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Michael Mann: Swiftboating Comes To Science
Lasrick writes: Michael Mann writes about the ad hominem attacks on scientists, especially climate scientists, that have become much more frequent over the last few decades. Mann should know: his work as a postdoc on the famed "hockey stick" graph led him to be vilified by Fox News and in the Wall Street Journal. Wealthy interests such as the Scaife Foundation and Koch Industries pressured Penn State University to fire him (they didn't). Right-wing elected officials attempted to have Mann's personal records and emails (and those of other climate scientists) subpoenaed and tried to have the "hockey stick" discredited in the media, despite the fact that the National Academy of Sciences reaffirmed the work, and that subsequent reports of the IPCC and the most recent peerreviewed research corroborates it.
Even worse, Mann and his family were targets of death threats. Despite (or perhaps because of) the well-funded and ubiquitous attacks, Mann believes that flat-out climate change denialism is losing favor with the public, and he lays out how and why scientists should engage and not retreat to their labs to conduct research far from the public eye. "We scientists must hold ourselves to a higher standard than the deniers-for-hire. We must be honest as we convey the threat posed by climate change to the public. But we must also be effective. The stakes are simply too great for us to fail to communicate the risks of inaction. The good news is that scientists have truth on their side, and truth will ultimately win out."
Even worse, Mann and his family were targets of death threats. Despite (or perhaps because of) the well-funded and ubiquitous attacks, Mann believes that flat-out climate change denialism is losing favor with the public, and he lays out how and why scientists should engage and not retreat to their labs to conduct research far from the public eye. "We scientists must hold ourselves to a higher standard than the deniers-for-hire. We must be honest as we convey the threat posed by climate change to the public. But we must also be effective. The stakes are simply too great for us to fail to communicate the risks of inaction. The good news is that scientists have truth on their side, and truth will ultimately win out."
If Global Warming is a science issue then stop trying to make political arguments.
You are LOSING the political battle. Stop fighting. Everything since Al Gore started organizing this movement has been one political miscalculation after another.
Why would you expect otherwise? This is the same guy that lost to GWB after serving a Bill Clinton's Vice President for eight years. That election was in the bag. And he blew it by thinking that attacking guns in the middle of a presidential election was a good idea.
Every single serious presidential contender until Obama made sure they had a picture of themselves holding a shotgun or something in their national ads. Think about that.
Seriously. If you don't want this to a political campaign then stop treating it like a political campaign. Swiftboating? Are you fucking high? You're going to bring up that shit that John Kerry was whining about? Stop listening to failed politicians to structure your political arguments.
If you want sound political advice, talk to someone that wins. Talk to Bill Clinton. I'm sure he'd be happy to give you some advice. He'd probably tell you to stop being such royal pricks and try to build some bridges. Which is probably why you like Al Gore... he probably says "fuck the opposition we are right!"... which is possibly the dumbest political advice possible.
If you want to talk about science, then show me a tested climate model that has been subjected to an empirical test of its validity. It isn't that hard guys. We have a lot of very accurate historical data. Feed in past climate data and see if your climate model can predict the past or the present accurately. The first model that can do that which isn't just a collection of plug variables is something worth taking seriously.
Until you have that model... you have no theory. There is no global warming theory without a tested model. You have rather a global warming hypothesis. To get a theory you need a validated model. You do not have that at this moment so far as I know. Which means... you have jack.
Which is a problem because you're losing the political argument. If on top of losing the political argument you're also unable to provide a validated climate model... then what we have here is a platform sustained almost entirely by hubris and graft.
Please contradict me... show me your validated model.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Society is not governed by science. We've made it to democracy and capitalism in which vote count and bank account reign supreme. And in our society, science is still poor and a minority. The truth does not ultimately win in a democracy. "It's about votes, not truth, dumb ass." And it's easier to buy votes than to inspire them with education.
Scientists completely underestimate the opposition. And the worst part is, the science doesn't even matter. It matters to scientists of course, but it doesn't matter to the deniers. They are on a mission to make money and serve their cause. And all they really need is to buy time. That is all they want. As long as they can postpone action, the more money they make. So even if they believed in the inevitability of scientific conclusion and of actual global warming, they aren't even concerned about those outcomes until they happen. All they have in mind is immediate gratification. So they've already won, and they keep winning. The battle scientists are fighting over "minds" is moot. There are no minds to find. They need to fight the money.
True scientists only echo the voice of nature. Today, nature is our slave. And nature has no voice. Global warming is inevitable. It's nature's revenge. I'd invest in a post warm economy than any attempts in saving it. Science will never have enough money to win the war on global warming.
Oh iI get it, very smarmy. Let me guess you only listened to the crew mate who said what you wanted to hear, hence all the crew mates you heard. Why does that so remind me of the typical Fox not-News spin, that and of course outright lies, like "It's not a police state it is a safe state" talk about doublespeak overdrive https://www.youtube.com/watch?....
