House of Eratosthenes

Via Cartago Delenda Est, via blogger friend Rick, we come across this article in The Atlantic about how the global warming alarmists are responding to their disgrace. Rather fascinating the psychology at work:

The guild mentality has come to the fore. Campaigns are under way to defend the integrity of science from a scurrilous smear campaign. The message is simple: you are either with us or you are a barbarian.

The first line of response to the leaked or hacked emails, you recall, was to say that they showed science going on as usual–even science at its best, some argued. “Trick” did not mean trick; “hiding the decline” did not mean hiding the decline. These were innocent phrases torn out of context.
:
The next line of response was to say that the emails involved just a few individuals, and implicate no more than a sliver of information about global warming. Even if you threw out everything the Climatic Research Unit had done, such is the weight of other research that nothing would change…This is a strange defence. Would deleting not just selected CRU data but its entire research effort really subtract nothing from what we thought we knew?If CRU’s work is as redundant as that, taxpayers might wonder if they have been getting value for money.
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Also note that the first line of defence fatally undermines the second. If the CRU emails show climate science as it is done in the real world, and there is nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed about, then what reason is there to think that the corroborating research, even if truly independent, has been done to a higher standard?
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Which leaves just the “attack on science”. Circle those wagons. If you criticise one of us, you criticise all of us. No distinction is attempted between intelligent informed critics and ignorant malicious critics. The distinction which is emphasised, rather, is between qualified critics and unqualified — where “qualified” means “people who agree with us”. What could be more anti-scientific?

To criticise the work of a particular scientist or collaborating group of scientists is no more to attack science than criticising a particular journalist is to attack press freedom, or criticising a particular politician is to attack democracy. Trying to shut down criticism in the name of science is the real attack on science.

They are a puppy playing fetch with a dynamite stick. The fuse has been lit, and it doesn’t matter if the puppy realizes it is a dynamite stick or not. It doesn’t matter that the game-of-fetch has already been played for so many rounds, that cap-n-crap taxation is inevitable…and all the freedom-bashing laws that lie beyond it are also inevitable.

None of that matters.

What matters is that these excuses, each and every single one, are dealing irreversible harm to the credibility of this supposed scientific discipline and those who practice it.

The puppy, be he aware of it or be he not, m-u-s-t drop the stick right now and run away. He must. If he keeps carrying it around he’ll be blown to kingdom come, and there will be no do-over.

No distinction is attempted between intelligent informed critics (of whom there are plenty) and ignorant malicious critics (of whom, admittedly, there are far more).

This is a very good point, well taken by me, and I’m talking about a cautionary note for “our side”.

We have lots of under-informed and partially-informed people going off half-cocked on our side, over-stating things and mis-stating others. We should make sure we go to trusted resources and double check answers.

The distinction which is emphasised, rather, is between qualified critics and unqualified–where “qualified” means “people who agree with us”.

Gee … where have I heard this before? 😉

Well all the people who agree with us agree with us!!!!” – some very observant person I happen to know.
- philmon | 12/10/2009 @ 15:57
We have lots of under-informed and partially-informed people going off half-cocked on our side, over-stating things and mis-stating others. We should make sure we go to trusted resources and double check answers.

Well if you have a premise whose (useful) comprehension depends on a very high level of education and synchronicity, but it depends on a less sophisticated premise that doesn’t demand such things, it makes good sense to debate the less sophisticated piece of it. Not just so one side or the other can “win,” but rather because this syndication is prone to error. Better to make less of it necessary than more.

And I don’t need a degree in climate science to understand this: That if we’re noodling out a way to save the planet by stopping the warming, and the warming is caused by a higher concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, I’d better be hearing from someone about how we’re trying to get that saturation down, and to what level. If the plan doesn’t include that, it’s not a plan it’s a scam.

I know what you’re talking about, I think. Just this morning I’ve heard some disagreement about whether “climate change exists.” But I didn’t hear that from any skeptic, it was Al Gore putting words into the mouths of his opponents. That’s an old, dishonest debating method. You say your kid isn’t autistic, you get sucked into a debate about whether autism exists. Say you don’t have dyslexia, you get sucked into a debate about whether dyslexia exists. Say that probably wasn’t a UFO we saw last night, you get sucked into a debate about whether it’s “possible” for life to exist out there.
- mkfreeberg | 12/10/2009 @ 16:13
Wait.
I thought the FIRST line of defense was “Those E-mails were STOLEN!”
As if that would mean anything following conspicuous lack of denial.
- CaptDMO | 12/10/2009 @ 16:19
Yeah, what I’m concerned with is when people say something that’s just wrong, making it easy to debunk and dismiss the whole thing (in an “argument”). You know, like “there’s been global cooling for the last 10 years”. Well … that’s debatable, for sure, but there definitely hasn’t been any warming, especially if you can’t say there’s been any cooling.

I ran across a “paper” on the web yesterday “debunking” the “fact” that there’s been cooling. What they did was to debunk a certain 4th level polynomial curve fit (higher levels tend to fit curves better in the middle, but not necessarily at the ends especially if the data drops or rises just at one end or the other or both — where it will tend to exaggerate that). Anyway, this was used to “dismiss” the “oil funded” (it’s always about the funding to these people when they’re not calling us “poopy-heads”) study (and was it really oil funded? No clue. Just allegations) the idea that there’s been cooling, and thus, the skeptics are OBVIOUSLY washed up. (tired of the parentheses yet, Morgan 😉 ?)

