The lonely fight of an AGW “denier”
Read his cri de coeur here:
I find it rings flat with me to have to face people asking where the scientists were when we were overcoming so many many obstacles to get a rare fair hearing. The scientists have been tied up and gagged in the back room…We were there screaming our lungs out all along.
[ADDENDUM: The NY Times covers itself in glory by pretending that Climategate is all about a few emails where scientists got a little carried away with the rightness of their cause. Once again, the Times shows its contempt for its readers and their knowledge of the facts, as the editors say “run along now children; it’s okay, the Times has spoken.” Anyone with even a glancing familiarity with the scope of the Climategate files knows it’s about far more than the emails, but the Times is counting on its ignorant readers to remain so.
“No one should be misled by all the noise,” write the editors. And it’s true; no one should be misled by their noise any more, although many undoubtedly will. But the Times is increasingly a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.]
[ADDENDUM II: How to write an entire WaPo op-ed about the dire need for massive government intervention to stop global warming, without ever once mentioning Climategate.
And watch Times’ public editor Clark Hoyt bob and weave as he pretends to answer questions, all the while resolutely following the current MSM meme and claiming that Climategate is all about the emails. The code and the messy and manipulated database are never even mentioned. But hey, as Hoyt quotes another Times editor as saying, “We here at The Times are not scientists.”
You can say that again. Of course, the same increasingly seems true of the researchers at CRU.]
I shall resist fisking the Times entire since it fisks itself in every word beyond the dreams of Pravda.
Still, we are left with “It is also important not to let one set of purloined e-mail messages undermine the science and the clear case for action, in Washington and in Copenhagen.”
Would that the institutional memory of the Times extended back far enough so they could say, “It is also important not to let one set of purloined Pentagon Papers undermine the policy and the clear case for military action, in Washington and in Vietnam.”
Good grief. In that WaPo article the author uses the word “moral” or some version of it about 50 thousand times.
So I guess I am an immoral person for not believing. Religion anyone?
What is it that the NYT wants? Change for the sake of change? Why has the paper traveled such a long and torturous ride from the most esteemed purveyor of news to third rate hacksterism.
It’s management is no longer principled. As a result, the NYT can no longer be relied on to relate all the news that’s fit to print, as it so proudly boasts. (It should be more honest and have a front page logo that reads something like, “Crap we continue to feed you and that you are stupid enough to buy and read!) Why has it so obviously corrupted itself to the point that, as a newspaper, there is no longer any there there? Not worth the paper it is written on. Not even worth a free on-line subscription. It speaks only to the choir of liberal speak.
Since it is no longer credible, what does this say about the remaining subscribers? That they look to the NYT for the latest posture. (I was for it before I was against it but now I’m for it again but only until it is no longer politically feasible to be for it and then I’ll be against it. By the way, what is our current posture? And, where do these postures come from?)
I loved the NYT. When it “lost its way” I lost a good friend. I used to read it religiously. It presented the facts and accorded me the compliment of being able to come to my own conclusions. It no longer compliments its readers. It fact, it denigrates them.
This is blowing back on science.
Now scientists have joined the long line of authority figures: priests, presidents, professors, lawyers, journalists, politicians, economists, and … um … community organizers, whom we can no longer trust to be looking out for the truth as opposed to their turf.
And that’s a grievous loss, at least to some like myself who once looked up to scientists as individuals who could be trusted more than the others because the checks and balances of the scientific method would keep them aimed at truth.
I’ve said it several times before and I’ll say it again. They will not go quietly into the night.
This is going to be an issue that can only be kept alive by the alternative media. And by such sterling organizations as the Competitive Enterprise Institue (CEI), which is going to court to get data from NASA and the Goddard institute for Space Studies (GISS):
11/24/09 “Today, on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, I filed three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies’ refusal – for nearly three years – to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.”
The MSM will not be covering the CEI’s legal actions either. Nor will they be making their own FOI requests from the Climategate organizations. Do the editors of the Times and WaPo not realize how transparent their lack of investigative journalism efforts are? It shows how much contempt they have for their readers.
huxley Says:
December 6th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
You’re right. This episode is a real tragedy in that it gives science a black eye in the public mind. Our modern technological society is extremely dependent on scientific principles correctly understood and applied. But the degree of scientific illiteracy among the general public, not to mention our political leaders, is really frightening and doesn’t bode well for the future. And this incident isn’t helping any, if it leads to public cynicism about science in general.
