Bishop Hill Will Sir John condemn "hide the decline"?
Feb 21, 2011 Bureaucrats Climate: Sceptics Government chief scientific officer, Sir John Beddington has a post up at New Scientist (H/T Matt Ridley in the comments). Like his pronouncements last week, this looks at the subject of scepticism, but adopts a more sensible position:
It is time the scientific community became proactive in challenging misuse of scientific evidence. We must make evidence, and associated uncertainties, accessible and explicable. In a world of global communication, we cannot afford to only speak to ourselves. We must also be confident in challenging the misrepresentation or exaggeration of evidence and the conclusions it leads to. Where significant consensus exists, it must be made obvious.
I have left a comment challenging him to condemn "hide the decline" in unequivocal terms. I'm not holding my breath though.
Bishop Hill
Looks like New Scientist hasn't allowed my comment through. It consisted of a quotation of Sir John's statement about being proactive in challenging misuse of scientific evidence and then said:
"If you mean it you will condemn "hide the decline" in unequivocal terms".
Is that too aggressive do you think? Perhaps I should try something more emollient.
Bishop Hill
Frank Furedi on Beddington
There is a chasm separating the outlook of someone like Mill from today’s celebrators of intolerance. If Mill were alive now, he would be horrified by the censorious attitude of men of science. When Beddington argues that since ‘there are enough difficult and important problems out there’ tolerance towards ‘what is politically or morally or religiously motivated nonsense’ becomes a luxury, he communicates a nonsensical idea of tolerance. Mill would not understand why someone’s nonsense should not be tolerated. After all, tolerance only really gains meaning through our refusal to silence views that we strongly disagree with; that is the real test. Beddington’s belief that tolerance means only putting up with sensible views is bizarre.
What do John Beddington, Britain’s chief scientific adviser, and Ryszard Legutko, leader of Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice party, have in common? Both believe that intolerance is a virtue, and that it should be celebrated.  Legutko, a vociferous critic of the gay rights movement, has written a book called Why I Am Not Tolerant. And Beddington boasts about his intolerance, too. Earlier this month, at the annual conference of Britain’s scientific civil servants, he called upon his audience to be ‘grossly intolerant’ of the misuse of science by religious and political groups. Beddington said: ‘We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of racism. We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of people who [are] anti-homosexuality… We are not - and I genuinely think we should think about how we do this - grossly intolerant of pseudoscience.’ No doubt Beddington also feels intolerant towards Legutko’s views on homosexuality. Yet what is truly fascinating about these two crusaders against tolerance is that although they have diametrically opposed viewpoints on gay rights, they are at one in their affirmation of the ethos of intolerance. The targets of their intolerance might be different, but they share the worldview of the bigot. Legutko is offended by the sight of gay and lesbian people dressed up as nuns and priests, while Beddington objects to people he disagrees with masquerading as scientists. The casual manner with which European public figures celebrate intolerance is testimony to the censorious and illiberal spirit that now dominates political life across the continent. In the current era, public figures only praise tolerance when they are giving Sunday school-style speeches. Political mission statements and EU declarations still contain exhortations to be tolerant. But increasingly, such tolerance-rhetoric is little more than a perfunctory gesture, which often serves as a prelude to narrow-minded bigotry. It is bad enough to hear a leading scientist brag about his contempt for tolerance. It is even worse when one scientist after another agrees with him and piles in to demand the silencing of views they disagree with. So following Beddington’s comments, we had Edzard Ernst, professor of the study of complementary medicine at Exeter University, exclaim that ‘for too long we have been tolerant of these postmodern ideas that more than one truth is valid’. The idea that we should not be tolerant of problematic ideas, or indeed of any beliefs other than our own, dominated the political culture of pre-Enlightenment Europe. It is important to note that until the seventeenth century, it was intolerance rather than tolerance that was upheld as a virtue. So when Beddington declares that ‘we should not tolerate what is potentially something that can seriously undermine our ability to address important problems’, he is adopting the dominant narrative of late medieval Europe. In that medieval outlook, heretical beliefs represented such a danger to society that the only virtuous response was to silence them. Intolerance was seen as a marker of moral virtue. As late as 1691, the French theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet boasted that Catholicism was the least tolerant of all religions, stating: ‘I have the right to persecute you because I am right and you are wrong.’ Today, it is not only the casual manner in which tolerance is once again condemned as a sign of moral weakness that speaks to the re-emergence of the attitude of the Inquisition - it is also the way in which some views are implicitly labelled evil or destructive. Bossuet and his fellow moral crusaders did not simply call for muscular intolerance. They also invented an ideology of evil. They presented their opponents as morally corrupt. In pre-Enlightenment times, such moral condemnation of heretics usually involved linking their behaviour to some kind of Satanic plot. In today’s secular era, a new ideology of evil justifies demands for intolerance by attacking people for their ‘outrageous behaviour’.
