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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."
...a guy isn't safe checking his wet dry hygrometer in the morning.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Yo. Conservative checking in. There's no hatred of science. 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. That's not forgetting the refusal to disclose publicly funded data, and then spending years tying up the courts over that pubically funded data. And so on either while refusing FOIA/SOI requests either. Nah. I know it's difficult to accept, but damn. But I suppose you can't fault groups like greenpeace(among other groups) turning around and trying to get their fingers in the pie either. I mean they sure have gone out of their way to invent BS to get written into the last several IPCC's.
Then again, perhaps I could simply say ah liberals. Actually going out and attacking people, including attempting to assassinate them when they don't like their political ideology. Which is sadly much closer to the truth. The US sure has had no shortage of liberals running amok in the last 6-8mo physically attacking conservatives that's for sure.
Also tip: I'm a canuck.
Om, nomnomnom...
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
In the beginning, there was only climate science.
Then came some skeptics, and all was well. And the discussion was between scientists.
Then came some denialists, and all was not well. The discussion was now between politicians.
Now come the death threats, and all is getting worse. The discussion is now between activists.
What's next? Violence? And a 'discussion' between armies?
I'm so glad to see that a lack of knowledge does not hold the world back from taking violent action.
-- Is there any record of a scientist who threatens a religious leader for not agreeing with the Books of Science?
Many activists are more interested in making grand gestures and gaining status within their own organisation, than bringing about actual change. Even terrorist organisations tend to follow this pattern.
And scientists (who want to abide by the law) can't defend themselves using guns...
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.
Are these the same guys who've been refusing SOI/FOIA requests because they claim that their work which is publically funded is 'proprietary'? Or are these the same ones from aussieland that made up the shit including forging the emails that they were being harassed.
No and even if they were that wouldn't justify sending them death threats. Also it doesn't seem to have come up on Slashdot yet, but the CSIRO has opened a site at http://www.csiro.au/greenhouse-gases/ where you can view the raw information about green house gas concentrations that has been collected in Australia.
Then again I can't really feel too much sympathy. People will only take a decade or two(maybe three) of doom and gloom based on fudged numbers, and corrupted policies. Especially when they realize that what you're proposing will effectively bankrupt the entire country and turn it into a 3rd world dirt farming nation.
Step 1. Build a global conspiracy supported by every major research organisation world wide suggesting that emitting large amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere is going to affect the climate and don't forget to suppress the voices of the brave and heroic rouge scientists and oil company researchers who attempt to reveal your conspiracy.
Step 2. Have governments world-wide introduces nation-bankrupting schemes to charge (some) people who bump lots of carbon into the atmosphere for that privilege.
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Profit!
Or something like that right? Looking at other countries, like for example NZ, which has a very very similar scheme to what is being discussed in Australia, the results so far have been positive, or is that just more misinformation?
Hell you don't even need to believe in climate change to see the need to encourage the uptake of more renewable energies. Global coal, oil, gas and uranium stocks are predicted to run out in the next few hundred years. In the meantime as demand continues to rise, prices will go up and countries which don't have alternatives will hurt (a lot in the nation bankrupting sense).
So science should be ignored, as it never deals with proof. Kinda hypocritical as you're reading this on a computer. So it seems you accept science when you want to, and dismiss it as sensationalist bullshit when it suits you. You also seem to have a very perverse idea about climate science and the scientists involved in that field. Which in itself is strange, as your actions ("fuck it - it's wrong") would only be a valid position if you had a solid understanding of of this field.
Diabolical super-criminals with a grudge against weather scientists are pretty rare. Stupid ones are much more common.
I think these guys are probably safe - basically if someone holding a gun in one hand and a picture of you in the other asks you if you're 'you', point the other direction, say "I think I saw him go that way" and just keep walking.
And there were just those two threats, five years ago, eh? No. You need to get your information from other people than Andrew Bolt. Followup to TFA:
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/change-of-attitude-needed-as-debate-overheats/2194216.aspx?storypage=3
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
You're talking about data submitted to the scientists by tree rings, right? Or by drilling cores? Or satellites? I'm sure those lazy satellites are just making stuff up instead of measuring it! Just like those evil weather stations all over the world!
If there was only one line of evidence that climate science was based on, you might have a point. But it's not.
As the facts continue to mount against them, these groups...
Climate change skeptics
Evolution denialists
"Birthers" (USA only)
become increasingly more extreme due to cognitive dissonance. I guess the end is when they can no longer even separate the facts from the messengers and having lost the factual battle seek to strike back in any way they can.
How pathetic.
Yea, the research universities use data from tired overworked coasties.
Not.
Anyways, even if you guys made up all of the data statistically some of the data would trend in the other direction also wouldnt it?
Have you thought this through?
No, OK. That explains alot.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
So the plebeians will rant and rave about how great science is when it makes their life easier and more productive (internet, modern medicine, manufacturing efficiency, productivity) but when it shows them changes need to be taken that will cost them a tiny fraction of their annual salary they go nuts. The greed of the average citizen in a capitalistic society knows no bounds.
