Bishop Hill A study in groupthink
Feb 26, 2012 Climate: other Maurizio Morabito pointed out his Twitter exchange with Bora Zivkovic, a blogger at Scientific American. Zivkovic is rather worked up, but I think it's quite interesting too see what he has to say. He is clearly very much out of the same mould as Peter Gleick, viewing his cause as beleaguered by wicked big business. It's a fascinating study in groupthink.
(I was also amused by the argument that dissentients will not debate, when the Gleick affair seems to have had its roots in Gleick's refusal to speak to Heartland.)
Please try to avoid simply venting in the comments.
When slimey Watts sends his hordes over, result is a comment thread like this: bit.ly/yCkrtp full of greedy, duped cowards.
Finding it hard to make up my mind on Gleick. All made harder by the fact that Heartland is in the business of making and selling lies.
@krelnik @kieranmulvaney those who comment for free are really dupes, not realizing they could be paid for it by the denialist "think tanks"
@danfagin I agree w/Horgan this was big strategic blunder. But ethics are shadier: is he a journalist, scientist, activist? Whose ethics?
@omnologos GW denialism is dangerous, criminal and slimey. Again. #climate
@omnologos "enemies"? You admit you are waging a war on science now. #Gleickgate
@omnologos Heartland is waging war. Scientists were naive thinking that "truth will prevail". Money prevails, Kochs win. Have to fight back!
@omnologos is "questioning alarmism" a phrase coined by Dezenhall or Luntz? The proper terms is "denialist" so let's call it as it is.
@omnologos terms "alarmism" and "warmism" werr invented by rightwingnut PR hacks. We should continue calling you all denialists.
@omnologos btw, how come I see your tweets, I thought I blocked you years ago?
@omnologos ask the Kochs. Green Leviathans exist only in wet dreams of greedy, slimy, denialist rightwing cowards.
@omnologos and your repeated attempts to draw my employer into a personal discussion with ME is another typical rightwing slimy tactic
Denialists should be studied by psychiatrists. So much projection.
Educating people does not work, it assumes the 'deficit model'. Exposing shennanigans, sources of money, finding hypocrysy - that may work.
I should be able to open up the submission form for the next #openlab on Monday, bear with me...
Attacks paid for by big business are 'driving science into a dark era' bit.ly/zVL5pT Sad and scary when scientists are intimidated.
RT @lexalexander: Gleick was wrong no Q and end does not justify means. But what he did is NOT morally = buying denialism & its consequences
Catching up: @mocost's terrific piece skeptically sizing up the evidence for neurogenesis. bit.ly/wioUua
Right versus pragmatic bit.ly/y4CU9a
Ethical considerations regarding Heartland/Gleick bit.ly/w6DbTJ by @scruffydan
Thank you! RT @raewing: Hooray! @PSMHopkins @sunbrae @BoraZ @artologica @j2wade you are all going into my fake book's real acknowledgements.
LOL, this tweet out of context could be misinterpreted ;-) RT @raewing: @BoraZ Good nuts!
@rvitelli @raewing a recipe book for a Tea Party (with Mad Hatter)?
#SciOVanuatu! RT @mistersugar: I'm hoping to go w/ family to #Vanuatu this summer. Anyone want to come along?
@wittier @sciencecomedian @blocke23 Lying about science is also un-American, thus Heartland and denialist liars need to be stopped.
@raewing too many gallons of icecream ;-)
@wittier @sciencecomedian @blocke23 denialists are free to speak, but their speech should be received by sharp debunking and laughter.
@wittier @sciencecomedian @blocke23 if denialists had any arguments worth considering, they'd debate instead of bankrolling PR liars.
Wasting Twitter characters to say "have a good day" is so rude.
@RyanMadanickMD LOL! No, that's what rightwingers like to do when they want to duck out of a debate.
RT @blocke23: Gleick's strategy may have been "misguided" but climate is NOT trivial issue. H.I. must be stopped by a diversity of tactics.
IN climate "debate" one side won with facts, the other side won with dirty money and lies. That's politics for you, I guess.
