Bringing Physics Into Disrepute

I first commented on the suspected link between the Institute of Physics and the noted Climate Change “sceptic” Piers Corbyn in a previous post :-

http://www.joabbess.com/2010/03/02/fred-pearce-still-crucifying-phil-jones/

One of my commentators challenged what I had written, so I edited it out, awaiting the opportunity to discover more.

More has now been uncovered; not my me, I hasten to add, but by another commentator :-

http://www.joabbess.com/2010/03/06/institute-of-physics-nosedive/#comment-600

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The Dutch Will Get Wet

When are the Media going to get their own School of the Environment, where all the journalists can come and learn the Science of Climate Change ?

The Times of London continues to mangle the facts, it seems to me; this time from the pen/fingers of Ben Webster, perhaps a Mini-Me version of that accreditable journalist Jonathan Leake :-

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7056173.ece

“[The IPCC]…also claimed that global warming could cut rain-fed North African crop production by up to 50 per cent by 2020. A senior IPCC contributor has since admitted that there is no evidence to support this claim…”

I don’t think that quite pins it down accurately.

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Zombie Climate Change Sceptic Arguments

Some bad ideas just won’t die.

Here’s Skeptical Science’s regularly updated list of the hottest and battiest Climate Change “sceptic” arguments :-

http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

And here’s the full, and updateable list of nearly 250 “sceptical” arguments that have been weighed in the balance and found erroneously wanting :-

http://www.skepticalscience.com/resources.php

Why do these arguments keep coming back from the grave with their great big evil green zombie eyes and their matted, bird’s nest zombie hair and their outstretched murderous arms ?

Who is promoting and protecting these vampire lies ?

Who are the stinking, rotting funders of disinformation on Climate Change ?

I think we should find out, and ask them to stop.

Imagine There’s No Medicine

Imagine there’s no Medicine; no doctors, nurses, hospitals, surgeons, ward administrators, paramedics on bicycles in bright yellow and green jackets, ambulances, medical technology or pharmaceuticals. It’s not easy, even if you try. What would your life be like ? Pretty painful and quite possibly nastily shortened, I’d hazard.

There are people in the world who still do not have access to medical care (let’s think…all those Americans without basic health care insurance), so they know the grim realities of it all – but the reason I’m considering this is there could have been a point in human history where the development of Medicine was thwarted by sceptics and people with ulterior motives.

“You’re sick because you’ve sinned”, a portion of humanity used to believe; the wealthy throughout history have sometimes been keen for disease to wipe out the scum of the poor. Appeals to Nature and to God to explain sickness and accidental damage could have been followed by a refusal to care for or treat people – as it was not what the Laws of the Universe dictated.

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Open Season on Science

Like several commentators, I am picking out a trend in Internet communications that indicates that there is a tribe of “doubt believers” out there, proselytising for their cause : bringing down the Science of Climate Change.

These evangelists often write and reply to web posts with statements of alarmingly high confidence levels, assuming authority they cannot possibly claim, sometimes using anonymity to cloak their network connections.

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How You Were Taken In : Media “Balance”

Poor (middle-aged) old George Monbiot ! He really feels like he’s been wasting his time trying to get through to people to communicate about Climate Change :-

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/03/08/the-unpersuadables/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/mar/08/belief-in-climate-change-science

I don’t think that he should despair. What the ordinary, Tabloid-reading , Daily Telegraph-reading, Times of London-reading or even Guardian-reading man-or-woman-in-the-street thinks about Climate Change Science doesn’t really matter in the end, as long as the policymakers know the direction of travel required. That is, towards strong regulation on Carbon Emissions.

And anyway, I think that the problem of Climate Change “doubt” can be resolved relatively easily – by educating those who work in the Media.

Let me begin my argument by asking a question : is it right and fair and balanced to pitch Dr Benny Peiser against Professor Phil Jones on the subject of the Science of Global Warming ?

I ask this, because this is effectively what happened during the hearings of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on 1st March 2010, when Dr Benny Peiser and Lord Nigel Lawson were first in the seats, and then Professor Phil Jones and Professor Edward Acton sat in the seats later on :-

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/uc387-i/uc38702.htm

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How You Were Taken In : The Manufacture of Doubt

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/naomi_oreskes_on_merchants_of.php

Please do watch Naomi Oreske’s magristral (not “magisterial”, since she’s female) presentation on her new publication “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming” in the YouTube above.

