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What can I say. Not another “downfall” video, oh yes. Oh Yes! But for those who know the background on the Recursive Fury retraction, the irony is delicious. Enjoy. Right to the end. … Yesterday I said I had to learn German. Today it’s probably better that I haven’t. Read on for clues if you are not familiar with the saga. Keep reading → April 26th, 2014 | Tags: Lewandowsky (Stephan), Satire & Parody, Unthreaded | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | | We’ve reached the end-game. The sensibles have all left the room and there is no point trying to fight a religion with reason. What utter foolishness to treat their ideas as sensible! The only response to satirical science (thank you Green-ecologicists) is to hold it up for the world to see its true nature. Green-electricity may not run your heaters well, but it is excellent fuel for the funnies. Enjoy! These Germans are so good at this, I have to learn to speak German. … … H/t to the brilliant James Delingpole
Germans spend ten times as much as they need too for green electricity and their big green achievement is that the nation has rediscovered lignite!
April 25th, 2014 | Tags: Germany, Renewable Energy, Satire & Parody | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | While some global whiners are predicting death, disease and reckless fish, an ominous array of other forces are gathering. The time of plenty, peace and abundance could be coming to an end. I’ve finally had a chance to look at David Archibald’s hot new book, and it’s a book that needs to be discussed. It’s the debate we ought to be having. (I’ll be referring to it again on this blog). In the West we have rarely had it so good: since World War II things have been relatively peaceful; the sun reached a once-in-8000-year global maximum, keeping us warm; the big easy oil fields were tapped, gifting us the cheapest energy in human history; and the most obvious gains in agriculture meant food supply increased even faster than populations grew. David Archibald paints a provocative argument of a world where a cooling sun means grain supply can’t keep pace with demand, oil production starts to slide and forces of unrest in the mid East collapse to chaos while those in the far East rise ascendant. David Archibald writes:
Twilight of Abundance: Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short
Obviously there is much to debate, and this is the debate we ought to be having, not the one about the carbon scary fairy. Here’s just one of the many geopolitical questions he stakes out the territory on: Will shale gas and fracking keep the cheap energy flowing? David Archibald describes shale as less a revolution, and more a temporary filler that will become expensive quickly. Archibald has an energy plan for the West involving thorium for electricity, and coal to liquids for your car. His detailed knowledge of energy prices and demand means he forecasts some quixotic and perverse situations — we should not be wasting compressed natural gas in power stations, he predicts its real value lies in cars and transport. Likewise, coal he explains is better used in coal to liquids, again to replace the oil that become increasingly and prohibitively expensive. We can save both these resources for our cars if we use thorium for our electricity, and if we keep electricity out of our cars. It’s just too inefficient: “Approximately 20% of the charge of an electric car battery is needed just to haul the battery itself around.” Something that stands out for me is the editing. Unlike many books today, Twilight of Abundance has done intense months of rewriting and reviewing and it shows. It has that polish and quality we used to expect of all top books in the days before rapid print. Regnery have brought out the best. It’s easy to read, but also rich with information (some books are easy because there’s nothing of substance to get in the way, not this one). This book is a resource I will be returning to. I may not agree with everything he says but I have to do research before I put up any objection. Archibald is marking out the terms of this debate, and is ahead of the game. Buy the book. Send me your objections. This is the debate we have to have. The other stuff is window dressing. Yes, the Amazon review below is that David Evans (the one I married). He’s a hard man to impress, he read this book to the last page, and it did shift his views. Keep reading → April 24th, 2014 | Tags: Alternative Energy, Archibald (David), Energy Crisis, Energy Intensity, Renewable Energy, Solar Radiation | Category: Energy, Global Warming | Print This Post | | Careful Cheryl Jones, your groupthink is showing. She’s a science writer who writes today in The Australian about “climate bets”, but without seemingly using The Internet. Here’s how she describes Roy Spencer:
To put this in perspective, this is Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He’s not just a climate scientist either. Roy Spencer and John Christy were the first two scientists to develop a method for getting temperatures from satellites, and the pair won NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, and the American Meteorological Society’s “Special Award.” But Roy does write an excellent blog…
If Cheryl Jones had gone so far as to type “climate bets” into a search engine she’d know that two Australians called David Evans and Jo Nova already have one of the largest climate wagers going and have offered to take up Brian Schmidt’s bet as well. (Would you believe, that other large bet was with a Brian Schmidt, but not the same one?). Jones would also know that Schmidt’s bet makes him practically a skeptic. He’s betting on a complete IPCC failure. No one who believed the IPCC would offer such a weak benchmark: “no warming” for another 20 years. Schmidt’s bet is an admission all the IPCC predictions were wrong.