So it is not surprising that Beddington did not merely say that pseudoscience is wrong or unscientific or even a source of misfortune. He also characterised it as ‘pernicious’, as the moral equivalent of racism and homophobia. His equation of dissent from his scientific opinions with the stigmatised categories of racism and homophobia was an arbitrary one. He could have achieved the same effect by depicting pseudoscience as something akin to Holocaust denial or support for slavery. The ideology of evil takes many forms. Edzard Ernst justified silencing dissent by arguing that journalists would not finish an article by ‘quoting the Ku Klux Klan’, and so they shouldn’t quote pseudoscientists either. Science columnist Ben Goldacre opted for an old-fashioned conspiracy theory in his expression of support for Beddington’s campaign for gross intolerance. ‘Society has been far too tolerant of politicians, lobbyists and journalists wilfully misusing science, distorting evidence by cherry-picking data that suits their view, giving bogus authority to people who misrepresent the absolute basics of science, and worse’, he stated. The attempt to legitimise intolerance by constructing an ideology of evil has become a regular feature of the twenty-first-century debate on science. Time and again, dissent from conventional wisdom is dismissed as yet another example of ‘AIDS denialism’ or racism or some other modern evil. One consequence of this pathologisation of dissent is that it trivialises fundamental problems such as racism. The significance of the KKK’s lynching of black people or acts of anti-gay violence are judged to be comparable to the ‘pernicious arguments’ of those who distort science. Instead of racism being treated as a serious problem, it is denuded of its content and used simply as a rhetorical device for embarrassing an opponent. Such cavalier deployment of historically significant symbols is testimony to the morally impoverished state of public debate today. When disagreement about some scientific claim is held up as the moral equivalent of racism, it seems pretty clear that the sole objective is to shut down dissent. Tolerance is not for intellectual cowardsScience has always been the subject of bitter disputes. In modern times, scientists have rightly been concerned about the potentially confusing and destructive effects of pseudoscience. In the nineteenth century, numerous British liberal thinkers wrote essays expressing concern about the influence of pseudoscience on public opinion. In 1849, Sir George Cornwall Lewis noted that the popularity of science led to what he described as ‘mock science’, including ‘mesmerism, homeopathy and phrenology’. He feared that through mimicking the ‘phraseology of science’, charlatans might succeed in misleading the public. John Stuart Mill shared these concerns. In 1836, he wrote about a ‘flowering of quackery and ephemeral literature’, all manipulated by the new ‘arts for attracting public attention’. Mill was no less hostile to the confusions sown by quacks and by ‘mock science’ than genuine scientists are today. But what distinguished Mill from someone like Beddington was his view on how to deal with erroneous ‘science’. Mill adopted a consistent and courageous orientation towards tolerance, for many reasons. One reason was his sensitivity to the fact that uncertainty had become a condition of life in the modern world. Mill believed that, aside from the need to uphold freedom of speech and belief, uncertainty demanded tolerance. It is precisely because we cannot be certain of truth that we must allow for great openness and give people the right to express their beliefs and opinions. Uncertainty demands that people should be free to pursue their quest for truth. For Mill, the tolerance of all beliefs, even false ones, was not a matter of being soft or polite. Rather, openness towards the expression of any opinion was seen as essential to the flourishing of human creativity and a healthy public life. Mill believed that the ‘evil of silencing the expression of opinion’ is that it robs society, and future generations, of the potential insights that can emerge from a clash of views. He said: ‘If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.’ In his essay On Liberty, Mill argued that in an uncertain world refusal to tolerate what Beddington describes as ‘pernicious’ views means assuming that one possesses the authority of ‘infallibility’: ‘To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.’ Mill went even further and insisted that intolerance of a false belief is itself an evil. ‘We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion’, he said, before adding that even ‘if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still’. Mill took the view that society actually learns about itself through confronting ‘false opinion’. That is why On Liberty sometimes reads like a celebration of the heretic. Mill defends heretics because he recognises that, through their questioning of received wisdom, they ensure that society is forced to account for its views, and if necessary rectify them. There is a chasm separating the outlook of someone like Mill from today’s celebrators of intolerance. If Mill were alive now, he would be horrified by the censorious attitude of men of science. When Beddington argues that since ‘there are enough difficult and