complaint about Parncutt’s recent diatribe but that’s another story ) so have an egg-nog and lighten up. ‘Tis the season and all that.
Happy holidays Bill, may your chosen deity bless you with the gifts you truly deserve.
( in the interest of transparency my given name is Craig Frier, my nickname has been with me many years, it’s habit to use it )
I’m hoping that my rather long post has just been lost to the spam bin. having written it twice on this fiddling little netbook and due to incompetence and a ludicrously cramped keyboard managed to delete my first draft with no chance of recovery then re-written it on same keyboard i don’t possess the will to write it again 🙂
[Reply: Rescued from spam folder and posted. — mod.]
I consider this article a very, very bad kind of joke. I don’t think it’s very different from certain professor calling for death sentences on Skeptics, actually. Maybe he was joking, too?
You don’t seem to care about the fact that many skeptics are no better than those you are putting to various levels of hell here. You don’t seem to care about the fact that you essentially use the same questionable methods. I can see half of the WUWT staff all over the hell you invented yourself for perfectly the same reasons you’re putting other people there.
To me it’s a new low for WUWT. I wonder what will be next.
Kasuha says: December 28, 2012 at 1:26 pm
=====================================
Lighten up, Kashua, it’s a parody on Dante at the expense of the global warmers. For your information, parody is an art form and high comedy. So relax, enjoy the humor, feel better, and live longer.
Kashua,
You’re trying to point out a mote in someone else’s eye, when you have a beam in your own eye. It is astonishing that you are comparing this tame and entertaining article with Parncrutt’s call for the execution of scientific skeptics. You need to get a grip. And a moral compass.
The cartoon of hell is from XKCD, not Verity. And note that none of the circles of hell have a specific punishment. It is an allegory intended to show the corruption and deceit endemic to the climate alarmist crowd. Sorry you don’t understand the difference between pointing out flaws with allegory, versus true evil. The 1930’s were not that long ago.
Humour for the humourless.
On par with science for the sciency scam?
Rhetorical devices and metaphors.
Oh for Pete’s sake, how clearly does this have to be spelled out. The whole point of the article is to highlight the dishonest motives, methods and techniques of the C.A.G.W. lobby. It has precisely nothing to do with wishing our opponents to suffer in a pit of liquid fire as anyone with an ounce of common sense or a rudimentary sense of humour would know.
The punishments described are merely there to highlight and make clearer the nature of the wrongdoing committed in the name of “the cause”.
In fact as has been pointed out several times, Dante would have needed more levels in his Hell to accommodate all of the tricks both clever and thug alike used in promoting this scam.
There is always the risk that in using religious imagery some will take it the wrong way, perhaps because it tugs at some of our most deep seated emotions and sensibilities. That is life, but please do not attribute an evil motive to such a piece of writing just because we have so many examples of our interlocutors wishing us real physical harm. That is a sign of increasing desperation on their part whereas our problem is simply getting heard in the wider world.
We need more Verities, Judith’s, Willis’ and Anthony’s speaking out and writing in eye catching ways so that many more people can understand as clearly as possible the sceptical strands of argument. It only takes one pebble sliding down a hill to start a landslide. Who knows which minds may be opened by this piece and who in turn they influence. Likewise there will be others who’s minds close thanks to the particular imagery used. For them there are other messengers using different images, metaphors and rhetorical devices.
Bill McKibben whines:
“And especially nice to see this kind of creativity applied to those already dead and hence unable to respond, like Stephen Schneider.”
Stephen Schneider specifically advocated and encouraged lying to further the climate alarmist agenda. We don’t give Herr Schickelgruber a free pass just because he’s dead, and the same goes for the mendacious Schneider.
The sixth circle plagiarism comic and the seventh circle graphic following the words “Gleick Tragedy” are both absurdly tiny and need to be resized.
bill mckibben says:
December 28, 2012 at 6:16 am
“What an excellent way to spend the week of Jesus’ birth, delineating precisely what kind of eternal torment people you disagree with will suffer. And especially nice to see this kind of creativity applied to those already dead and hence unable to respond, like Stephen Schneider. A really powerful (and revealing) paper!”
It was a response to the Dante’s inferno post on Mann’s facebook page, not to Parncutts plans to execute the pope, McKibben. Given that your totalitarians come up with another extermination idea every day of the week I see it’s difficult for you to keep track but PLEASE TRY.
Oh here’s another good one. From Wikipedia – Divine Comedy
For fortune-tellers, read modellers!
There is a hell and a special place in hell for people who dupe other people by falsifying data. It will be a very crowded place too. Mainly filled up with 97% of climate scientists whose work supports AGW.
Verity Jones says:
December 28, 2012 at 3:54 pm
“Yes, I’ve picked on Stephen Schneider – in his defense he did say IIRC that each should look to his own conscience, nonetheless he suggested scientists should avoid mention of their doubts. That’s what has got us into the whole climate issue now – with uncertainty being played down.”
schneider was the major organizer who kept the IPCC machine humming. They’re falling apart without him.
(Doesn’t stop the Kyoto / FIT / EPA train – but the IPCC is pretty much finished)
At first I thought this would likely be a bit silly but probably not that interesting. Then, as each circle was descended, I came to realize that it was not only quite well done, and considerably entertaining, but that it was a very approachable parable about the whole sorry mess of “climate science”.
So double points: Both for art / humor and for effect…
I wonder where all those people who publish in scientific journals would appear on this classification. Or where for that matter, those people who do not receive skeptical material for publication in those same journals?
@E.M.Smith
High praise indeed, Thank you.
It did start out as a bit of fun, but as it developed gained depth and substance. It felt important to add all the links because there are so many out there who swallowed the whole climate story and only recently came to doubt: they do not know the detailed history of the hockeystick shenanigans for example. Indeed it predates my conversion to scepticism such that I found it quite valuable and instructive searching Climate Audit (mostly) for appropriate links. I found aspects that I was previously unaware of such as the non-publication of the Polar Urals update.
@DecentFellow
There’s nothing intrinsically ‘bad’ about publishing scientists, although there is a lot wrong with the system of peer review, and the journal ‘system’ does hark back rather to the pre-digital age. As for those who do not receive skeptical material, it depends where the fault lies – is it fear from scientists that if they submit such material it will be a career-killer? Nonetheless they may regret the state that climate science has gotten into that they feel such a way. That sounds like Circle One (Limbo).
@all
I suppose the main difficulty with writing this was the need to assign ‘crimes’ and punishments to certain circles and the ‘judgement’ needed to do so being so very subjective. As several commenters have said, it makes one think, and that is no bad thing.
Interesting idea, but with the exception of the few who have changed (Judith Curry, Patric Moore, etc.) who are working their way out of it, these …people… already have a place waiting for them. The original eighth circle, Fraud. That pretty much covers everyone involved, including the politicians, who have no scientific background. And “Sorcerers, Astrologers, and Fasle Prophets” is an apt description of many AWG types.
another: Peter: “My see, my see, what have you done to my see?”
For Peter, substitute Newton, as founder of radiation physics.