This is a guest post about the execrable Greg Laden, and his calls for firing Dr. Willie Soon without having one iota of proof of his assertions. I’ve had run ins with this fool before, where I point out he’s lied about me, and even considered taking him to court for libel. In this episode, once again, Greg Laden is wronger than wrong, as is the paid political shill Brad Johnson, campaign manager of Forecast the Facts, who put together the smear campaign seen in the photo below. As Instapundit says, “hit back twice as hard”. Its the only thing a bully truly understands. – Anthony Watts
Guest essay, reposted with permission, by William H. Briggs, statistician, who blogs here
Government Funding Is A Conflict Of Interest: Cowardly Calls For Climate Scientist’s Firing
The Beast
What entity pours by far the most money into scientific research? I’ll give you a hint. It’s the same entity that has been growing without bound, mercilessly muscling aside all competitors who would encroach into its space. It’s an entity which has a keen and abiding interest in the research it funds. An entity with desires. This entity cares results from its funded research turns out this way and not that.
No, not an oil company. Nay, not Apple corporation. Not even a pharmaceutical. It’s Uncle Sam!
Did you not know the scientists who receive Uncle’s lusciously large lasting grants are the same scientists who sit on the committees which award the grants? Conflict? It’s true the various wealthy agencies have a permanent and ever-burgeoning staff (see Parkinson’s Law and this) which shuffles the booty to and fro, but they’re advised by transient academics who today are at their home institutions standing erect with their hands out, and tomorrow are on the Metro to the NIH to sit (erect) in judgment of their peers.
Yes, the same people who award the grants are those that receive them.
Didn’t you know this? It’s true a man can’t award himself a grant, but he can give one to his pal and neighbor, and when its his pal and neighbor’s turn to sit on the review committee, he can and does return the favor.
But aren’t grants anonymous? Sure, some of them are. In the same way you think your online presence is anonymous. It takes almost a full minute of scrutiny in most cases to discover the name of the pleader. And many times there is no pretense of anonymity. This makes it easy to punish your enemies and boost your buddies.
What about the nature of the grants?
If the EPA solicits applications for the grant “Find something wrong with this power plant” do you think their pleadings will go in vain? No, sir, they will not. Dozens upon dozens of imploring missives will arrive at headquarters, all promising to finger the culprit. And do you think the investigations of the winner (and now richer researcher) will disappoint? No, sir, these investigations will not. Besides the ordinary willingness to please found in cooperative well-fed persons, there is also the promise of future monies for a job well done.
Not only will the researcher gladly suck at the government teat, strengthening his own bank account, but the researcher’s boss will benefit, too. For in each government gift is attached the miracle of overhead. This amounts to an additional 50% (more or less) of the grant’s value, a sum which goes to the researcher’s boss to spend as he pleases.
As he pleases, I say.
Overhead can be, and has been, spent on all nature of things. New offices and furnishings. Wintertime junkets to sunny uplands. Hiring of nephews and nieces. This overhead is very pleasing to the researcher’s Dean and the Dean’s guard of deanlettes. The Dean encourages grants for this reason, making sure to hire just those folks who are likely to bring in more government overhead.
The system feeds on itself.
For these and for many more similar reasons, the biggest conflict of interest in scientific research is government grants. It is an open scandal of monstrous proportions that scientists who receive government money do not declare that they might have been influenced, that they never admit their interest (beyond saying, “This grant was funded by grant xxx-yyy”).
Climate chaos
And so we come to one of the most cowardly unethical asinine foolhardy pig-ignorant acts we have witnessed in the thing we used to call Science.
You can see the picture above. It’s being passed around by the juvenile simpleton—this is an provable accusation, not meaningless abuse—named Greg Laden. He would like to see Willie Soon fired from his job, because why? Because, and I quote the ass,
Apparently, his research is paid by the fossil fuel industry.
The research in question is the paper “Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model” written by Lord Monckton, Wille Soon, David Legates, and Yours Truly. See Climate Paper Causes Chaos, Angst, Anger, Apoplexy! (Hacking?) for more details.
Not one penny, not one iota of consideration of any kind, was received from any source for the writing of this paper. It was a labor of love, done on personal time (of which, for my heresies, I have mountains). We wrote and re-wrote, and re-wrote some more, then decided which journal might enjoy seeing the paper. We knew (see Climategate) our names alone would cause its rejection from the usual “Consensus” sources. So we went where we were not known, figuring the work would be judged on its merits and not its politics. It was.
We submitted. Then we endured a grueling peer-review process (your proctologist was not as thorough). Our paper was accepted. And that’s it.
That makes Laden’s insinuation a lie. No fossil fuel industry funding was received. And even if it was, the details I gave you about the true source of tainting money in research also proves that there is nothing special about oil money. Indeed, oil money is less influential because (1) there’s much, much less of it, and (2) there is not the habit of the same people who receive the grants also awarding them.
