Guest Opinion by Kip Hansen
Foreword:
It pains me to write this opinion piece. As long-term readers here know, I have often defended Andy Revkin, ex-NY Times Environmental Journalist turned NY Times Opinion Section Environmental Columnist, here at WUWT, opening myself to attacks ranging from childish to vicious, and occasionally childishly vicious. Of course, when I comment at Revkin’s NY Times’ Opinion section blog, Dot Earth, whether supporting him or criticizing him, I am similarly attacked by soldiers on one side or the other of the Climate Wars.
Revkin recently committed what I consider a public journalistic offense, on his Dot Earth blog, which I had hoped to help him see in a different, more complete and fairer light, through private emails and by an advanced copy of this opinion essay sent to him yesterday (13 June). That effort failed and, in replies to my emails (in which he neither granted nor denied permission to publish, though explicitly asked), he has informed me of his reasoning and justifications (see the Postscript if that’s all you care to read). Truthfully, what Revkin says only makes his offense worse, in my opinion.
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NB: This opinion piece is about journalism, lack of, not climate science or the other issues involved in the Watts/Peterson affair.
Andy Revkin, NY Times opinion section columnist, the author and host of the NY Times environment opinion blog Dot Earth, covered the Watts/McKibben meet recently in this in his piece:
A Climate Campaigner (Bill McKibben) and Climate Change Critic (Anthony Watts) Meet in a Bar….
to which I left the following comment:
“….Kudos to Andy for this — and for today’s title identifying McKibben as a “Climate Campaigner” and Anthony Watts as a “Climate Change Critic”.
….
The most interesting thing is that these two men are thought of as exemplars of the furthest reaches of opposing views on the climate change — yet in reality are clear thinking, reasonable men who simply disagree about a subject fraught with scientific uncertainty.
My thanks to Andy for highlighting this little get together, which should, in a rational world, be an everyday occurrence as colleagues in a shared scientific field meet and chat about their personal views.”
I still hold that opinion.
Revkin then disappoints, adding the following update at the top of the column:
“Update, June, 9, 8:51 p.m. | Having been on the run overseas since the weekend, I’m only now catching up with Anthony Watts’s attack on Tom Peterson, one of the authors of a recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate paper. The exchange, in which Watts accuses Peterson of prostituting himself and hints at fraud, occurred just before* he’d posted on his friendly meeting with climate campaigner Bill McKibben, described below.
Here’s my reaction:
Any notion that Watts is interested in fostering an atmosphere of civility and constructive discourse evaporates pretty quickly in considering how he handled his questions about that paper. Alternating between happy talk about rooftop solar and slanderous accusations is not constructive or civil.”
Challenged by readers, including myself, in comments, the only reply Revkin gives, to another commenter, is:
Andrew Revkin
Dot Earth blogger 12 hours ago
”I felt it was important to convey the “full Anthony Watts.””
In my opinion, Revkin has utterly failed in his duty as a journalist – the duty to find the facts and the context and report them without injecting personal or political bias.
He failed to discover the obvious fact that Watts had not attacked Peterson – Watts had sent a personal email to Peterson at his official government email address, stating a change in his [Watts’] personal opinion about Peterson’s scientific ethics. It was a harsh personal opinion, but it was personal, man-to-man, between men who should be colleagues and who have been communicating with one another on a one-to-one basis for years.
It is Peterson, a government employee, a government official, listed at climate.gov as “Principal Scientist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.”, who turns this exchange of official government email into a public matter. How? By sending a copy of his government email to a tabloid-like slander-slinging climate-wars website in Australia – a site with known and repeated antagonism to Watts and bending-over-backwards loving-kindness for all things and persons in agreement with the IPCC Climate Consensus. [This is my personal opinion of the website in question, based on repeated reading of content there. WUWT is not responsible for my opinion in this matter.]
