Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Sceptic Blogosphere Devours Gleick

Peter Gleick's confession that he lied to obtain the Heartland documents - though at present he's insisting that he didn't fake the key document that has the warmists ablaze with righteous anger - is welcome. It would have carried a bit more weight had he not already been fingered as the most likely candidate by Steven Mosher, Roger Pielke and innumerable sceptic bloggers. Now that he's confessed, he'll be wanting to clear his name of the forgery charge by allowing some IT forensic analysis to be done on his computers and servers. It should be fairly straightforward to establish that the forged document arrived unbidden and wasn't just rustled up on his machine...

The whole affair casts an interesting light on the whole climate wars front, particularly on the asymmetry of forces.

While the warmists were over the moon about the Heartland documents because it shed a light on the perceived nefarious forces fighting 'climate science', what they revealed instead was the petty cash available to the sceptic side. When cast next to the millions of dollars available to the climate orthodox from governments, transnational bodies (the UN and the EU, for example), from chairtable foundations and big-dollar environmentalists (Greenpeace, WWF etc), the money available to sceptics is tiny. I mean really, really, really tiny.

And it's not just the money, it's also the media. The climate orthodox have at their disposal most of the world's mass media - from the bastions of climate alarmism at the BBC and the Guardian, to well-funded web sites such as RealClimate, DeSmogBlog and others.

And yet, despite the money and the media, the climate alarmists know they are losing support. Despite everything that they have done to subvert peer review - and the Climategate emails showed us what was going on, warts and all, without the need to resort to forgeries - more and  more papers are being published which cast doubt on the alarmism. The public perceives the lack of warming and the message that there is still so much doubt about what we do know is getting across. The only way for the alarmists to explain this process, despite the clear disparity of forces, is by an appeal to conspiracy theory. As the Guradian puts it, in its story about Gleick's confession, there is...
a network of fossil fuel interests, rightwing think tanks and politicians have been working to block action on climate change


Gleick, who among other things frequently writes about ethics and integrity on science, is thus driven to look for the evidence to bolster this paranoid fantasy. And, even after breaking the law and just about every code of scientific integrity ever written, he finds nothing to match his fantasy, so we must assume that he manufactured the forged document.

There are some who will see this as a departure from normal means by Gleick. This is just a personal failure, and on the plus side he will have earned martyr points from many of his warmist colleagues, or so they will like to tell us. But this isn't so. It's of a pattern of unethical behaviour that we saw in Climategate. It's the 'any means necessary' mindset that sees climate scientists conspiring to remove troublesome journal editors, to malign opponents, to 'redefine peer review'. Hell, we even saw a small example of it when Gleick 'reviewed' Donna Laframboise's book on the IPCC at Amazon without having taken the trouble to read the book.

While the disparity of forces puts the financial interests and media support firmly in the alarmist camp, the sceptics have some obvious strengths. The first and most obvious is an eye to detail and meticulous picking apart of data among a sizeable camp of sceptics. They are used to poring over data, of looking behind the obvious and of teasing things out of the most unlikely sources. These skills are highly prized in sceptic circles - just as they used to be prized in scientific circles. We see this at work not just in the deconstruction of the hockey stick, but in the way that the IPCC reports were dissected and the references checked (and often found to be from non-peer reviewed literature), or the BEST temperature record found to be at odds with what Richard Muller was claiming it said or... Again and again the sceptic camp shows itself to be worthy of the name. Nothing is taken on trust, everything is challenged and the data checked.

In Gleick's case this process happened very quickly. The allegedly forged document was checked and found to have come from a different source and different time zone. The writing style was shown to be different to the other documents. And, taking things a step further, a number of voices suggested it was Peter Gleick very early on.

This is the sceptic blogosphere at work - and it shows why, despite the disparity of money and media, the alarmists know they are losing. It's just ironic that Gleick fell victim to the very thing that his paranoid fantasy ignores.

15 comments:

patrioticduo said...

The foundation of science as proposed and explained by Bacon is that our inquiry must avoid (at *all* costs) the path of "the noble cause" but instead one must "follow the data to where it leads". The climate alarmists utterly discredit themselves as "scientists" because they have become wholly consumed by the cause - without themselves knowing it (which is what is most dangerous to science). That is why the scientific method was created in the first place. To replace religion and its false conclusions (dogma) with conclusions reached via a path devoid of all of the myriad biases and fallacies that follow from religion.

Anonymous said...

You may be interested in this, if already read apologies.

http://www.thegwpf.org/opinion-pros-a-cons/5000-bjorn-lomborg-germanys-sunshine-daydream-.html

Anonymous said...

Second paragraph: "assymtery of forces". Should be "asymmetry".

- Colonial

Anonymous said...

Good article!

Minor typo:

...Amazon without having taking the trouble to read the book.

taking taken

Contrarian said...

Thanks all for picking up the typos...

tonylearns said...

And how has the "skeptic community engaged in the scientific method?
After 20 years of attacks on ACC as being socialist/environazi/watermelon propaganda what alternative theory has been put forward that rigorously explains the facts of the last 40 years, and accurately hindcasts the last few hundred million?
I have read dozens, probably scores of explanations why ACC is wrong, from 1500 year cycles to complex analysis of the 2nd law of Thermodynamics, to Mysterious cloud irises in the pacific, to mystical recovery from the LIA. gravity disturbances due to magnetic anomalies in the earths core, to 60 year cycles, to under reported UV radiation, to galactic cosmic ray cloud seeding due to REDUCED solar radiation, to galactic dust clouds, so many I can't remember more than a small fraction.
Yet the skeptic cummunity is big tent republicanism writ large. Doesn't matter WHAT the argument is, as long as it is agaisnt ACC it is welcome.
Strangely in the bizarro world of real science, scientists with opposing hypothesis actually critique each others arguments. And the anti AC skeptic blogosphere can conflate and exaggerate whatever they want depending on the argument of the day True to form this post takes isolated instances in climate gate and Gleicks unethical act and decides that the entire scientific community engages in unethical behavior because they know ACC is a false doomed ideology.
The reality is that both advocates for and against ACC exaggerate and conflate and mislead. The difference is that climate science actually continues to support ACC from and scientists are not falsifying and distorting facts and research, whereas skeptics do so on an almost daily basis from multiple media sources and blogs, with absolutely no interest in the truth or any sense of regret for previous deceit.

