Winning the easy way

I chanced upon this article by Josh Harkinson of Mother Jones, which says we sceptics have won.

It's news to me, but that's not actually what attracted my attention. I was intrigued by the intricate flowchart showing how big business and big energy drives the thinktanks who drive the front organisations, who drive the media machine. In particular I was interested in the "front organisations" that link the think tanks and the media machine (including bloggers like me).

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EIKE conference

The annual conference of EIKE, the climate sceptic group in Germany, is to be held in Munich on November 25-26, 2011.

The panel includes some, ahem, familiar names.

Whiteout

David Whitehouse takes aim at John Beddington's claims about global sea levels:

[T]he statement by Professor Sir John Beddington, who has said that global sea level has increased by about 10 cm in the last 50 years (and so man must be to blame, unequivocally) is highly misleading, and a partial representation of the data. Whilst it is true that the sea level has increased by 10 cm in the past 50 years (coincident with a period of global warming), it also increased by 10 cm in the previous 50 years when man could not have been to blame!

An awkward position - Josh 120

An uncomfortable week for John Cook's crew at 'Skeptical Science'

Cartoons by Josh

Incomprehensible times - Josh 119

H/t James Delingpole

Glikson on the MWP

Updated on Sep 23, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Sep 23, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Australian scientist Andrew Glikson has a very strange article in the Conversation. He appears to believe that we sceptics are like something out of 1984.

Ideologically dominated or totalitarian societies – such as George Orwell’s famous “1984” Ingsoc – are marked by:

• attempts to alter reality (“2 + 2 = 5 if the party says so”)
• elimination of history (“He who controls the past, controls the future”)
• rewriting collective memory (“Oceania is at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia”)
• The corruption of logic through aleration and elimination of language “Newspeak”
• mind control (“thought crime”).

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Guilty men

Guido Fawkes, the UK's biggest blog, has written something about a new pamphlet entitled "Guilty Men". Although Guido's piece is mainly about Euroscepticism, in the red text he uses to emphasise his take home points at the end of his pieces, is this sentence about global warming:

Though this isn’t referred to in the text, it occurs to Guido that many of the same guilty men are currently making the same kind of hysterical claims about global warming.

Try, try again

Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic reckons the problem with the whole climate change thing is just some nuances in the message. Polar bears are out and people are in:

The nugget of the argument here is the framing fighting climate change as a way to help nature is flawed. Even in a really clear example of climate-induced ecological change -- the loss of many species in the forests Thoreau explored near Walden Pond -- other species are doing just fine. We're changing the ecosystem, but life isn't leaving the forest. We're applying a very certain kind of filter on the forest (specifically, which plants can change their flowering time quickly) but life there survives because ecosystems, even those stressed by rising temperatures, are resilient.

Human-built environments, on the other hand, are very efficient and very brittle. They function best in a very narrow set of temperature and precipitation conditions. Witness what happens when it snows in Portland or it gets very hot in a cold place or it rains somewhere where it's always dry. A people as rich as Americans can deal with any climate, but only if we put the right infrastructure in place. People in Buffalo have snow plows. People in Phoenix have air conditioners.

This idea that the answer to the climate change problem is more media or different media is one that gets wheeled out every few weeks it seems, without anyone seeming to get it - it's not the way you are telling the story guys, it's the fact that the message is so obviously politicised that nobody trusts you.

Raising the game

The standard on the comments threads has deteriorated markedly in recent weeks and particularly today.

Please can commenters:

1. Avoid dominating threads. If you want to go toe to toe with another commenter, please take it to the discussion forum.

2. Please avoid insulting language and abusive analogies to other commenters and to people on other websites.

Time to Mann up – Part 2

This is a guest post by Richard Brearley, following up on his article yesterday.

Some mention has been made of the precedent upon which Mann relies, namely Sweezy –v- New Hampshire and of the link by Mann’s lawyers in their intervention to the appeal by Cuccinelli in the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act case.

In Cuccinelli’s case the issue in dispute is the extent to which the government can investigate people like Dr Mann, given that their rights to freedom of expression/academic freedom are indeed protected by the First Amendment (although those rights are not absolute). This sits squarely with the Sweezy case, which is itself related to government investigations.

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The Cook timeline

John Cook says:

... I regularly update old rebuttals when new data is released or when new papers are published. In this case, I updated my original rebuttal of the "Antarctica is gaining ice" myth with the latest GRACE data from Velicogna 2009 and while I was at it, also incorporated references to a number of other papers, trying to give a broad overview of what the peer-reviewed science had to say about what was happening in Antarctica.

Fine. I see that. The original article was written in December 2007, but attracted no comments until March 2008, including the one from AnthonySG1, which first appears in the page capture in July 2008. A non-commital ("stay tuned") response from Skeptical Science was already in place.  PaulM's comment came some months later at the start of September 2008 and was captured at the end of that month. However, there was no reply at this point.

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Time to Mann up

This is a guest post by Richard Brearley

There has been quite a lot of coverage that I have seen of Mann’s attempt to intervene in the UVA FOI case.  None of it has given sufficient detail to enable me to understand the specific issues involved and so I decided to have a look at it myself. 

We need to remember that the order requiring “protective disclosure” of all of Mann’s emails during his six-year stint at UVA was by agreement between ATI and his former university.  Further, that order specifically stated in its text that its purpose was “protecting information that may be exempt from disclosure under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act”.  Any documentation that the university unilaterally deems to be exempt cannot be disclosed to the public without a further order of the court.  This means that the university can decide without agreement from anyone else what is exempt and it can only thereafter be disclosed if a judge says so.  This would only ever happen if the ATI then took back to the court a challenge that some or all of the information the university had deemed to be exempt should not be so treated.  That issue would then be decided by the court.

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Matt massacres Malthusians

Matt Ridley has a great article about global population:

Already huge swaths of the world are being released from farming and reforested. New England is now 80 per cent woodland, where it was once 70 per cent farm land. Italy and England have more woodland than for many centuries. Moose, coyotes, beavers and bears are back in places where they have not been for centuries. France has a wolf problem; Scotland a deer problem. It is the poor countries, not the affluent ones, that are losing forest. Haiti, with its near total dependence on renewable power (wood), is 98-percent deforested and counting.

Read the whole thing.

Cooking the books

Skeptical Science and its host, John Cook, have been much commented upon recently, the site's grubby treatment of Roger Pielke Snr having caused considerable disquiet. I'm grateful to reader PaulM for pointing me to another example of the way things are done on John Cook's watch.

Take a look at this page on the site. It's an older article, dating back to 2008, and it covers the vexed question of whether Antarctica is gaining or losing ice.

Skeptic arguments that Antarctica is gaining ice frequently hinge on an error of omission, namely ignoring the difference between land ice and sea ice.

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Atlas mounting

The brouhaha over the Times atlas seems to be developing legs, with NSIDC denying any involvement in the errors. But it not NSIDC, then who was it that supplied the duff data?

Maurizio Morabito has been examining the amusing possibility that the source was Wikipedia.