Poor readers of The Australian might come away thinking that silly Maurice Newman was just relying on a blog post. Instead Newman is taking the safe side of one of the most awarded and notable climate scientists of our time, while poor Brian Schmidt, albeit a Nobel winner in astronomy, probably hasn’t even published a blog post on the climate, let alone a paper.
That’s right, climate model projections to 2100 remain intact, untouched by reality. But 98% of their predictions from the last 20 years have met reality and reality won. Indeed they not only fail on global scales, but on regional, local, short term, tropical, polar, and upper tropospheric scales too. They fail on rainfall, drought and they fail on clouds. A skeptic’s job is easy. Nature seems to be on our side. (Of course, that’s not a coincidence.)
Dear Cheryl, 70% of the global mean surface is water, and 90% of the energy is held in the oceans. What we don’t have is good data on that. Are the oceans warming? If you believe that ocean buoys can measure temperatures of the 1.3 billion cubic kilometer global ocean to one hundreths of a degree, you might use the phrase “strong evidence”. Scientists though, would not. Plus, not only are ocean trends not statistically significant, but the rate of sea level rise has slowed too. IPCC climate scientists didn’t see that coming either. I think the real problem is that Jones is talking about imaginary people: Keep reading → April 23rd, 2014 | Tags: Bets, Spencer (Roy), The Australian | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Bob Fernley Jones takes a close look at Australian temperature records, and finds that while the BoM can fish out records that are technically true, those “records” can also be paradoxically irrelevant and largely meaningless at the same time. Not so long back weren’t these same people telling us that only long term climate trends mattered, and that one hot or cold year, or bad storm was cherry picking and unscientific? Dare I suggest the obsession with headline records is more a PR stunt than a scientific measure? Its true, that 2013 was probably the warmest year in Australia averaged over the whole land mass and the whole year, at least since we started recording temperatures (a microsecond ago in geological time). But even so, for individual Australians it didn’t necessarily mean anything much at all. Nor has it got any scientific meaning; one hot summer over 5% of the surface of the world doesn’t tell us anything about cause and effect and CO2. But who would know that from reading a BoM release? But from BoM data we can tell that:
In the end, Australian temperature records are only 100 years old (according to the BoM anyway). Parts of Australia are 4,000 million years old. Wouldn’t impartial scientific advisors also point out the bigger perspective on how scientifically meaningless these records are? — Jo ——————————————————————————————— Guest Post by Bob Fernley-JonesMore Naughties From The Australian Bureau of Meteorology et al.Now that temperature data for last summer (Dec – Feb) are out, let’s review some scary authoritative pronouncements from the past year. The Climate Commission, made much of dramatizing the earlier summer of 2012/2013 with labels like “angry” and unprecedented. (Then they were dismissed by the incoming LNP government [A] ). On 3 January 2014, Dr David Jones, a senior scientist at the BoM [B] appeared all over the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) with the message that 2013 was the hottest year for Australia on record, and he also emphasised:
Furthermore, the BoM has a recent report entitled Annual Climate Report 2013 on its website, from which there is this extract:
SummersSummer in this hot dry land [C] is arguably more important than whole year average temperatures, so let’s firstly take a closer look at the BoM data for summer. Fig. 1 below comes from two BoM time-series graphics for all of Australia, that include the latest 2013/4 summer data. The pink bars highlight the 2012/3 “angry summer”, and notice that the surrounding six or more years are much cooler (including unannounced below “average” blue) in both cases. Words like “excessive noise”, “outlier” and “significance” could be used.
