Slashdot Mirror
Smithsonian 'Toned Down the Science' In Climate Change Exhibit
An anonymous reader writes "According to an International Herald Tribune article, the Smithsonian pre-emptively toned down the scientific content of a climate change exhibit put into place last year. The changes, including removal of scientist conclusions and muddying of displayed data, were made to ensure that the exhibit would not offend the Congress or the White House. Pressure brought to bear by Institute officials resulted in the resignation of Robert Sullivan, a sixteen year veteran of the organization. 'This is not the first time the Smithsonian has been accused of taking politics into consideration. The congressionally chartered institution scaled down a 1995 exhibit of the restored Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, after veterans complained it focused too much on the damage and deaths. Amid the oil-drilling debate in 2003, a photo exhibit of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was moved to a less prominent space.'"
Are you guys still spreading misinformation about the hockey stick?!
It's 2007...
The people arguing that science is making "golden conclusions" are (shockingly) creationists. They want science to be another belief system, and it's not. If they win their argument, their point then becomes "why would anyone follow a belief system that didn't have a savior?" The whole point is that science is experimental, it was created by people to debunk claims of "mystical powers", by testing those powers. Recent tests of whether or not global warming is happening seem to conclude that we all better learn to swim really soon. You can believe anything you want, but you can also test for gravity, electricity, C-14 radioactive decay, and even global warming and see for yourself.
stuff |
Historically (eg, glacial/interglacials): current best theory is that the first mover was orbital variations (Milankovitch cycles) leading to ice sheet retreat. Ice sheet retreat leads to warming. Warming leads to CO2 outgassing from oceans, CH4 being produced from melting permafrost. CH4 and CO2 increases lead to more warming.
Present-day: CO2 increase is solely due to human activity. This CO2 increase is a priori expected to lead to temperature increases, and the actual temperature increase seems to be largely explained only by human induced atmospheric changes in forcing, if you include feedbacks (increased water vapor, glacial retreat, etc.)
Long long ago historically there is evidence that we never would have left snowball earth without the CO2 increases caused by volcanic eruptions over hundreds of thousands of years, and no CO2 sink through rock weathering/ocean uptake because everything was covered by ice.
What do you think they do? Look who authored the report. I don't see any scientific credentials there.
... all well known scientists.
You obviously haven't looked at the report. Check out the SPM drafting authors. Just off the top of my head, I recognize Alley, Hegerl, Joos, Stocker, Stouffer, and Stott
Hell, read the report, or even the summary for lawmakers. See how often the words "could" and "if" are used.
Wow, scientists aren't 100% sure what will happen. The United Nations must be corrupt.
Why don't you take a look at the US National Academy Assessment of the hockey-stick cluster of studies rather than relying on climateaudit.org? Though the 4th Assessment Report isn't a bad place to look either. Also, I believe that the hockey stick always came with error bars, and was fairly good for a first pass, and subsequent studies have mostly confirmed Mann's argument that the current global scale warming is likely unprecedented in the past 1000 years.
So let me guess - they put in the Hockey Stick and then someone pointed out that its a scientific crock of shit.
... a hockey stick: they concluded that the recent warming is a robust feature of the data, although they said the error bars on the earlier reconstructions should be widened. And that doesn't even begin to address all of the other paleoclimate reconstructions by other researchers, using different and independent methods, which also found hockey sticks.
In point of fact, the independent NAS review panel found that when you correct Mann's hockey stick you get
Skeptics like to hold up Mann (or Hansen, or Gore) as some kind of archetype, who if knocked down would bring down the whole scientific theory of global warming with them, but that is far from true. The scientific case for global warming does not rest on any one individual.
And the same Stephen McIntyre who holds no advanced degree and has never been published in an ISI peer-reviewed journal?
No, you wouldn't be close. Further research and sampling will (surprise, surprise) cause people to update their data sets to reflect the further research. The hockey stick model still fits, though possibly not as dramatically as Mann's original model.
Oh, give it a rest. Instead of blaming 'censorship', why don't you blame the weakness of your sources and the fact that your arguments have been debunked multiple times before?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The problem with your response is that the summary is not wholly accurate. The problem the veterans had with the exhibit is not that it had information on the thousands of deaths and the horror that came later. It was the lack of context. The original script for the exhibit spoke of a crippled japan desperately trying to defend itself against the aggression of the US. The implication also made in the original draft that the Japanese started the war with us due to our own racism was what really set people off. The complaint was not that the US killed people, but the lack of context which when coupled with the description of the Japanese's desperation at the end of the war gave what the veterans groups called a bias. Specifically lines such as "For most Americans it was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism." support this point when attached to planned photographs of Japanese religious symbols at ground zero. Not saying that the veterans don't have there own agenda, or that the Smithsonian should kowtow to special interests, but the issue was more complicated then the trite summary given.
You can find the original scripts, just search for the title "The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb, and the Origins of the Cold War"
"...the script...was rewritten to minimize and inject more uncertainty into the relationship between global warming and humans..." Imagine that! Uncertainty in science. If you want certainty, get a shaman/priest/rabbi.