What Watts did not do: He did not publish his personal opinion publicly – despite being the editor and owner of the world’s most viewed website on climate (by orders of magnitude). He did not write a joe-romm-ish 1,500 word screed and send it to the tabloid press. That action would have been a public attack. He did not do that. There was no public attack.
The Questions that would have been asked by a True Journalist:
What? Answer: A personal communication between a citizen and a government official at NOAA, in which the citizen expresses a harsh personal opinion about his loss of trust in the public official’s work product and/or personal professional ethics, that has morphed in the blogosphere into an “attack on Peterson by Watts”.
Who? Answer: Anthony Watts, proprietor of the world’s most viewed website in climate matters and Thomas Peterson, as “Principal Scientist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.”.
When? Answer: The original email exchange took place approx. 5 June. Thomas Peterson copied the email exchange with Watts from his official NOAA NCDC email account to a tabloid-like climate website in Australia on June 6, 2015 at 6:04 PM.
Why? Answer: Peterson’s real purpose in doing so is known only to him. But in his comment accompanying the copied email exchange he states “Dear Sou et al., I thought you might find an email exchange I had yesterday with Anthony Watts interesting.”
Does it bleed? Answer: [This flip question is ‘sorta’ what journalists ask themselves to see if there will be relevant public interest in the event.] Yes. US Government Official copies work-related email exchange to foreign web-based tabloid press, suspected of doing so for personal/political advantage in the Climate Wars.
Do we see these answers in Revkin’s journalistic effort? No, nothing in his published work product on this affair reflects that he even considered the context or the facts – other than the one-sided spin in the web-tabloid. Nothing in his response to criticism on his blog (where he gives only the one reply above) indicates that he even noticed that it was Peterson himself that turned a private communication into a “public attack” (although he knows Peterson made the email public) or that Peterson’s copying work-related government email to the foreign web-based tabloid press might be a violation of NOAA regulations or an government employee ethics offense. Or that it is extremely unprofessional at the very least.
In fact, it appears that Revkin’s only involvement with the issue has been to band-wagon on the politically-motivated Climate Wars blogosphere outcry – without reviewing the facts at all.
As of 11;25 AM today, I have had no response from Revkin to my comments on Dot Earth or to personal email to him requesting that he take another look at the affair.
I know that Revkin is over-committed time wise – holding what for most people would be at least two full-time jobs. Maybe he has been too busy to look more closely at the issue. If so, he should not have said anything until he took the time to review the affair properly in its entirety.
I invite him to do this review now and respond here at WUWT. (Or, if he wishes, he knows my email address and can comment fully to me off-the-record, with portions marked “OK for publication”, which he knows I will honor.)
I look forward to seeing a revision of his Dot Earth comments here or at Dot Earth.
# # # # #
Postscript:
I have received two replies from Mr. Revkin, which I do not have explicit permission to publish. Thus, rather than simply inserting them here, I will pull three fair-use quotes from them, which contain the essence of his reasoning and justification.
The first two quotes are from Mr. Revkin’s emailed response to an advance-of-publication copy of the above essay. In that response, the quotes are presented already as quotes, probably from his response to Anthony:
“What was notable was the contrast between your [Watts’] approach to Bill and to Peterson. I couldn’t justify the tone in what I wrote about your Chico meeting without an addendum reflecting what transpired here.”
“Suggestions of scientific fraud or prostitution, even in a personal email, are different (particularly given your policy about considering such missives ‘fair game for publishing,’ one presumes you figured this might end up public).”
My response to the above, though a great deal longer, can be summarized in this one extracted sentence: “Your reasoning is specious at best, even for a private citizen — as a journalist, they cut no ice at all. There is no journalism in that.”
The second is more damning, and came as a reply from Revkin to my response just above:
“Don’t take this wrong, but I really do have more important things to do than dig in further on this.”
What happened to the World Class Journalist Andrew Revkin? Has he hung up journalist spurs? placed his shiny Journalist Star in a shadow box and hung it on the wall? permanently shelved his pocket-copy of the Journalists’ Code of Ethics? Can it really be that he is simply too busy to do a proper journalist’s job?
