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Michael Mann Defamation Suit Against National Review Writer to Proceed
From Ars Technica comes this update in the defamation case filed by climate researcher Michael Mann against political commentator Mark Steyn of National Review magazine, who rhetorically compared Mann to Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky and accused him of publishing intentionally misleading research results.
"The defendants tried to get it dismissed under the District of Columbia's Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) statute, which attempts to keep people from being silenced by frivolous lawsuits. The judge hearing the case denied the attempt and then promptly retired; Mann next amended his complaint, leading an appeals court to send the whole thing back to a new trial judge. Now the new judge has denied the SLAPP attempt yet again. In a decision released late last week (and hosted by defendant Mark Steyn), the judge recognizes that the comparison to a child molester is part of the "opinions and rhetorical hyperbole" that are protected speech when used against public figures like Mann. However, the accompanying accusations of fraud are not exempt:"
Mann isn't a fraud, his observation an have been confirmed and refined, and you and Steyn are cowards incapable of facing the universe as it is. The only difference is at least Steyn is man enough to put his name to his libel.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The hockey stick has stood the test of time. The facts hold. The data continue to support it. Here's Mann recently, and discussion.
Here are myths about the hockey stick debunked.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Because it's an official meme of the Heartland Institute that scientific concern about radical climate change constitutes a "religion."
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
We look forward to your publication of the flaws you have discovered in Dr. Mann's math. Ah, but you can't publish them, because you're just making this stuff up. Or is it because every single reviewer for every scientific journal is a member of a deep conspiracy to undermine the fossil fuel industry because ... well if you have to ask you don't understand how these dark conspiracies work!
Here's Mann's new book on The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
"That should teach others to defile our religion"
Haha!
Well, religion or not, one thing it should do is reinforce the principle that you should be careful what you say about people, even online, and regardless of whether you are a journalist. In most cases the libel laws are no different for Joe Shmoe than they are or a syndicated columnist.
Generally, opinions are fine... as long as they're clearly opinion and not stated as fact. Because even "You're an asshole" is commonly accepted as an opinion, that's probably okay... especially if you make it clear that it's only opinion.
But "fraud", and other such claims? Usually over the line, unless you can show that it's true.
...
who couldn't think worth a dyne,
he accused the one Mann,
who has Truth in his plan,
and we hope the court rules him a slime.
It's the best I can do on short notice - but there's not much else we can do as long as long as his advertisers keep making money.
He is debating Steyn in court about whether he is a fraud. If Steyn can just prove he is a fraud, he wins, if not, he is in a lot of trouble.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
So "You're like a child molestor" is ok, but "You are a fraud" is not?
Weasel words and politicing, and slander in both cases in my books.
The legal system is seriously fucked up if it considers such minor differences to be grounds for letting someone off on making baseless accusations, "freedom of the press" or no. If you can't prove what you're making accusations about, one should be required to legally STFU and have some damned integrity in their writing, not be free to spew whatever bile and vitriol they like and whine "it's just an allegory."
Here's an allegory for the guy who wrote the insults and slams: "You're very much like the slime from between the toes of the Himalayan Sloth."
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It's one of those weird legal things. He wasn't actually accusing him of molesting children. He was saying that he was AS BAD AS a person who molests children.
But I agree with you. It's all an attempt to conflate person A with person B's crime in the opinion of the public (people who have not researched this).
It's reads like a marketing hype rather than as a scientific discussion.
I think you are being a bit optimistic if you expect to find actual scientists having proper scientific discussions with each other on a popular web site.
Realclimate.org is primarily for lay people. I do not believe that marketing hype is the right description for it, but neither is scientific discussion.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Got any links to denier sites that read like scientific discussions? I'd love to see them. Or just one.
http://climateaudit.org/multiproxy-pdfs/
Scientific concern about climate change isn't, of course, a religion. However, there are an awful lot of True Believers who act as though it were. And no, I'm not a member of the Heartland Institute, I'm just a skeptic who accepts the fact that the climate is changing (It's always changing, sometimes getting warmer, sometimes cooler.) but doubts that the main driving force at the presence is anthropogenic because I don't, personally, find the evidence sufficiently persuasive and prefer to think for myself.
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In other words you have a cognitive bias that leads you to reject one of the largest bodies of modern scientific research.
Good!
Fraud has a legal definition, and so does libel. Mann's research has been found to be scientifically accurate and no allegations of fraud have been found worthy of recognition in the academic community. Steyn's writing is purely political, and his assertions of fraud against Mann, being without merit, clearly show that the author's intent is to discredit Mann's presentation. Steyn clearly went beyond reason when he impuned Mann's character by comparing Mann's character to that of a sociopathic child abuser. My hope is that that Steyn and the National Review, it's editorial staff and publisher are all found guilty and whipped within an inch of their dubious credility using the pulpit of the court. They should be bludgeoned with its gavel for the failure to afford their readers a reasonable opinion or the benefit of moderating their overzealous attackdog, and they should be fined within the limits of the law so as to hold their action up in the light of its own outrageousness.
William F. Buckely went to his grave lamenting the current state of Conservatism and its discourse.
I've had my view on the whole climate change/global warming thing for a while. First up, I accept that temperatures have risen on average in recent times. The numbers are holding up to scrutiny, although very recent numbers may be suggesting we've hit a plateau, depending who you believe.
Where there doesn't seem to be a strong consensus is whether it's entirely man-made (I'm awaiting the flames to start on that commment...). We know Earth's climate has gone through cycles (medieval warm period, little ice age etc) before mankind was industrialised; are we sure this isn't happening now?
