Copenhagen

[Mr. Tea]

Michele Bachmann is another favorite; Tea, I suggest you look up her speech on CO2 being a "natural byproduct of nature" for a good simultaneous laugh/cry.

Hahaha, oh dear, I'm listening now and it's depressing and funny in equal measure. "Carbon dioxide is natural, so how can it be bad?!?!?!". Oh, it's only 3% of the atmosphere, so that's OK - presumably she'd happily drink a glass of water that was only 3% prussic acid?

There are few things more awkward to watch than someone who clearly hates science trying to use science to prove some point.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

so what you're really inferring is some kind of insidious & far-reaching plot between some stereotype of latte-sipping liberal groupthink, evil scientists and another stereotype of a wild-eyed radical aching to tear down industrial civilization.

That's the badger!

Here are two examples from yesterday of classically unflappable scientific behaviour, save for the mugging, thin-lipped contempt and swears (unprecedented (?) behaviour on Newsnight at 11:42, for which the presenter had to apologise)

Since Francis Bacon rejected the Idols of the Mind, science has demanded that its practioners hold themselves to the highest standard of epistemic character. Amongst the epistemic virtues required are objectivity, impartiality, disinterestedness, restraint in not going beyond ones knowledge, fairness to opposing views, intellectual competence, imagination, originality, honest dealing in the conduct of enquiry, sincerity of testimony and honest dealing with opponents.

This doesn't really come across in the vids, does it?

And, in the spirit of regathering, the Met Office is to re-examine 160 years of climate data. Obv. the government want to nip this in the bud.

 

[scottdisco]

so what you're really inferring is some kind of insidious & far-reaching plot between some stereotype of latte-sipping liberal groupthink, evil scientists and another stereotype of a wild-eyed radical aching to tear down industrial civilization.

it is this sort of stuff - such laughable, swivel-eyed, simplistic generalising and long-standing, unannounced interests in his back pocket - that make gun-for-hire Frank Furedi such a tool.

there are many reasons why he's a tool, of course, but that's one.

still he's not as bad as Manchester United fan and ex-LM editor, Mick Hume, of course. (Hume's pieces in rag fanzines are actually kind of amusing. naturally, i don't think Hume's a Manc, though i may be wrong there. perhaps his da's from Salford 5.)

gotta love a bloke from the Spectator - fairly mediocre establishment Tory rag (home to the truly dismal Rod Liddle, and the truly vile Melanie Phillips, among other dim-witted no marks) that alongside its peer the Telegraph is the only game in town for black sheep and achingly hip contrarian Bjørn Lomborg - making such a meal out of one bad performance from one academic.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Here are two examples from yesterday of classically unflappable scientific behaviour

yes, I suppose a scientist getting ornery on TV does discredit all scientists everywhere. esp. b/c the main focus of science is being good at television appearances (right?).

Since Francis Bacon rejected the Idols of the Mind, science has demanded that its practioners hold themselves to the highest standard of epistemic character.

wait a minute, didn't you link to this same blog post already? ah, there it is, in the carbon thread. that's all you've got? well, I guess if one guy at Cambridge has determined that scientists aren't quite impartial we might as well just toss the scientific method right out the window, that makes sense. I guess it's good that CC skeptics have such a sterling record of being objective (not in bed w/big fossil-fuel interests), levelheaded, reasonable, non-absolutely fucking crazy, and so on.

I didn't realize we were all playing by some arbritrary epistemic virtues checklist anyway. just tbc - you're saying it's a bad thing that not all scientists live up to these ideals, as opposed to a good thing that science aspires to them in the first place, that a great many scientists meet them & that scientists - unlike their opponents - have peer review to try to enforce them. b/c I'll tell you, impartiality, intellectual competence & honest dealing w/opponents are not exactly the calling cards of CC skeptics.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

People in positions of authority have to meet higher standards than their opponents to appear worthy of their superior standing or particular position.

The CC sceptics are not in a position of direct responsibility or trust vis-a-vis the public; the CC scientists are. They need to come across to us as trustworthy people as the public are not well-placed to perform or evaluate scientific research for themselves.

If the govt line was CC-sceptical, then the shoe would be on the other foot, obviously.

