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.'"
Overheard at the Smithsonian:
Worker: Sir, I have this old display of Noah's Ark you asked for. Where did you want it?
Curator: Put some dinosaur models on it then set it up in the Geology Wing.
Worker: Will do, sir. Oh I also changed all the signage in that wing from "millions of years" to "thousands of years".
Curator: That's what I like: proactive thinking! What about the Adam & Eve diorama?
Worker: It's where the Galapagos Islands exhibit was, just as you requested.
Curator: My boy, you have a bright future in science!
Trolling is a art,
Who ever has the gold, makes the rules.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Get it from private industry, expect to answer to the CEO and board
Get it from an individual, expect to answer to him
Get it from Microsoft, expect to answer to Satan
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The most troublesome part is that it was Smithsonian's administration that wanted the changes, not people from the US administration.
There's two kinds of people: those that change their beliefs to fit the facts and those that change the facts to fit their beliefs.
When you're changing the facts to fit other people's beliefs, well, I guess you get the budget dollars but lose all self-respect.
An alien with a green heart!! Shoot him!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Somehow I never though Science and Political Correctness fit together. If you are dying, does the doctor now tell you "Congratulations, you won't be paying taxes next year."
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
In a hundred years, the Smithsonian will be under water.
Well maybe the administration isnt responsible for all the stuff that goes on. If the Smithsonian would pre-emptively change how it does things just because it thinks thats whats expected of it, then all you need is the idea that you are going to suppress certain ideas, not actively pursue their suppression.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
By muddying the data, they're inferring that the climate will get wetter and the mud will obfuscate the data. I would love to see the memo that explicitly tells the janitorial staff NOT to clean up the mud off of the data! That would be a smoking gun!
Fucking Government, they think they outsmart me?!? HA!
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
"...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.
"...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?!?!!?!!
"...changes were made for reasons of objectivity. And some scientists who consulted on the project said nothing major was omitted." Speaks for itself, I guess.
*AND*, despite the summary above, "Sullivan said that to his knowledge, no one in the Bush administration pressured the Smithsonian."
668: Neighbour of the Beast
It gets massive government funding, so you don't want to piss off the funders. Also, anything that is socially or politically charged is always toned down nowadays in the bigger institutions. You get the occasional out there displays, usually from smaller places trying to make a name for themselves.
It's like newspaper reporting now- skimp on the facts and give some conclusions, maybe put in a few emotional bits. Good luck trying to find objectivity, anywhere, anymore.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Because your message is one of fear. You've got to learn to express things differently because fear only works if you have the might to back things up.
(Not you specifically.)
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Well then submit a story on it. News for nerds, right? Does he run embedded *nix, or that other OS? Can he be hacked to play XBox games? Do tell, do tell...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Al Gore toned down the science for his film. Or, he substituted science with hype. Even the scientist who accept the man-caused model find Al's wild *ssed misuse of science a little frightening.
If anyone is going to take it seriously, hyped arguments, with incredibly weak holes are going to drive people away from the true science. When a true scientist says, "Look, I have proof of man-caused climate change", the Gore-Hype-Doom-Weary-Joe-Everybody is going to ignore it.
Ignore Gore, DiCapprio, Robbins, Madonna, Rosie, etc. and lets get the truth separated from the hype, or it will be ignored.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
They are always toning down the science for Joe six-pack.
If they wanted a timely exhibit on climate change, they could randomly assign visitors to either side of an amphitheatre where they would don earplugs before yelling at each other at the top of their lungs while mathematical models that nobody in the room could understand flashed on an IMAX screen.
I guess these guys have to be as politically neutral as possible.
That's crap. Politics has no place in science. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it" comes to mind when politics and science meet.
Trolling is a art,
Whatever changes the Smithsonian makes in the name of giving science exposure, I am fine with. But when they get motivated by politics, and so openly at that, they are compromising everything the Smithsonian stands for!
Yet another reason I prefer NYC's American Museum of Natural History to its inferior counterpart in D.C.
And *I* am one of those folks who feels that there is less certainty to the science behind climate change than some researchers (let alone the public) do. So I should be pleased, but I'm not at all. Putting more research up, whether to clarify the picture or to show that most of it is inconclusive, that would be fine. But "toning down" stuff in an unscientific manner (you can "tone down" projections if a statistical analysis makes it appropriate, I suppose) and hiding information is just irresponsible.
I like basketball!!1!
You should. Before accusing the US government of polishing up its record, check out what the kind, benign, "Hello Kitty" modern Japan is doing.
The annexation of Korea? Peaceful merger agreed upon by both countries.
