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Climate Researchers Fight Back
tomduck writes "The Guardian reports that climate researcher Andrew Weaver is suing the National Post newspaper in Canada in a libel action for publishing 'grossly irresponsible falsehoods.' The Post claimed he cherrypicked data to support his climate research, and tried to blame the 'evil fossil fuel' industry for break-ins at his office in 2008 to divert attention from mistakes in the 2007 IPCC report. This comes fast on the heels of another Guardian article describing lessons learned from the exoneration of UEA scientists involved in the so-called Climategate affair. Are climate scientists finally fighting back against their critics, who they were previously more inclined to ignore?"
Real climate scientists have been fighting for years... It is the climate evangelists that have been ignoring everyone else up until now.
It would stand on its own, were the media to actually report what the data says. Since they seem to pay no attention to facts, I don't see a problem to poking them with a sharp lawyer and seeing if they'll pay attention to that.
Someone had to do it.
So people can just say whatever they want about him, with him having no recourse whatsoever (lest he make you think that maybe he really does have something to hide, if he objects to a newspaper publishing that he is a fraud)?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I've just got to ask, what's a "liberal fact"? Facts don't have political leanings. Facts aren't ideological. That's like saying gravity is right wing or red shift is centrist.
This has been the most vile aspect of the Conservative war on science. Anything that disagrees with the corporatist-social conservative-fundamentalist Christian confederation that is modern conservatism is labeled as "leftist" or "liberal". I've debated guys who insist biological evolution and geology are "liberal" sciences. It's absurd.
Whether or not anthropogenic climate change is actually true, it is a scientific theory. It is a-religious and a-political and just generally a-ideological. It's like trying to attach an ideology to hammers or torch wrenches.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It is good peer reviewed journal articles and making the data available for public scrutiny that will determine right from wrong, in as far that there is a right from wrong in such matters - I doubt a court room would come close to what other scientists can do to each others work. Do they really think a lawyer could even get close to understanding the statistical models these guys use? The other issue is public perception and the potential damage false accusations can inflict. And I also doubt that a court room would appease public sentiment. I can understand why they might feel aggreaved and hope they win - I just don't think the excercise will cover the big issues.
The National Post is free to publish anything it likes critiquing climate change. What it can't do, any more than anyone can do, is libel someone in the process. If I attack child molesters, there's nothing with that. If I declare that you're a child molester, well, that my friend is actionable. They're declaring this guy a fraud, in the general community a pretty serious charge, but in the scientific community it's the most serious charge, and unless they have actual evidence to back up their claims, they very well could be forced to pay damages and publish an apology for their statements. Editorialists and columnists do not have unlimited privilege to libel people.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They had 1 day of testimony. And their results still aren't reproduceable.
That doesn't mean that global warming isn't happening, but UEA can't prove it's happening.
there was no 'climagate' but private interests and right wing news organizations (ie fox news) picking and exaggerating on some piece of criticism in climate research. the kind of inside criticism in scientific community which is not only normal, but generally mandated to be there, in order for a research to be considered valid and scientific.
the same kind of news organizations which easily went as far to say 'what global warming, it is snowing here' while doing serious news pieces.
Read radical news here
Your analogy is bizarre. War is a political exercise. Chemical or nuclear explosions are not. They can be used in a war, but they are a-political. The fact that you can produce a large explosion that can kill people doesn't mean the forces and materials involved have a political bias, any more than a strip of wood does, even if its used to make a bow that can kill people.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The newspaper, not surprisingly, has the ability to reach a lot wider audience with what it says that this guy does. The libel laws are there for cases like this when someone lies / misrepresents the truth. Even arguing that he can inform the public of his side easily on the internet, what about everyone who read it in print, or who won't read what he writes because it won't be picked up by newspapers they read?
There needs to be an incentive to not lie about things in print. Saying that lies can be corrected doesn't necesarily fix the harm that was done.
along those same lines: facts are apolitical, but any given interpretation of those facts is unlikely to be as unbiased.
The theory is apolitical. The reasoning behind the conclusions is apolitical. The theory was formulated by examining facts, trying to figure out how they fit together, and gathering more facts. The motivations were the usual scientific motives of desire for truth, prestige, and grant money. (Prestige is not only satisfying to the ego, but helps in getting a job one likes.) Note that the desire for truth is usually pretty strong, as in general anybody smart and disciplined enough to be a scientist could make a lot more money doing something else.
There is a lot of politics going on around climate theory, and there are very legitimate disputes about what to do about it, but it is generally accepted among honest and informed people that the burning of fossil fuels since about 1850 has caused more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which has warmed the planet a little, which has caused various changes in climate.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
> they have to pay out will come from their backers - the oil industry
Do you any evidence of this, or do you just "know"? If I was to put on your conspiracy hat and "follow the money" I see trillions of dollars and power going to government agencies, scientists that "study" the problem are getting more and more funding. Western governments desperately need money to pay for social programs that are unsustainable, and "climate science" is a perfect excuse to tax more. Who exactly is using who?