The believers in science-is-politics who have organized the petition have attracted “21,263 signers so far“. This is a crowd that wouldn’t be able to define convection. This is a crowd that knows nothing about global warming, but they sure as heck believe in its solution.
Idiots.
UPDATE: (By Anthony)
I wonder if Greg Laden and Brad Johnson, campaign manager of Forecast the Facts, will be putting together a smear campaign to get every member of the American Geophysical Union fired? After all, in 2013, they funded their annual meeting heavily with fossil fuel interest$, and again in 2014.
http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2013/general-information/thank-you-to-our-sponsors/
http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2014/general-information/thank-you-to-our-sponsors/
Sigh. What an extremely naive (or intentionally misleading) view of how the federal grant review process works, and even what types of research are funded. There are no programs funding something so specific as, “what’s wrong with this power plant.” If there are, please show them to me.
Yup, it was a bit overplayed, but the naïveté of not acknowledging its existence, does not make it any less real.
There are no programs funding something so specific as, “what’s wrong with this power plant.
Hmm…. Just for starters–review “Challenger” and “Columbia.”
http://www.911myths.com/index.php/Comparing_costs
: > )
You don’t do humor, eh Barry?
First, don’t sue anyone. That is costly and time consuming. Do make sure this jerk’s actions are widely known.
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For those not familiar with how government goes about getting research done, the process is handled with a “request for proposals” that describe what someone (who?) thinks needs doing. Here is a link:
Requests for Proposals (RFPs)
http://www.education.nh.gov/rfp/index.htm
A day ago on Jo Nova’s site I made a reply, part of which says: “ However, through the process of “Request for Proposals” (RFPs) there is too often a mis-allocation of funds into ideological driven and wasteful activities. The USA’s Senator Proxmire initiated a “Golden Fleece Award” to highlight such waste. For example – from 1975: “The Federal Aviation Administration was named for spending $57,800 on a study of the physical measurements of 432 airline stewardesses, paying special attention to the “length of the buttocks” and how their knees were arranged when they were seated.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece_Award#Award_winners
Overhead
Briggsy mentions the problems with “overhead.” The concept is that a university has to pay for electricity, janitorial service, and many other things. Thus, the reasoning goes, that the funded research is an extra load on the budget and should be paid for by the grant. So, an audit (or several audits) of university budgets are completed to determine (across different types of research) what this extra cost might be. The result has been a percentage of the total salary on the budget line.
“This amounts to an additional 50% (more or less) of the grant’s value,
I haven’t seen any of these things in years, so maybe others could say what they have seen recently. If so, state the type of research. Thanks.
John, the time for playing by gentlemanly rules is long over … if you want to defeat ‘terrorism’ you deploy their tactics against them. Ever wondered why ‘terrorism’ is such a successful pursuit nowadays?
Well, some of it is funded by the US government in the name of the US taxpayer.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-should-americans-fund-hamas-1401913021
Oooops! I may have just stumbled across a universal truth.
It’s a growing problem in almost all fields of serearch and not only in the US. A researcher who does’nt pull in grants is ipso facto a bad researcher. As a friend of mine (at a Swedish University) said recently, today Einstein would not have a chance to get tenure since he did his research by just thinking. No research teams, no projects, no grants, no equipment, no overhead…..
Laden isn’t finding any support on his blog, and he’s certainly doing lots of back-peddling. Now he’s claiming that he simply posted a link to a survey about whether or not Soon should be fired and saying that he thinks Soon should be investigated for ethical issues that don’t deserve a firing.
Hmmm… so Greg Laden realizes he shot himself in the foot… and barely escaped shooting himself in the head because his foot was in his mouth… hmmm… hmmm…
Out of concern for Mr. Laden’s safety, I suggest he not be allowed possession of anything more dangerous than these.
http://www.greenrainbowrevolution.com/images/small/9-023_24_Reuser_kindergarten_scissors.jpg
Thanks for the update, Michael.
P.S. And I’m not 100% sure he should even be allowed to possess these http://www.greenrainbowrevolution.com/images/small/9-023_24_Reuser_kindergarten_scissors.jpg
without a BATF Class 3 permit and a note from his mother.
Michael Jankowski
Ahhh, but he did sign the petition requesting Soon be fired, right?
Yes he did…”reluctantly,” lol. I can only imagine what forces conspired to force his hand.
Warning: Trying to follow his form of logic causes headaches.