Colonization (and attempts of same) of the rest of Asia? Defending the fellow Asians from the racist Europeans. (Yes, the same government, that for decades continued to deny citizenship to Koreans in Japan is accusing someone else of "racism")...
Murder of civilians? Impossible — because Japanese soldiers are the most disciplined in the world (and always have been, you see).
Every time a Japanese Prime Minister visits the shrine, there are shrieks of him, allegedly, "honoring the war-criminals". That's not true — the handful of criminals there are in a tiny minority among the people, who died furthering the government's conquests without committing any crimes.
It is the justification for the conquests presented in Yasukuni (and I was only able to see the English versions of them, native versions are, likely, even more extremist), that we should be objecting to...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
First of all, I liked the movie. However, one thing that he did exaggerate (by omission) was his discussion of the 20 foot rise in sea levels. Sure, if either the ice on Greenland or the West Shelf of Antarctica melts, sea levels will rise (at least) 20 feet. If both melt, sea levels will rise 40 feet. Of course, no scientist (that I'm aware of) is predicting either to happen in the next 100 years. So, his facts were right, but the implication (that this would happen reasonably soon if things don't change) is not.
Global warming is serious and should be addressed in an intelligent, deliberate manner. Over-hyping it is counter-productive.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Are you guys still spreading misinformation about the hockey stick?!
It's 2007...
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.
Exactly what else was that exhibit supposed to focus on? It was a war. Contrary to what our mass media and politicians would like us to believe, people actually do die in war, and it normally doesn't happen as movies and television like to dramatise. That plane dropped an atomic bomb, the first of its kind and one of only two to ever be dropped, that was responsible for the most deaths ever from a single explosive. If it didn't have that distinction, no one would care. It would just be yet another bomber from World War II. Personally, I think the exhibit should have been far more detailed than it was. Maybe a few shots of the barren wasteland that was once Hiroshima, or victims' fucking shadows etched into the sand from the detonation. The after-effects of the radiation, perhaps.
All exhibits, however, regardless of how important they seem, should be as detailed as possible. We should absolutely strive to put them in the correct context, and present the facts, unabashed, to the best of our knowledge. Kowtowing to any particular group or person does a grave disservice to society as a whole, because it will only result in the dissemination of misinformation, or at the very least only partial information. We can all digest the facts and come to our own conclusions, but the facts themselves are essential to the process.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
Whether the museum curator in the parent posting existed or not, I salute anyone with the guts and gall to question assumptions and place integrity above deceit. And, yes, such people probably will lose jobs and - in rare cases - possibly a whole lot more. History teaches us, however, that in the long run, inaccuracies do get weeded out. Nobody these days uses Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the British Kings as a textbook, and popular Victorian school texts (which depicted Iron Age Britain as filled with unkempt cave-dwelling barbarians with no language or culture) have been replaced with more reliable and infinitely more believable studies of Celtic life.
Pissing off the public with the truth is inevitable. It will happen, sooner or later. May as well get it over and done with quickly, even if that carries risk. Life is all about risk - so why not take risks that might make a difference?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
7. ????
8. Profit!
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.
Don't take it personally. After first contact, there were a lot of people who didn't trust the Vulcans.
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.
I was on assignment in Washington DC for the spring and summer months of 2004. The last time I had been there prior to 2004 was when I was about 8.
In what time off work I could find, I went to the Smithsonians (except the portrait museum, as it was closed, and the Native American museum, because it had not yet opened), and was rather disappointed by all but one.
The Air and Space museum, although home to a lot of really cool planes, was filthy. Dust everywhere, stained floors, etc. Also, from what I do remember about my visit now nearly 20 years later, much of the museum's public collection was the same. In fact, I didn't find much to look at there beyond the planes themselves. There were no interesting placards that I can recall, no interesting multimedia, and seemingly no information newer than about 1991.
The same goes for the American History museum. It seemed very propaganda-y. Major cultural divides throughout US history were glossed over or ignored completely. I remember specifically reading about how something to the effect of "some native peoples were unhappy about the country's expansion across the Great Plains." Yeah, I bet at least a few were unhappy.
What saddens me the most is that while I was there, the Natural History museum was the best one. Their displays were modernized, they had exhibits about current issues, the IMAX I went to was great, the facility was clean and the placards with the exhibits, although were somewhat simplified, were appropriate for a somewhat educated audience.
The Smithsonian Institution really is one of America's treasures. When people visit London, they hit the British Museum. In Paris, it's the Louvre. DC has the Smithsonian(s). Those facilities are home to much of the physical historical record of this country. They see millions of visitors per year.
Why not put politics aside, at least mostly, and let them be run as well as they deserve to be?
Sadly, I suspect I already know the answer.
