[Vision2020] 949 Responses to “Whatevergate”

Sun Feb 28 15:48:56 PST 2010

Given you are posting criminally obtained text, allegedly authored by
the person you name, text that may have been somehow altered, I don't regard
your advice in this matter to have merit; nor do I require a reminder to
seek an independent source, on any subject.
------------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

On 2/27/10, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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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>
>
>
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