 Figure 1
I’ve added green horizontal lines showing two alternative comparative averages over the last seven and twelve-years, (based on the so-called raw data in both cases). Those high peaks may be mere noisy outliers. Nevertheless, the so-called “Climate Council” [D] which was reincarnated from the sacked tax payer funded “Climate Commission” has issued another report calling the 2014 summer as another angry summer with even more records broken than 2013. Strangely, global average temperatures (which include Australia?) from various other authorities start from 1850 or 1880, not 1910 (when BoM records start). Furthermore, the period 1850 -1910, according to some sources, included extremely hot times in Australia (like in 1896); since discarded by the BoM. According to the Fig. 1 data, the 2012/3 summer for the whole of Oz was prima facie unprecedentedly warm. However, there is a paradox to be found in the more detailed BoM data following next. Summer of 2013 was not a record in any state or territoryWhen Australian State and Territories are examined, a very different picture emerges for the whole of Australia:
 Figure 2 In short, ALL seven divisions of Australia have records of significantly warmer summers in past years. It is possible that when each state had its “hottest” ever year, the other states had cooler years so the net total average across the nation was smaller in those years. But nonetheless the claim that it was therefore an unprecedentedly hot 2012/3 summer is a potentially misleading claim. Most people in all the states of Australia have lived through hotter summers, and one hot summer in one part of the world doesn’t tell us anything about cause and effect and CO2. Keep reading → April 22nd, 2014 | Tags: Australian temperatures, BOM | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | How the concern for the worlds poor hurts. The pain! Ian D’oherty skewers the fake compassion. As I said in Global Bullies Want Your Money, How many people would you kill in order to save us from a theoretical “modeled” threat? Would that be thousands? Could it be more? Could be… Let’s count the ways wasting money on climate change betrays sick? Indur Goklany estimates that biofuels lead to nearly 200,000 deaths in 2010 alone. Is that enough? Warming kills less people than cooling, but let’s demand money to stop the warming. Poor climate predictions lead to real deaths, so why not shut down polite debate before it begins? Jail those deniers! Researching pointless things will undoubtedly mean some people die who could have been saved — (never ever count the opportunity cost, unless you’re talking about how much funding green programs could have got). Fake markets feeds corruption, farmers die, rivers run dry and some are left homeless, what does a caring person do, call the fake market a “free” market and ask for more. Who hurts the most when cheap energy gets more expensive, not the rich doctors wives who can afford subsidized solar (see point 4). Skeptics entirely hold the moral high ground. It’s time more skeptics unapologetically plant the flag there and call the fake compassion for what it is. The only ethical choice is to look at the evidence. D’oherty bluntly pokes at the contradictions of those who pretend to care.
Ian D’oherty The UN has released its latest report into global warming or, as we’re now meant to call it, climate change. And, like all UN reports, it should be treated with the same kind of scepticism and contempt that greets every utterance that is farted out of the bowels of that corrupt, counterproductive, bloated and profoundly dangerous organisation. …if you want to stop climate change, you must automatically be happy to see black babies die. Or you are happy to let brown and yellow babies live in misery, squalor and fear. And are you happy with that? I’m going to be a bit presumptuous here and suggest that, maybe, you’re not all that happy with starving children. If anything, they end up on the news and make you feel guilty when you’re eating your dinner. But where do you think the massive increase in emissions is coming from? America? No. Europe? Are you mad? Keep reading →  Cumulonimbus over Queensland | Photo by Geoff Derrick | Click to enlarge Magnificent. How loaded and vitriolic the conversation is about the weather. Too loaded. George Brandis describes how the left have stopped arguing for free speech and instead do everything to silence different views. He was shocked, he said, at the deplorable attitudes in two particularly white-hot topics: climate change and racial discrimination. Australian Senator Brandis is the Attorney General of Australia, and at the center of the debate about the noxious 18C legislation on hate-speech and whether we Australians have to make sure we don’t say anything to offend anyone. Curiously, this interview has got The Guardian and Sydney Morning Herald talking. Commenters at The Guardian are doing their best to say why Brandis is wrong (“he is a lunatic”), while at the same time proving nearly everything he says about their tactics is true. Brandis, after all, explains that he agrees with the climate consensus, but doesn’t see why asking questions about the science should evoke a shocking form of authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism. He speaks of the emergence of a habit of denying the legitimacy of any other point of view. Commenter “scuzzlebutt” says: “I’m starting to believe that Brandis may just be one of the most dangerous people in Australia.” Later he or she added: “The worst part is that he claims to be in agreement that climate change is real, yet turns such a matter in to a political football that he and his nasty party can exploit.” (And so it goes: saying you “believe” is not enough, you must also shout down the heretics too.) Meanwhile Jim Lakely at The Heartland Institute is already being deleted from The Guardian comments for the sin of posting links to NIPCC. There is no Gospel but the IPCC! Brendan O’Neill writes up this excellent interview at Spiked Online. It’s packed with quotable quotes. It should spread, and rampantly. The home truths are very well said. Brandis says… “there were two recent, specific things that made him realise just what a mortal threat freedom of speech faces in the modern era and that he would have to dust down his Mill, reread his Voltaire, and up the ante in his war of words against, as he puts it, the transformation of the state into ‘the arbiter of what might be thought’. The first thing was the climate-change debate; and the second is what is known down here as The Andrew Bolt Case.”