Oh, and by the way:
EPA Set to Declare Carbon Dioxide a Public Danger
This is really a demonstration of how politics (and the money, fear and power that it can throw around) can trump anything, including science. And, Gore (the evangelical scientist and “watermelon” man) was at the center of this disgrace, which is still running at a school near you. He was preeminent in pushing it as vice president and would have pushed it to the limits had he won the presidency in 2000. He might actually have made Carter look good in comparison and, hard as it is to contemplate, may have caused more damage than Obama is now doing. (Is there a candidate that the Democrats can put forward who is a reasonably sane person?)
It takes a particularly loathsome person to force feed children on fear as Gore did by insisting that his lies, contained in The Inconvenient Truth, be shown and shown and shown in our schools. The truth is that Gore is certifiable. The climate changes day to day; always has, always will.
Gore insists that the debate is over. Does anyone remember the debate? Who was debating? What were the issues? When and where was it held? Were the results published? How did global cooling morph into global warming and then into climate change? Why do these hucksters of fear enjoy such stature in our MSM when they are ALWAYS PROVED WRONG?
The lesson here is abot government.
Government is a monster. When it gives you something – research funds, health care, anything… – it takes your freedom, fortune, and very soul in return.
We need to reform government starting with voting outr the current Congress and the travesty of a president we have.
Government loves to plan. Once it starts planning it can’t help itself.
Steve G. said, “Gore insists that the debate is over.”
I guess that’s why he refuses to debate anyone in public. Lord Christopher Monckton has had a standing offer to debate Gore in public for some time now. Gore has refused. And now he is not going to appear at Copenhagen in the greeters line. Fear of uncomfortable questions? I believe he knows the jig’s up and has lost his nerve. Probably busy trying to find a suck, ah, er, buyer for his carbon trading company.
Standing alone against the crowd to do on a matter of principle is difficult. It’s why we should show “High Noon” over and over again in schools.
nregol,
“…take away two or three cards, and there are still 49 or 50 cards facing you.”
What difference how many cards show, they’ve all been marked, crimped, shave, stacked, and dealt from the bottom.
The science is less settled and the jig is more up.
Thanks for linking to the letter from Christopher Essex. I hadn’t seen that. (good one!) I have been a “skeptic” for a very long time, partly because I grew up very, very rural, and rural people mostly just don’t buy the global warming nonsense — simply because they live their lives in closer contact with the natural world than urban people.
30.3 million hits on Google on the term “ClimateGate” which was coined 16 days ago by James Delingpole!
The Media has a lot to answer for. Environmental journalists belonged to the SEJ — the Society of Environmental Journalists — and a visit to their website is interesting.
Journalists expect to learn from each other — real scientists were seldom invited to speak, environmental groups (good) such as Greenpeace and Natural Resources Defense Council are hailed, skeptics (bad) are widely accused of being funded by Exxon, not being properly “peer-reviewed” (the CRU Team really did a job on that). I just visited their website (www.sej.org) not exactly a source of information on ClimateGate!
Latest seems to be that the hackers probably came out of a Russian University, for the Russians have a vested interest in skepticism.
I was talking about ClimateGate with a friend who’s an AGW believer, but not rabidly so.
My point was that what took place wasn’t “science’ – her counter-argument was that the people who did the work were scientists.
I thought for a moment, and said “Look, everything my dentist does is not “dentistry” – it’s not like a scientist is only capable of doing science.”
The Elephant’s Child: You might want to take a look at this.
Kundera: “Reality is a continent visited less and less often” is truly the slogan for our times. Thanks, Neo, although it scares the heck outta me.
Back in my hippie days, my now-husband and I used to have discussions about what the “real world” was. His father was a cellist in the Houston Symphony Orchestra, while he lived as a rebel hippie musician–not exactly on the streets of Houston (he had a girlfriend, after all–me–and the joke at the time was, what do you call a musician without a girlfriend? Homeless!), but near enough as made no real difference. I, on the other hand, was a cancer research hematologist observing the fringes of that down-and-outer world. He used to say that his parents didn’t have any idea of the real world–that gritty world with which he was a sometime intimate. I told him that wasn’t true, that their world was real too, it’s just that it was a different reality–and there are many realities. His dad had been familiar with the grittier realities in his youth. He had spent his childhood in post-WWI Hamburg, living only on potatoes and turnips, and had left Germany when Hitler came to power; he played ‘cello on transatlantic liners for a while before settling in New York. He used to say he had seen what was coming in Germany, and got out. I think one of the reasons he didn’t fall into the grasp of the socialism and statism that seduced so many was that he became familiar with class mobility–it was one of the benefits he reaped from settling in America. Having been poor and in touch with the “village” perspective, he worked hard and prospered, and gained much from his exile. And he changed his reality.