Yes, science has uncertainty. The problem is in injecting more uncertainty than the scientific studies originally concluded.
"...officials omitted scientists' interpretation of some research and let visitors draw their own conclusions from the data..." Why would they do that? Don't they know the great unwashed can't be trusted to draw trhe "proper" inferences?!?!!?!!
Hell, even other scientists have trouble looking at a graph and drawing conclusions from it, unless they're experts in that specific field. That's why scientific papers and scientific talks have words to go along with all those pretty graphs.
Look at all of the abuses of science that go on in Slashdot global warming threads when you take away the interpretation.
Raw data: graph showing CO2 increases following temperature increases, instead of leading them
Implied conclusion: CO2 doesn't cause temperature increases
Missing scientific interpretation: temperatures cause CO2 increases, which in turn amplify and prolong the original temperature increase
Actual scientific conclusion: CO2 does cause temperature increases (and vice versa!)
Raw data: graph showing CO2 increasing smoothly in the 20th century, but temperatures falling mid-century
Implied conclusion: CO2 doesn't cause temperature increases
Missing scientific interpretation: there were non-CO2 cooling effects in the mid-20th century, including heavy air pollution and a brief spike in volcanism
Actual scientific conclusion: CO2 does cause temperature increases (and other manmade and natural factors also influence the climate)
Raw data: graph showing temperatures and solar intensity increasing
Implied conclusion: solar brightening causes global warming
Missing scientific interpretation: the increase in solar intensity is real but too small to produce the observed warming, and did not increase at a rate similar to the increased rate of late 20th century warming
Actual scientific conclusion: solar brightening can only account for a small minority of the global warming
Raw data: graph showing Earth and Pluto temperatures increasing
Implied conclusion: solar brightening causes global warming everywhere in the solar system
Missing scientific interpretation: see above, and the fact that Pluto has recently been unusually close to the Sun
Actual scientific conclusion: solar brightening isn't responsible for global warming on Earth or Pluto
There is nothing wrong with explaining how scientists interpret data. The data themselves only give part of the picture, especially to non-scientists who don't know as much about the issues.
This is B.S. I remember when this actually occured. This is a qoute from the proposed exhibit: "For most Americans, it was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism." It went down hill from there.
The curators presented Japan as an innocent victim of US aggression. No mention of the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, Japanese medical experiments on prisoners, or Japanese bio-warefare. Instead, the exhibit dwelt on the Allies blockade of Japan, US internment camps, and the atomic bombing. When criticized for not mentioning the estimates of US and Japanese casualities resulting from an invasion of the Japanese homeland, the currators cited numbers cut by 75% (with no rationale given).
And yet the removal of the bristlecone pines is the main thing that keeps McIntyre & McKintick's analysis from showing the same results as Mann's. So their analysis is not sensitive to the inclusion of the pines.
What ARE you talking about? The HS was replicated by McIntyre. The HS was the result of the massive overweighting of bristlecone pines, a proxy known to be NOT a temperature proxy. McIntyre showed that without the bristlecones, the HS shape disappeared.
Their analysis should that with or without the bristlecones, the HS failed multiple statistical tests for significance.
Oh? Please explain how it is statistically insignificant? No one, not even McIntyre & Mckintick, claimed that the findings were statistically insignificant -- they just disputed the data samples and reconstructed the graph according to their own cherry-picked data. Note that even when analyzed over the 1000-year mean, instead of Mann's original 20-year mean, the hockey stick still appears, and is still statistically significant.
It fails two key tests, R2 and the Durbin-Watson. Both showed zero significance.
M&M DID claim that the findings were statistically insignificant. And just in case you think its a fluke, a replication by friends of Mann, Wahl and Ammann also showed zero significance for the R2 test.
The rest of your statements are simply rubbish.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
In point of fact, the independent NAS review panel found that when you correct Mann's hockey stick you get ... a hockey stick: they concluded that the recent warming is a robust feature of the data, although they said the error bars on the earlier reconstructions should be widened. And that doesn't even begin to address all of the other paleoclimate reconstructions by other researchers, using different and independent methods, which also found hockey sticks.
That Panel also recommended that bristlecones should not be used as they were not a robust temperature proxy - but all of them included Mann's PC1 with its heavy overweighting of bristlecones, as a Proxy. They all failed tests for statistical significance, just like the HS.
In no sense were the others "independent". They used the same set of proxies over and over again.
Skeptics like to hold up Mann (or Hansen, or Gore) as some kind of archetype, who if knocked down would bring down the whole scientific theory of global warming with them, but that is far from true. The scientific case for global warming does not rest on any one individual.
The archetype is the complete lack of ethics by any of them as well as a willingness to exaggerate their asses off. ALl of this has been documented.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
That's not being caused by rising sea levels, chief. The Mississippi river is all leveed up and it's not depositing any more sediment onto the delta. The delta's being eaten away by waves. You can blame the Army Corps Of Engineers for that fubar.