Republicans 4 Environmental Protection vs. Heartland #climate disinfo campaign: Climate #Science Watch awe.sm/5fsrD
Reader Comments (126)
Some of these tweets cast the tweeters in such a dim light that one wonders if they are faketweets designed to denigrate their 'cause.'
This one belongs in the Irony Hall of Fame:
"if denialists had any arguments worth considering, they'd debate instead of bankrolling PR liars"
This format and the numbers of screaming tweeters reminds me of the frenzied activity of useful idiot ants running around after the anthill has been kicked over... just before, I hope, they pave the place for good.
But that's just old hat. Recycled and boring. Dispatched long ag with aplomb here:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/printable/6320/
Ah - but the text message is often just a tease to prompt the recipient to open a link.
How else could you stand a reasonable chance of getting a confirmed consensualist to take a look at a realistic news item or, say, a graph on a sceptic blog?
Mike Haseler:
while I am in no way even pretending to be a scientist, could this rather prolonged conflict I had be of interest to you? - http://scienceblogs.com/classm/2011/12/are_the_winds_shifting.php. I never did get a sensible answer to the quite simple question that I asked.
BTW, John Harrison (whom I have learned is quite local to me) is also one of my own particular heroes, not least because he really bucked the establishment.
Feb 26, 2012 at 5:27 PM | Don Pablo de la Sierra
But there is no right wing Greenpeace and there never will be. You can view Greenpeace vessels attacking whaling ships. The show ran for several weeks on one of those cable channels, Animal Planet or some such. Part of the money for attacking whaling ships might very well have come from some of my colleagues.
Radical Rodent
Highly entertaining, thanks!
JEM:
I agree. But Easterbrook is what he is -- at the extreme fluffy end of computer science, kind of applied sociology of software development.
Let's call this chap out.
"if denialists had any arguments worth considering, they'd debate instead of bankrolling PR liars"
Go on, we can debate him, can't we?
I read this one elsewhere. And is reminds me of several points. First, the presumption that there is not debate - when there have been, maybe a dozen and a half involving at least one scientist (or other authority). Second, the presumption that there's nothing to learn because one hasn't heard of any debates.
Third, only a year and a half ago, was going to launch my own climate science blog devoted to tracking, critiquing, and sharing knowledge of the various debates on AGW. Maybe I ought to reconsider?
Fourth, I blanched at the project because of the degree to which pretty much all of the debates really boiled down to broad claims of certainty/uncertainty, and therefore one's weighing of the debaters rested upon one's knowledge of the elements going into scientific certainty/uncertainty. Hence, if it was going to be educational, it required a good deal of multiple moderator participation. Lacking the latter, what would be the point?
The tweet above raises anew the question, without many who soberly address certainty/uncertainty, what would be the point?
Lewis said: "...the Jehovah Witness people have always been unfailingly polite and with a sense of humour!"
A Witness at work complained of a headache. I suggested he consult a doctor if it continued. "Or don't you go to doctors?" I asked. He replied, "Yes, we do. You're thinking of those other nuts."
But there is no right wing Greenpeace and there never will be.
Heritage Britain.
A difference between left and right is that the left tend to be internationalist, whereas the right tend to be localist. But Heritage Britain applies pressure on government to save things it deems "important" based solely on value judgement. As a result some appallingly large amounts of time and effort are spent to protect very little of use to the average person. You may like Heritage Britain, and not Greenpeace, but they are in the same business.
What we're seeing in some of these tweets is the total illogic of psychosis, a bizarre belief that ad hominem arguments are somehow valid. When we point out that this proves nothing, Warmists respond in increasingly insulting terms. When we offer data that falsifies their beliefs, they simply become even more abusive, soon descending into a spittle-spewing rage. In their cabinet-of-Dr.-Caligari minds, they never lose an argument! This is, indeed, dangerous in the extreme.
Feb 26, 2012 at 10:39 PM | jorgekafkazar
Lewis said: "...the Jehovah Witness people have always been unfailingly polite and with a sense of humour!"
A Witness at work complained of a headache. I suggested he consult a doctor if it continued. "Or don't you go to doctors?" I asked. He replied, "Yes, we do. You're thinking of those other nuts."
==============
Witnesses are polite but they try to pick up a thread of sympathy which they can enlarge.
