The author seems to be taking an awfully narrow view of innovation, as if it only matters what occurs in front-page consumer electronics. All of the big companies he names are quite innovative in commercial software and hardware in systems like industrial control, telecommunications and finance that are too complex and specialized to make the splashy tech news. Occasionally news of some big company innovation like IBM's new mainframe makes it to the front page, and reading about the history and technical details of an achievement like that gives some realization of the magnitude of technical progress and innovation going on behind the scenes.
The UEA research group has been cleared by two independent British panels, the House of Commons, the University itself, Penn State, Nature editors, and the United Nations IPCC commission. UAE's research and conclusions continue to be supported by NASA, NOAA, CSIRO, NIWA, Canada AES and every other major climatology research group in the world. Now, you can try labeling NASA and NOAA corrupt organizations (like Limbaugh does), but if you keep following this trail of accusations far enough then you'll end up pointing back at yourself. And then you'll need to "spend some quality time behind bars for... [having] perpetrated a number of obvious frauds".
Although this article esquire.com - marc morano is admittedly pop-media, it demonstrates that most of the fault here lies with reporting, not the science or even the scientists. The researchers at UEA have been doing the best job of measuring and analyzing that anyone can, yet when they are harassed by payed pundits and gadflys the objectivity of the media is completely lost. Even now that the researchers have been cleared of any professional wrongdoing, they are still being criticized (or apologized for) because they expressed frustration that their work was being misrepresented. If we should take away any message from this incident, it should be concern about how easily information can be corrupted in the public mind, even at times when clear public debate is critically important.
Case in point: The Guardian is not the most balanced news outlet, and often has a sensationalist agenda of it's own.
This is also typical. Attack the science with quotes from an opinion column that cites other opinion columns that make up stories and repeat falsehoods until they look like truth. Thank goodness most national governments aren't run by bloggers, so we can actually get something done.
It's good that another review has been announced in order to offset the political hype, but it's discouraging that there was political attacks on the science to begin with. As the article points out, the controversy has essentially been about a single wrong number in the IPCC report, which itself is a summary of over 10,000 peer-reviewed papers published over the last three or four decades. Criticism of this single error has only gained traction because of pointless repetition by critics who stand to make some profit over creating controversy.
The discussions and debate should be focused on policy, not on the science. We have already made our best effort at determining whether there is a problem. Now we need to determine what to do about it.
number of papers used in this one flawed report: none
hockey stick graphs created from this: none
papers from "hide the decline" subroutines: none
errors in raw data: none (this was a error in a projection, not an observation)
accurate papers based on flawed data: some, but not in this case.
You may be the first actual scientist I've seen post in one of these discussions. That's a very well written explanation of the realities of research. Mod this guy up!
This comment displays a vast ignorance of how research actually gets done. Most research is funded to gain knowledge, regardless of the result (otherwise it would simply be called 'knowing', not research). Note for instance that the drug companies continue spending millions dollars on basic research year after year, even when they don't get an immediate result. So don't broad-brush the dedicated work of hundreds of thousands of scientists with your own questionable view of ethics.
The people who are not motivated enough to put in the effort are not scientists - they are pundits. Researchers who are truly interested in their work - and that would be most of them - put in decades of observation and analysis looking for some truth, because simply grinding an axe would never be personally satisfying. It is lazy and disrespectful of you and other armchair commentators to simply dismiss all that work with a three-line opinion.
Yeah, it's just you. AP News found no evidence of massaged or ignored data (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091212/ap_on_sc/climate_e_mails). So climate science is a poor example of this thesis.
AGW research has been going on for nearly 50 years, but the most heated controversy has only been the last decade. However you want to frame the debate at this moment in time, there has still been at least forty years of good, undisturbed research to build on. Hence AGW is science, whereas the opinionated skeptics are politicians at heart.
The theory is that unprecedented levels of CO2 are forcing unprecedented levels of global temperature increase (and glacial retreat) due to CO2's ability to capture and re-radiate infrared energy, which can be demonstrated in the lab. The question is whether you're willing to bet that there is some (currently unknown) natural process which can balance that unprecedented heating, or whether we're toast.
There's a major, man-made difference this time: atmospheric CO2 has increased 30% in the last century, to the highest level in a million years (according to ice cores). Are you willing to bet against that making a major, permanent change in our climate? A change that might, for instance, make vast amounts of US farmland unusable due to drought?
How does this constitute a 'complete hoax' of global warming when literally thousands of other researchers have produced thousands of papers over the last twenty years showing similar trends in atmospheric temperature, ocean temperature, glacial retreat, permafrost melting, seasonal trends, species migration and etc?
If the data was manipulated, then why does it show the same trends as NASA and NOAA data? And how come it agrees with research by the Germans, Australians, Japanese, Candians and French? I mean, come on, when do the French *ever* agree with anyone else?
That's an astonishingly ignorant analysis of science. You've completely missed that point that published results can be reviewed and replicated by thousands of researchers from any research group, in any country, at any time. If 'vanity' drives any given researcher to lie (like that Korean geneticist), then sooner or later some other independent researcher will find them out. That's how science is supposed to work, and how it successfully overcomes political agendas. If you think that climate change research is rigged, then you're thinking much too small (or else thinking like a politician).