He describes the climate-change debate – or non-debate, or anti-debate, to be really pedantic but also accurate – as one of the ‘great catalysing moments’ in his views about the importance of free speech. He isn’t a climate-change denier; he says he was ‘on the side of those who believed in anthropogenic global warming and who believed something ought to be done about it’. But he has nonetheless found himself ‘really shocked by the sheer authoritarianism of those who would have excluded from the debate the point of view of people who were climate-change deniers’. He describes as ‘deplorable’ the way climate change has become a gospel truth that you deny or mock at your peril, ‘where one side [has] the orthodoxy on its side and delegitimises the views of those who disagree, rather than engaging with them intellectually and showing them why they are wrong’.
He describes how Penny Wong, the Labor Party senator for South Australia and minister for climate change in the Julia Gillard government, would ‘stand up in the Senate and say “The science is settled”. In other words, “I am not even going to engage in a debate with you”. It was ignorant, it was medieval, the approach of these true believers in climate change.’ Wong, whom Brandis tells me is ‘Australia’s high priestess of political correctness’, is far from alone in suffering from what the American journalist Joel Kotkin recently described as ‘The Debate Is Over’ Syndrome. Throughout eco-circles, and among the political and media elites more broadly, the idea that the time for debating climate change is over, and now we just need action, action, action, is widespread. And to Brandis, this speaks to a new and illiberal climate of anti-intellectualism, to the emergence of ‘a habit of mind and mode of discourse which would deny the legitimacy of an alternative point of view, where rather than winning the argument [they] exclude their antagonists from the argument’.
The great irony to this new ‘habit of mind’, he says, is that the eco-correct think of themselves as enlightened and their critics as ‘throwbacks’, when actually ‘they themselves are the throwbacks, because they adopt this almost theological view, this cosmology that eliminates from consideration the possibility of an alternative opinion’. The moral straitjacketing of anyone who raises a critical peep about eco-orthodoxies is part of a growing ‘new secular public morality’, he says, ‘which seeks to impose its views on others, even at the cost of political censorship’.
John Stuart Mill, particularly in chapter 2 of On Liberty, made the case better than anyone has made it before or since that the best way for the public to be enlightened, for wicked opinions to be exposed for what they are, is to get them out in the cold light of day and let there be a contest of ideas. Let people judge, having heard the contest of ideas, what views are right and supportable, and what views are wrong. Indeed, in a recent TV discussion here about Section 18C, one firebrand leftist described free speech as something that only serves ‘old white rich men’.