important problems out there’ tolerance towards ‘what is politically or morally or religiously motivated nonsense’ becomes a luxury, he communicates a nonsensical idea of tolerance. Mill would not understand why someone’s nonsense should not be tolerated. After all, tolerance only really gains meaning through our refusal to silence views that we strongly disagree with; that is the real test. Beddington’s belief that tolerance means only putting up with sensible views is bizarre. The great, and tragic, irony in all this is that science was one of the principal beneficiaries of the emergence of the ethos of tolerance. Science by its very nature thrives on open debate, which is why scientists were often in the forefront of advocating tolerance of dissident and despised views. The nineteenth-century biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who was known as Darwin’s bulldog, said ‘scepticism is the highest of duties’. Many scientists believed that no ideas or views should be beyond discussion. The motto of the Royal Society was: ‘On the word of no one.’ Sadly, science has become politicised and has become prey to dogmatism. There is now a tendency to devalue debate and to replace argument with moral condemnation. There are many reasons for this defensive moralistic turn in sections of the scientific community. The principal driver of the re-emergence of intolerance as a moral virtue is Western culture’s aversion to engaging with uncertainty. This is best captured by that unattractive term ‘zero tolerance’ - a concept which presents the world in the language of black-and-white and either/or. It spares the intolerant the trouble of having to fight for their views. It is far easier to resolve disagreement and confusion through shutting down discussion than to practise true tolerance. Tolerance demands courage - intolerance, the outlook of the intellectual coward, merely requires a censor’s pen. Frank Furedi’s On Tolerance: A Defence of Moral Independence is published by Continuum in June 2011. (Pre-order this book from Amazon(UK).) Visit his personal website here. Previously on spiked Frank Furedi saw Tariq Ramadan’s latest book as a therapeutic perversion of the ideal of tolerance. Mick Hume explored the New Heresies. Brendan O’Neill said that the demonisation of ‘climate change denial’ has had a chilling effect on free speech. Nathalie Rothschild looked at how the Holocaust was used to silence debate on climate change. Read more at spiked issue Free speech. |
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Reader Comments (45)
Did you miss the following then?
Frank Furedi on Beddington:
"When disagreement about some scientific claim is held up as the moral equivalent of racism, it seems pretty clear that the sole objective is to shut down dissent."
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10217/
matthu -
The "fixated on the divergence" snippet is hilarious when placed in conjunction with the Bishop's comment. You made my day!
I thought Sir John Beddington was Action Man - because he is always demanding that we act now to deal with climate change and those pesky sceptics.
Sir John must be on medication to be this relatively calm and assured.
I wonder if Action Man's arch nemesis Doctor X has doctored his tea?
Another self-publicist - the perpetually grinning scientist, Brian Cox - finds "climate deniers incredibly irritating" here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8330863/Brian-Cox-Im-not-anti-religion.-Im-anti-maniac.html
Will Sir John condemn "hide the decline"?
I am guessing that neither Beddington nor New Scientist have a clue about what you are referring to.
They relied on the science-by-consensus experts who said the science was settled
Darn, another esprit d'escalier moment...I shouldn't have said "in conjunction with" in the 1:51 post above, I should have said "when juxtaposed with." One so rarely gets the chance to use "juxtapose" in context, that passing up the opportunity to do so is criminal.
"Divergence" and "hide the decline"
are linked now, forever entwined.
Juxtaposition!
Call a physician,
I'm laughing right out of my mind.
There, I feel better now. A few more meds and I'll be back to normal.
Umbongo made my day by telling us that 'Brian Cox - finds "climate deniers incredibly irritating" '.
I was just wondering if I needed to scrub my kettle - definite build-up of carbon black!
Is the following confirmed yet? On reading Beddington's editorial, Oxburgh emailed Beddington: "Blinder well played."
Steve, wasn't it Beddington to Oxburgh.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/6/15/the-boy-played-a-blinder.html
I've just posted the following:
"It is time the scientific community became proactive in challenging misuse of scientific evidence."
Just three points:
Can Sir John point me to an example of the misuse of scientific evidence related to climate change. i.e, the specific evidence and the way it was misused. (I have written to Sir John before asking where the overwhelming evidence of human caused disastrous climate change was, and he pointed me to the IPCC documents where no such evidence exists!)
Can Sir John tell me why Lord Oxburgh was supposed to have played a blinder in producing the Oxburgh report, because if ever there was a misrepresentation of scientific evidence said report is the case.
I think Steve was being ironic.
