"....But what exactly does it all mean?posted by ericb at 1:24 PM on December 9, 2009 [20 favorites]
I think two issues arise. The first concerns organizational behavior, and is a genuine problem. It receives little notice. he second is whether any of this is relevant to the global warming issue. This is unfortunately the most important, because ignorant people (and worse) have claimed the hacked emails demonstrate dishonesty and fraud by scientists regarding the most important issue of our day.
The misuse of emails taken entirely out of context by people who literally do not know what they are talking about is fully exposed in a great Youtube broadcast that I hope every denier of global warming denier will take the time to watch. I think the rest of us should take a look as well - it's entertaining as well as devastating and as a side benefit, demonstrates the utter intellectual bankruptcy of the right.
What is the real issue here? People associated with global warming research acted unethically in trying to suppress articles they disagreed with. They tried to keep control of their data, and often referred to opponents in disparaging terms. In short, they acted as members of almost any organization tend to act when under intense hostile pressure from the outside: they confused their organization's well-being with the mission the organization was established to accomplish. They fell into an 'us vs. them' mentality.
Ironically the most intelligent condemnations of this failing have come from fellow scientists and the science press. The Nov. 28 issue of New Scientist takes them to task for abuses of scientific ethics. Meanwhile right wing sources have continued to make their case with breathtaking dishonesty.
But does any of this bear on the global warming issue? No. No more than corrupt and dishonest Catholic bishops discredit spirituality." *
"A fascinating essay about how big business, working alongside Hill & Knowlton, among others, manufactured fake doubt about the link between tobacco and cancer, the danger of CFCs to the ozone lawyer, and now climate change. It's long, comprehensive, and very good."*posted by ericb at 1:30 PM on December 9, 2009 [9 favorites]
ROHRABACHER: Copenhagen may well lay the foundations for the future that the globalists who are pushing this agenda envision for us. [...] What the Copenhagen crowd would mandate and can be traced back to the same alliance between our own radical environmentalists and the global elite. [...] This is about centralizing power into the hands of global government, that’s what Kyoto and Copenhagen are all about, that’s what the globalist alliance is all about. [...]posted by ericb at 2:12 PM on December 9, 2009 [1 favorite]
We must fight the globalist clique that is trying to shackle generations of Americans. … Members of Congress need to hear from angry constituents, and I predict they will.
Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago -- about 65 million years after scientists say most dinosaurs became extinct -- the teacher said.posted by empath at 2:16 PM on December 9, 2009
After conducting a college band and watching Palin deliver a commencement address to a small group of home-schooled students in June 1997, Wasilla resident Philip Munger said, he asked the young mayor about her religious beliefs.
Palin told him that "dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time," Munger said. When he asked her about prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin said "she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks," recalled Munger, who teaches music at the University of Alaska in Anchorage and has regularly criticized Palin in recent years on his liberal political blog, called Progressive Alaska.
More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.Yeah but ... just because there's no evidence for any of these things doesn't mean it isn't true. Those scientists are clever people. They probably fly up to their Fortress of Propoganda on the polar ice cap, meeting with representatives of electric car companies and recycling plant managers, to discuss newer and better ways of fleecing us all.
"Climate change has turned some polar bears into cannibals as global warming melts their Arctic ice hunting grounds, reducing the polar bear population, according to a U.S.-led global scientific study on the impacts of climate change."posted by ericb at 3:32 PM on December 9, 2009
#114 Implicit Hamburgerposted by rokusan at 5:59 PM on December 9, 2009 [3 favorites]
Well, let's see: two-time Vice President, author, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Oscar winner versus former beauty queen, part-term governor of low-population state and failed vice-presidential candidate. Decisions, decisions.it does not fall very far from the accusation of pandering to ad hominem, non-factual evaluation that the coal industry is accused of:
On the other hand: boobies!
The first case study I've posted reveals how a coalition of US coal companies sought to persuade people that the science is uncertain. It listed the two social groups it was trying to reach – "Target 1: Older, less educated males"; "Target 2: Younger, lower income women" – and the methods by which it would reach them. One of its findings was that "members of the public feel more confident expressing opinions on others' motivations and tactics than they do expressing opinions on scientific issues".So I looked at some of the email. I sorted by size and looked at the ten or so largest. (Looking at the smallest yielded mostly "I am out of the office. Contact me when...") If there is anyone out there interested in commenting, I have a few observations on what I read.
Non-climate factors include soil, tree age, fire, tree-to-tree competition, genetic differences, logging or other human disturbance, herbivore impact (particularly sheep grazing), pest outbreaks, disease, and CO2 concentration. For factors which vary randomly over space (tree to tree or stand to stand), the best solution is to collect sufficient data (more samples) to compensate for confounding noise. Tree age is corrected for with various statistical methods: either fitting spline curves to the overall tree record or using similar aged trees for comparison over different periods. Careful examination and site selection helps to limit some confounding effects, for example picking sites undisturbed by modern man.Elsewhere in the article is mention of an effect I had never heard of:
The divergence problem is the disagreement between the temperatures measured by the thermometers (instrumental temperatures) on one side and the temperatures reconstructed from the widths of tree rings on the other side, in the northern forests.If the main tool of inference in dendroclimatology does not support our observations in the present, would you trust it to make claims about 1000-2000 years ago?
While the thermometer records indicate a substantial warming trend, many tree rings do not display a corresponding change in their width.[1] A temperature trend extracted from tree rings alone would not show any substantial warming. The temperature graphs calculated in these two ways thus "diverge" from one another since the 1950s, which is the origin of the term.
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posted by odinsdream at 1:10 PM on December 9, 2009 [4 favorites]