Or has he traded all that in for the more-or-less anything goes rules of the Opinion Columnist?
Or has become just another echo-chamber partisan gunslinger on the Climate Team’s side of the Climate Wars, taking quick-draw cheap shots at those who others point out to him as opponents? unconcerned if he shoots down the wrong guy in any given shoot-out, too busy to check his aim.
Maybe this is what has become of the majority of science journalists …. They are all simply too busy to do their real jobs. What a sad sad day.
# # # # #
Note from Anthony:
Kip Hansen wrote this essay unsolicited. While I admit I used harsh words, probably the harshest I’ve ever used, I too was surprised that Dr. Tom Peterson chose to immediately send the email to the slimiest of outlets Sou aka “hotwhopper”, run by a person dedicated to denigration, who has not the integrity to use her own name: Miriam Obrien. While I regret that I didn’t choose my words better, I have no change in my opinion [after the NYT incident] on NCDC after what they did with Karl et al. 2015. And apparently, according to insiders, there was an internal fight at NCDC over the publication of Karl et al. 2015. I offered this backstory to Revkin, but he was uninterested.
Sadly, it speaks to the integrity of both Dr. Peterson and Andy Revkin that they consider this form of “journalism” acceptable.
Anthony Watts says:
But his e-mail to Tom Peterson clearly said:
If Watts’s opinion hasn’t changed, why did he say he used to hold one opinion but now “no longer hold[s] that opinion”? That’s pretty much the definition of a change in opinion.
I find that I have used the term “bully pulpit” repeatedly — a term that might not be in every reader’s lexicon. The Wiki gives this definition:
“A bully pulpit is a sufficiently conspicuous position that provides an opportunity to speak out and be listened to.
This term was coined by President Theodore Roosevelt, who referred to the White House as a “bully pulpit”, by which he meant a terrific platform from which to advocate an agenda. “
The biggest problem in the effort to sway public opinion on the climate (toward the obvious fact that Earth’s climate in the past 150 years has been perfectly normal): Leftists character attack, instead of debating their positions, while objective people like us too often try to debate our positions, and refuse to character attack.
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I would think that people who really care about the science of climate change would be used to receiving character attacks by now, and, in return, would treat the smarmy “warmists” with the lack of respect they deserve.
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No objective person or scientist ever has to apologize for calling a leftist “scientist” a liar (hockey stick chart), or a stooge of environmental activists, or a fraud for “adjusting” data to show more warming or eliminate the “pause”– that’s what they do to get government grants to play computer games for a living.
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A lot of men, and I suppose a few women too, would love to get government grants to play computer games for a living in an air conditioned office … especially if the alternative was collecting data / samples outdoors, or doing scientific experiments in a hot, smelly laboratory !
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No objective person or scientist ever has to apologize for calling a politician a parrot for repeating bogus climate statistics (“97% of scientists agree”), or a fool for treating computer games as if they are real science with real data, or a power hungry fascist for trying to make new laws through new EPA regulations, bypassing Congressional approval.
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The hacks who write for the New York Times are only allowed to publish leftist-biased views their editors approve — their left-wing bias in what they choose to publish, and what they choose not to publish, has been obvious for many decades.
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It would be foolish to expect a non-biased article in the New York Times (they recently attacked Republican Marco Rubio for getting four traffic tickets in 17 years, and buying a fishing boat with 10% of the money he made from writing a book, as if that was as bad as the Clinton’s billion dollar slush fund !).
My climate blog (for non-scientists):
http://www.elOnionBloggle.blogspot.com
” I don’t go to bed with no whore and I don’t wake up with no whore, that’s how I live with myself. I don’t know how you do it.” (Bud Fox’ dad in the movie Wall Street)
Whenever you are tempted to climb into bed (metaphorically speaking, of course) with a McKibben or any other known whore, just remember that quote and remember who these people are. They sell themselves (or at least their mind and their integrity) for pleasure and profit. Not much else need be known about a person than that.