Apart from the infamous congratulation to Oxburgh for playing a blinder with what Steve McIntyre called 'a flimsy and embarrassing 5-pages', Beddington apparently was influential in setting up that panel in the first place.
http://climateaudit.org/2010/05/19/warming-up-the-oxburgh-inquiry/
I fear Beddington may be out of his depth here, not merely with regard to atmospheric sciences and climatology, but also with regard to the function and benefits of debate within a civil society. From that essay by Furedi:
The attempt to legitimise intolerance by constructing an ideology of evil has become a regular feature of the twenty-first-century debate on science. Time and again, dissent from conventional wisdom is dismissed as yet another example of ‘AIDS denialism’ or racism or some other modern evil. One consequence of this pathologisation of dissent is that it trivialises fundamental problems such as racism.
and, later,
'The great, and tragic, irony in all this is that science was one of the principal beneficiaries of the emergence of the ethos of tolerance. Science by its very nature thrives on open debate, which is why scientists were often in the forefront of advocating tolerance of dissident and despised views. The nineteenth-century biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who was known as Darwin’s bulldog, said ‘scepticism is the highest of duties’. Many scientists believed that no ideas or views should be beyond discussion. The motto of the Royal Society was: ‘On the word of no one.’ Sadly, science has become politicised and has become prey to dogmatism. There is now a tendency to devalue debate and to replace argument with moral condemnation.'
No doubt we are all somewhat vulnerable to 'dogmatism'. It would therefore be a fine thing if such as the Royal Society, and HMG's Chief Scientific Officer, were to put some effort into protecting us from it.
"Where significant consensus exists, it must be made obvious."
I think it has been made fairly obvious, but you don't settle scientific questions with a show of hands, not even a show of hands from those representing peer-reviewed science. The history of science has shown this repeatedly, and I think even a person of humble intelligence can understand why something other than the crushing weight of scientific evidence can lead to consensus in these matters.
There are fashions in scientific thought as in other areas. This is not to deny the rationality of science but to say that scientists themselves are influenced by a number of forces (e.g. sociological, economic) lying outside the selfless pursuit of truth. Beddington writes as if he has not grasped this point so he sees the failure of climate scientists to persuade the wider world of their case, as merely a problem of communication. The wider world meanwhile has not lost its respect for science but for scientists and, more particularly, for climate scientists whose own communications betrays a willingness to distort and deceive.
mathau:
Yet if we become fixated on divergence, we lose sight of the importance of consensus; significantly a consensus built upon rigorous enquiry. Only through a collaborative effort and purpose can the greatest global challenges be addressed and tackled.
At regular intervals memes come out of the warmist/alarmist camp and are continuously parrotted across the piece. The Science is Settled, The Vast Majority of Scientists believe...The Consensus is...
And now the meme that because there are some people who don't take their catastrophic warming theories fully on board this small group (they must be small because of the overwhelming evidence and near unanimous scientific agreement) are stopping the challenges of global warming being addressed.
Ask yourself how they are doing it? There are no sceptics at Copenhagen participating in the debates, nor at Cancun, yet neither could even get "the war on warming" out of the blocks. So we have a new meme, we sceptics are misrepresenting the science and spreading misinformation and must be stopped, Forget the fact that conferences devoid of sceptics couldn't agree on action, it has to be the sceptics fault.
My comment did not make it through the New Scientist gatekeepers.
BTW Andrew, if I may say so the "hide the decline" issue isn't about misrepresenting the data, which they did by using data that suited their case, but which has can be explained by telling us that the data was real and was from thermometers, so the decline, although hidden wasn't a decline in reality. The real issue here is that the tree ring proxies showed an unexplained drop in temperatures against the instrumental temperatures. Without an explanation for this no real scientist would have continued to use the trees as tempertature proxies, they may well have underestimated temperatures outside the instrumental period and there would be no evidence to indicate they had. No, the decline was hidden for sure but its importance was the invalidation of the proxies because there was nothing unusual about the late 20th century that could explain why the proxies failed to provide the same temperatures as the insturmental measurements. So dodgy proxies and shouldn't be used.
Bishop,
The shrillness of the AGW promotion groups and opiinion leaders is increasing at a near asmptopic rate.
Your comment was reasonable, and coming from a published recognized skeptic/critic of the consensus.
That ehy were unable to permit evven that level of comment through only demonstrates that their world veiw is brittle, reactionary and defensive.
Why are the New Scientist and the Guardian, who one would expect to be investigative power houses, studiously ignoring Beddington's intimate involvement in the Oxburgh fiasco? Not only are they ignoring the facts, they are censoring anyone pointing out the truth on their 'comment is free' pages. Why not simply report the facts and let the public decide, why attempt to control the message? What happened to journalism in Britain?
Bish
Beddington has given us our go-ahead to be intolerant.
I think we should condemn Mike's Trick in clearer terms.