The presentation is somewhat marred by poor audiovisual capture, but it’s fascinating, all the same, and good to hear her logical argumentation; and be reminded of what has been happening for the last 50 years in the public “debates” on Science.

The Media have still not gotten to grips with what Science actually is, and how to present it, and how to research it, and often end up interviewing and reporting people who are either not expert in the field they are asked about, or have an underlying agenda for misinformation being published.

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Christopher Booker’s International Campaign

Not content with apparently intentionally polluting the minds of British thinkers with Climate Change scepticism that appears to be of the most vituperous kind, Christopher Booker now turns his money-raking skills to Canada, with a syndicated column in the Vancouver Sun, that reads like outright propaganda to me. To help evaluate its content, please keep in mind that his article is not written by a scientist, nor does it express the position of the current science :-

http://www.vancouversun.com/global+warming+alarmists/2649497/story.html

“The global warming alarmists : Glacial melting, rainforest and crop failures, extreme weather, rising seas: ‘Isolated’ events that together comprise the ‘warmist’ message : BY CHRISTOPHER BOOKER, DAILY TELEGRAPH MARCH 5, 2010 : Although North America and Europe have been slammed by the worst winter in decades, the global-warming storm has hit a lull, and the alarms that have been raised by ‘warmists’ are based on scare stories from environmental activists, Christopher Booker writes. The news from sunny Bali that there is to be an international investigation into the conduct of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its chairman Dr. Rajendra Pachauri would have made front-page headlines a few weeks back. But while Scotland and North America are still swept by blizzards, in their worst winter for decades, there has been something of a lull in the global warming storm — after three months when the IPCC and Dr. Pachauri were themselves battered by almost daily blizzards of new scandals and revelations. And one reason for this lull is that the real message of all the scandals has been lost. The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC’s last 2007 report is that there were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. Okay, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent, that sea levels were rising dangerously and that hurricanes, droughts and other “extreme weather events” were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The “science is settled,” the “consensus” is intact. But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heat waves all becoming more frequent…”

This piece is riddled with easily refuted inaccuracies. Why did they print it ? Why did they pay for it ? Who received the money ?

There really is only one thing to say to this nonsense : O Canada !

A Question of Pedantics

The Climate Change Science Obstructers, or “the obstructers”, who style themselves as “sceptics” (or “skeptics” if you are in other climes than the UK of GB and NI), love throwing any muck they can find, hoping that any little drab will stick.

Unfortunately, this does sometimes result in the breaching of semantic spaces, and false meanings can occur. Sadly, this seems to happen most often in the minds of journalists, who then write up the mistakes and publish them abroad widely.

Here is an example from a usually faithful reporter :-

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7347658/Climategate-professor-admits-to-withholding-information.html

“‘Climategate’ professor admits to withholding information : The professor at the centre of the ‘climategate’ row, has admitted sending ’some pretty awful’ emails refusing to send information on to other scientists. : By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent : Published: 02 Mar 2010″

Dear Louise, I’ll have to interject right here : Phil Jones did not admit he refused to send data to other scientists.

Phil Jones explained that is is not “standard procedure” to include all the data in every research paper when it is published. That’s not the same as saying he “refused” to.

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True Science Search Engine

Breaking News : a “true science” Internet search engine that you can trust to give you the facts on Climate Change.

In the first stages of development, the new tool, which can help you exclude Climate Change scepticism from your Internet searches, is available online here :-

True Science Search Engine

Yes, it’s powered by Google, but that’s great.

If you find any Climate Change denier-sceptic web articles in the results, do let me know, and I can inform the search engine designers to improve the filtering.

“What’s Nuked, Pussycat ?”

[ NOTE FROM JOABBESS.COM : ALL UNEXPLAINED QUOTATIONS ARE TAKEN FROM TRANSCRIPTS OF THE SIMPSONS EPISODE "FRAUDCAST NEWS", UNLESS OTHERWISE STATED. ]

[ AS AN INTERESTING ASIDE, IT'S CURIOUS THAT THE SIMPSONS CARTOON MAKES MORE SENSE THAN A GREAT DEAL OF THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA JOURNALISTS WHEN THEY ATTEMPT TO WRITE ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE. ]

“I’m going to change this town’s accurate impression of me – I’m going to buy every media outlet…It’s time to win back the love of those hateful morons.”