… this is something new, …the left’s turn against freedom of speech is a pretty recent thing: ‘It’s a complete inversion. The right, until maybe the 1970s or 80s, used to be on the side of censorship, and the left used to be on the side of liberation. That has inverted in the last 20 or 30 years. Now it is the left, in the name of political correctness, in the name of this kind of new secular public morality, which seeks to impose its views on others, even at the cost of political censorship. And it is the right, traditionally more authoritarian than the left, which has become the custodian of classical liberalism. Keep reading → It’s another pious scientist. Sigh. Why do good researchers sometimes throw their professional standards to the wind (or in this case, just blow them right up?) Fiona Stanley has done great work in the prevention of spina bifida with folic acid, and with indigenous health problems. The new big state funded hospital in WA is named after her, and she’s another Australian of the Year. (Is that award the worst thing that can befall a good scientist? Post hoc, they seem to think the world wants to know their personal feelings on topics they know nothing about.) Cue Professor Fiona Stanley who assumes all fields of science “work” even though she herself says climate science is politicized. Stanley goes so far as to say that being skeptical of the IPCC view is like “child abuse”. But isn’t it a form of child abuse to throw away the Scientific Method, to sacrifice the next generation’s quality of life, their careers and then burden them with debts to the the God of Wind-farms and the Saint of Pink Batts? Don’t we owe our kids the transfer of a culture of logic and reason that was handed to us? At least Stanley admits she doesn’t know what she’s talking about and is making a faith based statement:
So she’s a religious follower, which she’s entitled to be. And the evidence is in-credible — we quite agree. (I don’t think she meant to say that.) With a true sense of fair play she even admits the scientists she “trusts” don’t know, and can’t be expected to know precisely what is going on.
But look out, there’s contradiction ahead.
So the data is compelling, but the scientists aren’t precise? Obviously she didn’t look at the data herself, but trusted those other experts to look at it and tell her accurately and without omission what is going on. (So suppose it’s 1614 instead of 2014. Who are you going to trust, the Pope and his experts or that little man from Padua?) Duck for cover, here comes the sermon:
I presume she means temperatures may not be rising, while “risk factors” are — supposedly the greenhouse gases. What Fiona Stanley doesn’t seem to realize is that obviously we don’t know what “all” the risk factors are — if temperatures are not on the rise, it follows that some actual factor is over-riding all her hypothetical rising risks. What could it be? Don’t ask a climate scientist — they don’t know, but they can give you a dozen possibilities. When good scientists speak so irrationally, that’s when I worry for my kids. Don’t read this next one literally — it’s a spiritual thing looking after a ball of magma:
Here come the Holy Rosary’s:
And is there any chain of evidence, or even a chain of assumptions that suggest that if every Australian became a bike-riding vegetarian that we would get nicer weather?
Yes, Prof Stanley, good scientists are being denigrated. Some people call them “deniers”, and they get ostracized, exiled and blackbanned. Bad scientists are hiding data and declines, pretending adjustments are neutral, using mysterious methods, avoiding debates, and clinging to theories that are proven wrong. They pretend red is yellow, and ignore 28 million weather balloons. It is politicized. That is exactly the problem. In fairness, she’s not trying to disguise her faith, nor to hide the hype: Keep reading → April 17th, 2014 | Tags: Logic & Reason, Religion | Category: Global Warming, Logic & Reason | Print This Post | | UPDATED: Lovejoy has responded (in PDF and in comments. See below.) I could tell from the headline below this was going to be a candidate for the Top-Ten most vacuous papers. It lived up to expectations, and then some. “Odds that global warming is due to natural factors: Slim to none” Is there anyone with the lights on at McGill University or “Climate Dynamics“? Surely ScienceDaily ought to have laughed at the press release and sent it back? Seriously, people wield the magic wand of “statistical significance” without realizing that a/it isn’t magic, and b/ tiny p values can still mean nothing. (Depends on the hypothesis and assumptions underneath, hmm?). LoveJoy looked at  Modern climate science can predict virtually none of the spikes and wiggles on this graph. Note the graph doesn’t include the last 100 years which adds about 1C to the rise. Don’t look now, but it’s another Nail In the Deniers Coffin.
Judge the calibre of the man by his, er… name-calling:
And we all know that he conducted his research totally impartially, and if the results had suggested anything else, he’d tell the world “climate-change deniers” were right. Sure. The actual abstract takes the farce to high art:
The one useful thing about this paper is that it admits that GCMs are all the alarmists have and that their case boils down to “assumptions”. But the idea that LoveJoy did anything empirical is boggling.
