Alt-Truth
gregladen | June 4, 2014Sadly, a large percentage of Americans are under the impression that climate scientists do not agree on the reality of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). A lot of people are simply wrong about this. They think that there is a great deal of controversy among the scientists who study the Earth's climate. But there isn't. One way we know this is from a study done by John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs, and Andrew Skuce, called "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature…
gregladen | May 15, 2014The Global Warming Policy Foundation is an organization of mainly economists dedicated to mucking up the development and advancement of good science-based policy related to climate change. It is a denialist "think" tank.
A couple of weeks ago, Swedish meteorologist Lennart Bengtsson joined the GWPF. This was a little surprising, but not totally surprising. It was surprising because Bengtsson is scientist and the foundation is anti-science and, as I noted, mostly economists. (Well, they are sort of like scientists too, but a different kind of science.) It was not surprising because…
gregladen | April 17, 2014UPDATED: Interview with Michael Mann on this court decision (and other matters).
An important Virginia Supreme Court finding came out today, related to the hugely complicated maneno that I feel totally unqualified to explain to you ... but Michael Halpern of the Center for Science and Democracy is:
The Supreme Court of Virginia today found unanimously in favor of the University of Virginia in its attempt to protect its employees from unwarranted intrusions into their privacy through the commonwealth’s Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA). In doing so, the Court rebuffed efforts by the American…
gregladen | April 15, 2014 Henry Markram
Henry Markram, a chief editor at Frontiers, the journal that recently retracted (resulting in multiple resignations of editors from that journal), inappropriately, an important paper on climate change denialism, just made the following comment on a post on that journal's blog.
My own personal opinion: The authors of the retracted paper and their followers are doing the climate change crisis a tragic disservice by attacking people personally and saying that it is ethically ok to identify them in a scientific study. They made a monumental mistake, refused to fix it and that…
gregladen | April 9, 2014Yesterday, Ugo Bardi resigned his editorship at Frontiers Journal over the Recursive Fury Fiasco. Today, a second editor has done so as well.
You should go read the original post, but here's a key part of it:
Frontiers retracted a perfectly fine (according to their own investigation) psychology paper due to financial risks for themselves. It can only be seen as at best a rather lame excuse or at worst rather patronizing, if Frontiers were to claim to be protecting their authors from lawsuits by removing the ‘offending’ article. This is absolutely no way to “empower researchers in their daily…
gregladen | April 8, 2014Ugo Bardi is a scientist who until a few moments ago served as Chief Specialty Editor at the journal Frontiers. As you know, Frontiers has recently retracted a perfectly good paper, initially indicating that the retraction was due to pressure from the climate science denialist community, who did not like the paper because it was about them. Later, Frontiers changed its tune and claimed that the paper was retracted because of ethical violations of the authors, even though the journal had earlier clearly stated that there were no issues, ethical or otherwise, with the paper. I talk about…
gregladen | April 6, 2014Recently, the OpenAccess journal Frontiers retracted a paper written by Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer, and Michael Marriot Hubble called “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation.” The paper discussed conspiracist ideation as implicated in the rejection of scientific work …
A recent study involving visitors to climate blogs found that conspiracist ideation was associated with the rejection of climate science and the rejection of other scientic propositions such as the link between lung cancer and smoking, and…
gregladen | April 6, 2014I just watched a report on ABC news about anti-vaxers causing the current and alarming measles outbreak. It was a reasonable report for MSM though I missed large parts of it because I was multitasking ineffectively. But an idea came to me that would go a long way to manage this problem of anti-vaxers threatening everyone else's health and well being. Lives, even. They are threatening our lives.
Here's the deal. Most public schools have a mealy-mouthed policy that allows people to send their kids to school unvaccinated because they are dumb asses. That's a problem and that should be…
gregladen | March 31, 2014STFU.
Seriously. For your own good.
Every time you make a move you seem to create your own pile of dog do and step in it. The latest own-goal for those who deny climate science was scored after an unreasonable and obnoxious attack on Professor Lawrence Torcello, of RIT. Details here and here.
Those mentioned above, and others such as the Drudge and Infowars, lied. They lied knowingly, blatantly, obnoxiously. They willfully misconstrued Lawrence Torcello's word and his research in order to make climate scientists look like Hitler. This is not a new tactic and it didn't work before.
And…
gregladen | March 26, 2014This is a followup on Are the climate science deniers criminals?, which explored recent work by Lawrence Torcello, a philosopher at Rochester Institute of Technology. (See: Is Organised Climate Science Denial Criminally Negligent?)