There is a very disturbing question here of why climate research is being handled like a political football. We don't normally politicize chemistry, or physics, or math, or even oceanography. We could and should be having heated policy discussions about how to address global warming, but the scientific evidence is not really in question, and the researchers behind the evidence are clearly not political operatives. So who has turned the public view of climate research into such a circus, and why?
So, maybe you missed the memos? The one over a year ago where the Bush Administration confirmed that man-mad global warming was a real threat? The one where the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA had to regulate CO2 as a pollutant? The one where every nation in the world is meeting in Copenhagen in two months to draft a replacement to the Kyoto protocol, because ten years on the climate threat is considered more dangerous than ever?
How about the one where the several thousand scientists who contributed to the last IPCC report don't care much for your baseless, non-scientific opinions that denigrate decades of careful research and observations?
When did the WSJ sink to the level of Fox news? The article seems to imply that Al Gore controls the entire Department of Energy, and that Fiskar and Tesla are entirely foreign built. Does the WSJ hate the environment enough to become a kneejerk conservative rag?
nickous and couchslug are right; these investments will help American technology in the long run, especially at a time when our 'conventional' domestic automakers aren't doing that hot.
Anyone who blindly repeats this old Limbaugh canard about using scare tactics to get funding instantly reveals themselves as knowing nothing about the research community or science. Most geophysical research is funded on a steady, ongoing bases because it is basic research, not results driven. Lying about results will not get you more funding, it will get you less.
The problem is with communicating to the public about complex, slowly developing issues. If you can't match the latest blockbuster movie for excitement, then the important issues don't get airtime.
If there are lots of dire warnings maybe its because there are lots of dire problems.
If many of these dire warnings seem over dramatic, maybe its because it is very hard to get people to pay attention to slowly developing problems, like a decades of ozone depletion or a century of global warning. It may not seem to be affecting you today, but we're still eventually faced with the same problem as the frog in boiling water.
It's been well documented by the IEEE Times and other engineering journals that the major problems with the Xbox were faulty thermal designs for the custom ASIC chips and power supplies. Microsoft simply did a poor job of hardware design. If you place any blame on the users, then you are falling in line with one of Microsoft's major marketing innovations: if the product doesn't work, then the customer is the problem.
Do you happen to work for Microsoft marketing?
Slashdot Mirror
If Exxon is going to fund you to astroturf comments full of loaded adjectives like this, then shouldn't your post be tagged as a Paid Advertisement?
The author seems to be taking an awfully narrow view of innovation, as if it only matters what occurs in front-page consumer electronics. All of the big companies he names are quite innovative in commercial software and hardware in systems like industrial control, telecommunications and finance that are too complex and specialized to make the splashy tech news. Occasionally news of some big company innovation like IBM's new mainframe makes it to the front page, and reading about the history and technical details of an achievement like that gives some realization of the magnitude of technical progress and innovation going on behind the scenes.
The UEA research group has been cleared by two independent British panels, the House of Commons, the University itself, Penn State, Nature editors, and the United Nations IPCC commission. UAE's research and conclusions continue to be supported by NASA, NOAA, CSIRO, NIWA, Canada AES and every other major climatology research group in the world. Now, you can try labeling NASA and NOAA corrupt organizations (like Limbaugh does), but if you keep following this trail of accusations far enough then you'll end up pointing back at yourself. And then you'll need to "spend some quality time behind bars for ... [having] perpetrated a number of obvious frauds".
Although this article esquire.com - marc morano is admittedly pop-media, it demonstrates that most of the fault here lies with reporting, not the science or even the scientists. The researchers at UEA have been doing the best job of measuring and analyzing that anyone can, yet when they are harassed by payed pundits and gadflys the objectivity of the media is completely lost. Even now that the researchers have been cleared of any professional wrongdoing, they are still being criticized (or apologized for) because they expressed frustration that their work was being misrepresented. If we should take away any message from this incident, it should be concern about how easily information can be corrupted in the public mind, even at times when clear public debate is critically important. Case in point: The Guardian is not the most balanced news outlet, and often has a sensationalist agenda of it's own.
This is also typical. Attack the science with quotes from an opinion column that cites other opinion columns that make up stories and repeat falsehoods until they look like truth. Thank goodness most national governments aren't run by bloggers, so we can actually get something done.
It's good that another review has been announced in order to offset the political hype, but it's discouraging that there was political attacks on the science to begin with. As the article points out, the controversy has essentially been about a single wrong number in the IPCC report, which itself is a summary of over 10,000 peer-reviewed papers published over the last three or four decades. Criticism of this single error has only gained traction because of pointless repetition by critics who stand to make some profit over creating controversy.
The discussions and debate should be focused on policy, not on the science. We have already made our best effort at determining whether there is a problem. Now we need to determine what to do about it.
reference: http://web.hwr.arizona.edu/~gleonard/2009Dec-FallAGU-Soot-PressConference-Backgrounder-Kargel.pdf
number of papers used in this one flawed report: none
hockey stick graphs created from this: none
papers from "hide the decline" subroutines: none
errors in raw data: none (this was a error in a projection, not an observation)
accurate papers based on flawed data: some, but not in this case.
