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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?"
So you could say that... the situation between climate scientists and the anti-climate-change crowd is heating up?
I don't give a crap about the "climate evangelists" (whatever exactly that is). But if the National Post is simply playing fast and loose with the facts surrounding a scientist, and basically libeling him in the process, I hope they pay, and pay dearly. If you want to debate the merits or faults of a scientific theory, you debate the merits or faults, you don't go around invoking conspiracy theories, and if you are going to stoop to that level, you probably shouldn't actually go accusing the scientists directly, but rather keep it all nebulous. The pseudo-skeptics need to take a page from the anti-evolution crowd. When talking about the evil conspiracy, don't name names, don't make specific accusations, keep it nice and general and that way nobody can go to a lawyer and drag your ass into court.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Said Canada's environment minister John Baird in 2006. He then proceeded to eviscerate all government funding for climate research.
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.
Bear in mind, the National Post is the closest thing Canada has to a Fox News network. I've seen numerous instances of the NP playing fast and loose with facts and using lightly-camouflaged op-ed to subtly (or not so subtly) discredit people.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
I don't see the relevance... In climate data, that "suggests" global warming, and then the assumption that it is our doing.
Either you're hopelessly biased or you don't understand science. Science is the process by which we hypothesize various things, then test to see which one has the most support, via a semi-formal method. Science never "proves" anything absolutely. It doesn't prove that gravity exists or how it works. It just very, very strongly suggests it.
In order for a rational person to believe anthropogenic global warming is not happening they need to either reject science entirely or they need to have a competing theory with more support. You just hypothesized that the changing climate is the result of natural processes, but if you're being rational, you can't believe that until that theory has more scientific evidence than global warming being largely the result of human influence. That is simply not the consensus of the experimentation and modeling I've seen to date, by a huge margin.
There is always room for an alternate model of global warming. Creating such a model and then creating falsifiable tests to see if it holds up has been a large endeavor among many very well funded scientists. The thing is, none of them have panned out or produced results that compare favorably to man-made global warming. For you to not accept that global warming is most likely strongly influenced by human actions you have to picking and choosing as to when you believe in the scientific method and when you don't.
I'm getting tired of reading this nonsense. As someone with a degree in environmental science, I feel the need to point out a few things:
Which is more likely: that scientists got together and colluded to invent a crisis thinking it would make tons of money roll in, or that the wealthy are projecting their greed onto the less greedy? Occam's razor.
The Internet is full. Go away.
It's climate change, idiot.
I think it's even more specific than that. It's about human influenced climate change. Climate Change is a fact. The climate on this planet is constantly changing and has been changing naturally for as long as we have any way of measuring. The causes may be something as simple a cyclical changes in the energy output of the sun, volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts, or a multitude of other natural phenomenons. There's not much we can do to change the normal cycle of climate change. The question is what impact we are having on the climate with the stuff we are pumping in to the atmosphere and what, if anything, we should be doing about it.
Yes, they do. And climate theories have been evaluated under a bright light. And unlike N rays, or cold fusion, the consensus of knowledgeable experts has emerged that anthropogenic climate change is a real phenomenon.
No, the economic implications have nothing to do with the science. There is no "especially" here. In fact, your invocation of it illustrates the motivation behind much of the denial: for whatever reasons of political philosophy, many people find the prospect of carbon taxes disturbing, and so are psychologically motivated to deny the evidence.
It's rather like a guy having a heart attack who keeps dismissing it as indigestion; it's not necessarily that he's ignorant of the symptoms, but nobody wants to think that a heart attack could happen to them.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood