[ExI] Scientists Behaving Badly

[Alfio Puglisi]

On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 9:14 PM, <moulton at moulton.com> wrote:

>
> Alfio
>
> Thank you for referring to something in the article.  I assume you
> read it all and found the lines you quote as most worthy of discussion.
>

Actually, I didn't read it all when I sent the previous email, just skimmed
the first paragraphs and found those lines.

Now that I have read all of if I see that it is full of factual errors,
irrelevant or misleading statements, and unfounded accusations like
"Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago" (two errors in one
sentence), or   "utterly politicized scientists such as Jones, Mann, and
NASA's James Hansen" (politicized? care to prove it?) , or "There have been
rumors for years about political pressure being brought to bear on the
process to deliver scarier numbers" (wrong, pressure was in the opposite
direction, at least in the US), or "according to one of Jones's emails,
actually destroying the raw data in the face of a successful FOIA
requisition." (Jones suggested to do that in an email, but there's no proof
of destroying anything in response to FOIAs requests), repeating the
"travesty" argument when it has been explained to death that it means
nothing of the sort, and so on.

When not dwelling in such propaganda, it focuses on the medieval warm period
and its reconstructions, giving its own interpretation of the famous emails.
Nowhere it says that these emails are a small subset of the total, released
by someone with an explicit agenda stated right at the beginning of the
archive, and so any interpretation of these email is suspect and anyway
expected to be one-sided.

More importanly, I see no discussion of the simple topic that, even
conceding some of the worst interpretations of the emails, nothing would
change in the global warming picture: CO2 would still be a greenhouse gas,
its increase would still be of anthropogenic, Arctic ice and glaciers would
still be melting, Greenland would still be losing mass, plants would still
blossom earlier, temperatures would be still going up, etc.   To resume, in
my opinion this article adds nothing to our understanding of the situation,
but instead actively tries to instill in the reader a distrust for science
with misleading statements and attacking irrelevant details, while missing
the big picture entirely.


Alfio



> See my comments below.
>
> On Sun, 2009-12-13 at 19:35 +0100, Alfio Puglisi wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 6:56 PM, <moulton at moulton.com> wrote:
> > So for example how about reading the article that Max referenced
> > and criticizing it based on its content not on the website on which it
> > is published.
> >
> > Sure, some samples of the general tone:
> >
> > "...the air has been going out of the global warming balloon."
>
> In the article that phrase appears to refer to both how well global
> warming is doing as a hypothesis and how the state of the general public
> perception.  On the first point that is what is being debated currently
> and I think it is too soon to tell.  We will likely know more after a lot
> of people go back and double check the data sets and research methods.
> On the second point about public perception my reading of various
> media sources is that the author needs to delve deeper.  This question
> of public perception needs a more nuanced discussion than I think the
> author gives since it needs to be differentiated into perception of
> global warming as an isolated item and perception of global warming
> relative to other items.  On this see for example mention of how global
> warming has fallen to third place as discussed in Eurobarometet 313
> http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_313_en.pdf
> While certainly this is just one study and no one is claiming that it is
> definitive but I think it represents part of the relevant information
> and is an interesting example of some trends worth watching over the
> coming months.  This is not to say that the respondents to the poll
> are correct in their evaluation; perhaps they should have keep global
> warming as number 1.
>
> > "As tempting as it is to indulge in Schadenfreude over the richly
> > deserved travails of a gang that has heaped endless calumny on
> > dissenting scientists...."
>
> How about we look at the entire paragraph so that we get an idea about
> the author was getting at:
>
>    "As tempting as it is to indulge in Schadenfreude over
>    the richly deserved travails of a gang that has heaped
>     endless calumny on dissenting scientists (NASA's James
>    Hansen, for instance, compared MIT's Richard Lindzen to
>    a tobacco-industry scientist, and Al Gore and countless
>    others liken skeptics to "Holocaust deniers"), the meaning
>    of the CRU documents should not be misconstrued. The emails
>    do not in and of themselves reveal that catastrophic
>    climate change scenarios are a hoax or without any
>    foundation. What they reveal is something problematic
>    for the scientific community as a whole, namely, the
>    tendency of scientists to cross the line from being
>    disinterested investigators after the truth to advocates
>    for a preconceived conclusion about the issues at hand. In
>    the understatement of the year, CRU's Phil Jones, one of
>    the principal figures in the controversy, admitted the
>    emails "do not read well." Jones is the author of the most
>    widely cited leaked emissive, telling colleagues in
>    1999 that he had used "Mike's Nature [magazine] trick" to
>    "hide the decline" that inconveniently shows up after 1960
>    in one set of temperature records. But he insists that the
>    full context of CRU's work shows this to have been just
>    a misleading figure of speech. Reading through the entire
>    archive of emails, however, provides no such reassurance;
>    to the contrary, dozens of other messages, while less
>    blatant than "hide the decline," expose scandalously
>    unprofessional behavior. There were ongoing efforts
>    to rig and manipulate the peer-review process that is
>    critical to vetting manuscripts submitted for publication
>    in scientific journals. Data that should have been made
>    available for inspection by other scientists and outside
>    critics were released only grudgingly, if at all. Perhaps
>    more significant, the email archive also reveals that even
>    inside this small circle of climate scientists--otherwise
>    allied in an effort to whip up a frenzy of international
>    political action to combat global warming--there was
>    considerable disagreement, confusion, doubt, and at times
>    acrimony over the results of their work. In other words,
>    there is far less unanimity or consensus among climate
>    insiders than we have been led to believe."
>
> Given the above quote I think it reinforces my point that we need to
> depoliticize and open up this entire climate debate and strive for
> more transparency.  I hope you agree.
>
> Fred
>
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