If you think one of these guys has a ‘heart of gold’ (McKibben, in this case), just remember this; if they did have a heart of gold, chances are pretty good they wouldn’t have become a whore in the first place. There is no morally redeeming quality in selling your integrity or your mind. There is no ‘kind of dishonest’ or ‘sort of corrupt’ on the side that demonizes any who dare to disagree with the Great and Powerful Oz. Once you are on the medicine show wagon, you are a bought soul. If they were honest, they’d have left that camp behind years ago, when they first began to see the game for what it truly is.
Once you sell your soul, there’s no point in playing fair anymore.
This was my first response to your announcement that you were going to visit with McKibben. I didn’t hit the post button. Instead, I deleted it and posted not a word. I always pause and stop what I am saying when I find myself denigrating someone on an ‘a priori’ basis. This is usually exactly what happens. But now done is done and they’ve again proven that their team has zero scruples and no moral compass of any kind. I feel no compunction to pull punches or be delicate with what I call them. Any who would take the time to discover the facts would see this. So few will that it doesn’t matter. That is how they win. They lie, they cheat, they catch an honest broker in a trap and present the appearance that the person who made the effort to close the divide is in fact the bad actor. Did you think something else would happen than this?
In conclusion; stop laying down with whores and you won’t get burned by them any more. Or keep looking for that ‘broken angel’ and keep waking up with whores. Your choice.
Just my judgmental $0.02 on a dreary Iowa morning.
Because of this thread, I found out about dotearth. I like to be well informed so there is no reason to waste time visiting there again.
I’m a little confused. As Mr. Revkin has failed to permit Mr. Hansen permission to reproduce his copyright e-mails, and Mr. Hansen has obliged, why is Mr. Revkin not up in arms at the copyright infringement by Dr. Tom Peterson of Mr. Watts e-mails.
Copyright has been automatic everywhere since the Berne Convention (signed by the U.S. in 1989) permission to use copyright material, except small extracts for the purpose of literary criticism and other fair use. By publishing in Australia, Dr. Tom Peterson has breached copyright and has opened him-self up to the risk of civil suit. It also gives an indication of his attitude to the rights and opinions of others, perhaps that others rights and opinions are not important whereas the thoughts, rights and opinions of Dr. Tom Peterson are all important.
Brandon, I believe that your assertion that Antony’s email is not a “record” is incorrect. Over the past few years, there have been numerous cases in which U.S. federal agencies recognize emails as “records”. Indeed, agencies e.g. EPA have regularly expurgated identifying information even on the identity of their own employees. For you to support your assertion, you need to provide a case decision, and I am hugely dubious that such a decision has ever been rendered.
Since Anthony’s email was sent to two people (Karl and Peterson), my earlier comment about “slanderous” is not quite as clearcut, though, since they were both coauthors of Karl et al, it seems unlikely to me that an email sent to them jointly could be considered “slanderous”, though it was uncivil.
Revkin and McKibbens both enjoy up to 7 figure salaries, compensation which would be lost if they admited any skepticism whatsoever. To think otherwise is naive.
Also in additional response to Brandon above, NOAA has previously responded to FOIA request for documents, including correspondence, as including emails and produced some, refused others under various exemptions, but never argued that these documents were not “records”.
Brandon, I respect the work you have done in exposing Cook, Mann and the other climate alarmist frauds. Off late, you are digressing unwantedly into areas where you patently are wrong and arguing for the sake of argument, with no basis. Please quit being pig headed, especially when it’s [obvious] that you are wrong.
Here’s your government and press at play.
Don’t you think there’s a better way?
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Well, as intimated above, there was schism in the inner circle over whether or not to release Karl et al. There must be some there who recognize what poor science this was.
So, in the process of ever improving science, which branch of the schism is more likely to thrive?