If they find there's more than antipathy, an alien way of thinking, they don't try to argue, they walk away, politely.
The last lot that came to see me asked if I didn't think it terrible that all these bombs and rockets were being made to kill people. I explained that since I'd worked on a couple of missiles and for a company which had made guidance systems for several more missiles, the answer was no. The only time I felt bad about it was when business was slack and that wasn't often.
They wandered away politely.
Thank you, Pharos. Particular favourites of mine were: “Science does not deal in proof.", and: “"what would happen if CO2 was removed from the atmosphere?"
The temperature would drop by over 30C. Known for 150 years.”
While there were definitely a lot of flaws in my arguments, it was fun having them spinning like tops. Perhaps I should have stopped a bit earlier. I wonder if that Wow person is still alive?
Back-and-forth, inside-out, up-and-down... seek any objective, rational debate with AGW catastrophists and Briffa, Hansen, Jones, Mann, Trenberth et al. will seek to strangle you with a CO2-dipped tree ring.
Like Anabaptists of Munster, this Green Gang of peculating Luddite sociopaths will soon discover that Nature cares nothing for their hyperventilated fantasies. Meantime, though knowledgeable refutation is in order and political disbursements have their own imperatives, debating a disgraced Holy Office is not worth one's time.
How can such completely contrasting outcomes occur (CAGW believers vs the skeptics) when everyone is looking at the same data? I'm just struck by the fact that anyone can not only take the CAGW position and so fervently believe it when in my view it is obviously faulty. As if dodgy funding sources could ever be the reason the hockey stick fell over under scrutiny.
re: Gleick and truck / diesel regulation..
Brings this to mind. Was he a contributor to this fraud as well?
California Carb Regulation Whistleblower
This is a closed positive feedback loop where they believe their own propaganda.
Such systems eventually self-destruct.
Skeptical clean sweep at the Bloggies:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/26/weblog-awards-2/
Congratulations to:
WUWT
JoNova
Tallbloke
Climate Audit
TRUTH always wins out !
Theo Goodwin
I agree that most organizations like Greenpeace, which I was once a member many years ago, are leftist zealots. At one time, long, long ago, Greenpeace was actually an environmental organization but was taken over by the nutters. Sierra Club is another, but fortunately they are less militant.
However, I have also seen right wing nutters. They tend to be racist and/or fundamentalists. The KKK comes immediately to mind.
This is off topic, but well worth posting. A couple days ago I got locked out of the CREATE POST function. The server clearly hung and I chased it down with the Bishop's help to the IP address being hung in some manner. All other features of this blog worked normally, but CREATE POST would hang indefinitely. And since it only happened to me, according to his eminence, and all three of my systems had the problem, it was clearly tied to my external IP address.
Should that happen to any of you, you may have to reboot your router and/or DSL modem if you have one. Like many others, I have a private internal network and it is actually the DSL modem that has the external IP address assigned to it. Most ISPs tend to leave an IP address more or less permanently assigned to the DSL modem because it is generally left on all the time. You may have to turn it off an leave it off for an hour before reconnecting so that the ISP will give you a new IP address.
Simple fix, really, but not obvious. Since it happened randomly to me, it could happen to any of you. If it does, just turn off the DSL modem, if you have one. If you are using a dial up modem (some people still do) you simply have to dial in again.
Tried to google that: nothing, then Bing gave me "The weather conspiracy : the coming of the new ice age.
That works.
Beleaguered by wicked big business.
Yeah right. Even though big business spends $millions pa , whereas their ally big brother spends tens of $billions.
He's been eating too much tuna. All that mercury has made him as mad as a hatter.
@Mike Haseler
John Harrison is a great example. A Board of Longitude and a prize were set up after the oddly named admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell ran his fleet into the Scilly Isles because he had not a clue where he was. But the Board wanted an astronomical way to determine longitude and Harrison's clocks were repeatedly dismissed. But he kept on making better and better ones until in the end and shortly before he died Parliament itself - not the dismal Board - awarded him the prize. Of course chronometers have been used for longitude calculation ever since. A real benefactor of humanity.
Perhaps the warmists would feel better if they invested in a good chabuk and practiced flagellation on themselves instead of doing it to our entire world.