The behaviour of the scientists in the excerpts could have done nothing but chip away at this trust.

 

[crackerjack]

fairly mediocre establishment Tory rag (home to the truly dismal Rod Liddle

he's worse than truly dismal (quoted in full so you don't push up his traffic)

The first of an occasional series – those benefits of a multi-cultural Britain in full. Let me introduce you all to this human filth.

It could be an anomaly, of course. But it isn’t. The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.

he is a loathsome cunt

 

[vimothy]

For mixed_biscuits and/or Zhao

Jared Diamond: shill for big business

 

[vimothy]

Okay, bear with me. Looking for stuff on climate change, I read this:

Several pieces from three different sites on the global warming cult: that conspiracy to spread the useful lie of human-caused global warming.

In the first, Shannon Love outlines what “peer reviewed” science actually is. Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) cultists act as if peer reviewed science is without fault or error. Of course, this is wrong. Peer review is a way of making sure that methodological biases are passed on between researchers in some area. I have first-hand experience with this. Of my first two peer-reviewed works, the one that got passed the anonymous and secret editors was the one that played to the methodological bias of the field. It was less interesting, less useful, equally as generalizable, but was in its method what the reviewers were expecting. So it got in.

In the second, Shannon Love notes the poor quality of the models created by the CAGW cult. Again, I have first-hand experience backing this up. After I wrote my master’s thesis on the basis of a computer model, I knew to take every other model with a healthy dose (not a grain, but a glass or gallon) of salt. Even among professional scientists, this is serious, because those scientists rarely have training in software development. Global warming models are buggy, amateurish computer programs that until now has been secret.

Combining these threads, Shannon points out that peer review is not even used for scientific software. Yet again, I have first-hand knowledge backing Shannon up. The two statistical programs I use most often are MPlus and R. Of these, only R’s code is publicly available, peer-reviewed, and largely the result of academic research. MPlus, better marketed and for-profit, is secretive. It is hard to take seriously the conclusions of closed-source software, because it boils down to scientists just trusting their tool-makers.

However, software models is all the CAGW cultists have left. This is because they threw away their raw data. So you have to trust their secret, bugger, amateurish software, as that’s all they have.

Only tangentially related to this scandal, but important to realize the CAGW cult is truly a cult, is this story about a kindergarten teacher leading students in a global warming prayer.

Even Real Climate, which generally defends the University of East Anglia, raises red flags about the conspirator’s desire to delete Freedom of Information-related data and the field’s emphasis on secret and commercial data sources.

Obviously, this comes straight from the constiuency that m_b is criticising (if indirectly: I mean that the blogger's politics are immediately apparent from his position on climate change).

Disregarding the irrelevant stuff about peer reviewing at the top of the post, the authors touches on a few things that interest me. The issue of methodology especially. What is the state of modelling in climate change science? The blogger suggests that it is not good. But is it really worse than, say, economics, engineering or epidemiology? ("After I wrote my master's on the basis of a model". Er, yeah. But isn't that what everyone who isn't in the humanities does?) Genuine question.

Do climate change scientists use "secret models" that cannot be used be other researchers to replicate their results? Do they really use R?

He also mentions some data being thrown away. Were these data important? Were they the extent of all data that exist (the suggestion, as I read it, is that climate change science has to rely on theoretical models because there is no empirical data left)?

Seems like a lot of straw men, but I don't know enough about the field to say for certain...

EDIT: This was mentioned in the blog post above: http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/10399.html

 

[polystyle]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/06/copenhagen-editorial

 

[crackerjack]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/08/met-office-warmest-decade

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6948629.ece

 

[Tentative Andy]

^^ That Rod Little thing got me quite angry. Some of the supportive comments he got afterwards even more so.
What was it d_q said in the racism thread? 'So smug and cosy in their safe little world' or something similar. Cap seems to fit here.

 

[crackerjack]

^^ That Rod Little thing got me quite angry. Some of the supportive comments he got afterwards even more so.
What was it d_q said in the racism thread? 'So smug and cosy in their safe little world' or something similar. Cap seems to fit here.