Amy Turner at The Sunday Times (“yeah ! I’m a feeeeeature cooooolumnist”), in my humble opinion, makes a really poor show of comprehending what’s really going on in the “Blogosphere” (“now there’s a thousand freaks xeroxing their worthless opinions”) :-

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article7043753.ece

As the Blogger Tim Lambert (“the pen is mightier than the flaming bag of poop”) at the Deltoid makes clear, her article could easily be criticised as a blatant attempt to frame the whole Blogging world with her own narrative (or probably that of her ultimate boss, Rupert Murdoch), seemingly deciding on her readers’ behalf who to accept as the “big fish” in the Blogosphere, and who to dismiss as “the amateurs”; and then quoting one of her trusted “big fish” Roger Pielke Jr :-

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article7043753.ece

“…Among these minnows are controversialist bloggers like Tim Lambert, who are professionally unqualified to engage in the substance of most debates (certainly the case with respect to my own work)..”

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The Times : Leakey Bucket

Writing about Climate Change Science, attempting to navigate the complexities of the communication of Climate Change, plus dealing with the torrent of disinformation out there, can take people to some strange places in their minds.

Yet again, I have been challenged that I am being too negative, and too down on the Media kids (instead of “down with”). There has been an inordinate level of bad journalism about Climate Change, particularly in the last few months, and I am not the only person whose internal sense of wrongness has been stirred.

But how to express it ? How to constructively make a contribution towards the betterment of the Media ? I do not know the way. All I can do is pick holes and light beacons. Are there any journalists we can trust any more – trust to treat Climate Change Science and the Climate Change Scientists correctly ?

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Fred Pearce : Still Crucifying Phil Jones

[ CORRECTIONS FROM JOABBESS.COM : ON THE ADVICE OF inel CERTAIN INFORMATION PREVIOUSLY GIVEN ABOUT THE INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS HAS BEEN REMOVED. ]

I’m sorry to note that Fred Pearce, writing for The Guardian newspaper is still hanging Phil Jones out on a crucifix to bake in the burning Sun :-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/mar/01/phil-jones-commons-emails-inquiry

Fred Pearce quotes the withering “coruscating” evidence submitted by one or more members of the Energy sub-group of the Institute of Physics, and demands us to accept that it is adequate commentary on Phil Jones’ behaviour (behaviour that we don’t accurately know, but has been described to us by people misinterpreting his e-mails, which were stolen).

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Christopher Booker : Lie Of The Land

Yet more apparently brazen disinformation from Christopher Booker, who seems to want to whip up such a sentiment of old schoolmasterly rage, that many a poor young sap will cower at his claims :-

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7280369/What-the-weatherman-never-said.html

“What the weatherman never said : Might the beginning of Lent not be an appropriate time for a little repentance, asks Christopher Booker. : By Christopher Booker : Published: 20 Feb 2010 : As the roof continues to fall in on them, in an endless succession of scandals, the beleaguered defenders of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change…”

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The World Warms Up

The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center in their monthly “State of the Climate”, state :-

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/index.php

“Selected Global Highlights for January 2010 : The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for January 2010 was 0.60°C (1.08°F) above the 20th century average of 12.0°C (53.6°F). This is the fourth warmest January on record…”

How can this be ? The newspapers have been saying that Global Warming is just a confused scare story, or perhaps a tax-begging scam, or a bunch of self-important technologists on a gravy train creating false alarm to justify their funding streams – nothing to worry about. And of course, we can believe the mainstream Media implicitly. There are rules about the quality and accuracy of reporting.

Are NOAA sure they’ve checked that their thermometers are calibrated properly ? It all seems rather worrying that such a large American Science agency should be claiming that January 2010 was so warm when there has been all that snow and rain and ice about. The Media tried to point out this bad weather, but the scientists just carried on measuring high temperatures.

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The Faily Mail : Not To Be Trusted ?

It looks like the Daily Maul has messed up sufficiently this time to get a dishonourable mention on three major web logs (not including this one here, because this one is not a major web log).

You would have thought that after the poor coverage of Climate Change Science over the last couple of years and the disparaging put-downs by everyone from David King to George Monbiot that the newspapers would have realised by now that they need some proper, factual reporting from people qualified to do so. But not a shred of it.

