William M. Briggs would be the smartest, funniest and best informed Climate Editor the New York Times ever had. He’d put the Times back on the map as the frontline of debate. As such, there is no way he will get this job (and this is a real application). He’s the perfect candidate — the Statistician to the Stars has published actual papers on climate models, uncertainty, and yet also writes with wit and humor.
Guys like William are the reason the new media is killing the old.
A few snippets here, the whole letter at Brigg’s Blog http://wmbriggs.com:
New York Times Is Looking For A Climate Change Editor. That’s Me!
It is the Times’s tremendous luck that I’m at liberty, ready, and willing to take on this monumental task. Together we can screw people’s heads back on straight and get them to worry about something really important. Like the rise of politics dictating science and the corrupting influence of money.
I am an actual bona fide scientist. I have published actual articles in the Journal of Climate, among many others. My specialty is in the value and goodness of models, and the expense and badness of bad science. I’ve written a best-seller (my mom bought two copies) on the subject. Uncertainty: The Soul of Modeling, Probability & Statistics. I know this is a presumptuous questions, but if I get the job can I get this reviewed in the Book Review? Might boost sales.
How can they knock this back?
We’d run this headline: “Wonderful News: Global-Warming-Of-Doom Proved Almost Surely False”.
I envision a series in which we expose the schemers, hangers-on, band-waggoners, activists, fund-raisers, self-deluded, egos (I almost said “politicians”, which would have been redundant), and even frauds and bamboozlers whose claimed knowledge of fluid physics on a rotating sphere is as artificial as that thing perched on Donald Trump’s cranium. Let’s call out these folks who have turned “climate change” into an unhealthy living.
How many times have we heard psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, economists, and other un-trained scientifically ignorant (I use this word in its technical sense) academics lecture us on the horrors that await us under “climate change” when they wouldn’t know a cloud parameterization from a sigma coordinate? I’ll tell you: too often.
I predict the Editors of the Times will continue to cower behind petty namecalling, will fear doing anything socially risky, and will miss this opportunity to beat the rise of the new media.
h/t to Willie Soon, and Paul Driessen