February 2012
56 posts
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Lacis On Scientific Integrity
[Andy Lacis comments on the Heartland Affair. The fortrightness of the reflection evidences the integrity of a scientist’s thought.]
From all the foregoing, as I see it, Peter Gleick was simply being inept in his deception (i.e., he got caught doing it). And, there was some poor secretary at the Heartland Institute who was being gullible and naïve (I hope she still has her job). All of...
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Double Agent
[kdk33 finally solves the Gleick mystery. Some typos removed]
Gleick is a double agent. Planted years ago after deep indoctrination at a secret right wing training camp. He has no memory of this. He was programed to self destruct then sent forth to study climate.
The code word is MT. Steve McIntyre is his handler. He phone Gleick in the middle of the night and, when Gleick answered,...
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“Another great thing about the internet is that you can always turn it off and...”
– Peter Davies
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“Gleick was a member of the editorial board of Climatic Change.”
– Steve, network analyzing.
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“I want to see the review comments because I’m thorough, not because I expect...”
– Steve, thoroughly thorough.
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“Fake experts doing fake science which leads [the Heartland Institute] to fake...”
– WebHubTelescope, coming with a useful mnemonics.
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Blowing Whistles
RickA,
You believe that the “miracle worker” could have been a whistleblower:
I think FOIA was an insider […].
I believe you have experience with the law. The first substantial post at Steve’s was the UK legislation for whistleblowers:
http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/uk-whistleblower-legislation
One has to wonder why this has not been done in the Heartland affair, but...
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“Here’s one of the interesting subtexts: […]”
– Steve, misapplying a bit the concept of subtext, but showing he does know about about it.
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“One nice thing about having a blog with traffic is that when I get one of these...”
– Steve, not wasting one second getting angry.
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“Very simple to construct a keyword list: scrape climate audit and pull out
terms...”
– Moshpit, leveraging information.
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“I have posted in this thread ONLY in response to references to me made first by...”
– Lee, spotting when Steve has a bit too much of “little fun”.
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“In the time that it took you to notice the latest twist in the McIntyre audit to...”
– Mus Musculous, with the very interesting concept of AuditToEndAllAudits,
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“Everybody hated Cassandra, too. And she was no happier than the Trojans were...”
– PDA, disregarding Apollo.
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“No. I’m not sharing.”
– Lucia, switching from parsomatic to oracle mode.
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“It is not that Anthony’s project is useless, it is that for climate science...”
– Eli Rabett, having to mansplain why Heartland might be interested in Anthony’s project, a few years ago.
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“The ClimateGate Burglar has saved the economy $trillions. Gleick should be...”
– Vaughan Pratt, boiling the consensus at Judy’s down to a tweetable 140 characters.
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“We beg on our bare knees for forgiveness for our anti-climate, anti-environment,...”
– Joseph Bust
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“I think that my ascription of motives is the most plausible of any alternatives...”
– Steve, not mindreading, but ascribing motives.
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Conceptually Tengential
Ross McKitrick: Heartland owes a duty to its members and donors and employees to defend its reputation and operations.
Matt Skaggs: As a general and rhetorical question to the commenters here (and aside from public/private arguments which are conceptually tangential), why would sunshine be the best disinfectant at UEA but not at Heartland?
Note: How Ross dances around Matt's accusation of double standard.
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“Pure Aristotelian tragedy: A good man commits hubris (attempting to shame those...”
– Jonathan Gilligan
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“I don’t know or care to know about the Heartland issue. About who did what or...”
– Tom Gray
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Hypocrisy Sandwiches
Jeff,
Here’s the last sentence from the article to which we are alluding:
If you like your hypocrisy sandwiches served with a side order of double standards, then these leaked documents are certainly the place to dine out.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/feb/15/leaked-heartland-institute-documents-climate-scepticism
I believe that Hickman’s criticism was about...