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
Please tell me some of the other conspiracies from your rich internal life.
For some reason, this phrase conjured pictures of his spleen plotting against his pancreas...
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
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
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Yeah, but the power of fear diminishes exponentially over time.
Thus, showing "An Inconvenient Truth" to high-schoolers four or five times makes them indifferent, or worse, nihilistic.
Get the kids some exercise, get them playing some sports, get them into photographing nature. Make the bad things seem boring.
Summary: the positive approach is the better long-term investment, unless you're a shrink or an anti-depressant vendor.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Ah, spin. Was Tennekes dismissed for asking uncomfortable questions? There is no evidence of this; as far as I can tell, he simply retired, and most of his public skepticism was after he left. (And even if he was dismissed, what were the circumstances? Was he speaking in an official capacity, or his own? He arguably doesn't have free reign to use his job title to trump up support for a position at odds with his employer.) Was Winn-Nielsen a tool of the coal industry? Did Sutera and Speranza lose funding for raising uncomfortable questions? Or because they were out-competed by other proposals? It's not as if they were blackballed: they're both still publishing, as is Lindzen!
The notion that if you're ignorant of something and somebody comes up with a wrong answer, and you have to accept that because you don't have another wrong answer to offer is like faith healing
A straw man. The IPCC does not push such a notion. When IPCC numbers are at the edge of the error bars, What IPCC numbers are at the edge of the error bars? and situations so laughably implausable as the A1FI scenario are treated as genuine risks, you've stepped far from the realm of science. The SRES emissions scenarios have their flaws, but are not "laughably implausible"; see, e.g., the conclusions of Tol, O'Neill, and van Vuuren (2005). In any case, the A1 scenarios are not believed to be the most likely.
It is not okay to say that we're going to put a large number of cities underwater
The IPCC does not say this.
and that we are certain that is all on the back of CO2.
Nor this.
When Bush and Congress stand up for their stump speeches and tout how well they've done they feel that its important that we actually believe that, particularly when they say they've done a good job studying global warming because we don't know enough as Bush is wont to say.
If, however the general public actually learns that the problem is real and hasn't been attacked aggressively then they'll start shopping around for someone else to protect them.
While historically speaking the comparison to evolution is apt it might be better to compare it with the level of "terrorist threat" or the war with Eurasia. In the former case the issue is one of protection, are we making our "way of life" safer. With the War on Terror(tm) the claim is that Bush and Cronies are fighting the enemy and succeeding (look how many terrorists we have convicted and put behind bars). With Global Warming the claim is that it isn't a problem so they don't have to act on it. In either case the tendency to lash out at those who say that they are doing a bad job with respect to terror (journalists, PBS, research scientists) or global warming (scientists again, schools and museums) is just a natural reaction. Because if they aren't doing a good job they lose the license to give kickbacks and generally ruin things that they now have.
At the end of the day it is all about power and money.
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.
Here in Europe, where I live, in Africa, where my mother lives, in Australia, where my sister lives, the climate has obviously been changing over the last one and a half decades.
When I got to Europe in 1986, there was snow in winter on the local hills near to Zurich here in Switzerland so that kids could go skiing almost all winter, and people said they were used to that. Since then, the winters have gotten progressively warmer until there is often no snow on those local hills anymore long enough for more than one or two days of skiing, the whole winter. The summers have been starting earlier and earlier, so that this last April, the warmest EVER in HUMAN MEMORY, I was in a short sleeves in very warm sunny weather. In 2003, Europe had the hottest summer EVER. Last october, was the second hottest EVER recorded. The mountains in the Alps are losing their glaciers VISIBLY, not just in some geeky scientific measurements. The permafrost holding many of the highest together, is melting, causing massive landslides.
South Africa, where I come from, has gotten progessively warmer and drier in the same time. The high plateau inland down there, which at no point is below 1000 metres above sea level (about 3300 feet for the metrically challenged), didn't used to get much warmer than around 30 degrees Centigrade (86 Fahrenheit) in summer due to the altitude. In the summers now, the temperatures have regularly started to reach 36 degrees centigrade.
Australia, where my sister lives, is having one of the worst if not the worst drought the country has ever experienced, so much so, that scientists are beginning to think it might actually be a climate shift, i.e. it might be semi permanent.
What fucking blows me away, when climate change is pretty obvious to the naked, dumbass eye, without needing to see scientific measurements, is that some people are still fucking disputing this. I'm not talking about Greenland or Antarctica or northern Canada, since I don't live there. I'm talking about stuff that I can see. It blows my mind that so many here dispute it. Is there no such obvious change in America? Or is it that Americans spend so much of their lives in air conditioned houses that they don't notice?