It’s naive to expect this soon, but it’s even more naive to think it won’t happen.
=======================
U.S Fish and Wildlife service bulletin on treating email as federal records:
http://www.fws.gov/policy/m0089.html
On the one hand:
I agree that Peterson should not have published the email. (Regardless of where)
On the other:
Nobody who engaged in the complaints about scientists based on Climategate email has standing (in the casual sense of the term) to complain. Even if it were the case that all email on a government server were public (which it isn’t), or that all email written by a civil servant were public (which it also isn’t), there’s the fact that many of the mails were written by people from outside — as Anthony is outside of NOAA. The only difference of kind is that this time, the recipient of the email made it public rather than a hacker.
Vis. the legal arguing:
Wow. My wife is a lawyer, which leads to discussions about standards of evidence and what is or is not a legal argument (in the sense of being the way that lawyers make arguments). Most of the comments on this have been bad enough that even I can see why my wife rolls her eyes sometimes.
It’s certainly _possible_ that an email could be a ‘record’. But the fact that it _could_ be so does not make it one. Else nobody could ever delete a message from their inbox — not even the trillion reminders about meeting times, or ads, etc.. As a legal argument, the ’email is records’ is nonsense.
There are requirements for something to be a ‘record’. To be serious about it, you need a lawyer who has specialized in this area. But one really elementary guideline is that it’s something used for decision making. On its face, it’s exceptionally hard to envision that Watts’ hostile email would be used for decision making in NOAA. Now, if Peterson were fired on the contents of that email (or promoted), then there’s a decision and the email would then be a ‘record’ (maybe; at least it becomes a not so trivial question). Anybody truly think that Peterson will be fired or promoted based on that letter, which says merely the same things which have been said very publicly here for years about NOAA (+ US government scientists, or, indeed, anybody in climatology who reaches conclusions which are disliked here)?
Robert Grumbine says: “even I can see why my wife rolls her eyes sometimes.” If your wife has to read your legal analyses, I can understand this as well.
Emails are regularly produced by agencies in response to FOIA requests, including emails that were not used for decision-making. Sometimes emails about setting up meetings are relevant. Whether “all emails” are records is not at issue, only Peterson’s unilateral dissemination of Watts’ email.
If a FOIA request had been made on June 7, 2015 for NOAA documents evidencing correspondence between Peterson and Anthony Watts during 2015, it seems to me that NOAA would almost certainly considered the email in question as such a document, though they may or may not have produced it or expurgated it. It would be retrievable by a search of Watts’ name. I cannot imagine NOAA seriously arguing that the email was not subject to FOIA because it was not a “record” that was valuable for subsequent decision making. Your attempt to connect the issue to whether the document was relevant for subsequent decision-making is precisely the sort of poor legal reasoning that makes your wife roll her eyes.
In regard to your point about deletion of emails, it is entirely possible that NOAA’s document policies would not have required the retention of the email and that it would subsequently be deleted from NOAA archives under those policies. After such deletion, it would no longer be a NOAA record. The fact that NOAA might subsequently be entitled to delete the email from their records does not mean that Peterson was entitled to distribute the email. Your wife’s eyes ought to be rolling at you once again.
As to hypocrisy, I agree that there is plenty of it to go around in connection with Climategate. Many of your, shall we say, fellow travelers called for police investigations and the severest possible punishments for “Mr FOIA”. So you can hardly, without hypocrisy, claim that Peterson should be entitled to violate rules with impunity, as you appear to be arguing. I do not recall Climategate critics arguing that hacking could be carried out with impunity and most critics understood that Mr FOIA was at considerable legal risk. If Peterson believed that bringing Anthony’s email to public attention was sufficiently important to break government rules (if he did), then he should obviously be prepared to accept the consequences – though, being a civil servant, these are undoubtedly mild.