This is exactly like the kind of PR=B$ that pseudo Christian pseudo conservative (both just masks they wear) foist on the public as pretend science, just empty talking points repeated over and over again and repeated as if it were truth on multi-national corporate controlled media.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
"Hide the decline" Mann.
http://climateaudit.org/2015/01/08/more-mann-grafting/
In most places outside the US, science isn't accepted as something that can be so casually threatened by special interests working against all objectively observable sources of information.
I've been following the wider skeptical movement here in the US for a while now. Perhaps earlier on (over a decade ago), challenges to the scientific consensus on things like global warming had some legitimacy as a real movement - but by now, it really is just a shill movement. Every existing doubt remaining is NOT in terms of the science being wrong, but rather which implication of the science is most correct. Yes, you can always find a theory or person willing to speculate in any direction you want - but nothing that still constitutes a challenge to the science of global warming anymore. It's observed from space, observed from dozens of major lines of evidence, observed from all known history we can trace, observed from watching other planets, and passes every known line of meta-analysis that uses an actual scientific process.
It's only here in the US (or perhaps OPEC nations) that none of that really ends up mattering to what a person at random gets to hear. Don't get me wrong - nowhere is science really reported without a million biases, just the same as no scientist or agency perfect - but we really do distort our science reporting with a huge amount of false controversy. It's just painful to see how much of that twisted interpretation of so much science so heavily represented in so many of these slashdot stories.
And so often,l it's from the libertarian side, which also weirds me out - again, I come in as a close follower of the skeptical movement (got a JREF card in my wallet), which is filled to the brim with libertarian ideals. It weirds me out, because in order to have a meaningfully free society, it seems absurd that the overwhelming push is to close off so much from objective observable truth, and to use the constant barrage of logical fallacies so rampant in the global warming denial popularizers toolset.
Honestly, just follow more lines of evidence, in just about any direction you want - the pattern of global warming, and it's predictable (if chaotic at some scales) effects are as much a science as anything I've seen. The studies themselves come from all sorts of people - but they all get to the same places in wonderfully surprising ways, and the overall picture is rather resilient by this point. Skepticism should mean looking for truth, eliminating where we're lying to ourselves, and at this point, the only folks consistently lying have been the folks in steadfast and unobserving denial.
Ryan Fenton
Only about 20% of scholarly papers that are cutting edge science are still corroborated 5 years later.
One example of research that has been particularly well corroborated by later papers is the temperature reconstructions by Mann, Bradley and Hughes.
There is no higher standard of affirmation than reproduction by independent lines of evidence.
How can this possibly be fraud?
Neither is he self-promoting. He is science promoting. That is to be admired. Even if you're a Bush or Murdoch, so that you've an interest in not promoting it.
coming from a known fraud: Michael "Hide the Decline" Mann
http://climateaudit.org/2015/01/08/more-mann-grafting/
and the religion of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change is alive and well... unfortunately
Ahh, the anti-science movement calling the pro-scientific movement a "religion".
This is one of the lies that the anti-science's PR movement pays people to tell. If you have a fault, it is a good idea to accuse the other side of that fault so that the perception develops that both sides are as bad as each other.
How's that working out for you with the audience of http://science.slashdot.org/ ?
That's because it doesn't work on people who are actually following what's going on.
You think Fox news is crap only if you're on the left of politics?
The thing you seem to have failed to grasp is "Truth is objective."
Anyone who is denounced so loudly by Koch Industries, the Scaife Foundation, and so many others probably has a story worth telling.
Well, considering that the word "swiftboating" is derived from accusations against John Kerry that were true. when someone says they are being "swiftboated" they are admitting that the attacks against them are based in truth.
You're missing the point entirely.
Typical political attacks aim for an opponent's weaknesses, broken campaign promises, personal indiscretions, etc.
Swiftboating is the opposite, it attacks an opponent's strengths and tries to turn them into vulnerabilities. With Kerry a big selling point was his war service and purple hearts, swiftboating created a second narrative where he was unpatriotic and a bad soldier.
The same thing happened in '12 where Romney's business experience was turned into a negative by associating him with layoffs and the rich people who broke the economy. And to a lesser extent in '08 with Obama and his academic credentials and intellectual reputation, many people started implying that his academic career was the result of affirmative action.
What's happening to scientists is the same idea. There's three big reasons to believe scientists.
1) They have a ton of integrity.
2) They're succeed by finding new things and changing the established thinking.
3) They use the peer review system to enforce rigorous standards.
Climate change opponents attack all of these qualities. They attack scientists' integrity by alleging mass fraud. They deny the revolutionary aspect by claiming scientists don't want to point out problems with climate change. And finally they claim the peer review system is used to stifle dissent and create a false consensus.
