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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."
Starsky and Hutch and Crime Story didn't really have much to do with climate change - but I did like the Del Shannon theme song he used on the latter.
#DeleteChrome
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.
Except they weren't true, as almost all of his cremates have said.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Who are these crew mates?
http://mediamatters.org/research/2004/08/05/submerging-the-truth-about-swift-boat-vets-on-h/131593
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.
There are plenty of climate models that have been subjected to an empirical test of validity.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If Global Warming is a science issue then stop trying to make political arguments.
Global warming is a science issue and is argued by scientists in papers. The problem is that convincing everyone to do something about global warming is a political issue, and politicians aren't above discrediting anyone who opposes them to get their way.
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.
That is interesting, since all of his crew mates I have heard say they are true.
I think you're full of shit. The people who made the accusations were either not part of his crew, or were not present on the missions for which they disputed Kerry's accounts and questioned the basis for the medals he received.
Some of those who did make the accusations flip flopped - they actually praised him, and one officer submitted his name for a Silver Star, before joining the Swiftboat political action group.
I think it's more likely that you just never bothered to get the facts, rather than that you are outright lying, but by all means, post a single shred of evidence for what you claim.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_Vets_and_POWs_for_Truth
Whether global warming is happening and what the effects will be is a scientific issue. But what we need to do to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is to change energy policies, so that is a political issue. It's just the same as with CFCs eating away the ozone layer and sufur emissions causing acid rain. If no political action had been taken, those would still be problems.
Ironically, most of the people who argue against the science of global warming are opposed to what to do about it. They argue we should not destroy the economy and go back to an agrarian lifestyle. But using LED light bulbs (and doing other things to use energy more efficiently) and generating power from solar, wind, and nuclear are the actual proposed solutions, not lifestyle changes. In effect they're taking a politcal issue and trying to argue it in the scientific arena, which will never work.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
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.
Anyone who is denounced so loudly by Koch Industries, the Scaife Foundation, and so many others probably has a story worth telling.
When Arrhenius predicted global warming over 100 years ago, he was not looking at past data. He began with a reasoned hypothesis (burning fossil fuels emits carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, therefore burning fossil fuels will cause warming), made his prediction, and we've observed the warming which proves the prediction correct. It's a slam dunk as far as I'm concerned.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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
You can, oh I dunno, gather more data... Which they do. What the fuxk do you think researchers actually do? They gather data, they refine models, they compare to the data, repeat and rinse.
Not all theories are built as monolithic constructs, and nowhere in science is it a requirement that a theory must be complete (whatever that means) to have utility.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
Feed in past climate data and see if your climate model can predict the past or the present accurately.
And, surprise! It does. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07...
While I agree with most of your post, what you describe here is not science. That approach turns science on its head. The scientific method begins with a reasoned hypothesis, followed by a prediction based on the hypothesis, and an experiment to prove or disprove this prediction.
Correct. The hypothesis dates back to Arrhenius 1896 http://www.lenntech.com/greenh... The numerical calculation of greenhouse warming due to carbon dioxide was first accurately done using measured value for infrared absorption and numerical integration of the profile was done in 1967 by Manabe and Wetherald-- it's summarized in any reasonable book about atmospheric science (such as the one on my desk at the moment, An Introduction to Atmospheric Radiation, by Liou (1980), p. 188). Calculating the greenhouse effect alone (that is, assuming no change in cloudiness, and constant relative humidity), Manabe and Wetherald showed "a ten percent increase in CO2 concentration (from 300 to 330 ppm) would lead to a warming of 0.3 K." It's a logarithmic response function (Arrhenius calculated that much back in 1895, although he didn't have the data to do the complete numerical integration), so it's easy to extrapolate this to the current carbon dioxide of about 400 ppm. It comes to about 0.8 K increase by their model.
Comparing it to the data, from 1967 on... looks like the experimental result matches the prediction.
Climate "science" on the other hand does exactly what you describe here. It looks at past data and attempts to fit it to a hypothesis.
Nope. The hypothesis dates back to Arrhenius. The detailed calculation dates to Manabe and Wetherald.
In any case, while the measured temperatures are a nice validation that the models are in the right ballpark, there's plenty of other data. You seem to be unaware that there is is a lot of measurements of the atmosphere.
That's not science at all. That's little more than a statistical model. These guys believe they have their answer and are trying to fit all observations to it.
That's a description of deniers. That's not the way climate science is done.
The reason we believe that the model is more or less accurate is that there are terabytes of data confirming it. The reason we don't believe that alternative models are accurate is that there aren't any. All of the alternative models proposed so far fail when compared against the evidence.
When there's an alternative model that fits the data, believe me, people will pay attention. Many people have looked very hard to come up with an alternative model. So far, no success.
You don't seem to know much about the subject, but this is not one or two scientists doing questionable work and then everybody else saying "oh, they must be right". There are thousands of scientists working on it; supercomputer models built on five different continents; ground, balloon, and satellite measurements, terabytes of data.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
The culture determines integrity, and the scientific culture has a ton of integrity.
As for Manning your narrative would imply that he's moved away from the science, but the reality is that he's still heavily involved in the science. Note that people are experts at compartmentalizing, if Manning has in fact shown less integrity in his public relations work (a point I don't concede) there's no reason to believe that's bled over into his research.
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.
That's not quite right.
Incremental revisions to theories are how science happens. You need to read the relativity of wrong.
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...
Is it perfect? No.
Do we have a better alternative? No.
I stole this Sig
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!
That's ice surface area, which tells you only how spread out the ice is, not how much there is. You need to look at the ice mass, which is declining at an accelerating rate.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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
Fox News may be a proper noun, but so is Microsoft Works.
It still does not constitute a true statement. And while I do to some degree concede that Microsoft does work sometimes, whatever Fox produces ain't no news.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Yeah. Right. Just a blow job.
What I think is a whole lot better is a born again Christian who with his cronies, frittered away our money, lied to us, put us into the longest war in our history, destroyed our reputation around the world, put the world into the great recession.
Because, as you know, Character counts.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If you want to have a reasoned argument and be taken seriously then you shouldn't try to compare people like Soros to socialists. I'm not going to defend everything the guy has ever done but he did play a significant role in Hungary's transition from communism to capitalism. He's done some other very good things like donating $35 million to underprivileged kids in New York. At the same time he is something of a hypocrite, -getting rich off the very things he thinks should be more closely regulated. But he is no socialist.
A socialist believes that the people (or government in actual practice) should own the means of production rather than private companies. We're not talking just about health care, we're talking about all major industries. No current US Democrat supports such a notion. Some Democrats may have been willing to work with socialists back in the 30's but they've grown farther and farther apart since that time. People like Soros want to place greater controls on the markets, but they also want the markets to continue to exist.
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?
There are skeptics elsewhere in the world but they are not treated with any reverence because most of the them are non-scientists with an opinion and not a fact. it just seems that the US skeptics, who are just as opinionated without facts, are revered for some reason other than common sense.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)