This because the curve showed some fairly innocuous wobbles but showed a sharp drop for the last three years …. at the end. So they “debunked” the end of the curve — the link said “thoroughly” as being meaningless (which it is) to dismiss the whole thing, which showed no significant warming or cooling over the period.

I had clicked on the link because the author of the linking article said that the assertion that there had been no warming had been “thoroughly debunked”. Well, it hadn’t, but if someone said there had been cooling because of that sharp drop in the fitted curve at the end … well they’re right, that would be bogus.

I’m careful to couch any talk of cooling in the last decade as specious, because it ‘s just as specious as the assertion that there’s been statistically significant warming over normal climate variation over the last 150 years.

Diversion.

Which seems to be the name of the game with the warmists… and most of the Left … these days.
- philmon | 12/10/2009 @ 17:07
You have been warned

I am a librarian not a scientist. I have a PhD in Philosophy and thus am more of a meta-physicist than a physicist. However, to paraphrase Tim Allen in the movie “Galaxy Quest “It doesn’t take a good actor to recognize a bad one and it doesn’t take a good scientist recognize a terrible one” The people promoting Global Warming are bad scientist.

Here is how I put the argument for the simple minded.

“It is impossible to create the graphs used to support Global Warming with the data that the people who produced the graphs used. They also cannot use their models to work backwards from where the temperature is now and get an accurate picture of the temperature changes over the last 20 years or so. If you cannot accurate predict what has already happened then you cannot predict what hasn’t happened. ”

At a slightly more sophisticated level ask the Warmist to publish their error bars and confidence levels for their statistics. They don’t even know what those are! But even if they did they cannot give you a confidence rating for their work because it is so statistically flawed that it is worthless. They simply have no idea what they are doing.
(http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11824#more-11824)

They are not scientist they are monist who worship nature.

At least the guy referenced by CapDMO above that claimed cooling was TRYING to work with actual data. The Warmist do not even use their own data. I’d bet real money that the Warmist refuting the chart was still using EAU-CRU or ICCP data that has in the past three weeks been clearly and without doubt shown to be worthless. The Warmist simply make it up as they go along and then pummel doubters with ad hominem attacks and charts created from worthless data. Indeed, the most unscientific of critics as referenced above are more scientific and fact based than the average greenie cap&trader who appear to me to be morons who believe in a sort of noble savage world of grass huts and happy natives. They don’t know the difference between Carbon-Dioxide and Carbon-Monoxide. They can’t tell you how much CO2 is in the atmosphere or how much of that is naturally occurring. They don’t understand nature except in an impressionist painting or from grocery fliers from Whole Foods.

The real tragedy is that the Warmist have wasted 15 years or so and untold amounts of money on a fraud and that time and that money could have been used to solve some real environmental problems.

Global Warming is not about the environment. It can’t be because there are no environmental issues associated with current levels of CO2, or if there are they are different issues than are being presented. Everything or almost everything they publish is provably false. I think it is actually about population control but I can’t prove that. I think they are actually anti-human.
- Fai Mao | 12/10/2009 @ 19:26
I even read an article today that claimed that the “facts” on global warming are clear (a phrase Gore uses over and over) and went on to say that there are 385 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, mainly due to human activities.

Now that is one STUPID statement. I say at least get your facts straight. No serious Warmist “scientist” would even say that CO2 in the atmosphere is due “mainly” to human activity. They will say in the 19th century it was 280, and now it’s 385. So only up to a little over a quarter of it could possibly be from our impact on the total carbon budget.

It turns out, and I can’t remember the number but I do know that our contribution to the total carbon budget of the planet has been shown to be in the single digits. And that’s a percentage of the budget, not necessarily what ends up sticking around in the atmosphere.

Now maybe it was 280, maybe it wasn’t. But even by their measurement methods, we know that CO2 levels have been much, much higher in the past. The problem is, these are the things we need to hash out.

“Really? 280? How did you arrive at that number?”

“Well, we did this and this and this.”

“Well did you consider that this bit may be subject to such and such an error?”

“Yes, but I accounted for that this way.”

or

“No, it’s not and this is why.”

or

“Gee, I hadn’t really thought of that.”

This is how science works. Not who funded your study, or whether or not you voted for a conservative or a liberal in the last election. Yes, coercive funding (direct or indirect) can affect your incentive to come up with certain conclusions, but it’s not necessarily so and that is what the peer review process (illustrated crudely above) is all about. Those who think studies funded in part by oil companies are automatically suspect due to conflict of interest never, EVER consider that studies funded by governments and progressive organizations that want ever more regulatory power have at least the same conflict of interest. So let’s focus on the science, the facts, the review — instead of all this other crap that mostly the Warmist side focuses on. You’ll notice they rarely argue facts. They argue speculation, emotion, funding, and “poopy-headedness”.
- philmon | 12/10/2009 @ 19:53
Incidentally, I suspect that THOSE EMAILS were intentionally leaked from the inside by someone with a conscience.

I have no proof. It just seems too timely, and whoever it was seemed to know exactly what evidence to grab and publish.
- philmon | 12/10/2009 @ 19:57

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Puppy Playing Fetch with a Dynamite StickThursday, December 10th, 2009

Puppy Playing Fetch with a Dynamite Stick
Thursday, December 10th, 2009