The plan is to discredit climate change by discrediting science itself, the opponents can't gain credibility, but if they discredit scientists they don't have to, it just becomes a case of he-said she-said.
I stole this Sig
as soon as he returned he began vilifying the people he served with. The only people who thought Kerry's war service was a strength were people who were as anti-military as John Kerry.
Why does opposition to war automatically mean you're anti-military and vilifying soldiers?
Have you considered that people who oppose war simply want to minimize the number of people who are killed, and to avoid putting soldiers in the kind of situations that lead to people committing atrocities?
I stole this Sig
1) They have a ton of integrity.
Scientists have as much (or as little) integrity as the next guy. Fortunately the scientific method yields tools for outing the ones who acted with little integrity. Unfortunately, scientists with little integrity tend to move the discussion into into politics before the integrity problem can catch up with them, after which science kinda goes out the window.
Manning stands accused of the latter. Some of his emails focused on how to discredit folks who dispute his findings suggest those accusations have some merit. If you want to keep politics out of science, you simply can't engage on a political level.
2) They're succeed by finding new things and changing the established thinking.
No. Just no. Finding a new way to confirm an old theory is just as successful science as testing a new theory. Finding a way to refute an established theory is highly successful science which rarely happens, and finding the new theory that fits all the data -and- whose predictions survive the test of time is rare genius.
Test of time is important. If you have to incrementally revise the theory as new data comes in, it's not a very solid theory.
3) They use the peer review system to enforce rigorous standards.
A theory which, sadly, has been discredited in the past decade or so.
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Do you have a better term for people who continue to vociferously claim that warming is not happening? They're not just doubters or skeptics or merely asking questions. Personally, I think denial is the most accurate term for these people, but I'm open to other suggestions.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
When Canadian columnist Mark Steyn questioned Church of Warminetics doctrine, Mann took the unusual step of filing a suit:
http://www.steynonline.com/656...
I never knew that hiring lawyers was such a crucial element of the scientific method.
"Climate change denier" is merely descriptive and accurate as such. Any negative connotations are purely the fault of those following this "school of though". Above some level of utter stupidity, any descriptive term automatically acquires negative meaning.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
From TFS:
Wealthy interests such as the Scaife Foundation and Koch Industries
Why is it that the uber-rich on the Left are never mentioned? Most of the richest people in the US Congress are Democrats. Why don't we hear more about George Soros, who collapses national currencies for fun & profit, and the leftist/progressive institutions he funds like Tides Foundation and others who then in turn fund numerous other PACs and other groups? How about Bloomberg? Or if you want to get to the real money in political contributions, look at public & private sector unions.
What is it with rich socialists that they hate the rich so much? Or do they just hate the idea of anyone *else* becoming rich? They seem to view other people increasing their wealth as decreasing how much richer they are, and consider the resulting decrease in wealth disparity the same as having been robbed.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
OTOH this is a USA phenomena and not worldwide. It's generally only in the US that there is such a schmozzle over this. The standard right wing response "The evidence isn't in yet." is still being used, or it's some kind of hoax. The right wing is making (or has made) world perception of the USA's public attitude as a bunch of morons willing to believe non-fact checked science. All the Koch bros/Fox are doing is discrediting the intelligence of the general US public. The impression is that the general US public is listening to them and believing them is so real that whether it is true or not, it really doesn't matter.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
The movement in religion seems to be towards the extremes. Fundamentalism and atheism are both on the rise - it's the middle that is in decline, the people who profess belief but only go to church for weddings and funerals, and who never actually read their bible. There's a contradiction in such people - they openly profess a belief which should define their lives, but ignore it in all their actions. So it's easy to confront them with this and force them to either turn devout and practice what they claim, or admit they were lying to themselves about believing all along and abandon their religion altogether.
From your link:
Recent observed global warming is significantly less than that simulated by climate models. This difference might be explained by some combination of errors in external forcing, model response and
Ginternal climate variability.
In other words, the models don't work at all, what is the excuse that the rubes will buy so we can keep draining science funds for a few more years?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So, If you disagree you must be a paid shill. Who's making ad-hominem attacks?
The right wing is making (or has made) world perception of the USA's public attitude as a bunch of morons willing to believe non-fact checked science. All the Koch bros/Fox are doing is discrediting the intelligence of the general US public.
I disagree. They aren't "discrediting" the intelligence of the general US public, they're showing the world just how stupid the general US public is. We are a bunch of morons.
Nah, the Left supports it because it's the truth. The right believes in whatever's convenient.
Learn to love Alaska
Apparently too many people take faux news as truth, just read all of the denier posts below
So are you saying U.S. soldiers did nothing wrong when they raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages, and poisoned food stocks?
Or are you saying it's wrong, but we shouldn't talk about it?