Contrarian said...

The scientific method goes something like this. Someone comes up with hypothesis X that purports to explain phenomenon Y. Consistent with X there are predictions a, b and c. If someone comes up with data that shows that any of the predictions a, b or c is wrong then it means hypothesis X is wrong as currently stated and needs to be revised or a new theory devised. The sceptics have both looked at the evidence for phenomenon Y and shown where predictions a, b or c are wrong. That's called serving the scientific method. It's not actually incumbent on anyone to come up with an alternative theory.

David C said...

Gleick's pathetic forged memo really does open ones eyes to his intellect or lack thereof.
He gave himself a quite unwarranted prominence in it, and took a pop at some people he is known not to like, one very much an alarmist himself.
The deception was so obvious I even considered the possibility that the fake memo had been drafted by one of Gleick's enemies to shove the blame on to him.
This really is playground behaviour.

Anonymous said...

"Yet the skeptic cummunity is big tent republicanism writ large. Doesn't matter WHAT the argument is, as long as it is agaisnt ACC it is welcome."

Which is why WUWT attacked the gravito-thermal theory for being BS, right?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/17/thanks-and-apologies/

Trying to make blanket declarations about those who call themselves skeptics is silly.

Contrarian said...

> Trying to make blanket declarations about those who call themselves skeptics is silly.

Agreed. Besides, what are we to make of alarmist scientists like Kerry Emanuel who describes himself as a Republican?

Jerome Bastien said...

Good post Progressive Contrarian. I must take issue with your blog name however. You seem to imply that 'progressive' means in favour of human progress. That's not quite right. Dont feel bad though, many make the same mistake.

Progressive actually means, historically at least, that society should be governed by 'experts', rather than democratically elected government. It stems from the flawed notion that social sciences can be applied. However, rational observers know that social sciences are 90% pure bullshit, 10% flawed methodology. We see it all the time today, where governments pretend to be constrained by this or that studies which purports to provide scientific backing to this or that (left-wing) political ideology.

Most influential progressive US Prez was Woodrow Wilson. The progressives in the US were very impressed by certain authoritarian European political parties in the 1930s. They both shared the idea that they knew best what was best for the dumb masses and that no area of life should be beyond the state's reach. And now today you have a 'progressive' US Prez who wants to force churches to buy condoms for their employees.

Those who are in favour of human progress are called 'conservatives', because they understand the conditions in which human progress is achieved (freedom, free market, capitalism, limited government) and want to conserve this condition, in order to foster human progress.

Which is my long way of saying you're not a 'progressive contrarian', you're just a conservative.

Anonymous said...

That isn't a surprise- 62% of Democrats and 36% of Republicans believe in global warming is mostly caused by human activies.

http://environment.yale.edu/climate/files/PoliticsGlobalWarming2011.pdf?utm_source=Yale+Project+on+Climate+Change+Communication&utm_campaign=b83a63aa7a-Politics_and_Global_Warming9_6_2011&utm_medium=email

Amusingly individuals who support the Tea Party are more willing to both build nuclear power plants AND having them in their local area (37 and 16 versus 8 and 6 for democrats). I'd would be tempted to read more into it but the sample size is too low so there is a large margin of error. Still you'd think taking one for the team counts as an egalitarian value.

Contrarian said...

@Jerome

I know that the word 'progressive' has got a distinctly statist feel to it, but originally it signalled a tendency to believe that progress was a good thing. It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when those on 'the left' cared about improving industrial productivity, increasing material wealth and improving the condition of the mass of ordinary people.

I grant you that in practice this ended up being about technocratic and authoritarian politics. I grant you too that nowadays most 'progressives' are downright reactionary and believe that industrial society and material progress are evil in themselves. And they're even more technocratic and authoritarian than before.

However, conservative isn't the label that comes to mind either. Conservative often meant an anti-progress agenda too. And, looking at our 'conservative' government in the UK I see little that I recognise as being about limited government, free markets, liberty or material progress.

So, as someone who rejects the meaningless labels of left/right but who values the idea of progress, change, limited government, free markets etc, I feel that claiming the word progressive back from those who've claimed it for reactionary purposes is the sort of grand gesture that appeals to me...

Contrarian said...

Amusingly individuals who support the Tea Party are more willing to both build nuclear power plants AND having them in their local area (37 and 16 versus 8 and 6 for democrats). I'd would be tempted to read more into it but the sample size is too low so there is a large margin of error. Still you'd think taking one for the team counts as an egalitarian value.

Very true. But I hope you're not suggesting that carpet bombing the countryside with wind farms isn't a selfless activity - especially for urban liberals who get that self-righteous glow when they talk about saving the planet.

Jerome Bastien said...

So, as someone who rejects the meaningless labels of left/right but who values the idea of progress, change, limited government, free markets etc, I feel that claiming the word progressive back from those who've claimed it for reactionary purposes is the sort of grand gesture that appeals to me...

Fair enough. I agree that the labels end up creating more confusion than anything. It's the ideas that matter. On that front, yours seem to align with mine and I will be bookmarking your blog.