Yesterday (31 January), Nobel Prize winner Charles Townes died at the age of 99. He invented the laser and discovered the black hole at the centre of the galaxy, and spent many decades on the vanguard of scientific inquiry. In a 2005 interview with National Public Radio, he said:
“Consider what religion is. Religion is an attempt to understand the purpose and meaning of our universe. What is science? It’s an attempt to understand how our universe works. Well, if there’s a purpose and meaning, that must have something to do with how it works, so those two must be related.”
Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/simcha-fisher/rip-charles-townes-brilliant-physicist-man-of-faith/#ixzz3QRKPS7j3
Our American Broadcasting Corporation’s world news had to talk about measles , football and a big snow storm. Just not enough time for a great man and his valuable work. I’m sure they will somehow find several hours for Algore someday in the future unless he freezes in an SUV stuck in a snow bank.
It was the Maser he invented not the laser.
Townes invented the MASER, yes.
He also invented the optical light LASER.
Infra-red LASERs were developed just before.
Ted Maiman produced the first laser in 1960, a ruby laser, in the visible. Townes was trying to get an IR laser to work at that time but wasn’t successful. The first gas laser (He-Ne) was produced at Bell labs in the same year, it was the first continuous laser.
That doggone Townes was still consulting well into his 90s. The Energizer physicist.
There’s considerable confusion in that quote. How something works is often fairly clear (well, considering climate, maybe not). Purpose is an entirely different kettle worms. Consider the screwdriver, what is it’s “purpose.” It seems implicit in the name, but actually the name is just a description of the form. When you open a can of motor oil, what do you open with? Well there are a lot of possible tools, but my dad’s preferred tool was a screwdriver. Open a can of paint? Well, again there are specialized tools, but even many professional painters I known just carry a screwdriver for the job. Then, turn to the “meaning” of a screwdriver. Right.
For sociopaths like Laden there is nothing you can say to him that would faze him, he is amoral, not immoral or moral just incapable of having any consideration of morality. His thrill is in manipulation. What can you do about the Ladens of the world, not much, they have their personality disorder and that’s about it.
The people he easily manipulates are lost causes as well, tell those folks someone or something to hate and they’ll line up. The best that can be done is to expose Lards ignorance and neanderthal approach to debate (bloody your opponents with a bat to the point they are unable to debate) and hope reasonable people are listening.
And now for gratuitous ad-hominem; Laden literally looks like he could make a good Dr. Evil, figuratively he has an amazing resemblance to a pus filled infected boil.
No need to hold back, Alx. Tell us what you really think ;o)
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I pretty much share your opinion except for the last sentence. I don’t think gratuitous flattery is appropriate on this thread.
HR
Ok, that one almost knocked me out of my chair
Some of my best friends are pus filled infected boils,…..
Is Greg Laden’s middle name ‘bin’? His diatribes have about as much truth as other defamatory rants we have seen in recent decades.
No, it must be ‘S**t”. He’s so full of it.
I wouldn’t hesitate to donate money for a lawsuit against this…(fill in your term of choice)!
William H. Briggs’ logic in his blog article ‘Government Funding Is A Conflict Of Interest: Cowardly Calls For Climate Scientist’s Firing’ is simple; eloquently so.
Following is my assessment of Briggs’ generic logic in his blog article. Research funding sources should always be questioned and investigated, thusly, requiring that research paper bias should always be a fundamental critical issue to analyze for in all research papers.
On a separate thought. By Laden’s own explicitly stated position on funding disclosure, Laden needs to reveal all indirect, incidental and direct funding for his smearing articles and activities on Dr Soon. Laden should include disclosure of any agreements (verbal or written) with other parties that outline any form of compensation or future considerations favoring himself in return for his smearing articles and activities on Dr. Soon.
John
the Shirky Principle, named after a statement by Clay Shirky that:
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
In some ways that’s a corollary to Upton Sinclair’s famous quote:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
+1
They say you can’t judge a book by its cover but judging from that photo of Greg Laden I’ve come to the conclusion that that saying is untrue. Either that, or there’s an exception to every rule. Perhaps such a potent visage as portrayed (hard to look at, eh?) provides the exception: a truly graphic representation of a human being I’d rather not know.
I just paid a visit to Laden’s blargh; he’s actively deleting comments.
I guess negative attention is better than none at all.
Actually I was a little surprised when I looked at the Alexa numbers (ranking closer to #1 is better):
US or (UK) Rank Worldwide rank
WUWT 12,244 21,583
Scienceblogs 37,745 114,635
Hotwhopper 73,479 419,141
I’m unsure what ranking begins to define the shallow end of the gene pool, but I was expecting Hotwhopper and Scienceblogs to be in the same neighborhood. Scienceblogs may inadvertently get traffic from the more legitimate “scienceblog.com” site.
Laden’s post has caught the attention of Bradley Keyes
Here’s Mr. Keyes at ATTP
.
and
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/some-new-rules/#comment-6588
I think the take away message from the posts so far is, nobody ever heard of this guy Laden until now.