My, my, how the newspapers are wasting our time and creating social division in spats between citizens around the watercooler and the schoolyard gate !

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Cowardy, Cowardy Custard

I received the following in one of my e-mail Inboxes, which, as you can imagine, I was tempted to completely ignore.

To be honest, I’m baffled why this fellow thinks I’m the right person to answer a bunch of Global Warming denier arguments that have had endless rebuttals already.

My advice to Climate Change sceptics everywhere : read the Climate Change Science before asking overly sceptical questions, then you won’t need to ask them.

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The Future of Flight

For decades we have been spoonfed Science Fiction about the future of flight and space exploration as if it were fact.

Richard Branson (“Sir”, if you insist) has drawn us to his vision for commercial passenger space flight :-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8400353.stm

Yet his participation in the Industry Taskforce for Peak Oil and Energy Security leads him back down to Earth :-

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James Delingpole Trusts Known Obstructers

I think I might start using a new term : “Climate Obstructers”, people who make lots of challenges to the IPCC consensus, who have what seems to me to be an agenda to obstruct the course of Climate Change Science.

In his latest Web Log post, James Delingpole attracts attention to a “magisterial report” from Joseph D’Aleo (of web log ICECAP) and Anthony Watts (of web log WattsUpWithThat), which is actually a crock of shambolic fripperies, in my view :-

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100024023/global-warming-is-it-even-happening/
“Global Warming: is it even happening?”

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Send a Sceptic to Siberia

Yawn. Yet another anti-Science web log page floats into my field of vision. It’s so…boring, trying to keep up with the Global Warming Deniers. I can barely keep awake. Here’s an example of the trite, and frankly, petulant genre :-

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100023339/james-hansen-would-you-buy-a-used-temperature-data-set-from-this-man/

Actually, don’t bother reading it. It’s a waste of column inches.

If only the Climate Change Sceptics would just go away and let us get on with the gargantuan task of revitalising the Energy industry around sustainable technologies.

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Laughing With James Delingpole

James Delingpole is so endearingly consistent in barking up the wrong tree, it’s sometimes easiest just to laugh along with his rambling, unscientific meanderings.

“‘AGW? I refute it THUS!”, he shouts out amusingly in his web log post of today :-

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100022226/agw-i-refute-it-thus-central-england-temperatures-1659-to-2009/

proving to me once and for all he could never be a statistician or a Police Officer, as he doesn’t know enough to detect an outright fabrication when he encounters one.

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Dominic Lawson : Sussex Farmhouse

Once again, Dominic Lawson fails to realise that many of his readers will simply not connect with him :-

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article6982310.ece

Only a very marginally low proportion of the British population can identify with, or only hope to aspire to, his perilous predicament.

Stuck down a snowy country lane and running out of heating oil ? Look, mate, you can afford to live in a “Sussex farmhouse”. Isn’t it about time you took your finger out and wrote a fat cheque to get connected to the gas mains ?

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Mojib Latif : Old, Non-News

http://mediamatters.org/research/200909240021

The Climate Change Denialists have been trying to resurrect a non-story from Autumn of 2009 – claiming that Professor Mojib Latif is predicting Global Cooling.

He is not, OK ?

Mojib Latif is merely saying that there is some variability, but that the long-term trend is warming. Warming. That’s right. Warming.

Here’s just a selection of the Media and Web Log reaction to this “viral” lie from the denier bloc :-

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Richard Betts : Communicating Science

Yes, we’ve all been there. Just idly chatting to someone in the pub, office or outside the school gates, and they say “I don’t rate that Global Warming thing. Look how cold it is today.” Or like a family friend said, on his own, un-tutored authority a couple of months ago, “I don’t think it’s warming up as much as they say it is”.

Don’t fret, Climate Changers, it happens to us all.

The main source of this dissonance between Truth and Deniership is the mainstream media, I’m sorry to say. They really haven’t improved things, when, with just a little more care and attention, they could have done so much to help comprehension of the scale and might of the risks of dangerous Climate Change.

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Rod Liddle : Gutter Press

There’s something that’s been threatening to keep me awake at night, and it’s not drinking too much coffee. I don’t drink coffee, normally, by the by. No, it’s this : why does Rod Liddle’s photograph on the The Spectator website look remarkably unlike the way he looks in realtime, that is, today ? Here’s what I mean :-

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