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The Secrecy of It All
Jeff,
Thank you for your candid answer.
If I read you right, in the fourth link there is this quote:
The documents reveal that Heartland […] plans to raise US$88,000 to help a former television weatherman set up a new temperature records website.
So this refers to Watts alright. But I’m not sure I recognize the smear in that sentence. If that’s all you can do to back up that
...
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Smear Campaigns
Jeff,
Well, I don’t see the smear campaign. Your post has not linked one single article of that smear campaign. It’s a campaign, and these are smears. Should be easy to substantiate.
While you provide some links about that smear campaign which deserves due diligence, I note in your reply:
[B]eing attacked for accepting money, without regard [my emphasis] for what that money was being used...
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Dancing and Flipping
Joshua,
I agree with GaryM’s main point: monopolizing the dancing floor shows bad manners. If you need that much room to swing and jive, it might be better to seek other ballrooms. If memory serves me well, I already told you twice. Here’s one conversation:
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/11908568084
This leads me to a second point I’d like to tell you. You claim that David insulted...
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“Just as the pen is mightier than the sword, so is a water pistol loaded loaded...”
– Vaughan Pratt, falsifying a Popperian saying.
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When Zappa Meets Dali
[Howard reminisces on the last hurly burly.]
I love it. Reminds me of High School where Frank Zappa meets Salvidor Dali while geeks play the Jock and Cheerleader roles.
Who cares who did what. HI and the WUWT peanut gallery are moronic cranks more interested in politics. Maybe some of the political CAGW moronic cranks juiced a HI memo. We must get to the bottom of this!
Mosher is pretending...
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Only Connect
[WebHubTelescope has an elegant way of describing two choices that can inhabit commenters, complimenting Vaughan Pratt and dodging a monkey wrench. With an hat tip to E.M. Forster for the title.]
(A) It is amazing what one can accomplish if one spends a couple of free hours every evening blogging your thoughts over the course of several years. Eventually you can collect hundreds of...
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A possible argument: Heartland has no power to ensure the stuff actually gets used.
A Brit: [W]hy are these people [from Heartland] spending so much cash on making [a program for K-12 including their propaganda]?
Some parsomatic: [P]eople writing the NIPCC document do not share my view of the science or their document. Rather, they have are sincere in their belief and think that is balanced science.
Take Home Exam: Find how the parsomatic oracle answers the why question.
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Act like in Mars Attack
Suggesting that Jones should resign is defensible without appealing to perfection. Pragmatic considerations suggest that it might have been a good move, from a public relation point of view. The main problem is that there is a possibility that the resignation would not alleviate any political pressure. From the point of view of warfare, the suggestion is absurd: no game has ever been won by...
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How to Write a Proposal
[Fred Moolten shows how.]
In the first place, I want to congratulate our own David Wojick for acquiring a $100,000 per year contract from Heartland for developing climate science teaching modules. David – your stated goal is to develop content that is accurate, objective, and free from propagandizing. It’s a commendable goal and deserves to be accomplished.
As you know, this has been a...
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The Age Of Darkness
[**A guest poem by Lewis Deane, written a few years ago when is was younger, having now had the weeks to shake off what he harshly calls "his bombast", which are amply compensated with the sentiment of estrangement that one can't but have when reading these weekly hurli burlies. Reprinted with permission.**]
The chatter on the wind is the irritation
Of the street: drunks or illiterate poor
Claiming back bitter heritage of dark
Or barbaric recompense of pillage.
The habited Romans on their destined sword
Of solitary circlings; burnt books,
Artefact’s in whose flames is seen the death
Of some peculiar, personal march
To some incongruous goal. Not sacrificed
But burnt with the words and flaming tongue
Taking all in a lying confession
Of confounded biographies.
The time heralded on an ox skin drum
And thus brought to a passive, anonymous march,
A world of strangers.
Copyright Lewis Deane.
