[Vision2020] "Off List" Responses To Climate Research Unit E-mail Hack: Wall Street Journal "Hack" Piece

[Ted Moffett]

I am receiving "Off List" responses to the discussion on the Climate Reseach
Unit e-mail hack, so others are following the dialog.

The arguments presented in this editorial from the WSJ make broad
generalizations implying a widespread bias involved in science publishing
regarding climate change, generalizations that would prompt a high school
English teacher's red pen, given that the evidence offered is the behavior
of a few scientists, and alleged manipulation of one science journal.  No
independently conducted study of the whole international world of
professional science publishing is referenced.

Note the editorial does not mention that one of the papers, Soon and
Baliunas (2003), that prompted Mann's alleged objections to the journal
"Climate Research," was found after rigorous peer review to be seriously
flawed, and should not have been published, without corrections.  And that
this paper ended up being referenced in the US Congress, a blatant
politicization of faulty science that can have significant impacts on
political and economic policy.  That Mann might have suggested actions to
stigmatize this journal are understandable when considering that the journal
published "junk science" that ended up being politicized.  The editorial
suggests Mann was attempting to "keep dissent out of the respected journals"
when Mann's alleged objections were based on protecting the integrity of
science publishing from a faulty peer review process at "Climate Research."
Of course, the full story behind the Soon and Baliunas (2003) paper in
"Climate Research" would weaken the editorial slant of this hack piece (hack
as in both criminal computer hack and hack writer).

I don't doubt for a moment there are unethical climate scientists, who have
engaged in political maneuvers to promote their career or theories or to
manipulate professional publishing.  Every profession has a percentage of
unethical members.  But the claim that the international world of science
publishing is controlled by a conspiracy pursued by a "clique" of climate
scientists pushing one theory and suppressing others, will require
considerable more evidence than what is presented by the WSJ in this
editorial.

The body of published science on climate change involves thousands of
scientists and peer reviewed papers from scientific organizations around the
world, published in a large number of journals.  As has been pointed out
repeatedly, to suggest that the consensus behind the widely held view
among major scientific organizations that human are altering climate, is a
political or ideological conspiracy of some sort, would require a
vast international network of scientific co-conspirators.  All of the
following scientific organizations would be co-conspirators:

-International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics
-American Geophysical Union
-Network of African Science Academies
-American Association for the Advancement of Science
-The US National Academy of Science
-The Union of Concerned Scientists
-The Royal Society (United Kingdom): They honored Mark Lynas's book "Six
Degrees: Out Future on a Hotter Planet" with the prestigious Royal Society
science book award 2008, proof of their complicity in the conspiracy
-American Institute of Physics
-American Meteorological Society
-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
-US Global Change Research Program
-International Arctic Science Committee
-European Academy of Sciences and Arts
-Royal Society of New Zealand
-European Geosciences Union
-Royal Meteorological Society (United Kingdom)
-World Meteorological Organization
-US National Research Council
-European Science Foundation
-Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
-International Union for Quaternary Research
------------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

On 11/27/09, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Just to show that I, too, can cut & paste - I bring to you, that one
> mythical reader that is actually following this stuff, the following opinion
> piece from the Wall Street Journal:
>
>
> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703499404574559630382048494.html?mod=wsj_share_facebook
>
> How to Forge a Consensus The impression left by the Climategate emails is
> that the global warming game has been rigged from the start.
>
> The climatologists at the center of last week's leaked-email and document
> scandal have taken the line that it is all much ado about nothing. Yes, the
> wording of the some of their messages was unfortunate, but they insist this
> in no way undermines the underlying science, which is as certain as ever.
>
> "What they've done is search through stolen personal emails—confidential
> between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is
> often foreign to the outside world," Penn State's Michael Mann told Reuters
> Wednesday. Mr. Mann added that this has made "something innocent into
> something nefarious."
>
> Phil Jones, Director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research
> Unit, from which the emails were lifted, is singing from the same climate
> hymnal. "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not
> read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were
> clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms
> frequently used between close colleagues," he said this week.
>
> We don't doubt that Mr. Jones would have phrased his emails differently if
> he expected them to end up in the newspaper. His May 2008 email to Mr. Mann
> regarding the U.N.'s Fourth Assessment Report: "Mike, Can you delete any
> emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?" does not "read well," it's true.
> (Mr. Mann has said he didn't delete any such emails.)
>
> But the furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or
> even whether climatologists are nice people in private. The real issue is
> what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus
> on global warming was arrived at in the first place, and how even now a
> single view is being enforced. In short, the impression left by the
> correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the
> climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start.
>
> According to this privileged group, only those whose work has been
> published in select scientific journals, after having gone through the
> "peer-review" process, can be relied on to critique the science. And sure
> enough, any challenges that critics have lobbed at climatologists from
> outside this clique are routinely dismissed and disparaged.
>
> This past September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the
> leaked emails that: "Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost
> entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted." Mr. McIntyre is a
> retired Canadian businessman who fact-checks the findings of climate
> scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds—including some in Mr.
> Mann's work—on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction
> of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more-famous
> papers.
>
> As anonymous reviewers of choice for certain journals, Mr. Mann & Co. had
> considerable power to enforce the consensus, but it was not absolute, as
> they discovered in 2003. Mr. Mann noted to several colleagues in an email
> from March 2003, when the journal "Climate Research" published a paper not
> to Mr. Mann's liking, that "This was the danger of always criticising the
> skeptics for not publishing in the 'peer-reviewed literature'. Obviously,
> they found a solution to that—take over a journal!"
> The scare quotes around "peer-reviewed literature," by the way, are Mr.
> Mann's. He went on in the email to suggest that the journal itself be
> blackballed: "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate
> research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.
> We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more
> reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board." In other
> words, keep dissent out of the respected journals. When that fails,
> re-define what constitutes a respected journal to exclude any that publish
> inconvenient views. It's easy to manufacture a scientific consensus when you
> get to decide what counts as science.
>
> The response to this among the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has
> been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of
> view, theirs is still the best climate science we've got. The proof for this
> is circular. It's the best, we're told, because it's the most-published and
> most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature.
>
> Even so, by rigging the rules, they've made it impossible to know how good
> it really is. And then, one is left to wonder why they felt the need to rig
> the game in the first place, if their science is as robust as they claim. If
> there's an innocent explanation for that, we'd love to hear it.
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20091128/8eb8828a/attachment-0001.html