He's copping an unusual amount of shit for it too though - hopefully this will be the point where calcualated mischeif-making spills over into getting the sack (at least from the ST, which probably pays much better than the Spec). Anyway, don't wanna derail.

 

[crackerjack]

Copenhagen: a genius speaks

 

[Pestario]

can't help but laugh at the guardian's bait tactics

 

[scottdisco]

We are a non-partisan, non profit making pressure group that seeks to provide a counterpoint to environmental groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth that, although undoubtedly well meaning, have brought an alarmist and hysterical tone to the debate on the future of our planet. Our members include several academic scientists as well as experienced business leaders in fossil fuels and writers for publications such as the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph. Our Board of Trustees includes Professor Ian Plimer, the writer and polymath Christopher Booker and the provocative columnist James Delingpole.

here

 

[polystyle]

Forest protection pact coming

This sounds good ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/science/earth/16forest.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

 

[zhao]

my instincts were right to avoid this thread until now, for the first 3 pages or so were just a waste of time, aside from some of Tea's science -- his name is MIXED BISCUITS, for chrissakes. meaning that the dude's BISCUITS are MIXED UP. why you lot would indulge this kind of common place trolling is quite unfathomable.

thanks for some of the good links on this page though. Diamond pro big biz, step toward saving the forests, the Alaskan Genius exposing the big lies (like dinosaurs) that would keep us all from grace of the Lord, etc.

do i have anything useful to add? not really.

 

[droid]

Its all settled so.

 

[droid]

Monbiot on the rise of denialism and the importance of the conference.

There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere which cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.

A survey last month by the Pew Research Centre suggests that the proportion of Americans who believe there’s solid evidence that the world has been warming over the past few decades has fallen from 71% to 57% in just 18 months(1). Another survey, conducted in January by Rasmussen Reports, suggests that, due to a sharp rise since 2006, US voters who believe that global warming is the result of natural causes (44%) now outnumber those who believe it is caused by human action (41%)(2).

A study by the website Desmogblog shows that the number of internet pages proposing that manmade global warming is a hoax or a lie more than doubled in 2008(3). The Science Museum’s Prove it! exhibition asks online readers to endorse or reject a statement that they’ve seen the evidence and want governments to take action. As of yesterday afternoon, 1006 people had endorsed it and 6110 had rejected it(4). On Amazon.co.uk, books championing climate change denial are currently ranked at 1,2,4,5,7 and 8 in the global warming category(5). Never mind that they’ve been torn to shreds by scientists and reviewers, they are beating the scientific books by miles. What is going on?

It certainly doesn’t reflect the state of the science, which has hardened dramatically over the past two years. If you don’t believe me, open any recent edition of Science or Nature or any peer-reviewed journal specialising in atmospheric or environmental science. Go on, try it. The debate about global warming that’s raging on the internet and in the rightwing press does not reflect any such debate in the scientific journals.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/11/02/death-denial/

When you survey the trail of wreckage left by the climate emails crisis, three things become clear. The first is the tendency of those who claim to be the champions of climate science to minimise their importance. Those who have most to lose if the science is wrong have perversely sought to justify the secretive and chummy ethos that some of the emails reveal. If science is not transparent and accountable, it’s not science.

I believe that all supporting data, codes and programmes should be made available as soon as an article is published in a peer-reviewed journal. That anyone should have to lodge a freedom of information request to obtain them is wrong. That the request should be turned down is worse. That a scientist suggests deleting material that might be covered by that request is unjustifiable. Everyone who values the scientific process should demand complete transparency, across all branches of science.

The second observation is the tendency of those who don’t give a fig about science to maximise their importance. The denial industry, which has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming, insists that these emails (which concern three or four scientists and just one or two lines of evidence) destroy the entire canon of climate science. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/12/07/the-real-climate-scandal

The summit’s premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accomodation. No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow.

This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/12/14/this-is-about-us/

 

[sufi]

Monbiot on the rise of denialism and the importance of the conference.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/12/14/this-is-about-us/

that last article was in the grunter yesterday and is irritatingly spot on - copenhagen's not about the climate it's about the human race etc etc...

apparently they've followed up with a sort of video nob-clash between boris and the moonbat, available online today....