However - regardless of whether climate change is man made or natural, there's a hard fact that we're burning up fossil fuels (gas, oil, coal) far faster than it can be created in the ground. They're going to run out at some point, so we need to reduce our usage of them somehow. Add in the pollution argument and surely it would have to be a no-brainer to be trying to cut down our usage of fossil fuels? The exception seems to be those heavily tied in to the oil & gas companies who don't care about what happens 40 or 50 years down the line, they just care about their profits now.
And he is on record as saying that what Mann has done is 'rubbish'.
I see. Are you able to provide a link to this record?
Mann modified the technique to ensure that graphical analysis would suppress any variation in the bulk of the graph, while driving the final data high - a hockey-stick, in other words. Jolliffe could see no other reason for introducing this modification beyond producing hockey-stick output.
This is the output that turned out, in the end, to be correct?
That output?
Curious.
Steyn didn't assert that Mann is a fraud, but rather that Mann "tortured" the data. You may recall that Principal Component Analysis was used on a limited and secretly-adjusted data set to come up with the alarming "hockey stick" chart.
It's pretty much indisputable that there was significant warming from like 1930-1996, but very little since then in spite of more or less linear increases in CO2 concentrations since like 1850. The anthropogenic component of global warming is poorly understood, and the appropriate interventions even less so. But diverting taxpayer dollars so wealthy people can get a Tesla as their third or fourth auto is probably suboptimal.
The actual source code is this, from briffa_Sep98_d.pro http://wattsupwiththat.com/200... - you can decide for yourself whether this is "torture" or not, and whether this particular debate should be squelched:
By citing Jolliffe as an authority, then, you are accepting his position that much more evidence than the hockey stick supports the idea that the climate is changing?
French - The lingua franca of Europe!
Mann isn't a fraud, his observation an have been confirmed and refined, and you and Steyn are cowards incapable of facing the universe as it is. The only difference is at least Steyn is man enough to put his name to his libel.
How is Steyn a "coward" when he is standing up in court, rather than fleeing?
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
Which says nothing of Mann but does give the rest of us a perfectly accurate view of Mark Steyn and National Review magazine.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Isn't realclimate.org just his advocacy site? I've had people point to it before. It's reads like a marketing hype rather than as a scientific discussion.
Are you looking at the same link I am? Other than using the "Myth #1" style of summarization used by many people (including marketing) if I have a criticism of realclimate.org it's that they write too much like scientists. Their writing is full of caveats, asides, and long winded explainations because the subject is inherently messy. Frankly I think their writing is just too dry and analytical to reach a general audience. Just look at this excerpt from the link in question:
MYTH #4: Errors in the "Hockey Stick" undermine the conclusion that late 20th century hemispheric warmth is anomalous.
[...]
The second falsehood holds that there are errors in the Mann et al (1998, 1999) analyses, and that these putative errors compromise the “hockey stick” shape of hemispheric surface temperature reconstructions. Such claims seem to be based in part on the misunderstanding or misrepresentation by some individuals of a corrigendum that was published by Mann and colleagues in Nature. This corrigendum simply corrected the descriptions of supplementary information that accompanied the Mann et al article detailing precisely what data were used. As clearly stated in the corrigendum, these corrections have no influence at all on the actual analysis or any of the results shown in Mann et al (1998). Claims that the corrigendum reflects any errors at all in the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction are entirely false.
Realclimate.org isn't marketing, it's dry scientific writing directed to laypeople, what the AGW community needs is an advocacy site written by non-scientists which is less concerned about the science and more concerned about the debate. Realclimate.org fills an essential niche in the debate but it's not the kind of hand wavy tabloidish mass audience style of blog that's needed to counter Watts Up With That?.
I stole this Sig
This isn't about whether the (very) widespread claims that current evidence supports 'global warming', it's about whether Mann committed scientific fraud.
For instance, George Bush's commander really did think of Bush the way a fake letter (put forth by CBS as real) said he did; presumably the faker was frustrated by his inability to get that fact in the news, so he resorted to fraud, no doubt thinking that the real truth made it morally OK. But he still committed fraud, and the news that the secretary who would have typed the letter if it were real, said it was the commander's opinion, even as she debunked the letter was quite lost in the scandal over the fraud.
So global warming could be real, and Mann still a fraud, or it could be all a huge mistake by thousands of scientists, and Mann NOT a fraud, simply in possession of data that was mistaken or didn't mean what he thought.
Steyn is no doubt happy about the trial, because it will give him grounds to subpoena great heaps of Mann's work, looking for the same thing that the climategate E-mail thieves looked for: any kind of out-of-context quote they can find that they cam drum up into a "scandal" - a fraudulent one, of course...
By the standards of science, peer-review and SEVEN INVESTIGATIONS.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Mann's research has been found to be scientifically accurate by an investigative team appointed by the same University President who could not be bothered to investigate allegations of child molestation against Sandusky, a University President who had a vested interest in Mann's research being found to be scientifically accurate to the tune of several million dollars in research grants.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Well, regardless of whether the climate is changing or whether humans have anything to do with it, consider CO2 and the acidifying oceans because of it. Man pumped up the extra CO2 over a very short time frame, short enough where species will have a hell of a time coping. Don't forget that one of the bases of the food chain is the ocean.
Acidifying oceans as a result of man-pumped CO2 in a short time frame is enough reason to stop it.