I think there may come a time, or times, when everyone’s “reality” changes. It necessarily includes a bit of ceding of understanding others’ realities to the control of people like MSM types and pollsters, accepting a bit of essential insularity. It’s only destructive when one either actively renounces, or passively accepts, a healthy skepticism regarding what one is told, and (maybe most important) by whom. Information providers often have agendas (i.e. the MSM or pollsters), and one must bother to be aware of their agendas’ existence and content.
her counter-argument was that the people who did the work were scientists.
An impressively silly argument. Scientists are those who practice the scientific method to obtain new knowledge (this last distinguishing them from, e.g., mechanics and electricians), not those who wear lab coats.
Tell her that in honor of her perspicacity, she’s invited to avoid the crowds by voting on Wednesday.
Whoa! I meant to say, “. . .when one either actively or passively renounces, rather than accepts, a healthy skepticism. . . .”
Sorry about that.
I just watched a talkshow (Nachtstudio) on the theme of light.
One participant was a doctor who used light therapy; another was a biologist who is beginning a new project to study the effect of artificial light on the environment. Both said we know practically nothing about the effects of the energy-saving lightbulbs on humans or the environment as a result of the move toward the blue end of the spectrum. The biologist said that we don’t know how they will affect things like the insects that now fly around outdoor lights. The doctor was strongly against fluorescents because people are more active in cooler light and we don’t know how it will affect their daily rhythms. He also mentioned that people living with cool lighting tend to turn the heat up, more than countering the energy savings of the fluorescents. Finally, he mentioned that hundreds of workers in Chinese bulb factories have mercury poisoning.
It is amazing that one simple little thing like light bulbs is fraught with so many unknowns, although the tools and methods of study are pretty advanced. Yet there is a consensus of experts that these bulbs will help save the climate. These guests, and the other two, were little-piece-of the-big-picture scientists and they saw lots of reasons to go slowly.
I don’t know how people think we can jump into massive projects without producing unwanted consequences. And I can’t stand it when the little guys, scientists or laypersons, are treated like ignoramuses for asking questions.
expat, not to worry. They’ve just revalidated the Hawthorne effect.
CFLs are fine. So are incandescents. So are flaming brands, limelight, and candles. All is well. Something else will just have to step up to doom us.
Maybe we will develop some sort of light bulb selection frustration syndrome that will send wimps like me into a range and cause me to ransack stores. On the other hand, Obama could designate light bulb advisors and salesmen as part of his green jobs initiative and provide them with college loans for advanced degrees.
The doctor was strongly against fluorescents because people are more active in cooler light and we don’t know how it will affect their daily rhythms. He also mentioned that people living with cool lighting tend to turn the heat up, more than countering the energy savings of the fluorescents. Finally, he mentioned that hundreds of workers in Chinese bulb factories have mercury poisoning.
What kind of lights do your Hospitals use, “doctor”?
I think he was referring to home lighting. He was talking about people not liking the CFLs and that their response to them shouldn’t be ignored. He wasn’t a crackpot. He doesn’t like people being told what to do by people who don’t know what they are talking about.
My only point was that people who can’t even get light bulbs right shouldn’t come up with a 5-year-plan to remake the world.
Occam’s Beard: I agree with you about “High Noon.” I just saw it recently for the first time. My only gripe about the film is that the way the left tries to claim it as part of their legacy by saying it is about the McCarthy era. It’s a much better film than that.
BumperStickerist: Your story about scientists and science reminded me a little of my experience doing graduate work in English. My department also had an MFA program, and the MFA students who wrote what they considered poetry would introduce themselves and each other as poets. “Hi, this is my friend Jean, and she’s a poet.” As one who is definitely not impressed with much of what passes as contemporary literature, I always found a bit of ironic humor in their self-regard in calling themselves poets. It always made me think of Thoreau: “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.”
My point was that what took place wasn’t “science’ – her counter-argument was that the people who did the work were scientists.
Oh, good! I’m an engineer: When I kicker her in the middle of her dopey hippy ass, I can say it is engineering.
He used to say that his parents didn’t have any idea of the real world—that gritty world with which he was a sometime intimate.
(His dad) had spent his childhood in post-WWI Hamburg, living only on potatoes and turnips, and had left Germany when Hitler came to power; he played ‘cello on transatlantic liners for a while before settling in New York.
Right there. Right there is the kinda thing why I want to kick baby-boomers right in the ass….
But of course, you had a marvellous effect on him and now you guys are clearly “some of the good ones.”
Prof. Hulme is one of several scientists calling for the raw data of climate-change research to be made available to everyone, including climate-change skeptics, on the Internet. That, he says, would allow genuine research to proceed unhindered. Some of his colleagues also say the IPCC now does more harm than good and should be disbanded.