Professor Torcello's point was made in part by reference to the tragic events at L'Aquila, Italy, where a screw up mainly by non-scientist government official seems to have resulted in unnecessary deaths due to an earthquake. Torcello notes:
If those with a financial or political interest in inaction had funded an organised campaign to discredit the consensus…
gregladen | March 25, 2014It is very hard for me to view the world without my Anthropological glasses, since I’ve been one kind of Anthropologist or another since I was 13 years old. Thinking about climate science deniers, I realized what makes them annoying to me. Let me tell you what I mean.
The ongoing conversation at an archaeological site.
When Archaeologists (a kind of Anthropologist, in the tradition I was trained in) dig a site, they are constantly learning about what is under ground at that location, and throughout the process develop a model of what it all means. As an aside I should mention that…
gregladen | March 22, 2014WTF Frontiers in Psychology Journal? Scientists publish a peer reviewed paper in your journal, a bunch of cranks complain about it, and successfully bully you into taking the paper off your web site? Do you seriously want the rest of the scientific world to take you seriously, ever, from now on? I'm thinking that's not going to happen. We await a full and unmitigated apology to Stephan Lewandowsky, JohnCook, Klaus Oberauer and Michael Marriott, the authors of Recursive fury: conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation
In the mean time, since you…
gregladen | March 16, 2014Our future is at risk. The science is settled, in the main, though there are many details to continue to work out and there are unknowns. But no one doubts that business as usual release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere mainly as the greenhouse gas Carbon Dioxide spells big trouble for humanity and the planet Earth, including eventual massive sea level rise and highly disruptive changes in the Earth’s climatology that will make a mess of many things including our food supply. Think failed state. Think Syria. Now, think failed planet, Syria over half the globe, the other half merely a mess…
gregladen | March 10, 2014Neil DeGrasse Tyson on CNN:
And while we are on the topic, Carl Sagan, of the original Cosmos, on climate change:
See also this from Chris Mooney at Mother Jones.
And just for the heck of it, here's my interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson from 2011.
gregladen | March 5, 2014I have four things for you, two of which you already know about and one that is brand new and very exciting.
You already know that Skeptical Science is a web site that addresses most, perhaps all, of the questions that people raise about climate science. These questions might come from your Uncle Jeb who just figures global warming is a fad and not very important, or they may be questions that come from trained trolls who travel the Intertubes attempting to systematically disrupt the most important conversation we can have in the early 21st century. Skeptical science is also like an intro…
gregladen | March 4, 2014Who What When Where
Nic Lewis, an unaffiliated self described climate scientist, and a journalist, Marcel Crok, also unaffiliated, are known climate science denialists. The two of them have an objection to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conclusions regarding an important thing called "Climate Sensitivity." Perhaps unable to get their work in the peer reviewed literature, the two of them wrote "a report" titled "OVERSENSITIVE: How the IPCC hid the good news on global warming," that is available here. They make a claim which is totally incorrect but if it was correct it…
gregladen | February 27, 2014The famous Polar Vortex has come and gone in North America. Then, it came back. What a jerk.
As I write this the outside temperature is 13 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and tomorrow morning’s Bus Stop Temperature promises to be about –25F windchill here in central Minnesota. Meanwhile my Twitter stream is polluted with climate science denialist tweets pointing out that it is too cold outside to believe in global warming, even though the entire land area of the United States, where this cold is being experienced as a cultural and physical phenomenon, is about one and half percent of the…
gregladen | February 25, 2014I generally ignore climate change denialists on Twitter. I use The Zapper to do that, and it works great, better than blocking. But sometimes I check my Twitter feed on something other than Chrome on my own desktop or laptop and then I see them, and occasionally engage. When I do, I often see troubling or annoying visual tropes that seem to go along with this breed. Guns, exploitative photos of women, flag-draped symbols, and Nazis. That sort of thing.
So, this morning I put together a collage of images off the Twitter home pages of just the last handful of Denialists who were obsessively…
gregladen | February 19, 2014The BBC stepped in it. First, they engaged in a totally absurd "false balance" presentation regarding climate change, then in response (link below) they aired very reasonable complaints by listeners, and to this, they responded officially that everything is fine, you can go home and lock your doors and windows, nothing to see here, our balance is in balance, thank you very much. Or words to that effect. If I was British I would be ashamed of the BBC for this, but since I'm not British I'm peeved.
Should the Today programme have invited Lord Lawson, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and…
gregladen | January 18, 2014Copernicus Publications is an Open Access enterprise that provided the ability for an academic entity of some sort or another to create a new Open Access journal. In March 2013 the journal “Pattern Recognition in Physics" was started up and added to the Copernicus lineup. The journal apparently put out a few items, and then, recently, produced Special Issue 1, called “Pattern in solar variability, their planetary origin and terrestrial impacts." The special issue editors were Nils-Axel Mörner, R. Tattersall, and J.-E. Solheim. Readers of this blog will recognize R. Tattersall as TallBloke,…