> Look at how much the oil industry have had to pay to take over governments
You seem to confuse taxation with "pay off".
>dismiss science
Science is a methodology, what's being dismissed is evidence that contradicts the pervasive theory.
> The longer you resist, the more you will suffer.
Whose therapist said that?
-cluge
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Of course we can't; not until the planet is uninhabitable will we know with absolute certainty (ie. can make the statement). We do know the effect of greenhouse gasses, and that we are pumping an unprecedented level of them, on a continuous basis, into the atmosphere, and that the environment is warming.
The best evidence that the environment is warming is the sudden interest in Arctic ownership and access. The same governments and businesses which undermine climate change are jockeying for rights and access here. Do they know something we don't?
Consider that it's pretty damn hard (and should be) to get a newspaper for libel, at least outside the UK, so it's not something you'd see often (and I'd expect, as you note, that it would be in the fact corrections area or letters to the editor)
More generally, requiring apologies in cases of slander/libel cases is standard, as it allows the guilty party to repair the victim's reputation, at least to some degree.
Consider that most of us in academia would rather be caught killing someone than forging data. Though in this case, the rest of the scientific community knows that the allegations are false anyway.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Short time?
You mean 750,000 years of data? That's not a short time.
Plus, there is a ton of data. Read up. Culd new data come in? maybe but you don't sit around and wait for data to support your theory. YOu go with th data you have and modify as new data cmoes in.
Would this make sens:
I believe gravity is happening, but we shouldn't go around saying its because mass bends space until more data comes in.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I think that sounds like a really good idea, actually.
The willful misinformation of the American population is causing us a lot of problems. Making people accountable for their public lies spread through media would be a step forward.
I'd say relations between the two are cooling.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The theory essentially states that the input of large amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases that have been sequestered for millions of years in the space of just a few centuries contributes directly to climactic changes, and that those changes will become more pronounced in the future.
Now we can debate the merits of the theory, we can debate whether the theory actually explains the data and whether or not the theory's predictions are valid. There is nothing ideological about any of it. The theory may be wrong, but not because a general ideological grouping declares it false, it will be wrong because it does not explain the data and does not properly make predictions about what we can and will observe.
How people use the theory is another thing entirely. Theories, or at least their names, have been co-opted for ideological ends before (genetics was condemned by the USSR as a corrupt western science during the Stalin era and everyone knows about social Darwinism, which has little or nothing to do with Darwin's actual theory).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Facts don't have political leanings? How naive.
A liberal fact: Unprotected sex leads to STDs and unwanted pregnancies, resulting in increased costs of treatment, and more abortions. Protection protects you 99.9% of the time.
A conservative fact: Abstinence means you never have morning after regrets or worries.
A liberal fact: Dumping uncounted tons of pollutants into the atmosphere has to have a negative consequence
A conservative fact: Water vapor has more of an effect on global warming then carbon.
In this case, frankly, it doesn't matter what the newspaper is. If they truly libeled the guy, then they should pay for that. If not, then they're free to publish whatever they want.
I can only say that it's good that this has finally landed in a court, so that the issue can be resolved with all due diligence, rather than by a mob with torches and pitchforks acting on the heat of the moment. Whatever decision comes out of it, I'll trust it much more than any /. speculation, whichever way it is slanted.
Funny, your opinion seems to be total bullshit. You must be afraid of having to own up to the damage you've caused.
Well, the choice is to let them lie about the data, lie about what the scientists are saying, lie about the scientists themselves, methods and personal life. And answer that lie with silence. That gives them credibility. The people publishing the lies don't care to publish the responses, so the accusations will remain unanswered, leaving many people misinformed (by purposeful lies)
Or, sue them for the illegal lies they are telling so they stop and don't misinform people for profit anymore.
You are recommending the first. My only question is why?
Learn to love Alaska
The problem isn't scientists playing politician but politicians playing scientist. Of course, lack of transparency is despicable and needs to be dealt with. It sickens me that the publications resulting from research paid for with my tax dollars is often locked behind paywalls.
That said, transparency is somewhat difficult. I have about 50 GB of test results from some research I should be working on at the moment. I can publish it online, but without the software that I use to read the file format it's useless. I wrote that too and could publish it, along with instructions on how to use it, but honestly it would still be very impenetrable to someone not an expert in the field. Now algorithms/ML research is a lot less controversial than AGW, but the point stands. Science is extremely difficult to do right, and to understand. I'd be hopelessly lost if I tried to interpret the CRU data, and I have a very good understanding of scientific and mathematical methods compared to the average person.
