<div>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.</div>
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<div>Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett<br> </div>
<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 2/27/10, <b class="gmail_sendername">Paul Rumelhart</b> <<a href="mailto:godshatter@yahoo.com">godshatter@yahoo.com</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid"><br>Quoting an email from Michael Mann that was part of the hacked emails that were leaked in "whatevergate":<br>
<br>"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."<br>
<br>(RC above refers to <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://realclimate.org/" target="_blank">realclimate.org</a>)<br><br>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.<br>
<br>Perhaps you should look around for a more independent source, for comparison's sake.<br><br>Paul<br><br><br>Ted Moffett wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid"><span class="q"><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/whatevergate/#more-2806" target="_blank">http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/whatevergate/#more-2806</a><br>
<br><br> Whatevergate<br><br>Filed under:<br><br> * Communicating Climate<br></span> <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/communicating-climate/" target="_blank">http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/communicating-climate/</a>><br>
<br> * Reporting on climate<br> <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/communicating-climate/reporting-on-climate/" target="_blank">http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/communicating-climate/reporting-on-climate/</a>><span class="q"><br>
<br>— gavin @ 16 February 2010<br> <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/gavin-schmidt/" target="_blank">http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/gavin-schmidt/</a><br>
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.<br>---<br><br></span>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 <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://climatesafety.org/swallowing-lies-how-the-denial-lobby-feeds-the-press/" target="_blank">http://climatesafety.org/swallowing-lies-how-the-denial-lobby-feeds-the-press/</a>>, misrepresentation <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/leakegate_the_case_for_fraud.php" target="_blank">http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/leakegate_the_case_for_fraud.php</a>> and confusion <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/01/rosegate_david_rose_caught_mis.php" target="_blank">http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/01/rosegate_david_rose_caught_mis.php</a>> 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.<br>
<br>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 <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window</a>>.<span class="q"><br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br></span>A few examples: Monckton being quoted as a ‘prominent climate sceptic’ on the front page of the New York Times this week <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://climateprogress.org/2010/02/09/new-york-times-elisabeth-rosenthal-unbalanced-climate-coverage-ipcc-pachauri/" target="_blank">http://climateprogress.org/2010/02/09/new-york-times-elisabeth-rosenthal-unbalanced-climate-coverage-ipcc-pachauri/</a>> (Wow!); The Guardian digging up baseless fraud accusations <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/weather-stations-china" target="_blank">http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/weather-stations-china</a>> against a scientist at SUNY that had already been investigated and dismissed; The Sunday Times ignoring experts <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/leakegate.php" target="_blank">http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/02/leakegate.php</a>> telling them the IPCC was right in favor of the anti-IPCC meme of the day; The Daily Mail making up quotes <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/01/rosegate_scandal_grows.php" target="_blank">http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/01/rosegate_scandal_grows.php</a>> that fit their GW hoaxer narrative; The Daily Express breathlessly proclaiming the whole thing a ‘climate con’ <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/154428/Global-Warming-What-a-climate-con-" target="_blank">http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/154428/Global-Warming-What-a-climate-con-</a>>; The Sunday Times (again) dredging up <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7026317.ece" target="_blank">http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7026317.ece</a>> 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.<span class="q"><br>
<br>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.<br>
<br></span>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 <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://cjr.org/the_observatory/mia_on_the_ipcc.php?page=1" target="_blank">http://cjr.org/the_observatory/mia_on_the_ipcc.php?page=1</a>> at CJR and Tom Yulsman <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.cejournal.net/?p=2797" target="_blank">http://www.cejournal.net/?p=2797</a>> 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.<br>
<br>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 <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/are-the-cru-data-suspect-an-objective-assessment/" target="_blank">http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/are-the-cru-data-suspect-an-objective-assessment/</a>>). 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.<br>
<br>Eppure si riscalda <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif" target="_blank">http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif</a>>.<br>
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------------------------------------------<br>Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett<br>------------------------------------------------------------------------<br><br>=======================================================<br> List services made available by First Step Internet, serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994. <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.fsr.net/" target="_blank">http://www.fsr.net</a> mailto:<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="mailto:Vision2020@moscow.com" target="_blank">Vision2020@moscow.com</a><br>
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