No. This is a site where several prominent & practising climate scientists post.
For example, here's a translated one from Stefan Rahmstorf
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Try SkepticalScience.com or ClimateCrocks.com
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Don't be ridiculous. Government funded scientists have lots of proper scientific discussions. Practically all of CERN is government funded by various governments, just to pick an example off the top of my head.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The anthropogenic component of global warming is poorly understood, and the appropriate interventions even less so. But diverting taxpayer dollars so wealthy people can get a Tesla as their third or fourth auto is probably suboptimal.
Straw man.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The "hockey stick" agrees closely with the average of IPCC models. Yet none of the models comes close to matching real measurements. Perhapsthe hockey stick only stands the test of time when compared against other models, not real data...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
There aren't that many scientists in any particular field. There are only small communities of people with personal, hands-on, in-depth work on the raw data indicating that the Cosmic Microwave Background exists, or that atoms have nuclei made of protons and neutrons, or that portions of general relativity hold up in the lab. All scientists "piling on" to every single aspect of modern science are "just laymen" with regard to the bulk of human knowledge outside a very specific sub-field that they personally work on. Would you give credit to some dentist funded by a creationist think-tank claiming that the CMB was a fraud, despite the claims of all the scientific researchers working on it? If not, why are your reasons different for denying plausibility to the community of climate scientists, while giving credence to corporate shills (who are also not climate scientists, and demonstrate poor levels of reasoning that make them a laughingstock of the vast majority of scientists)?
Unless you have personally done the research, you also have a cognitive bias to accept one of the largest bodies of modern scientific research. It's only a matter of which side you believe, in the end.
Both sides act like drunken schoolyard bullies beating up the smaller kids for their lunch money.
I saw what you did there.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
How is Steyn a "coward" when he is standing up in court, rather than fleeing?
The cowardness being discussed is Steyn's inability to "face the universe as it is," i.e. accept that climate change is man made.
One could argue that the denial of man made climate change is an extensive attempt to flee from the facts and their consequences.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Steyn didn't assert that Mann is a fraud, but rather that Mann "tortured" the data.
The judge disagrees that there is a distinction. Since the dozens of temperature reconstructions using different methods and different proxies all come up with the same answer it will be difficult to understand how Mann's work could be considered wrong, let alone fraudulent.
you can decide for yourself whether this is "torture" or not
Probably you cannot. Probably the most you can do is concoct conspiracy theories based on code comments. Leaving aside the fact that this code was authored by someone completely unrelated to the Mann temperature reconstructions (but why let facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory?), it may be worth noting that the code was used in a paper that calls tree rings proxies into question : Trees tell of past climates: but are they speaking less clearly today?
So if you want to dismiss the results of the paper that used this code, then you are dismissing work critical of one of the proxies used in Mann's reconstruction.
It's only false equivalence if the other guy is doing it.
While I don't expect you to really be bothered by such things as facts, you might be surprised to learn that the University of Pennsylvania is different and distinct from Pennsylvania State University, the university where Jerry Sandusky committed his crimes.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
Actually, it was Pennsylvania State University that found Mann's research to be scientifically accurate, not the University of Pennsylvania (although you were correct that it was the University where he teaches and that receives income from the funding of his climate research. The interesting thing is that the person who put together the group to investigate him was the President of Pennsylvania State University, the same President who put together the group which initially "investigated" the allegations of sexual misconduct against Sandusky (that found no reason to contact the police about those allegations, even though the law clearly required them to do so).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Even so, climate research gets a lot of scrutiny and the work of Mann, Hansen, and the other big names gets seen by a lot of eyeballs, most of them looking for flaws.
There's a lot at stake and anyone who can topple the pillars on which AGW stand is going to be very, very rich & famous.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
By the standards of science, peer-review and SEVEN INVESTIGATIONS.
Welcome to Slashdot, haruchai, where posting simple truths brings out the deniers, to silence you.
To mod your post flame bait? Come on.
It's sad, that many of those who deny AGW will complain vociferously about censorship of their view, but are quick to try to bury anything they disagree with.
And yes, Mann has been investigated many times, and found innocent. Wait to see what they do to my post.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Steyn didn't assert that Mann is a fraud, but rather that Mann "tortured" the data. You may recall that Principal Component Analysis was used on a limited and secretly-adjusted data set to come up with the alarming "hockey stick" chart.
I'm not sure about "alarming" - perhaps you've let your fear get the better of you. A good description would be "accurate" since the modelling accurately reflected what happened to the climate in the years succeeding.
It's pretty much indisputable that there was significant warming from like 1930-1996, but very little since then in spite of more or less linear increases in CO2 concentrations since like 1850.
And if we do not artificially split the period 1930-2013 into 2 chunks for no reason, we can see a clear interdecadal signal from CO2 induced warming - as predicted by Fourier, Arrhenius etc. If we artificially selected a region, say 1980-1996, we can see a significant warming trend somewhat above the long term trend predicted by GCM models, and then if we selected the period 1996-2013 we can see a definite warming trend, somewhat below the long term trend predict by GCM models. The data is so clear that the climate scientists were able to reduce the uncertainty (per AR5) of long term predictions of CO2 forced warming.