Peterson also has received some mild discipline in the past for inappropriate conduct in respect to opponents. You may recall that the NOAA Inspector General found that some of Peterson’s Climategate conduct was “inappropriate” as it raised issues about his objectivity. This led to their suggesting that NOAA take actions in respect to Peterson’s conduct, which took the mild form of Peterson being “counseled” by his supervisor. Obviously, Peterson didn’t take the “counseling” very seriously.
Robert, I suggest that we mutually dial back the rhetoric, as both of us gone somewhat outside our usual range.
My point in raising the question of Peterson’s legal liability was that I thought that there was a mildly interesting legal issue. Many such speculations about legal issues have taken place over the past few years, including discussions at the time of Climategate, about which laws, if any, may have broken by Mr FOIA (or, for that matter, by Phil Jones and others. )
One can engage in such discussions without “condemning” someone, either implicitly or explicitly, but merely out of idle interest, which, it seems to me, is the relative level of interest that both you and I have in this particular matter. In that vein, it was silly of me to snipe at you. I disagree with your legal analysis but there was no need for me to attach needless editorializing and I apologize for that.
Having said that, viewed simply as idle legal speculation, I think that your analysis of the legal issue is incorrect. Even if Peterson breached a regulation, I doubt that NOAA would do anything about it. Nor on a scale of all the issues in the world am I particularly concerned about or offended by Peterson’s conduct. But it does seem plausible to me that he breached the regulation referred to above.
Robert,
as a Canadian, the term “fellow traveler” does not immediately invoke a U.S. political phenomenon of the 1950s. The term had usage in other parts of the world, including Canada and England, prior to McCarthy and separate from McCarthy. It’s xenophobic on your part to assume that I, as a non-American, am “modeling” my language on an American politician. Having said that, you have pointed out that it does have such associations for you as an American, something that I had not anticipated, but which I understand.
To a very considerable extent, Canadians tried to avoid the excesses of McCarthyism and it is not an important issue in Canadian political heritage. My grandfather had personal experience with the Un-American Committee, though in an unusual role. In the early 1950s (and here I’m recalling from his biography), the Un-American Committee wanted to interview Igor Gouzenko, whose defection had revealed the notorious spy rings. Arranging for such an interview within Canadian law while avoiding the circus of U.S. politics presented a conundrum for Canadian authorities. My grandfather, then a chief justice in Ontario, was chosen to preside over the session and took great pride in ensuring that the hearing was formal and disciplined.
You say:
Be that as it may, NOAA regards emails as records that they are obliged to search under FOIA. Here is a quote from a NOAA decision:
So your argument that the emails are not “records”, as I stated above, is not one that NOAA itself holds – so allow me to roll my eyes a little.
A logical question to ask oneself is whether the Watts email would have been produced in response to an FOI request. U.S. agencies have frequently refused emails for various reasons, including privacy interests. It seems that there would be a principled legal argument for protecting some privacy interests, but not others, though the Privacy Act may well not be correct perspective for looking at the question.
I really cannot believe that with all the e-mail scandals that have happened in recent years there are those who still trying and argue that e-mails are not records. The law might be slightly ambigious but the case law is not. This is an issue that is already settled and need to be debated on a blog. The official case law is that any e-mail relating to official business is a record.
Anthony e-mailed about official NOAA business . That makes it a record. Its pretty clear that the release of this record violated the Privacy Act.
Steven:
xenophobic, I’m not, nor is it derivable from my ‘error’. Parochial, perhaps. (Though that’s also untrue.) My Canadian son will be particularly amused at me being called xenophobic. My coworkers, most of whom are from outside the US, will also have a chuckle.
Ironically, it’s the fact that I _do_ know Canadians that lead to that ‘error’. Namely, as they themselves point out routinely, Canadians have a pretty good idea about US history. Regarding things like McCarthy, they average better knowledge than US people (in my experience). In parts of the US, textbooks are being rewritten, curricula modified (or, at least in both cases, it’s being argued in favor of at high levels) to portray McCarthy as a hero. Not likely in Canada, afaik.