Another area where dissent from the consensus is not tolerated is Shaken Baby Syndrome:
Pathologist Dr. Squier says "It appears to me that there has been an attempt to remove from the courts all of those people who are willing to challenge the mainstream hypothesis, even if those opinions are sincerely held and are based on a lot of day-to-day experience and are based on a thorough grounding in the current evidence available in the scientific literature."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9389000/9389553.stm
Once it has been demonstrated that the consensus has not been obtained through use of the scientific method, of what use is it? Once it has been demonstrated that science in a particular field has failed spectacularly to correct blatantly bogus studies, the question arises -- of what is the consensus constructed. If science isn't self-correcting any more, it isn't science.
I think the biggest mistake skeptics make is to focus the argument about the science (i.e. the greenhouse effect, sensitivity calculations, feedbacks, etc.). Better to first demonstrate that the studies and the process which produced the "consensus" were crap. Show that the science is incapable of self-correction. Show the corruption of peer review. Show the lack of transparency, the failure to replicate or even audit. Show the lack of quality control for the databases, the statistical failures, and the software disasters. Remind the public that the climate models are a key linchpin and they can't be used to make predictions because of failures to verify and validate.
In essence, demonstrate the massive quality failure. Because no one needs to be a PhD scientist to understand when quality breakdowns have produced crap. Once the public recognizes that the consensus has lost any claim to quality, the alarmists lose all authority from which to appeal.
Then, we can start arguing about the science.
Beddington should realize that you cannot tell people what to believe. Nor can you tell people why they should believe what they believe. They choose what to believe, and they choose why. Perhaps, if your case is good and presented well, you can persuade people, but it will be by meeting their criteria for belief, not by insisting that they adopt your criteria.
The goal should be to invite belief, not command it.
I (posting as jeremy) did get through the New Scientist gatekeepers, unlike Philip Bratby and geronimo. My take on Beddington's article there is not very positive. At one level, it reads like the Dunning-Kruger argument consensus commenters at the Guardian like to use - you're not even clever enough to realize you might be wrong, because you're blinded by your prejudices. That's one reading of his sentence "It is human nature to find evidence more convincing when it backs up our own preconceptions". He makes some noises about sharing data ("We must make evidence, and associated uncertainties, accessible and explicable"), but by and large he's just saying that the science needs to be communicated better until even the idiots can understand it.
Furedi writes:
How true!
It is so strange that these superstitious drones call themselves skeptics.
I'm very much afraid, Your Grace, that we are here dealing with a warmist fanatic. See, i.a., http://www.climaticoanalysis.org/post/tag/john-beddington/
Does anybody have a transcript or recording of Beddington's speech at the Government Science and Engineering conference on the 3rd? I can't find one. All I can find is the same few snippets of his speech that the Research Fortnight article quoted. The blogosphere insists on interpreting these as an attack on climate change scepticism but climate change isn't mentioned and Beddington has always insisted - and insists again in his recent New Scientist piece - that climate change scepticism is essential to the proper functioning of climate science. It would be nice to read the whole speech and see the context - and whether he even mentioned climate.
Re the usually admirable Furedi's long waffle (which kicks off with the same tired snippets from Beddington's speech): he's just trying to sell a book, innit.
For the record...
The UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA) is the personal adviser on science and technology-related activities and policies to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet; and head of the Government Office for Science – GO-Science.
He has a significant public role as the government's most visible scientific expert.
The present incumbent is Sir John Beddington.
Immediate preceeding incumbents were Sir David King, 2000–2008, Sir Robert May, 1995–2000.
Lord Oxburgh, a geologist by training and the former scientific advisor to the Ministry of Defence, was appointed to lead the enquiry into the scientific aspects of the Climategate scandal, despite being a director of GLOBE, the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment, and also remunerated directorships as chairmanship of Falck Renewables, and chairmanship of Blue NG, a renewable power company. (Oxburgh holds no shares in Falck Renewables, and serves as a non-exec chairman.) He also declares that he is an advisor to Climate Change Capital, to the Low Carbon Initiative, Evo-Electric, Fujitsu, and an environmental advisor to Deutsche Bank. For a year he was non-exec chairman of Shell.
Sir John Beddington played a leading role in suggesting Lord Oxburgh as the head of the inquiry into UEA's scientific competence.
On completion of the Oxburgh Report, Lord Beddington congratulated Lord Oxburgh with a message
'Dear Ron.
Much appreciated the hard work put into the review, general view is a blinder played. As we discussed at HoL, clearly the drinks are on me!
Best wishes, John'
Following hearings of the House of Commons Select Committee of Science and Technology on the Oxburgh and Muir Russell inquiries, The following amendment to the formal minutes of the Committees conclusions on these inquiries was proposed by Graham Stringer MP, but voted down.