The actual source code is this, from briffa_Sep98_d.pro http://wattsupwiththat.com/200... [wattsupwiththat.com] - you can decide for yourself whether this is "torture" or not, and whether this particular debate should be squelched: ; ; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!! ; yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904] valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,'Oooops!' yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
Looks pretty innocuous. Perhaps you either (a) Posted the wrong section of the model (b) Misunderstood the meaning of the comment "Apply a very artificial correction for decline" per the quite embarrassing mistakes made by some conspiracy theorists with respect to the word "decline" used in the CRU emails.
I'm sure there are "fair-minded thinkers" who don't believe in AGW - but Mark Steyn is NOT one of them.
I don't really give a damn whether he believes in global warming or not but he smeared a scientist purely out of political spite.
A "fair-minded thinker" would have stuck to a scientific critique. Steyn is a polemicist by nature, has been sued before and should be aware that he was straying into deep waters.
It's not a foregone conclusion that Steyn will lose, far from it, but it's telling that the National Review refuses to support him.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
consider CO2 and the acidifying oceans because of it.
Indeed. And, as I've written here before, you don't have to buy into AGW, or whatever they're calling it today, to think that pouring endless amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere to see what happens is a bad idea. I grew up in Los Angeles, and I can remember what the air there was like before we started putting in all of the pollution controls. I'd like to see some of the other developed/developing nations start doing something about their air quality (Mexico City and Beijing are good examples here.) because in the long run, I think it's in their own best interests, and I'd like to see the US start building nuclear power plants again so that we can stop being so dependent on fossil fuels.
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You should check out http://climatechangenationalfo...
One of the key features of the Climate Change National Forum is the comment section. Below each entry, and above the general comment section, will be comments made by other contributors. Rather than presenting a unified face to the outside world, contributors are encouraged to question, debate, dispute, expand, and otherwise discuss other contributions. The public rarely gets to see scientists debating each other, outside of the fake debates that are set up by news shows. As scientists know, what scientists eventually tell the outside world in publications, presentations, and committee reports gives little or no clue (or even the wrong impressions) about how scientists judge scientific claims, evaluate evidence, develop hypotheses, and reach conclusions. I know of no web site, inside or outside of climate science, that allows the public to experience true scientific discussions on a regular basis.
- http://blog.chron.com/climatea...
If you think you know so much about the issue, then why do you pick and choose your sources of information?
Of course, that's nothing more than a straw-man argument, and can be ignored. I do my best to stay informed on the subject, but I don't like (among other things) the way that the AGW people have done everything they possibly could to deny that the Medieval Warm or the Little Ice Age happened or that they were anything except "local phenomena." I also have a friend who requested the raw data from the CRU back when Climategate was raging and had his request refused because "he didn't know enough about statistics to understand it." What they didn't know, and my friend was too much of a gentleman (and probably too disgusted) to mention was that he has, among other things, a Masters degree in Statistical Inference, and probably knew more about statistics than whoever refused his request. There's been too much cherry-picking, too much using peer review to suppress contrarian papers and too much playing around with funding to make sure that nobody who doesn't agree with AGW can get the money they need for me to believe that there isn't something funny going on. However, if you think it's been proven, go right ahead and don't let my viewpoint stop you.
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Even if the planet is warming entirely because of man, there is no definitive proof that it will reach worst case.
Right. We have to do a rational cost/benefit/risk analysis and take reasonable steps. The only thing standing in the way of rational policies is the hyperbole from the political ideologs.
Do we need to stop expiration by all animals on the planet? Should we all go on the Atkins diet? After all, herbivores expel more methane. Hmm, that's probably very sustainable.
Sigh....
I'm not sure that's true. There are three factors. Of which I am aware, that is... IANAL. And of course I'm talking about U.S. Libel laws are different in UK.
[1] The statement must be of a defamatory nature (likely to cause others to have a lower opinion of the subject or otherwise damaging, as to professional reputation for example). [2] It must be untrue, and [3] the person stating it must know, or reasonably should know, that it is not true.
I could be wrong, but I don't think intent per se is a requirement. For example, someone could write something damaging about someone else, genuinely believing it to be true, but if they reasonably should have known it was not true, then they can still be guilty of libel. So it's possible to run afoul of the law without intending to tell lies about somebody.
You can verify climate science claims to the same high-school/college level that you verified all other branches of physics. You can demonstrate, e.g., the greenhouse effect, and the spectral transmission characteristics of carbon dioxide, with simple equipment. You can check that burning carbohydrates releases H20 and C02. You can build simple toy-model radiative transfer models that show trapping more heat in a system (via greenhouse gas) increases the temperature. I doubt you did significantly more "conclusive" tests of gravity, particle physics, or quantum mechanics in high school or college --- you were just willing to trust that extending the same procedure that predicted the simple toy model results also works in the "damn, that's too hard to do in my garage" systems.
You probably haven't personally worked on squeezed light states or quantum entanglement or production of exotic particles in TeV-scale supercollider experiments; do you assume the scientists doing these are frauds pulling the wool over your eyes? Yes, the finest details of global climate modeling are too messy for high school students to pin down; but the science does make sense on the crude level accessible to college-level experiment. Data sets and models are available and shared between qualified researchers --- but, just like raw data from the LHC, they're not always easy for an "outsider" without extensive subject-specific training to evaluate. So, why do you assume that somewhere along the way (at the levels too complex for an Excel spreadsheet) the system suddenly turns fraudulent? Just because paid industry shills have told you so?
"Accusing someone of being a child molester is OK, but you can't call someone a liar. Can you call the person who called you a child molester a liar?"
Huh? Where did this come from? What is it supposed to mean?