Then, as you elaborate after my initial response to your ‘fellow traveller’, you have even more reason than most to know McCarthyism for the evil it is. Yet you used McCarthyist language anyhow. I’ll take your word you had no such thoughts.
But McCarthy aside, guilt by association is not the argument of someone who has the facts on his side or is interested in serious discussion.
I agree with you that there’s a point of potential spectator’s interest regarding whether Peterson broke any particular US laws. Raising the notion was not the eye-rolling aspect. The extreme certainty some have expressed that Peterson heinously violated Watts’ rights under Privacy Act law is the eye-roll. Leave aside whether I think it was or not. Nobody in law thinks there’s certainty. Adage is, even with the best possible case, you’ll only win 80% of them. And even with the worst possible case, you’ll still win 20%. The figures are perhaps a bit pessimistic. But, given their experiences, it’s a sentiment common among the lawyers I know.
Y’all:
There’s a real simple, and profitable y’all, way to prove me wrong. Watts files suit against Peterson for violating his rights under the Privacy Act. You legal experts chip in your dollars to get the ball rolling, and split the proceeds with Anthony when he easily wins.
‘official business’
In the mean time TomT et alia: What ‘official business’ was being conducted in Watts’ letter? Window dressing (Eisenhower, Yamamoto, …) aside, it boils down to:
Watts thinks Peterson and other committed fraud.
Watts thinks Peterson and others prostituted themselves, perhaps at the direction of higher ups.
What action is it that Peterson is supposed to take? Official business, whether corporate or governmental, involves somebody having to do something. The prostitution assertion, as it’s figurative rather than literal (or at least that’d be a usual reading, perhaps Anthony does mean literal), doesn’t involve action either.
But, make your accusation of fraud on the part of Karl, Peterson, et al., to the NOAA or DOC inspector general (whatever the job title is), and then there’s an action to be taken. Fraud is a serious matter, and it’s the job of such people to investigate fraud.
It’ll probably get farther if you put more behind the accusation than ‘Anthony Watts thinks so’, which was all that is in the letter that did get sent.
Anthony I know you are not the kind to push but Peterson needs to go down for this.
The 1974 Privacy Act is born out of the civil rights movement. In the Jim Crow south not every white person was a racist bigiot. But anyone who exercised their constitutional right to ‘petition the government’ would have their petition passed onto the KKK.
This collusion between the state and 3rd parties to scare people out of using their first amendment rights was what the act was meant to stop.
Peterson passed this into a party he knew would do you harm with it. He did so with malice. It cannot be allowed to stand. Government officials cannot ba allowed to think that this is okay no matter the circumstance.
Robert Grumbine writes:
You sure can figure out stupid stuff to whine about. In this case, it also appears that you’ve imagined things.
Sometimes in the past, I wrote posts on how to do things in R. Handling different forms of compression in R hasn’t always been straightforward. I’ve promoted R as a way of making analysis exchangeable, so techniques for handling compression in R is useful.
I did a search of CA posts for the term .Z together with .gz.
I located two CA posts which discuss how to decompress .Z files in R: http://climateaudit.org/2008/06/09/an-r-package-by-a-ca-reader-solves-the-z-problem/ and http://climateaudit.org/2010/08/30/tar-and-z/ . Both these posts diarized techniques for dealing with compressed files in R, including .Z files. They were entirely practical and free of complaint. In one case, a CA reader had contributed a decompression package to R, which Douglas Bates, a prominent statistician and leading R proponent, praised as a “good idea”. Perhaps you aren’t interested in ways of making analysis exchangeable and accessible, but many CA readers are. A blogpost on decompression methods in R was hardly regular programming anyway,
The only other post that I located was a discussion of NOAA’s OCtober 2008 results, http://climateaudit.org/2008/11/19/noaa-in-finland/ where I made a single snarky comment about .Z compression, but otherwise the post was on an entirely different topic. The comment was:
Revkin is a boring hack.