They are, but the "Liberals" (just a name; they're actually the conservative group) have been adopting more and more American neo con tactics. They actually invited over several key Tea Party and Republican strategists to discuss tactics in private. Let's not forget the Rupert Murdoch owned newspaper "The Australian", which despite losing money year after year is subsidized by Murdoch to parrot right-wing talking points (see the National Broadband Network "debate"). Australia's media has consolidated and is failing them. The NBN will change that, but for the time being it's a real problem.
What reports are you referring to here and why should you expect scientific predictions (which are usually couched in error bars and scenarios) to stay constant in the face of new evidence or better modelling? And your appeal for raw data is particularly laughable, given that it's the usual gambit that deniers throw out as if it's all some vast conspiracy and if only scientists would spend every waking moment satisfying specious FOIA requests this conspiracy would be revealed.
And you're so sure because? Of what. A two letter word? Sorry doesn't wash. "Climate scientists" in australia have been doing the same thing as their colleagues have been in the UK, US, and in Canada. Refusing to disclose data including methodology for years.
Actually they have been disclosing their methodologies for years. As one would expect from papers submitted to various peer reviewed journals. That isn't quite the same as feeling inclined to satisfy arbitrary, time consuming FOIA requests from armchair bloggers who want the data merely to nitpick it. It's funny how the so-called "climategate" email leak didn't unveil some vast librul conspiracy. What it did reveal was a bunch of scientists bitching in private about armchair bloggers wasting their time with specious FOIA requests.
Go find a medical researcher who works with animals and ask him for his death threat collection....
Think again. Instead of trying to fix real existing threats that we have in front of us (waste management, water resources, starvation, pollution, etc.), the goal is to have a CO2 tax for something we aren't sure about. And we're not talking about banishing fossil fuel cars here, and replacing them with electricity, which would be the first thing to do. No, just tax them... Tax everyone, make a bank of the world which will be privately held, and go with that, continuing to pollute the world. If you think that will save you from dying, you are mistaking!
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.
Your first paragraph can be summed up as "My one data point is so much more trustworthy then thousands of scientists." I refuse to address this point because it cannot even stand up on its own.
Your second paragraph says that scientists should instead focus on making another planet habitable. SO scientists can terraform an entire planet, but we as humans cannot cause any inadvertent change in our own environment? That is the argument du jour. That the changes we are seeing are completely natural. If there is no possibility that we as humans have caused these changes, then what hope to we have to terraform a entire planet.
To use a slashdot favorite heres a car analogy. I can probably fix a lot of little things on my car, but I don't have much of a hope building one from scratch. The Earth is our car, it is so much easier to fix what we got, then it is to build a new one.
That doesn't even touch on the fact that this generation, and I'm willing to guess the next few generations, will never live on another planet/moon in large numbers.
This has nothing to do with being conservative, this has to do with ignoring science in favor of a gut feeling.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Because liberal groups would never send death threats to scientists right?
The point of view that the people who send death threats to scientists are mostly conservative would be news to scientists involved in animal testing.
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.
And how do you intend to make them stop doing it? In case you missed it, that's the entire point of taxes on pollution: they gradually raise the cost of polluting until it's not economically feasible anymore. Simply legislating that coal-fired power plants had to be switched off tomorrow would be a disaster, because there's no transition plan. A tax that increases every year at a predictable rate lets people depending on coal have a predictable point where it will no longer be feasible and plan accordingly.
More importantly, it gives a financial incentive to be the first person to switch. If you say 'no more coal in 10 years' then there's a strong incentive to let everyone else pay the R&D costs of developing and deploying other technologies and then roll out your own version in 9 years, for much less since everyone else has helped push the economies of scale. If you start taxing and keep increasing the tax rate, then someone who switches now saves a lot of tax, while someone who switches in 9 years pays a lot more.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Also, planes don't fly. At least not in a deterministic fashion: Navier-Stokes is a differential equation. Non-linear, too.
Really, objects don't move, as this involves differential equations.
Clearly, thermodynamics are wrong, because it is as differential equations (or large numbers and probabilities, if you go the quantum route).
You have no clue what you are talking about: you assume that the solution must be steady state. You have no way of knowing that. In fact, you ought to know Sol cycles, so steady-state solutions are certainly wrong.
You have no clue what you are talking about: If I tell you that we are all going to die, with a certainty of .999 in 30 years, give or take 20, the proper reaction is not, in fact, to claim that as the error bounds are large, this must be bullshit.
The proper reaction is to say: oh, we'll prepare for the worst case, then.
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.
"Banishing coal electricity really is possible" Sure it is if you are willing to ignore the consequences. The majority of electric power on the globe is generated by coal. Remove coal from the equation and at a minimum you are reducing global power production by 50%. Can you see the population of any country, especially the leading industrial countries, putting up with this? No power means no jobs.
Climate change policy is about redistribution of wealth and globalization, not saving the environment.
"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, " -- Ottmar Edenhofer, UN IPCC
It is a tool for those seeking power, nothing more.