"There are proposals to increase worldwide taxation by up to a trillion dollars on the basis of climate science predictions. This is an area where strong and opposing views are held. The release of the e-mails from CRU at the University of East Anglia and the accusations that followed demanded independent and objective scrutiny by independent panels. This has not happened. The composition of the two panels has been criticised for having members who were over identified with the views of CRU. Lord Oxburgh as President of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association and Chairman of Falck Renewable appeared to have a conflict of interest. Lord Oxburgh himself was aware that this might lead to criticism. Similarly Professor Boulton as an ex colleague of CRU seemed wholly inappropriate to be a member of the Russell panel. No reputable scientist who was critical of CRU's work was on the panel, and prominent and distinguished critics were not interviewed. The Oxburgh panel did not do as our predecessor committee had been promised, investigate the science, but only looked at the integrity of the researchers. With the exception of Professor Kelly's notes other notes taken by members of the panel have not been published. This leaves a question mark against whether CRU science is reliable. The Oxburgh panel also did not look at CRU's controversial work on the IPPC which is what has attracted most series allegations. Russell did not investigate the deletion of e-mails. We are now left after three investigations without a clear understanding of whether or not the CRU science is compromised.".—(Graham Stringer.)
ZT wrote: ...Why not simply report the facts and let the public decide, why attempt to control the message? What happened to journalism in Britain?
The short answer is that the media owners have realised that the readers who appreciate good journalism are few and far between, so there is no profit in it. Profits come from not from sales but from advertising revenue. So it is all about dumbing down and assuaging and re-assuring readers with non-challenging content, whilst subtly make them feel good/clever so they will buy the crap again. Goldacre is a master at it. Since Paul Foot died I haven't seen any good quality mainstream journalism in the UK, not in print anyway. Private Eye under Hislop has also signed up to the consensus, and apart from tax scams doesn't appear too interested in wider but very important issues. Kenneth Roy still has some good pieces in the Scottish Review e.g. http://www.scottishreview.net/KRoy77.shtml where he comments on the demise of good journalistic standards within the BBC in the context of the Sheridan conviction. The best investigative journalism in now on the web - e.g. to find the truth on Lockerbie (not why Megrahi was released but how he was ever convicted) you have to read specialist legal magazines like The Firm - http://www.firmmagazine.com/features/324/Attack_or_a_trick?.html . You'd think that the mainstream press would at least want to look into this evidence, but it would seem not. We live in strange times.
Sorry Bish, ended up going a bit OT there.
Dreadnaught - that's another very good example - there have been some very dubious convictions for SBS in the UK and US. You'd think the courts would be wary of the quality of specialist evidence from a profession which tried to re-instate Prof Meadow after his bizarre and shameful pronouncements in the Sally Clark case. But then again if you know the background on how mercury containing vaccines were approved for use in the US and UK, Professor Elizabeth Miller, Dr David Salisbury and Professor Roy Meadow, have a lot to cover up: http://www.spectator.co.uk/spectator/thisweek/30630/part_2/what-killed-sally-clarks-child.thtml
Sorry Bish, I wrote the reply to Dreadnaught before my initial one on the Diary thread. It's all related - the corruption of science, hole digging, lack of professional integrity, hole digging, corruption, more hole digging, deceit and lies - but I'll desist.
lapogus
I raised the File on Four programme on Shaken Baby Syndrome as an example of how reputable scientists who defy a consensus can be subjected to character assassination by their colleagues.
Please forgive me if I prefer not to get drawn into a discussion on the safety of vaccines.
Dreadnought - indeed. No problem, but I just thought you may be interested in a little context. It is not just climate science that has been corrupted, the problem is endemic.
Sir John says "We must make evidence, and associated uncertainties, accessible and explicable.". If this is so why has the scientific community not set up a site like this one.
www.climatedata.info
"In a world of global communication, we cannot afford to only speak to ourselves."
Perhaps he should speak to a mirror - he might find someone to aggree with him.
Beddington is a serial adviser to government departments. You don't ascend to the top of the greasy pole of adviser unless you regularly give out all the messages the government wants to hear (and the EU and the UN of course). By toeing the party line you get amply rewarded with a fat salary, super pension, knightood, (baronetcy next?) and fame. It's a corrupt system that the last government was adept at using. The political system is full of the beneficiaries of this political patronage. Think Lord Turner, Chairman of both the FSA and the Climate Change Committee. Enough said.
First King, "climate change is a greater danger than international terrorism," now Beddington. How do they choose these people?