We do know Dr. Soon however, and he is a very fine Scientist. I would judge his work (if only I was qualified) by it’s content, not by the signature on his pay cheque. I have yet to hear a Sceptic criticise an alarmist work, for anything other than the content. The arguments are distinctly different in this regard which is why they don’t want open debate.
Eamon.
The Golden Fleece Award should be kept up to date, I’m surprised that it isn’t awarded every year. – Ref:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/31/greg-laden-and-his-cowardly-unethical-asinine-foolhardy-pig-ignorant-act/#comment-1849041
Wow! some nominations – the EPA, …USA Climate Change budget…there are so many…any good suggestions?
I wish I could remember who came up with this wonderful observation about lawsuits:
“If you want to get screwed, go to a courthouse. If you want justice, go to a whorehouse.”
OK everyone, we’ve given this goofball way to much thought. You can’t fight them with logic. No delusion is so firmly held as one that you are paid to keep.
Surprised no one has referred to him as “Greg Bin Laden” as of yet…
OK, I will. Greg “son of Bin” Laden. Never heard of him before this, but what an idiot P.O.S.
Every time the man is mentioned here this little Ad Hom pops up. I have no love for the man, he’s a vile and nasty piece of work who maliciously maligns many in his activism. However the persistent jibes about his name being similar to Usama Bin Laden. it’s puerile and does nobody any favours. Indeed having brought this up before the moderators have agreed and given warnings to be civil and rise above that sort of thing.
I have a friend named Bin Laden ( Binladin depending on who is reporting his name ) and that’s simply because he is a part of that Saudi family. Should he be mocked and abused because of an accident of birth, familiar ties to a man that was disowned decades ago?
There are still many European families using the surname Hitler. And why should they not given that it’s been around since the 1700’s. Would you castigate these people for sharing a name with a man history demonises?
Whilst an obvious way to attack Greg Laden it’s low hanging fruit and disappoints me every time I see it. And I see it every time his name comes up on this blog.
Furthermore…
Willie Soon is an animated and entertaining personality, whereas Laden is a plodding, soporific poser.
Willie’s a winner and Laden is a looooooooooooooser.
Come to think of it; are there any warmers with a funnybone? Not counting Ray Pierrehumbert, I mean.
Scott Denning, CSU, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GHlnjrZLUo
But this Greg Baby is another wonderful poster boy for the Cult of Calamitous Climate.
Just like the Mann few of us could have created such an odious character to mock these chicken littles with.
Yet for free and for real they leap into print, rush to control the narrative, causing most normal persons to stop, gag and question.
I just could not have created believable fictional characters so stupid and appalling as the Alarmed Ones keep puking forth.
For a list of 20-plus things that would be happening (but aren’t) if climate contrarians were actually well-organized and well-funded, see my WUWT guest-thread, “Notes from Skull Island” at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/16/notes-from-skull-island-why-skeptics-arent-well-funded-and-well-organized/
I’ve heard of Willie Soon, but who the heck is this Greg Laden?
It looks like Greg Laden needs an education like Ken Rice received.
http://www.populartechnology.net/2015/01/who-is-and-then-theres-physics.html
Does Greg’s employer need to learn what he has been up to?
Has anyone archived Laden’s article + (now reduced by 25) comments? If anyone has the ability, they should do it now. Laden has already changed the title of the article from; Willie Soon, fire him Soon to Willie Soon, will he soon be fired?. I would strongly suggest an archived version before any of the main context also gets altered, which Laden is known to do on a regular basis.
Greg Laden has been known to alter comments on his site so that they appeared to be criminal death threats. Archive any dealings with him with an independent third party. Archive.org can create copies on request.
One wonders if there is an element of ethnic prejudice in Greg Laden’s attack on Willy Soon. Since he won’t bow and confess belief in the apocalyptic end-of-hockey-stick warming gradient, GL thus can only regard him as a troublesome “gradient”.
Talking of ethnicity, slightly OT but it now seems that climate politics are extending control over US immigration policy also, with would-be immigrants expected to have “correct” views on climate change:
http://www.thedailyrash.com/obama-sends-troops-to-border-after-learning-illegals-deny-climate-change
Its always best not to step in the sh** in the first place rather than to try and clean it off your shoes . Although its tempting to react this way , its worth remembering that the AGW faithful have shown themselves time and again to be able to ignore any facts that do not agree with them and accept any lie that does and Greg Laden will probable be nothing but happy that people that are reacting to his BS so strongly , for his looking for ‘martyrdom’ to be see has speaking ‘truth to power’ by the fellow alarmists.
Point out his lies by all means , ask , him to back up his claims , but don’t waste effort on him .