You may be the first actual scientist I've seen post in one of these discussions. That's a very well written explanation of the realities of research.
Mod this guy up!
This comment displays a vast ignorance of how research actually gets done. Most research is funded to gain knowledge, regardless of the result (otherwise it would simply be called 'knowing', not research). Note for instance that the drug companies continue spending millions dollars on basic research year after year, even when they don't get an immediate result. So don't broad-brush the dedicated work of hundreds of thousands of scientists with your own questionable view of ethics.
The people who are not motivated enough to put in the effort are not scientists - they are pundits. Researchers who are truly interested in their work - and that would be most of them - put in decades of observation and analysis looking for some truth, because simply grinding an axe would never be personally satisfying. It is lazy and disrespectful of you and other armchair commentators to simply dismiss all that work with a three-line opinion.
Yeah, it's just you. AP News found no evidence of massaged or ignored data (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091212/ap_on_sc/climate_e_mails). So climate science is a poor example of this thesis.
You just proved the author's point.
You just proved the author's thesis.
AGW research has been going on for nearly 50 years, but the most heated controversy has only been the last decade. However you want to frame the debate at this moment in time, there has still been at least forty years of good, undisturbed research to build on. Hence AGW is science, whereas the opinionated skeptics are politicians at heart.
The theory is that unprecedented levels of CO2 are forcing unprecedented levels of global temperature increase (and glacial retreat) due to CO2's ability to capture and re-radiate infrared energy, which can be demonstrated in the lab. The question is whether you're willing to bet that there is some (currently unknown) natural process which can balance that unprecedented heating, or whether we're toast.
There's a major, man-made difference this time: atmospheric CO2 has increased 30% in the last century, to the highest level in a million years (according to ice cores). Are you willing to bet against that making a major, permanent change in our climate? A change that might, for instance, make vast amounts of US farmland unusable due to drought?
How does this constitute a 'complete hoax' of global warming when literally thousands of other researchers have produced thousands of papers over the last twenty years showing similar trends in atmospheric temperature, ocean temperature, glacial retreat, permafrost melting, seasonal trends, species migration and etc?
If the data was manipulated, then why does it show the same trends as NASA and NOAA data? And how come it agrees with research by the Germans, Australians, Japanese, Candians and French? I mean, come on, when do the French *ever* agree with anyone else?
That's an astonishingly ignorant analysis of science. You've completely missed that point that published results can be reviewed and replicated by thousands of researchers from any research group, in any country, at any time. If 'vanity' drives any given researcher to lie (like that Korean geneticist), then sooner or later some other independent researcher will find them out. That's how science is supposed to work, and how it successfully overcomes political agendas. If you think that climate change research is rigged, then you're thinking much too small (or else thinking like a politician).
There is a very disturbing question here of why climate research is being handled like a political football. We don't normally politicize chemistry, or physics, or math, or even oceanography. We could and should be having heated policy discussions about how to address global warming, but the scientific evidence is not really in question, and the researchers behind the evidence are clearly not political operatives. So who has turned the public view of climate research into such a circus, and why?
So, maybe you missed the memos? The one over a year ago where the Bush Administration confirmed that man-mad global warming was a real threat? The one where the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA had to regulate CO2 as a pollutant? The one where every nation in the world is meeting in Copenhagen in two months to draft a replacement to the Kyoto protocol, because ten years on the climate threat is considered more dangerous than ever? How about the one where the several thousand scientists who contributed to the last IPCC report don't care much for your baseless, non-scientific opinions that denigrate decades of careful research and observations?
When did the WSJ sink to the level of Fox news? The article seems to imply that Al Gore controls the entire Department of Energy, and that Fiskar and Tesla are entirely foreign built. Does the WSJ hate the environment enough to become a kneejerk conservative rag? nickous and couchslug are right; these investments will help American technology in the long run, especially at a time when our 'conventional' domestic automakers aren't doing that hot.
Anyone who blindly repeats this old Limbaugh canard about using scare tactics to get funding instantly reveals themselves as knowing nothing about the research community or science. Most geophysical research is funded on a steady, ongoing bases because it is basic research, not results driven. Lying about results will not get you more funding, it will get you less.
The problem is with communicating to the public about complex, slowly developing issues. If you can't match the latest blockbuster movie for excitement, then the important issues don't get airtime.
If there are lots of dire warnings maybe its because there are lots of dire problems. If many of these dire warnings seem over dramatic, maybe its because it is very hard to get people to pay attention to slowly developing problems, like a decades of ozone depletion or a century of global warning. It may not seem to be affecting you today, but we're still eventually faced with the same problem as the frog in boiling water.
It's been well documented by the IEEE Times and other engineering journals that the major problems with the Xbox were faulty thermal designs for the custom ASIC chips and power supplies. Microsoft simply did a poor job of hardware design. If you place any blame on the users, then you are falling in line with one of Microsoft's major marketing innovations: if the product doesn't work, then the customer is the problem. Do you happen to work for Microsoft marketing?