Wait. I see. Steyn "comparing" Mann to Sandusky. Which he really didn't do. What he did was repeat a comment that had been made by someone else about Mann:
"He has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet."
So Steyn didn't actually compare him to Sandusky, or call him a child molester. He repeated someone else's comment, which was kind of a parody of the Sandusky affair.
Because it IS a kind of parody, in my opinion Mann has no chance at all of convincing a judge that he was actually "compared to a child" molester. Instead he was accused of molesting important data.
The problem is that because Mann is a public figure he has to show actual malice to win his case.
But re: the tongue-in-cheek reference to Sandusky, keep in mind that libel is pretty specific.
Nope. This isn't about whether there are better methods. Dozens of other papers get the same hockey stick with different methods and different proxies. They would all argue that their methods are better. That is science, not law. At issue here are the allegations of fraud. Here is what the most recent judge has said:
A reasonable reader, both within and outside the scientific community, would understand that a scientist who molests or tortures his data is acting far outside the bounds of any acceptable scientific method. In context, it would not be unreasonable for a reader to interpret the comment, and the republication in National Review, as an allegation that Dr. Mann had committed scientific fraud, which Penn State University then covered up, just as some had accused the University of covering up the Sandusky scandal. For many of the reasons discussed in Judge Combs Greene’s July 19 orders, to state as a fact that a scientist dishonestly molests or tortures data to serve a political agenda would have a strong likelihood of damaging his reputation within his profession, which is the very essence of defamation.
No, but there are plenty of instances of entire fields getting it wrong for decades at a time.
Scientists in any field don't get famous by showing that the "scientific consensus" is erroneous, they get their grants turned down and their papers rejected. That's why it usually takes decades for major scientific errors to get corrected, and few people have the stomach and stamina to do it.
Career-wise, scientists choose to do experiments that are likely to support the current consensus, and to selectively show only data consistent with the consensus and dismiss data inconsistent with the consensus as experimental error. That's something we observe in many fields, and there is no reason to believe that climate science would be any different. People are slowly coming to realize this, e.g.
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/0...
http://www.scilogs.com/next_re...
I agree: the chance of deliberate field-wide fraud is indeed vanishingly small. The chance of field-wide error persisting for decades and remaining unchallenged, however, is very high, in particular given that "there aren't many climate scientists" and the statistics, computations, and models are highly complex and interdisciplinary.
"Railroaded"? For "outing a CIA newspaper reading bureaucrat"?
Here, this is from Wikipedia:
The only one who believes Black was "railroaded", is his good buddy and pederast, Mark Steyn.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, but there are plenty of instances of entire fields getting it wrong for decades at a time.
Can you cite examples of fields getting it wrong on large scale details accessible to contemporary levels of experimental evidence? The "big revolutions" in science have always been about the tiny details. Einstein didn't radically overthrow Newton; his theory indicated only microscopically tiny deviations from classical physics that could barely be measured by the most sensitive apparatus (and they were, and the rest is history). Quantum mechanics didn't destroy classical physics; it only showed strange things happening at the most sensitive boundaries of technology. Fundamental shifts in understanding --- things that shift the foundational basis for entire fields --- occur at the extreme margins of experimental evidence; it's never "the old guys are 90% wrong," but rather "the old guys are 99.9% right, but we've just found that 0.1% discrepancy."
Scientists in any field don't get famous by showing that the "scientific consensus" is erroneous, they get their grants turned down and their papers rejected.
Really? You just stated that drastic changes in scientific understanding have occurred before. Who built renown and careers off those? The guys who stuck with the old, discredited theories? Being the revolutionary discoverer of new physics overthrowing old theory has always been the way to get maximal renown --- you just need to be able to back up your stuff with solid evidence. Anthropogenic climate change deniers aren't discredited because they oppose consensus views; they're marginalized because they have zero solid evidence and rely on sloppy, unscientific, long-ago-disproven rhetoric instead of intellectual rigor.
The chance of field-wide error persisting for decades and remaining unchallenged, however, is very high, in particular given that "there aren't many climate scientists" and the statistics, computations, and models are highly complex and interdisciplinary.
That's why climate scientists report very broad confidence intervals. They can't tell you the weather five years from now in Minneapolis, or even precisely where between 1.1 degrees and 6.4 degrees average warming will be over the next century (depending hugely also on emissions levels). IPCC warming estimates fall in a large uncertainty band, estimated by best practices to cover the complexity in fine details of figuring out exactly how a strongly-coupled complex system is going to evolve. On the other hand, climate change denialism --- that there is no effect within the broad range of uncertainty cited by climate experts --- is based on nothing but anti-scientific corporate shill craziness. There is zero scientific evidence that a guess at where the climate is heading falls in the "no change produced by anthropogenic emissions" regime, though there is room for uncertainty in the band between moderate and extreme climate impacts.
To the extent that there is field wide error, such errors (based on historical precedent) are likely to be in the small details rather than the "big picture." Also, such errors are, a-priori, no less likely to over-predict anthropogenic impacts than to under-predict them, so the hard-line "there's nothing to worry about" stance is simply politically-motivated intentional ignorance (the antithesis of a scientific "skeptical" approach).