If the chief scientist would just admit that the entire feedback/water vapour business is a yet unverified assumption, I would put a little trust in his judgement.
.
I first stumbled into the works of John Stewart Mill during Teacher Training; the impact of his words upon me have remained down the years and one of the reasons I would never enjoin the government 'to do something'. About anything. The buggers in power presume too much already.
Don't Frank Furedi and Fiona Fox have a shared political history?
Judith Curry and Gavin Schmidt are engaged in preliminary but bloody blows at Curry's site now. She promises a major essay on "hide the decline." http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/22/hiding-the-decline/
Beddington is either ajenda driven, confused with the volume of information or misguided - in that order.
John Beddington said:
Who will do the scrutiny? It cannot be the public Beddington is referring to - we generally do not have the expertise to disprove or validate the science and merely agreeing or disagreeing with any particular claim doesn't add anything other then weight of support. Science isn't a popularity contest. This puts the onus on scientists with the appropriate expertise to be above board and fair in their dealings with claims and counter claims. Some have been shown to fall far short of that ideal.
Like those who mash climate change with man made climate change to perform either sleight of hand or just sloppy writing? Yes we know the climate is changing. It has always changed as far as can be discerned from various sources.
It's funny. He is referring to cherry picking and confirmation bias in the context of the sceptical arguments against AGW yet it also applies to the alarmist faith. What scepticism led to hiding the divergence of proxy and surface station data? What scepticism leads to the belief in teleconnection? What cynicism has resulted in some scientists quietly but inexorably distancing themselves from the real world and instead being concerned with working through the projected consequences of computer models?
Yes lets do this very thing. When someone manages to validate the computer models I may start thinking they are onto something concrete. Until then simple running the models with and without the programmed CO2 warming signal is not proof that CO2 causes climate change. It is just proof that the computer model is programmed to use changing CO2 levels as a driver of temperature.
What actual evidence is there for a significant deviation from natural variability, which in turn can be proven to be caused by increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere?
They don't like it up 'em. I am all for Beddington and others attempting to highlight where there is a consensus (even though it is not necessarily indicative of correctness) - they will find 'climate science' sorely lacking in such a thing. Beddington speaking out against the misuse of science and the timidity of admitting what we do not know is 20 years too late at least.
On the "scientific community"-tradeunion-political establishment versus the community at large:
Re Science Education, it's about WHAT, not about HOW, is taught.
"Scientists'" tradeunion-politically-controled "science" cannot be advanced/updated regardless of education system...
See the C signature link...
Unravel Some Of Nature's Complexities, A + B + C
(adnauseam, ad shown where these data-based statements are wrong)
A.
UNRAVEL COMPLEXITIES OF GENETICS.
Extend Evolution/Natural Selection Backward To Genes/Genomes, BOTH ARE ORGANISMS.
Again, Correct Some Figments Of Science Imagination
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_2SF3CJJM5OU6T27OC4MFQSDYEU/blog/articles/273273?listPage=index&bb=0
1. Dark energy and matter YOK. Per E=Total[m(1 + D)] all the energy and matter of the universe are accounted for.
Adopt space-massdistance concept, mass-to-energy reconversion.
2. Higgs Particle YOK. Mass forms below some value of the above D.
3. Galactic clusters formed by conglomeration?
Galactic clusters formed by Big-Bang's dispersion, evidenced by their Newtonian behaviour including expansion acceleration.
4. The universe expansion is fueled by the mass-to-enrgy reconversion. Eventually, as expansion will slow down, will run out of massfuel, gravity will overcome expansion and initiate empansion back to singularity. The universe is a cyclic array of energy-mass dualism, between all-energy and all-mass poles, under omnipresent gravity.
5. Natural Selection is a trait of organisms, life?
No. Natural selection is ubiquitous for ALL mass formats, all spin arrays. It derives from the expansion of the universe. All mass formats, regardless of size and type, from black holes to smallest particles, strive to increase their constrained energy in attempt to postpone their own reconversion to energy, to the energy that fuels cosmic expansion.
6. Life is an enigma?
Life is just another type of mass array, a self-replicating mass array. Earth life is a replicating RNAs mass. It has always been and still is an RNA world. ALL Earth's organisms are evolved RNAs, evolved for maintaining-enhancing Earth's biosphere, for prolonging RNAs survival.
7. Cells are Earth-life's primal organisms?
NO. Earth's life day one was the day on which RNA began replicating. RNAs, genes, are ORGANISMS. And so are their evolved templates, (RNA and DNA) genomes, ORGANISMS, as evidenced by life's chirality and by life's sleep.
