Wednesday
Jul092014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Quote of the day, alarm edition
Jul 9, 2014 Quotes Royal Society Every profession has its bad apples, but most try to discipline them. The Royal Society purports to oversee British science, but where is it when its members clearly cross the boundary between dispassionate research and commercial interest? The truth is that the one disease to which there is no known antidote is panic. It is a disease that politicians and professionals (including journalists) have a vested interest in propagating.
Simon Jenkins considers alarmism in science
Reader Comments (15)
> the boundary between dispassionate research and commercial interest?
How about the boundary between dispassionate research and political interest ? Orders of magnitude more serious.
Tuppence
Actually something of a distinction without a difference as far as the researcher is concerned. Academic scientists are interested in obtaining grants and getting published in high impact journals (there's a virtuous circle between these two facts) - those working in pharma will have a bias towards the commercial interests of their grant awarder, while those working with research council money will tend to be focussed on those issues that are of political interest (climate change, food science etc).
It's generally a good article from Simon Jenkins, although he probably should have made more comment about the 'science by press release' issue - very often the journal paper is much less sensationalist than the press release that accompanies it.
Interesting reading a few of the comments of the Guardianistas, showing how they are quite prepared to accept that terror threats and Big Pharma results are overhyped, but to not even consider the possibility that the threats from climate change may be similarly (indeed, some are still under the illusion that Big Oil actually pays for denialist research rather than as actually happens paying for the likes of the Hadley Centre).
The Guardian commentators actually believe skeptics are awash with funding whereas CAGWers are doughty minnows living on a tuppence and the truth.
We are - what - 15 years into the global warming hysteria campaign and people still don't have the most elemental knowledge of this issue.
BUT when it comes to Mann Made Global Warming (tm) panic that's ok. That article would have been illuminating HAD it included the hysteria that passes itself off as climate science.
Mailman
Mailman, the arcticle did mention MMGM:
Brilliant article (in my opinion) by Simon Jenkins.
I would not have been surprised if Christopher Booker had written it.
Well done to the Guardian on this occasion.
I think Tuppence hits a goodly nail on the head at 8:11AM. Those who saw political advantage in scaring us about climate are the primary villains. The financial opportunists arrived on their coat-tails. But they are nevertheless surely quite powerful and influential.
The array of vested interests in and around this scaring is substantial. Just trying Googling 'climate consultancy' to get a hint of it.
But the messages of the article, the drawing attention to panic and sloppy thinking, the unmerited respect for 'scientists', the flop (as far as the general public is concerned) that is the Royal Society, and the harm caused by weak characters like Donaldson taking what might have appeared to him as paths of least regret on his imagined epidemics, are all strongly relevant to the climate scare, and that will surely not escape at least the subliminal notice of even a Guardian Reader.
Simon Jenkins:
Doesn't that make the Guardian man a conspiracy theorist, no more nor less than the average climate sceptic? Worth pointing some folks at Comment is Free to for the next decade or two.
I have to say that I am really very surprised at the dearth of comments about this article.
I also think that so many of the scare stories mentioned in the article were financed under
the ill conceived precautionary principle.
This principle has a lot to answer for, but it can be very persuasive when used by the manipulators
to induce the not very well informed, to acquiesce.
The hilarious irony of this article is that the climate obsessed are mostly incapable of realizing this message is directed at them. The CO2 obsessed are obsessed precisely because they have been manipulated by fear mongers.
It would have been an even more compelling article if he had pointed out the role of sock puppet NGOs (and the BBC), paid by the government or the EU, to propagate scare stories about global warming so that they could then respond to these "spontaneous" calls for action. But perhaps that would not have escaped the attention of the Guardian sub editors.
As a technique it is. of course, not new - merely examples of the rumour mill being modernised by the politicians, using your taxes, to sway the opinions of a gullible public. Some of the more trivial but amusing private enterprise examples are to be found in the 19th C Italian opera business in which a rising scale of charges was quoted to purchase various degrees of audience response, from "applause" to, at the top of the scale, "spontaneous enthusiasm". Woebetide the promoter unwilling to cough up. Something similar afflicted the AGMs of Japanese AGMs in more recent history which the Yakusa gangs exploited to their advantage. What we now suffer is an updated form of gangster politics.
I'm assuming that the "panic" is the mad rush to the pig's funding trough in order not to lose out !?
PROFESSOR PHIL JONES
The English Prometheus
To tell the tale as it began --
An ego yearned
Ambition burned
Inside a quiet little man
No one had heard of Phillip Jones
Obscure to fame
(And likewise blame)
The creep of time upon his bones
Men self-deceive when fame is sought
Their fingers fold
Their ego told
That fire is what their fist has caught!
Such want to feel, not understand
Jones made it plain
That Hell must reign
In England's green and pleasant land
What demon in him came to birth?
In mental fight
Against the light
Jones raised the temperature of earth!
And with his arrows of desire
In sneak attacks
He shot the backs
Of those who questioned -- where's the fire?
Raw data which was burning gold
He threw away
So none could say
It falsified what he foretold
East Anglia supports him still
The truth denied
Whitewash applied
Within that dark Satanic Mill
The evil that this wimp began
Will go around
And come around
Prometheus soon wicker man
Eugene WR Gallun
This is better I think
East Anglia supports him still
No questions raised
Whitewashed and praised
Within that dark Satanic Mill
Eugene WR Gallun
The evil that this twit began
Wimp is an American word. Twit is definitely of England.
Eugene WR Gallun