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Language is a Social Art
Dear Kim,
Let’s look at Moshpit’s rephrasing:
He doesnt come across as one.
Let’s cut distancing and replace the pronouns:
David may not come across as a propagandist.
Let’s cut some more distancing and
add to whom that belief applies:
David may not come across as a propagandist to Moshpit.
David may come across as a propagandist to Michael.
David may come across as a...
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Driven Beyond the Endurance of a Normal Man
[PDA, a systems engineer, tries to salvage the reputation of sysadmins at the risk of his sanity]
Dishonesty aside, Rabett has now shown, quite conclusively, he has no idea how connecting to servers works.
Indeed, another clueless individual made a similar bone-headed suggestion:
If you do programmatic retrieval, it is usually considered good manners to insert a delay of at least 1...
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David Wojick [...] does not come across as a...
Judy’s entitled to her opinion, even if it’s not one of a scientist.
And perhaps she made this comment solely on her own behalf.
But the statement was made in a more general mode than that.
And as such deserves due diligence.
Yup.
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Nailing jelly to a wall: is it possible? →
Yes, and way more easier than to try to tease out a sincere discussion out of litteralist parsomatics.
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“This little episode does illustrate the power of blogs to bring sunlight onto...”
– Steve, moving on, after reluctanctly admitting that he might have been “running what he now realizes was a poorly-written site-scraping program because it didn’t include even so much as a one-second delay to allow other requests into the queue”, as Glen Raphael suggested.
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“These people obviously don’t like each other. This does not concern me or...”
– Anonymous
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“Why the discussion in the first place?”
– Ed Darrell, scouting at Lucia’s, the land where nothing gets ever conceded, and everything gets into her sparsomatic.
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“The Enron of climate science.”
– Steve Sadlov, inspired by Steve’s editorial practices
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“Call a spade a spade.”
– David Stockwell, after having cited Fraud in Science and Ruthless Science Fraud, in a comment following one of Steve’s post reminiscing Yamal
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“[S]omehow Esper managed to do a calibration and there is a lot of similarity to...”
– Steve, perhaps not saying everything he thinks
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“I would have expected specialists in the field to be [sic.] understand the...”
– Steve, seemingly “moving on”, not without seeming to mindread a bit.
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Yes, but RC Moderation
[A commenter under the name of OzJuggler came into the thread of the moment at Steve’s to interject a question, “as is often the case” at Gavin’s. This comment by OzJuggler got ignored. More than that, it got snipped. If you click on the sourced link, if should lead nowhere. That’s where the comment appeared at first.]
I just posted this comment at your most...
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What's Going On Here
Steve,
Indeed, it hardly [seems] uncommon for parties to negotiate before litigation. Nothing has never [been] said or implied otherwise. Perhaps I can clarify my main point. Talking about an “open dialog” simpliciter fails to mention many peculiarities of what’s going on here:
First, that this dialog depends upon this condition:
Unless [my emphasis] I am obligated under either Canadian...
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Conversation Laws
Joshua,
No more time for me this week. I’ll simply note that when you say:
[T]he credibility of scientists is diminished when they slip into using analogies as attacks to stand in for scientific debate.
you seem to forget that we’re talking about op-eds, op-eds published in the Wall Street Journal. This is not where scientific debate.
Besides, you more or less recasted the same...
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BREAKING NEWS IN THE CLIMATE DEBATE!!!
[_ By R.U. Kiddingme. from the Unassociated Press_
15 minutes ago
“Realists” use analogy of scientists to dentists” while “Skeptics” use analogy of scientists to Lysenko (and Inquisitors).”
Voicing “concern” today, “skeptics” all over the blogosphere weighed-in write blog comments objecting to an analogy used in a WSJ op-ed comparing scientists to dentists. This comes after much ado over...
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“Some who have read the book, or at any rate who have reviewed it, have it found...”
– J.R.R Tolkien, in his preface to the second edition of Lord of the Ring.