That position has led some of his colleagues to attack him. This week, several said in Internet posts that such transparency would be unworkable because the matter of climate is too urgent and the stakes too high to allow skeptics to have any influence on policy.
That, Prof. Hulme said, is exactly the attitude that led to the sort of questionable practices chronicled in the CRU e-mails.
— Breach in the global-warming bunker rattles climate science at the worst time
Hark! What be those muffled sounds coming from yon back room? Mayhap scientists crying into their foul gags and wrestling against their cruel restraints…
I’ve observed that our insect overlords have realized that the Internet’s conservative/ alternative/ contrarian websites, while annoying to them, are more of a safety valve for their opposition than a real threat. A place for us to expend our passions and our energies without any real effect on the course of events.
Right now, we’re in an Information Silo. We can shout ourselves hoarse, but our insect overlords and our ignorant neighbors are outside the silo, and can scarcely hear us. In fact, our insect overlords make sure they rattle and hiss loudly enough to drown out any faint noises that escape from the silo.
This is why they continue with their nefarious activities without any check of their stride. We have to break out of the silo.
My ex-girlfriend in the UK is a climate scientist. I tried to get her take on this and at first she said that it was mostly a big misunderstanding by people that didn’t know what they were talking about but the manipulation of the peer review process “wasn’t cool”. About a week later I brought it up again and now she’s much more adamant that it’s really no big deal at all after she claimed she looked through all the thousands of emails and documents. And she said that “trick” to “hide the decline” isn’t as dubious as it sounds. She went on about some tree ring crap recorded by some lake in the 1960s or something and that there was nothing sinister about plugging that data into the charts. I don’t believe she actually combed through all those emails and did all that homework all on her own though. Most likely she read some talking points off a blog entry on one of her sciency friends blogs and repeated what they wrote. Seems like they’re circling the wagons and closing ranks to support each other. Not to mention the conflict of interest of her wanting to preserve her job and the cultural bubble she lives in. She claimed that there would be much more money for scientsists in debunking global warming hysteria because all the major corporations have a vested interest in exposing real scientific fraud. I called bullcrap and sent her some articles and vids but she hasn’t responded to me yet.
expat, Don’t get me started on those twisty lightbulbs! How will I have time to worry about the Russians if I’m obsessing on the idiots in Washington who feel compelled to tell the rest of us how to live our lives. I want them to get their noses out of my life. My lightbulbs, my shower head, the food I eat — way too intrusive.
And as far as the Russians are concerned, some of the ClimateGate material passed through a “small” Russian server, which may not mean anything or yet again, perhaps it does.
Too much attention to the hacking (or whistleblowing). Barbara Boxer wants an investigation of the crime (nevermind that she has no jurisdiction over the British CRU).
Attention belongs on the attempts to silence dissenting scientists, attempts to hide data, destruction of evidence. They have politicized science and damaged the integrity of science.
Here’s another article by the Times where the only “skeptic” cited says, “The role of added carbon dioxide as a major contributor in climate change has been firmly established.”
Will these people ever give a voice to the likes of people who were refused publication in academic journals because of their contradicting evidence?
“Don’t get me started on those twisty lightbulbs!”
I have them in my kitchen and dining room, I immediately noticed that people appear to have a certain jaundiced tint to their skin when they are under these lights. I would say the blue spectrum of light is probably more mood uplifting, especially in winter, than dull yellow.
Within 24 hours of the release of the emails i said who was responsible… but the more they are responsible, the more it seems they cant be responsible. after all, how many people would believe that many trips to the cookie jar? resonable people use methods that have nothing to do with empirical facts, like judging something as too many, or too few, or too outrageous, etc…
CLIMATEGATE: FROM RUSSIA WITHOUT LOVE?
Suspicions were growing last night that Russian security services were behind the leaking of the notorious British ‘Climategate’ emails which threaten to undermine tomorrow’s Copenhagen global warming summit. An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the explosive hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked via a small web server in the formerly closed city of Tomsk in Siberia.
Russia — one of the world’s largest producers and users of oil and gas — has a vested interest in opposing sweeping new agreements to cut emissions, which will be discussed by world leaders in Copenhagen tomorrow. Russia believes current rules are stacked against it, and has threatened to pull the plug on Copenhagen without concessions to Kremlin concerns.