What fields have you applied for grants in? I'm not in climate science, but at least I particle physics, I can assure you that "everyone already knows this, and we're going to get the same results" is not a winning grant proposal or path to career success. If you want funding, you find an issue with lots of uncertainty (or one where you know you can do better than everyone else), and highlight how different your approach will be, with the possibility of finding new results. Trying to upset the consensus is the entire name of the game --- the only limit to doing so is demonstrating that you're competent to do so. Every scientist I know loves the principles of "underdog" experiments, using crazy new ideas that just might work to make new discoveries --- indeed, replication of results in many fields suffers because nobody is interested in just "confirming the consensus." There is no shame in the scientific community (at least the portion I've seen) about challenging the consensus with boundary-pushing work (negative results on well-performed experiments contribute to career success) --- you just have to be competent, rather than a nutjob spouting ignorance (the typical state of climate-change-denying "experts").
We look forward to your publication of the flaws you have discovered in Dr. Mann ....
Here's Mann's new book on The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.
Is it claimed that Dr. Mann won the Nobel Prize in that book?
Nobel Committee Rebukes Michael Mann for falsely claiming he was ‘awarded the Nobel Peace Prize’
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Whoops.
He admits in the comments below after this is exposed that in fact the polar regions are expected to warm faster than the tropics (hard not to, since we've observed it) and thus, temperature rises in the polar regions will be higher then the projections of the models, but handwaves this away. No, Roy, this is what maths is for. Don't handwave.
No, I didn't agree with you: people don't wire grant proposals to confirm consensus, they write grant proposals to challenge or disprove it. If you assume consensus is unchallengeable and true, then you have nothing to write a grant proposal on. Only if you find something new --- that previous researchers overlooked, or got wrong, or didn't have the tools to measure --- are you going to get research funding. "Confirm" and "test or challenge" are not the same things. You're saying that people can only get funding to do experiments that look for and find the same answers everyone got before ("the consensus"), which is simply false. People get funding to do things that might produce new results that change previous understanding ("test or challenge").
The actual source code is this, from briffa_Sep98_d.pro http://wattsupwiththat.com/200... - you can decide for yourself whether this is "torture" or not, and whether this particular debate should be squelched:
I really must disagree here. You can't infer anything worthwhile about the data just by reading some snippets of source code. If the analysis is convoluted and you don't trust it then the only way to "decide for yourself" is to analyse it for yourself. A bellicose blog ("arrogant programmer" and similar terms appear) doesn't count for much. A few lines of code don't tell you what the raw data look like, if the processing is reasonable based on the data, or if anything is being hidden. In this case, for instance, that code may be just a badly written attempt to produce a smoother curve.
soylentnews.org
Is it claimed that Dr. Mann won the Nobel Prize in that book?
You don't need to read a book to find that out. He did contribute to the winning of a Nobel peace prize. He received a certificate from the IPCC thanking him for his contributions. Various people, desperate people, thought this certificate was the Nobel peace prize, they never asked him, he never claimed it was. They made up a story about him faking the certificate - he didn't fake it, it was real. Much embarrassment was heaped upon Anthony Watts, and other worthies, including our favourite Lord-who-is-not-a-Lord Monkton, for these spurious and quickly debunked claims.
He never made any claim to have been a Nobel Laureate. He did win a Nobel peace prize, as one of many who shared the prize. He never claimed anything that was false, this was a rumour made up by a number of people who apparently can't read or otherwise lack basic comprehension skills.
But the climate deniers do seem to have gotten as thick as thieves in the past couple years.
Much thinner than they were a decade ago, IMO most of those that are left are trolls and astro-turfers who like to get in quick on AGW stories.
Mann has been character assassinated by "for hire" lobbyists, he has had numerous death threats and has appeared before several political inquisitions. The coal industries effort to discredit Mann and ruin his life is lead in congress by US senator Inhofe. It's about time Mann, Hansen, Schmidt, and others, fought back against political persecution and those who created the army of useful idiots intent on doing them physical harm. They should not have ignored the threat this long, I wish them the best of luck.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Yet we are still in a global temperature stall - and not a single model comes close to predicting it. The best worldwide dataset we have (the satellite data that Dr. Spencer uses) doesn't show the heating (where modern climate theory says it should happen the strongest - mid-troposphere). No data confirms the models. So which do you believe? Data or models?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Actually, those in academia who question global warming come under intense pressure: no funding, threats of firing, denial of tenure, social ostracism. Anyone who looked like he was about to come up with proof that global warming was a fraud would receive death threats: the population of college students contains a substantial number of people with no compunction against violence.
Much existing funding for climatologists comes from organizations that have a vested interest in demonstrating global warming, particularly the government which is interested in increasing its power and keeping its base of voting envirofreaks.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
whether this particular debate should be squelched:
On the one hand: That particular debate was the subject of a US senate inquisition lead by hostile senators from coal rich states. The national academies stepped in as arbitrator and reviewed the work, they agreed with Mann's methods but criticized some of his certainty levels, these minor criticisms were addressees in a subsequent "hockey stick" paper from Mann (circa 2005) that was published by the national academies in their own journal (Science).
On the other hand: Anthony Watts is a well known denier with strong links to the same anti-science lobby groups as Steyn, he has never published a single peer-reviewed article or paper. He simply ignores any and all contra-evidence to his claims because he knows that some people will believe him if he repeats the same bald assertions ad-nauseam.
more or less linear increases in CO2 concentrations since like 1850
I think you are using an unconventional definition of "liner", probably one invented by Watts. The facts are it took ~250yrs to pump 500 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, on current consumption trends it will take less than 50yrs to double it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Yet we are still in a global temperature stall.
false.
and not a single model comes close to predicting it.
false
The best worldwide dataset we have (the satellite data that Dr. Spencer uses) doesn't show the heating (where modern climate theory says it should happen the strongest - mid-troposphere).
false.