So I went straight to the Great William Briggs who has indeed, already shed tears over this paper:
April 16th, 2014 | Tags: Briggs (William), Statistics | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Good news, according to The Guardian Stephan Lewandowsky is doing Reddit/Science Ask Me Anything session (finished for today, but back again tomorrow). Richard Tol asked Stephan Lewandowsky how he felt about data. Stephan Lewandowsky replied with exactly the right answer, saying it’s crucial, and “I release all relevant data immediately”. Then Barry Woods quoted the Vice Chancellor of UWA refusing to provide Lewandowsky’s data (after many requests). Apparently it is UWA practice not to release data, no matter how many times researchers politely enquire. How unfortunate for Stephan to have worked at such a backward institution? Strangely, Barry Woods comment disappeared completely. (Lucky there’s a screen-shot.) There must be something wrong with the server at Reddit, surely? Nonetheless Stephan Lewandowsky is passionate about data, I’m sure he will fix this as soon as possible in the morning. (Actually he is probably emailing Stephen McIntyre this minute). It could all be solved so quickly. Of course, it is too late for him to call the Vice Chancellor, so it may take til lunch time tomorrow to change UWA’s data hiding practice. We look forward to advancing cognitive science with open data too Professor Lewandowsky. -Jo —————————————————————————————————————– The Reddit CommentsPlease elaborate on the importance of reproducibility of research, including the availability of data and background data to other researchers if not the public, and on the importance of instilling this attitude in our PhD students. StephanLewandowsky Professor of Cognitive Science Crucially important. That’s why I release all relevant data immediately upon publication. I also have now begun to preregister my experiments, which i consider to be an exciting new development in the social sciences. I am also now increasingly relying on Bayesian statistics for similar reasons. Finally, I have rarely published anything without knowing that it has replicated (e.g. my two recent papers on conspiratorial thinking and the denial of science). Barry Woods: In this case will you be providing the data that was requested for – NASA faked the Moon Landing, therefore [climayte science] is a hoax, Lewandowsky et al, Psychological Science The Vice Chancellor of UWA has refused to release it.
April 15th, 2014 | Tags: Lewandowsky (Stephan), Satire & Parody | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | AIMS researchers found that fish near a natural CO2 vent were not as scared of predators as their colleagues from more alkaline water: “Ocean Acidification robs reef fish of their fear of predators”. They compared populations in reefs with normal pH levels with those near the vent. I note this line in the abstract didn’t make it to the press release:
So the natural laboratory of the vent has biodiversity and a community, despite the “acid” (which is not acidic of course). Milne Bay, I gather, has pH of 7.7. The abstract points out that there might be a reason why fish are bolder:
Less predators, anyone? So these might be well adapted little fish that suit the natural environment around them? Call the press… If warming were politically correct, then people might say the fish became more confident. : -) Indeed shouldn’t we worry that fish in higher pH waters might be too anxious? Apparently, that is not the right question to ask. Here’s fear inducing press release of the Australian Institute of Marine Science:
April 14th, 2014 | Tags: Blame CO2, Fish, Ocean Acidification | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | Who is in charge of arithmetic at the IPCC? As Graham Lloyd points out, in March the IPCC Working Group II estimates the cost of a 2C temperature rise as being between “0.2 and 2.0 per cent of income.” So how much should we spend to prevent 2% damage to our GDP? The IPCC Working Group III says “10%”. Remember it takes millions of dollars of your taxes to come up with something this inanely stupid. Only a large government funded committee could suggest that spending 10% to save 2%* is an idea worth writing in actual words on actual paper. A private organization would have binned it at the back-of-the-envelope stage, the IPCC took it all the way through multiple drafts of multiple reviews of multiple meetings and sent it to every media outlet they know. Too much money is never enoughThis is pure ambit. The IPCC ask for 10% of everything in the hope that they’ll eventually get 1% and then instead of being grateful for that massive and entirely unnecessary funding they can feign how “poor” they are, how badly they’ve been treated, and why the answer is even more money. The masters of PRNotice too, the IPCC have perfected the technique of getting more media. Instead of releasing all three working group reports as one big release, they know that splitting them into three separate reports will generate more headlines, and they know that by leaking a draft, then releasing the draft, then by releasing the final, they get three shots for each of those three parts to get headlines. It’s the constant media drip feed that matters. The aim of course, is not about reaching the right conclusion, it’s about being a media machine. How else could anyone explain why such nonsense could make it through so many supposed layers of expert review? Judge the IPCC as a scientific committee and it’s a rolling joke, but judged as a marketing tool, it was a monster success. (Until reality bit back…) IPCC = Interminable Propaganda for Climate Change
Global panic — strictly for your weekend entertainment. Enjoy! … … The funny side of screaming for the climate.