8. Circadian Schmircadian sleep origin?
Sleep is inherent for life via the RNAs, the primal Earth ORGANISMS originated and originally active only under direct sunlight, in their pre-metabolism genesis era.
9. Epigenetics are heritable gene functions changes not involving changes in DNA sequence?
The "heritable or enduring changes" are epiDNAtics, not epigenetics. Alternative splicing is not epigenetics, even if/when not involving alteration of the DNA sequence. Earth life is an RNA world.
10.Genetics drive biology and culture modifications?
NO. It is culture that modifies genetics, not genetics that modifies culture. Culture modifies genetics simply via the evolutionary natural selection process of the RNA ORGANISMS. Likewise many natural genetic changes are due to aging and/or circumstantial effects on the genes and/or genomes ORGANISMS, similar to aging and/or evolutionary processes in monocell communities or in multicelled organisms.
SCIENCE SHOULD UNFREEZE. SCIENCE SHOULD ADJUST ITS VISION, COMPREHENSION AND CONCEPTS.
Dov Henis
(Comments From 22nd Century)
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/user/profile/1655.page
Seed of Human-Chimp Genomes Diversity
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_2SF3CJJM5OU6T27OC4MFQSDYEU/blog/articles/53079
03.2010 Updated Life Manifest
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/54.page#5065
Evolution, Natural Selection, Derive From Cosmic Expansion
http://darwiniana.com/2010/09/05/the-question-reductionists-fear/
Rethink Evolution/Natural Selection
http://darwiniana.com/2011/03/29/comment-from-dov-henis/comment-page-1/
==========================
B.
Quantum Mechanics Of Life
Life's Evolution Is The Quantum Mechanics Of Biology
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_2SF3CJJM5OU6T27OC4MFQSDYEU/blog/articles/271915?listPage=index&bb=0
From "Essence Of Quantum Mechanics"
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_2SF3CJJM5OU6T27OC4MFQSDYEU/blog/articles/245916?listPage=uncategorized
The universe, and life within it, are not just conglomerations of mechanisms. The universe, and life within it, have come into being by the nature of energy-mass dualism, and their fate, their final outcome, is governed by this dualism. The genesis and, most probable cyclic, existence of the universe are governed by the energy-mass relationship.
Energy-mass relationship governs also the routes, the mechanisms, of cosmic and life evolutions.
Mechanisms do not set/determine the classical physics fate states. Mechanisms are routes of evolution between classical physics fate states. Quantum mechanics are mechanisms, probable, possible and actual mechanisms of getting from one to other classical physics states WITHIN the expanse from cosmic singularity to the maximum expanded universe and back to singularity states.
The universe is the archetype of quantum within classical physics. This is the fractal oneness of the universe. Astronomically there are two physics. A classical Newtonian physics behaviour of and between galactic clusters, and a quantum physics behaviour WITHIN the galactic clusters.
Life's Evolution Is The Quantum Mechanics Of Biology.
UNRAVEL COMPLEXITIES OF GENETICS. Extend Evolution/Natural Selection Backward To Genes/Genomes.
BOTH ARE ORGANISMS.
The origin-reason and the purpose-fate of life are mechanistic, ethically and practically valueless. Life is the cheapest commodity on Earth.
It is up to humans themselves to elect the purpose and format of their life as individuals and as group-members.
Dov Henis
(Comments From 22nd Century)
=============================
C.
Adaptation And Genetics
Identify USA Science Problems
Enough Is Enough!
Concluding phrase of "A New Evolutionary History of Primates"
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110317172047.htm
"genetic underpinnings of human adaptation"
This phrase displays basic ignorance of the relationship between genetics and physiology/system adaptation.
It should be replaced with "adaptation underpinnings of human genetics".
UNRAVEL COMPLEXITIES OF GENETICS.
Extend Evolution/Natural Selection Backward To Genes/Genomes, BOTH ARE ORGANISMS.
IT IS ADAPTATION (CULTURE) THAT INDUCES GENES' EXPRESSION MODIFICATION, NOT GENETICS THAT INDUCES ADAPTATION. Modified genetic expression proceeds to energetically favor/enable adaptation.
Dov Henis
(comments from 22nd century)
Hope For Science?
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_2SF3CJJM5OU6T27OC4MFQSDYEU/blog/articles/248628?listPage=uncategorized
Sensible views in the past included the ether, that rocks cannot fall from the sky, that planets must move in perfect circles, the geocentric model of the Solar System and the stars, that continents cannot drift, eugenics (much wider in its acceptance than anyone pretends currently), and that the Genesis story was true - the list goes on and on.
Without overthrowing those and other sensible views, where would science be right now?
The mind boggles...