No data confirms the models.
false Sensing a trend here?
So which do you believe?
Oh gee, dunno.
What is missing is the proxy data from post 1980. Mann used proxy data for temperatures up until 1980, at which point he switched to using thermometer readings. He has, as far as I have been able to locate, never released the data that would allow a comparison of his proxy data to thermometer readings (that is, what the proxy readings would have shown since 1980). My recollection is that you are mistaken and Mann has never released his raw data, but I was unable to confirm or deny that understanding in the amount of time I was willing to spend looking.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
>the way that the AGW people have done everything they possibly could to deny that the Medieval Warm or the Little Ice Age happened or that they were anything except "local phenomena."
And there you went and proved your opponents point about observation bias. In fact, the medieval warming period is well known in climate science circles - and was discovered BY them.
I was once in a debate about climate change where a denier tried to use the medieval period to prove that climate science is a fake and Michael Mann is a fraud - to prove his point he linked me to a scientific paper about the medieval warming period... and proved he hadn't actually READ the paper because if he had opened it he would have seen, right on the front page, that the lead author was Michael Mann - the very scientist he was trying to discredit by bringing it up wrote most of the research we have on it !
The medieval warming period doesn't discredit modern climate science - that we know about it at all is a PRODUCT of modern climate science !
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Yep, nobody has ever discussed science at the Manhatten Project, or at NASA, or at DARPA or the NIH or the CDC or any of those government funded radio telescopes or the astronomers who work on them, or at any of the millions of government funded universities and laboratories around the world.
No, my friend, I think you will find that almost ALL scientific discussion happens where government funding is involved... it's the corporate-funded ones you should distrust, they are the ones who get paid to hide annoyingly inconvenient or unprofitable results.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Mann referred to himself as a Nobel prize recipient - which the IPCC has stated he's not allowed to do. Why are you posting obvious falsehoods in his defence throughout this thread?
Dr. Mann is a climate scientist whose research has focused on global warming. In 2007, along with Vice President Al Gore and his colleagues of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
https://www.facebook.com/Micha...
It is one thing to engage in discussion about debatable topics. It is quite another to attempt to discredit consistently validated scientific research through the professional and personal defamation of a Nobel prize recipient.
http://legaltimes.typepad.com/...
PS: I'm also a "Nobel laureate" if Mann is:
A peace prize made possible by the people has now been passed on to the people. The EU won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize, but the European Parliament believes this honour belongs to everyone. During a special ceremony in Strasbourg, the prize was symbolically handed over to 20 citizens of different ages and nationalities to represent the people of Europe.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/...
it's in my head
Yes, but we already know that hockey stick graph was misleading. Mann left off the warming and cooling trend of the Medival warming trend, aka, the right side of the valley, to show a hockey stick, not an elongated U.
We also know he had code problems, and his results are bad.
Fraud? Probably not.
Confirmation Bias? Probably.
Steyn is stating his opinion, so I am not sure it rises to libel
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
And PSU was notified several times about Sarduski's conduct and didn't see anything wrong. Or let's try another one: GW Bush has been investigated by several organizations for wrongdoing in the Iraq war conflict and they never found anything. Or the Warren commission found that JFK was assassinated by a lone gunman.
"Science" apparently believes that after certain "investigations" are concluded, free speech has to stop.
The Vatican was more open minded....
Praise Science! Those who disagree with Scientific Faith must be punished!
Meanwhile, have some freshly-sliced bald eagle straight from the windfield. I guarantee, no GMOs.
Welcome to Slashdot, haruchai, where posting simple truths brings out the deniers, to silence you.
There is so much research, investment and interest in getting rid of oil and coal, its inevitable that oil and coal will not last that much longer. There are more alternatives every day.
But oil companies have some money to lobby with. It would make sense that they would spend on some PR agents to propagate their ideals and objectives into the public conscience.
Follow the money. Who stands to gain by climate-denialists crazy arguments? Oil and coal. Auto companies perhaps, but not so much. They already power cars from many other sources, even if it costs more. But oil and coal companies stand to simply die if too many people switch to other power sources.
Who is funding the climate-deniers? Oil and coal. Where are the climate deniers concentrated? Oil and coal states. Who are the politicians that go along with climate-denier positions? Politicians from oil and coal states.
And this crazy argument that there is some "lobby" who "finances" and "creates false science" to "profit from global warming"? Who, the scientists lobby? We wish scientists had political power. Everything they say basically falls on deaf ears. What, the battery makers lobby? The electric car lobby?
There is no large green corporation, or group of companies, there is no central profit center. Power can be generated in an infinity of ways, and many, many of them are more efficient, cost less, and are (gasp!) cleaner than oil and coal, in many ways. They haven't quite gotten enough traction yet to completely replace oil, coal, and gas, largely due to lobby, PR scams, and protectionism of the oil lobby. Still, it seems inevitable.
If anyone really likes oil power so much, tell them to buy a generator, and power the house with oil. See the absurd noise, maintenance and costs. Quickly come to the - quite common sense - conclusion that oil power is not so great.
Which is likely to be the interest of the population in non-oil-and-coal-power - common sense. Not some imaginary "green lobby", a fictitious invention of the oil corporate lobby.
Oil and coal is not only affecting weather. It's making air unbreathable in many cities. Its not infinite. Many nations don't have enough and are vulnerable by depending on imports too much, like China and US. Europe is also dependent on Russian gas imports.