h/t Geoff S : – ) April 13th, 2014 | Tags: ABC, Satire & Parody, YouTube | Category: Funny stuff, Global Warming | Print This Post | | And the PR stunts continue. Once upon a time “Editors Resigning!” sounded important. Today, not so much. There are apparently hundreds of editors of Frontiers. As far as I can tell, these are not resignations from paid jobs, but resignations from a somewhat self-appointed, voluntary chore. They’re also not about any scientific argument, and it’s not clear that any of these editors were actually involved in editing the paper in question. The three editors are Ugo Bardi (energy and resources), Björn Brembs (neurobiology of flies and snails), and allegedlyProfessor Colin Davis of the University of Bristol (who at least is an expert in Cognitive Science). Davis doesn’t appear to have made a public statement. The only record is Desmog. Bjorn Brembs intends to resign, but may not have actually done it. Who knows? (More to the point, who cares?) Ugo Bardi, Chief Specialty Editor of the Frontiers Journal is resigning over the debacle about Stephan Lewandowksy’s twice failed paper. Overall, it’s an excellent event, but he’s a year too late. If I were an Editor, I would have resigned on Feb 3 last year (because on Feb 2, the journal published a ethically dubious, one-sided paper with no scientific merit, little research, and which abused English). Though we can applaud Ugo anyway, given his judgement, his exit means Frontiers is probably a stronger journal.
When a science paper is retracted the first and most important thing is whether it has scientific merit. But not for Bardi:
Having said he won’t discuss the science (which is hard to justify) he then tries to anyway. Note carefully the scientific merit Bardi attaches to this paper, and his evidence for reaching this conclusion. Remember this man is an Editor (or was) of a peer reviewed journal and he’s resigning, you’d think he would have looked very closely at this paper:
But Bardi seems to have resigned over the wrong paper. Recursive Fury doesn’t report the results of any survey. Instead it lists blog comments out of context, attaches derogatory labels to those comments (regardless of the truth or not of their comments). It analyzes them from the unscientific mindset of a religious adherent who thinks science is done by consensus rather than by observation. Both friends and critics have pointed out this mistake to Bardi, but instead of simply fixing it, he’s dug in and flat out denied what is obvious to anyone who looks. Recursive Fury does not report a “survey”. But Ugo knows the Lewandowsky paper has value — apparently because he personally has “seen it himself” on blogs. Golly!
Is there any more unscientific guide than conclusion-by-personal-prejudice? It’s not like he’s looked at the sample, or the statistics, nor even read the methods. We wonder if he has even read the paper. We also note that Bardi is a member of The Club of Rome, and lectures about renewable energy, so it would be fair to ask whether he is an impartial editor in any publication about climate change. To use Lewandosky’s own recursive lingo the persecuted victim (PV) feels the world is against them. Here’s Bardi:
Where were those “common” death threats, or even one in this case? According to other editors of Frontiers, there were not even legal threats, let alone death threats. But it did receive “well argued and cogent” complaints. How terrifying for the editors. Who exactly are the bullies here?Who is intimidating who? Is it the unpaid volunteers writing on blogs and pointing out scientific errors, or is it the professors backed by university teams of lawyers and PR agents with government funds who use their positions to publicly diagnose and allege the unpaid volunteers write words that are mentally deficient? Let’s get it straight. Bardi supports the team that started the campaign of intimidation against scientists long ago by calling anyone with difficult questions a “denier”. I defy Bardi to define it in scientific terms, and to show it has any use other than as a form of character assassination. Lewandowsky’s paper essentially took blog comments and reviews that he personally disagreed with and labeled those remarks (which even included an IPCC lead authors words) with psychopathological characteristics. What could be more intimidating, and unconducive to open science review than finding that even if you speak up about a real scientific flaw, you will be labeled publicly in a science journal as someone who “Espouses Conspiracy Theories”. Who wants to be “ideated”? Respect? Yes, let’s try some
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