People spend years of their life to wrest the tiniest piece of information out of the universe. It's extraordinarily presumptuous to assume that someone can in an hour go through all that information and come up with a logical conclusion. We're talking about a lifetime of work here. Think about your life: could someone with no related knowledge really sift through all you've done in the past ten years and judge it, in the amount of time we're talking about here?
My point isn't that they did or didn't do anything wrong. My point is that neither I, nor Glen Beck, nor a court of law, is qualified to judge this question. To quote from TFA, I have no objection to climate skepticism, it's climate change denial that I oppose. It's very clear to someone with a scientific background to identify the common thread in science denial whether it's evolution, climate change, or the big bang: it's a refusal to even consider the possibility followed with spouting off some Aristotelian-style sophistry. A scientist says "maybe the climate isn't changing" and investigates by looking for arguments. A denier insists the climate can't possibly be changing and anyone who disagrees is part of a massive conspiracy and writes analogies and syllogisms and rhetoric. There are a few scientists who dispute AGW. They aren't the ones involved in fomenting this McScandal.
If my research were as controversial as theirs and anyone who bothered to look at my work in the same detail would be able to manufacture a scandal too, at least if the general public cared about optimizing information gathering. Scientific programming by its very nature results in impenetrable codebases that don't build and extremely complex data sets.
So I don't claim to be qualified to judge. But my sympathies are with the scientists involved because I have an in in science and I find the idea of an oil industry conspiracy far more plausible than a climate change conspiracy, if we really need conspiracy theories to explain ignorance.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Not true. The headline for this article says that the UEA were exonerated and I don't believe it at all.
As I said when climategate first started, this is only the beginning of the end. There is much more that has come out recently and there will be more in the future. You'll know when the end is near when the RWP, MWP and LIA are restored in the climate history. It was pure hubris that removed them from the record. I'm sure most of the climate scientists would like things to go back to 2008, a banner year to be sure, but if you want to repack an opened can of worms, you're going to need a bigger can.
Glad to see that almost no one is using the term 'climate change' anymore. There is nothing to be ashamed about when using the term 'global warming', if that is what you believe in.
Point A:
Let's dispense with any questions about whether so called "greenhouse gases" can actually cause the "greenhouse" effect.
Scientists can produce the greenhouse effect in laboratories. This is not speculation, this is empirical evidence. A little knowledge of chemistry (which I believe is still considered "hard" science), and you can understand why. Without the "greenhouse" effect life would not exist on Earth, but would simply be a frozen rock. The greenhouse effect is what keeps the planet warm. We also know empirically that the more CO2 and/or methane that is pumped into a closed system, the greater the effect. Again, this is all elementary earth science. If one is ignorant (or in denial) enough to dispute that there is such an effect, then there is really no point in discussing the issue father, because in their case, facts don't matter.
Point B:
We know that certain activities produce greenhouse gases. Burning fossil fuels, cows farting and others all generate quantifiable amounts of CO2 and methane. Again, this is not in question. This can be, and has been proven in laboratories many times. We can also calculate how much CO2 is produced each year though surveying the amount of fossil fuels consumed, so there is no wiggle room here either.
Point C:
We know plants absorb CO2 and release oxygen back into the atmosphere. We can also, without doing any guesswork, quantify how much CO2 is absorbed by the density of plant life across the globe. We know without a doubt that the amount of plant life is decreasing as the area of rainforest is decreasing at the rate of about 30 million acres per year. Therefore, it is an absolute fact that the amount of CO2 being absorbed by plant-life is decreasing at an alarming rate. Again, no one (in their right mind) can argue with this fact.
I'm sorry, but there is just no reasonable justification for denying that there is an increasing greenhouse effect taking place on Earth and that humans are contributing to it. Even if you choose to ignore the measurements taken over the last several years that show the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is increasing and write it off as a natural cycle of the earth. Points A through C are not disputable. Even if there is a natural cycle taking place, wouldn't it be prudent (knowing points A though C) to try and slow the process down by limiting the amount of emissions and reversing the deforestation?
Do people really have to shoot themselves in the head to know that a bullet going through soft brain tissue is likely to cause some damage?
I'm all for a healthy debate, but can we check ignorance and stupidity at the door please?
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
"Science is a methodology, what's being dismissed is evidence that contradicts the pervasive theory."
No, what is being dismissed are red-herrings invented by lobbyists at think tanks such as the heartland institute. Effective propoganda is much cheaper than launching scientific instruments into space. The fact that you imply peer-review is hopelessly corrupt demonstrates how effective that propoganda can be.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"It would stand on its own, were the media to actually report what the data says"
The media is pretty much int he tank for global climate change, or global warming, or whatever you're calling it now. Virtually every mainstream media outlet has been pouring out stories about devastating climate change for nearly twenty years now, and probably a bit longer.