The Mail on Sunday understands that the hundreds of hacked emails were released to the world via a tiny internet server in a red brick building in a snow-clad street in Tomsk. The original internet link was quickly removed after the information spread from it like wildfire on to international websites. A message written in English accompanied the leaked package of emails. It read: ‘We feel that climate science is too important to be kept under wraps. ‘We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.’
but but..
i have constantly been pushed that these people and their games are not to be seen. they are to be ignored, that their actions mean nothing. however, lots of times people here are discussing the naunces of false facts that started with these same people. and they refuse to see. whether it be because they wish to protect the veiw they have, the icons they ahve grown to think special, etc.
Computer hackers in Tomsk have been used in the past by the Russian secret service (FSB) to shut websites which promote views disliked by Moscow. Such arrangements provide the Russian government with plausible deniability while using so-called ‘hacker patriots’ to shut down websites. In 2002, Tomsk students were said to have launched a ‘denial of service’ attack at the Kavkaz-Tsentr portal, a site whose reports about Chechnya angered Russian officials. The FSB office in Tomsk put out a special Press release saying that what the students had done was a legitimate ‘expression of their position as citizens, one worthy of respect’.
A Russian hacking specialist said last night: ‘There is no hard evidence that the hacking was done from Tomsk, though it might have been. ‘There has been speculation the hackers were Russian. It appears to have been a sophisticated and well-run operation, that had a political motive given the timing in relation to Copenhagen.’ And gazeta.ru news website, having received information about the Tomsk server connection, said: ‘Presumably it was Russian hackers who broke into the servers of the university.’
The university said that there was strict security on its server, heightening the theory that an extremely sophisticated hacking operation was carried out to obtain it.
East Anglia University has gone out of its way to promote itself to students from the former Soviet Union. Its website says that 33 Russian students currently study there. It is not known if they have fallen under suspicion as part of the police investigation.
Tomsk — 2,190 miles east of Moscow — was closed to foreigners during the Soviet era. Its population of 630,000 includes the secret satellite city of Seversk, formerly known as Tomsk-7 and seven miles to the north, which houses strategic uranium and plutonium plants and remains shut to Westerners. It was built in the Fifties by 20,000 prisoners from nearby Siberian labour camps. Today, the city, and especially Seversk, remains closely monitored by the FSB, the successor security service to the Soviet-era KGB….
of course no one wanted to believe when they cut the cables in the oceans that they were moving buisness to their just launched new communciations sattelites. so they may have had other access to data, because of that more than a year before. tons of stuff, but if one refuses to note one of them, one refuses to see all of them and how they influence things.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1233562/Emails-rocked-climate-change-campaign-leaked-Siberian-closed-city-university-built-KGB.html
[by the way, my knowing that the break came from russia, was not a guess. i had read it the day of it happening. cui buono? well before when russia wasnt a open market state, it was great to throttle back the US… now that its an open market, the active measure of global warming is about to come back and bite them (just as feminism, multiculturalism, gay politics, etc are. they resist as they do not want to dring the flagon with the dragon since its the chalice with the palace that holds teh brue thats true).
when the words worste polluters, and the worst towards humans, and the worst records towards anmials and other thins due to pragmatism, suddenly turn and pretnd to be the most green, the most humanist, the most environmentalist…
you shoudnt be trusting them any more than a mass murderer finding god in prison so he can get parole.
Artfldgr,
You make excellent points, and the Russians seem to have sufficient motive. Although I must say that to me, as a scientist, that’s practically incidental–the important thing out of all of it is that the shoddy science behind the whole AGW show be exposed. If it weren’t for that, the Russians wouldn’t have anything to reveal. It’s a very big help to those of us who have been fairly confident all along that the data were at best dodgy and at worst fraudulent–and we have had our reputations attacked because of it.
It’s also important that the entire world economy not have the “restart” button pushed on it, including the implied governmental control over everything we do, over this mess of non-science.
Although I must say that to me, as a scientist, that’s practically incidental—the important thing out of all of it is that the shoddy science behind the whole AGW show be exposed.
well, the shoddy science is the point of doing this. the waste of resources, teh drain on the economy. the harm to our decision making machines. etc.
this is war, and they are fighting it, they have never said anything different!!!!!!!!!!
they WANT a restart… they WANT to do so with the economics of america drained so she cant fight.
anyone remembver that it was an unfair treaty that crippled germany and made them completely open to hitler?
oh… no we forgot that… since we jump from A – N and think opq is the next stop.
hitler would nto have had his argument if it werent for ford, and others who wanted russian oil. they wanted to punihs germany for the war.
today they want to punish the US for their success. dont matter. an unjust punishment makes for a certaqin fraom of mind. no?
I think Beverly is spot-on correct.
We need to figure individual action. Things like buying gold, as the medieval Jews did-hideable, easily transported; paying vendors cash (if not IRS-reported, well, I can’t help it). Small individual things that add up. And prepare a survival stock.