[Vision2020] 949 Responses to “Whatevergate”

[Paul Rumelhart]

Quoting an email from Michael Mann that was part of the hacked emails 
that were leaked in "whatevergate":

"Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC any way 
you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about 
what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to answer any 
questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you 
might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold 
comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think 
they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d 
like us to include."

(RC above refers to realclimate.org)

Gavin Schmidt was referenced in many of those emails.  Of course he's 
going to say that it was all a big pile of nothing.

Perhaps you should look around for a more independent source, for 
comparison's sake.

Paul


Ted Moffett wrote:
> http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/whatevergate/#more-2806
>
>
>       Whatevergate
>
> Filed under:
>
>     * Communicating Climate
>       <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/communicating-climate/>
>
>     * Reporting on climate
>       <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/communicating-climate/reporting-on-climate/>
>
> — gavin @ 16 February 2010
>  
> http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/gavin-schmidt/
>  
> Gavin Schmidt is a climate modeller at the NASA Goddard Institute for 
> Space Studies in New York and is interested in modeling past, present 
> and future climate.
> ---
>
> It won’t have escaped many of our readers’ notice that there has been 
> what can only be described as a media frenzy (mostly in the UK) with 
> regards to climate change in recent weeks. The coverage has contained 
> more bad reporting 
> <http://climatesafety.org/swallowing-lies-how-the-denial-lobby-feeds-the-press/>, 
> misrepresentation 
> <http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/leakegate_the_case_for_fraud.php> 
> and confusion 
> <http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/01/rosegate_david_rose_caught_mis.php> 
> on the subject than we have seen in such a short time anywhere. While 
> the UK newspaper scene is uniquely competitive (especially compared to 
> the US with over half a dozen national dailies selling in the same 
> market), and historically there have been equally frenzied bouts of 
> mis-reporting in the past on topics as diverse as pit bulls, vaccines 
> and child abductions, there is something new in this mess that is 
> worth discussing. And that has been a huge shift in the Overton window 
> for climate change.
>
> In any public discussion there are bounds which people who want to be 
> thought of as having respectable ideas tend to stay between. This is 
> most easily seen in health care debates. In the US, promotion of a 
> National Health Service as in the UK or a single-payer system as in 
> Canada is so far outside the bounds of normal health care politics, 
> that these options are only ever brought up by ‘cranks’ (sigh). 
> Meanwhile in the UK, discussions of health care delivery solutions 
> outside of the NHS framework are never heard in the mainstream media. 
> This limit on scope of the public debate has been called the Overton 
> window <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window>.
>
> The window does not have to remain static. Pressure groups and 
> politicians can try and shift the bounds deliberately, or sometimes 
> they are shifted by events. That seems to have been the case in the 
> climate discussion. Prior to the email hack at CRU there had long been 
> a pretty widespread avoidance of ‘global warming is a hoax’ proponents 
> in serious discussions on the subject. The sceptics that were 
> interviewed tended to be the slightly more sensible kind – people who 
> did actually realise that CO2 was a greenhouse gas for instance. But 
> the GW hoaxers were generally derided, or used as punchlines for 
> jokes. This is not because they didn’t exist and weren’t continually 
> making baseless accusations against scientists (they did and they 
> were), but rather that their claims were self-evidently ridiculous and 
> therefore not worth airing.
>
> However, since the emails were released, and despite the fact that 
> there is no evidence within them to support any of these claims of 
> fraud and fabrication, the UK media has opened itself so wide to the 
> spectrum of thought on climate that the GW hoaxers have now suddenly 
> find themselves well within the mainstream. Nothing has changed the 
> self-evidently ridiculousness of their arguments, but their presence 
> at the media table has meant that the more reasonable critics seem far 
> more centrist than they did a few months ago.
>
> A few examples: Monckton being quoted as a ‘prominent climate sceptic’ 
> on the front page of the New York Times this week 
> <http://climateprogress.org/2010/02/09/new-york-times-elisabeth-rosenthal-unbalanced-climate-coverage-ipcc-pachauri/> 
> (Wow!); The Guardian digging up baseless fraud accusations 
> <http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/weather-stations-china> 
> against a scientist at SUNY that had already been investigated and 
> dismissed; The Sunday Times ignoring experts 
> <http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/leakegate.php> telling them 
> the IPCC was right in favor of the anti-IPCC meme of the day; The 
> Daily Mail making up quotes 
> <http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/01/rosegate_scandal_grows.php> 
> that fit their GW hoaxer narrative; The Daily Express breathlessly 
> proclaiming the whole thing a ‘climate con’ 
> <http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/154428/Global-Warming-What-a-climate-con->; 
> The Sunday Times (again) dredging up 
> <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7026317.ece> 
> unfounded accusations of corruption in the surface temperature data 
> sets. All of these stories are based on the worst kind of oft-rebunked 
> nonsense and they serve to make the more subtle kind of scepticism 
> pushed by Lomborg et al seem almost erudite.
>
> Perhaps this is driven by editors demanding that reporters come up 
> with something new (to them) that fits into an anti-climate science 
> theme that they are attempting to stoke. Or perhaps it is driven by 
> the journalists desperate to maintain their scoop by pretending to 
> their editors that this nonsense hasn’t been debunked a hundred times 
> already? Who knows? All of these bad decisions made easier when all of 
> the actually sensible people, or people who know anything about the 
> subject at all, are being assailed on all sides, and aren’t 
> necessarily keen to find the time to explain, once again, that yes, 
> the world is warming.
>
> So far, so stupid. But even more concerning is the reaction from 
> outside the UK media bubble. Two relatively prominent and respected US 
> commentators – Curtis Brainard 
> <http://cjr.org/the_observatory/mia_on_the_ipcc.php?page=1> at CJR and 
> Tom Yulsman <http://www.cejournal.net/?p=2797> in Colorado – have both 
> bemoaned the fact that the US media (unusually perhaps) has not 
> followed pell-mell into the fact-free abyss of their UK counterparts. 
> Their point apparently seems to be that since much news print is being 
> devoted to a story somewhere, then that story must be worth following. 
> Indeed, since the substance to any particularly story is apparently 
> proportional to the coverage, by not following the UK bandwagon, US 
> journalists are missing a big story. Yulsman blames the lack of 
> environmental beat reporters for lack of coverage in the US, but since 
> most of the damage and bad reporting on this is from clueless and 
> partisan news desk reporters in the UK, I actually expect that it is 
> the environmental beat reporters prior experience with the forces of 
> disinformation that prevents the contagion crossing the pond. To be 
> sure, reporters should be able and willing (and encouraged) to write 
> stories about anything to do with climate science and its institutions 
> – but that kind of reporting is something very different from 
> regurgitating disinformation, or repeating baseless accusations as fact.
>
> So what is likely to happen now? As the various panels and reports on 
> the CRU affair conclude, it is highly likely (almost certain in fact) 
> that no-one will conclude that there has been any fraud, fabrication 
> or scientific misconduct (since there hasn’t been 
> <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/are-the-cru-data-suspect-an-objective-assessment/>). 
> Eventually, people will realise (again) that the GW hoaxers are indeed 
> cranks, and the mainstream window on their rants will close. In the 
> meantime, huge amounts of misinformation, sprinkled liberally with 
> plenty of disinformation, will be spread and public understanding on 
> the issue will likely decline. As the history of the topic has shown, 
> public attention to climate change comes and goes and this is likely 
> to be seen as the latest bump on that ride.
>
> Eppure si riscalda 
> <http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif>.
>
>  Comments (pop-up) (949) 
> <http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=2806>
> ------------------------------------------
> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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