When I say 'media', I mean NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Orlando Sentinel, Portland Press Herald, Bangor Daily News, Sacramento Bee, Time Magazine, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Scientific American, Discovery Channel, Science Channel, and many many more.
What newspaper is similarly touting the naysayers? The tabloids and contrary print media that report on climate change 'deniers' is outnumbered at least 10 to 1, and probably more.
Most people get all up in arms when Fox News starts reporting on global warming naysayers. One damned network against a half-dozen or more competitors.
It doesn't seem to take much to upset the global warming crowd. ANY opposition is an affront to them, a personal attack to be answered in the most extreme and violent language available. Actual data is immaterial. The naysayers are demonized, discredited as scientifically illiterate imbeciles, and marginalized as either shills of the responsible industries or seeking to profit from their outbursts.
The complaint that the media is somehow NOT reporting on the data is ludicrous and entirely contrived, does not conform to the reality, and is false on its face. Get a real argument next time, ok? What a bunch of crap.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Its not 7500000 years of data. Its some years of modern temp readings, and then a lot of modeling of 2nd and 3rd level data to *infer* the rest. These models are subject to.... uncertainties to say the lest. The black and white nature of the debate here is not all that scientific.
But hay they are scientist... we should just trust them, they know what best.
Like hell. I am a scientist, and i don't trust me. In God we trust, the rest of you show me the data.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
"This has been the most vile aspect of the Conservative war on science"
That is an interesting way of looking at it given the posts above you that say that anyone who thinks AGW may not be that strong is a right wing hack.
Sadly this is the issue with the *politicization* of science - many on each side think theirs is the obvious and the other side is waging war on them. Your right, science stands or fails on it own. Conservatives have no war on science - indeed, we find that as the harder core left has made it into office funding for basic space exploration (and no, I do not mean the recent Obama NASA announcement - I personally like the privatization of it and many other conservatives I know do too), energy physics, and a whole host of ideas that have been funded through arguably conservative presidents have been drastically cut in place of research into why carbon emissions are bad, AGW, and other highly politicized topics (and to be fair when Bush took office a similar thing happened there too). Talking about a Conservative war on science is only perpetuating the problem from the other end.
Conservatives have a war on left thought masquerading as science as much of the AGW proponents do. Liberals have a war against conservative thought masquerading as science as many of the Oil Companies produce. In reality we should have a war one *all* of that, one side isn't the lamb here fighting the good fight.
Until we come to that understanding things are going to deteriorate in our scientific knowledge. Not only that but as that pseudo-science becomes more and more prominent it is going to take MUCH more work to root it out. We can already see that with the almost universally agreed upon fallout from the so called "climategate" - that is the CRU data set is flawed and has to be removed from models and redone (we are basically arguing how and why at this point, not if). Conclusions that were considered solid and based on other data is turning out to be entangled with it in a primary matter. It's not the first time, I recall when Jane Goodall's data on Apes was discovered to be simply wrong, that she had either left out major finds or fabricated data because she was afraid how it would make them look to others. So much science at the time was based on what she did that it took years to unravel and no one is sure if it even is now decades later. We know what her motives were and why in that field her name is mud (sadly in the media she is still a major voice), but in this case it is so widespread that many could be truly earnest in thier desire to produce good works but GIGO rules here. In both cases there were plenty of warning signs that *should* have resulted in the problems being outed at the start but a combination of politics, money, fame, and pressure from those needing it to be true silenced it.
Even if their complaints with his conclusions are 100% correct (doubtful - AGW skeptics are taking this to mean AGW is wrong, it doesn't say that. It simply means we are back to not knowing as much as we thought we did - though people claiming the science is still rock solid aren't helping when it obviously isn't) I suspect that this newspaper will loose unless they have something fairly strong that this individual was dishonest. Wrong is not dishonest, at least as far as US law is concerned (I suspect Canada is similar just because most first world countries are) they are going to have to prove to some degree greater than 50% that he knew he was not telling the truth. That's hard to do - if they had said incompetence then they may get away with it, but even then that is hard to show too, but they claimed dishonesty.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Peer-review is not supposed to be the end of science. But in global warming we hear "Consensus! Peer-reviewed!" But that is besides the point.
Even saying that, the IPCC WG4 has only 70% of its references from peer-reviewed sources. And even if that is not enough...
Science is supposed to be duplicated and experimented with and replicated before its set in stone as solid. Global warming from greenhouse gases is set in stone. The amount this is warming the Earth is NOT. Feedback effects and factors are not set in stone. This is still being studied.
And when this science is making decisions that will effect every nation in the world, the litmus test must be that much higher. Even one mistake is cause to look it over in detail simply because so much money is involved in the end. Did you know that Al Gore's company that sells carbon credits is worth 3 billion dollars? Propaganda exists on both sides of this argument whether you want to believe it or not.
So, they've published the method by which they modified the raw temperature data? Last thing I heard, they'd lost it.