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Aussie Climate Scientists Receiving Death Threats
An anonymous reader writes "With the Australian parliament beginning the debate on setting a carbon price, climate scientists are reporting an increase in threatening phone calls and even death threats. The threats are serious enough that several universities have increased security for their ecology and meteorology researchers. The Australian government is seeking to introduce a carbon tax by July 2012."
There's a dislike of fudged numbers, BS, doom and gloom, including the usual "If we don't..." and "we'll be drowning in 10 years, no wait 30 years, no wait 80 years!!11!" that people get tired of
Good thing you don't ride a bike to work like me then because its a never ending stream of "if I don't do something now things could be really bad for me in about five seconds".
For me managing the planet should be like riding a bike. I keep an eye out for developing problems and take action when I think something might kill me. The fact that it hasn't so far doesn't invalidate the assumptions I make.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It appears you are building a straw man so you can have a burning. The sheer idiocy of pretending that all of the people in any one occupation are exactly the same will become clear if you actually think about it.
Go find a medical researcher who works with animals and ask him for his death threat collection....
We aren't talking about "armchair bloggers", but about real scientists. Vincent Courtillot, a geologist (so not a climatologist) asked the university of East Anglia, and they really were hiding behind copyright, just as how they wrote on the leaked emails. VC isn't exactly just bloging merely to nitpick, he built his own data sets from many weather stations, and found very different results, simply because he couldn't get the original data sets from the AR4. Yes, they disclosed for a part their methods, and then we saw the leaked Pascal source code having some fudge factor written by hand, with no way to know where it came from.
All the above isn't joke, and you can't just dismiss all these facts because you trust blindly only one side. Recognize that it's a highly politicized field, and that we should be extremely careful reading each results, and we SHOULD ASK and CHECK FOR THE DATA. There's no other field on science where this doesn't happen. Why should we do an exception for climatology?
Please don't reply with insults, I'm sick of it, and FYI, I'm not on any side of this, I just think a CO2 tax isn't a good answer, and that currently, there's NO consensus and we should ask for more research, AND THE DATA that goes with it.
There is an excellent reason why climate scientists are being targeted personally. This is -- and has been -- the deniers' game plan all along.
The evidence for AGW is scientifically fairly certain, but powerful vested interests have attempted to derail regulation and legislation, firstly by lobbying, then by paying shady PR outfits to do "doubt mongering" and whip up the unhinged elements of the political Right.
Now that governments are paralyzed, the vested interests hope of tackling climate change have been foiled, by the climate action lobby appealing to the public directly.
The logical counter? Vilify climate action activists and climatologists, depict it as yet another battle of the Culture Wars, and whip up the lunatic Right into an even greater frenzy -- and make it has hazardous and dangerous as possible to advocate action on climate change.
The WORST thing we can do right now is back down in the face of abuse, vilification and threats, because if we do, then the oil majors and Koch Industries wins.
FTA: "One researcher told of receiving threats of sexual assault and violence against her children after her photograph appeared in a newspaper article promoting a community tree-planting day as a local action to mitigate climate change."
Death threats for planting trees? WTF?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
It's very clear from a quick google of Vincent Courtillot that his opinions are not held in high regard by climate scientists. Indeed one of the leaked emails suggests Phil Jones rejected one of his papers as "awful".
Of course Phil Jones doesn't like Courtillot, because he has a complete different opinion as his, and he is giving out numbers, curves, and plausible scientific explanations on what he says, WITH the data together.
Therefore why should a scientist bend over backwards to satisfy his requests?
Maybe because:
- It may give a chance to anyone to prove or disprove what has been researched
- It is what everybody does on all science field
- Because your dislike of someone who doesn't agree with you isn't a scientific argument
- Because it's public financed research
- Because it's the only way to do a satisfying peer review
I do agree that some protocol should be put in place for scientists to release data and in return to be immune from being pestered by FOIA requests but that's a separate topic altogether, and certainly does not imply that absence of arbitrary-data-request-being-satisfied that somehow it implies conspiracy.
Come on! Nobody is pretending we are in a James Bond movie. We are just saying that the head of the IPCC is refusing to have his work peer-reviewed by people he dislike, or who will have enough knowledge to redo all the calculation and maybe disagree. That's important! It's not at all what you just wrote. We aren't just talking about the average scientist here, but THE HEAD OF THE IPCC, Phil Jones. To date, we still don't have his data (unless I'm mistaking), even after the leaks. Shame on these researchers.
The UEA emails don't reveal any "smoking gun" at all, just a bunch of scientists engaged in technical, mundane and occasionally bitchy chitchat with their peers.
It does reveal however that Jones doesn't like his opponents to peer review his work, and is hiding behind copyright.
Since you have no feelings on the issue, and are interested in more evidence, why not stop waiting to be yelled at and research the issue in its details at whatever technical level you can manage.
I am fairly sure any level of honest investigation on this subject by anyone with reason and understanding of the difference between faith and science, will find themselves yelling in favour of prevention of this experiment during their or their descendants time on earth.
The arguments against action on climate change are so specious and contradictory that they can only be intended to fool those who want to be fooled.