Militaries around the world don't like being vulnerable on supply lines for energy and gas, any group generating their own power is far more autonomous. The same argument goes for industry, commerce, transportation, cities, remote locations, and pretty much anyone.
Car and truck transportation are being questioned for many reasons - global warming, air pollution, noise pollution, traffic, safety, costs, raw inefficiency, and urban planning. Each of these arguments have their own, huge, groups of supporters.
If there is an environmental lobby, it appears to be most of the population, pretty much.
The surprising part is how much the world politicians have bent over for oil, gas and coal monopolies.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Can we skip the name calling in favor of some references, please?
So what do you want the deniers to be called? Gotta have some reference name.
Mann's initial investigation was regarding the infamous Hockey stick diagram.
There was broad and general support by the science community in the year's since. I'll include some citations of freely available work:
Really long url, so I provided a tinyurl
Stalagmite records http://tinyurl.com/m2yhtgl
Reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the last 11,300 years. http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
Millenial Temperature Reconstruction. http://www.clim-past.net/3/591...
Borehole heat flux data. http://www.earth.lsa.umich.edu...
There is a lot more, but you might be able to do a little research after digesting this initial stuff.
After hackers stole the emails with the University of East Anglia, Penn State made two investigations of Mann. They cleared him of misconduct, but criticized him for sharing unpublished manuscripts.
Virginia Attorney Ken Cuccinelli, then Attorney General of Virginia (before this gets too contentious, yes, the Ken Cuccinelli that wants to make oral sex illegal) demanded that the University of Virginia release documentation of Mann's work via a Civill Investigation Demand.
The first demand was overruled by a judge. Cuccinelli revised his subpoena, and appealed to the State Supreme court. He lost there also, with the judgement that he had no authority to demand the work.
Note that Mann aided in the subsequent election efforts of Terry McCauliff, who was running against Cuccinelli in the 2013 Gubernatorial election.
Mann was investigated by the Office of the Inspector General of the National Science foundation in 2011, and exhonorated Mann of any professional misconduct.
http://www.science20.com/uploa...
At this juncture, I doubt that those who would deny AGW will accept any evidence, and would simply accuse Penn State and the National Science Foundation of corruption or worse. Note that there are many who likewise think of that University as a tool of the energy industry. Some interesting irony there.
Cuccinelli's failure to subpoena University of Virginia's records is probably the groundwork for claims that Mann refuses to share data with others. However, a pretty compelling case can be made that it was blatant politicizing of science.
Furthermore, Mann's campaigning for Cucchinelli no doubt really raised some hackles. Pretty much all out war. I suspect Mann would say he is just fighting back against those who have made it a mission to destroy him.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
SLAPPstick Farce by Mark Steyn January 25, 2014 http://www.steynonline.com/601...
"Meanwhile, in the same period [the two-year anti-SLAPP hearing], Dr. Mann has been brandishing his hockey stick out on the campaign trail against Republican candidates. In Virginia, he appeared in the Democrats' attack ads against Ken Cuccinelli, and helped get Clinton's bagman Terry McAuliffe elected governor. When his candidate Mark Herring also prevailed over the GOP in the attorney general's race, Mann crowed and published tweets from his acolytes congratulating him on "two fresh notches on your hockey stick."
Global warming is apparently not a bipartisan research effort, but more of a Democratic National Committee sponsored science project which initially was given National coverage by Al Gore.
Er, no. One of the claims of the global warming faithful is that a "consensus" of scientists agree with it's dogma while those who disagree are branded as heretics, er, non-scientists. Looking with one's eyeballs to criticize Mann is a good way to lose funding or status in the politically correct academic community.
New Scientist did a story on the scientists who disagreed with the global warming consensus. There were about a dozen of them (and some of them have since gone with the consensus). They get a respectful hearing, when they do scientific work, present it at conferences and submit it for publication. Scientists do not normally look to the National Review for scientific critiques.
Most of the critics of global warming are not scientists. They were published prominently on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, where I read them. Most of them were economists, not scientists. They didn't address the main issue, which was whether the climate (not weather) was warming as a result of human activity, and how much. They merely argued that (1) there was no man-made global warming and (2) if there was, the cost of reducing it would be greater than the benefits (using supply-side economics).
Mark Steyn is not a scientist. He is apparently a literary critic who writes in popular media about politics and culture. If he descends to insults, by comparing scientists to child molesters, it's easy to understand why scientists won't pay attention to his arguments.
It looks like the National Review has come down quite a bit since William Buckley (although I may have idealized Buckley).
In short, there's nothing wrong with a scientist playing the role of an advocate
There is if they insist on still calling themselves scientists when they do that. You know that the "climate science" gang went much further than that. They used popular sources to intimidate their skeptics. Just read through majority of responses about this topic in this thread. Most are foaming at the mouth. This is a religious level of fervor -- it's not a scientific advocacy. There is any number of questions I have on the topic, but I promise that with this level of fervor by this number of nuts I, with my PhD, would still be afraid to ask them out loud. They have denigrated pre-eminent physicists with life-times of achievement -- people to whom not a single one of the "climate scientists" could hold a candle when it comes to the level of their insight and intellect.
Anyone who suggests even for a second that the pro-AGW side is reasonable is blind. They are nothing of the sort. They are not even in the same ball park. This is the result of a political process being used to advocate for a scientific position. I don't see how you can claim that it hasn't corrupted the scientific inquiry.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.