Collide-a-scape

In order to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming, how likely is it that some climate skeptics would buy into this poll, hook, line and sinker?

If you liked that question, you’ll love this one from Rasmussen Reports:

In order to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming, how likely is it that some scientists have falsified research data?

That’s one of the questions from a telephone survey that provides the results that Rasmussen, Anthony Watts and Bishop Hill are headlining.

And so a central meme of the Morano/Inhofe wing (e.g., global warming is one big fraud) gets reinforced by a skewed poll.

Darn, I missed this show by just a few days. (I was in Boulder, Colorado much of last week.) I would have loved to hear from two prominent climate skeptics on how I’m part of the “brainwashed” media.

BTW, I spent much of my time in Boulder visiting with climate scientists at NCAR. I’ll let you know when the magazine story is out. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to continue with my deprogramming…

Anthony Watts, the proprietor of the well known climate skeptic blog, WUWT, seems to have a double standard on what constitutes an insult to ethnic groups.

Watts is making a big deal out of some recent comments by Timothy Wirth, a former U.S. senator and now the president of the UN Foundation, who reportedly said this during a recent conference call:

“[W]e have to–I think, again as I’ve suggested before–undertake an aggressive program to go after those who are among the deniers, who are putting out these mistruths, and really call them for what they’re doing and make a battle out of it. They’ve had pretty much of a free ride so far, and that time has got to stop.”

Watts and the right wing news outlet that is making hay out of Wirth’s comments, are disingenuously twisting the meaning of his words. Wirth is merely suggesting that climate skeptics should be more aggressively challenged on their claims, that’s all.

But Watts, a combat leader in the climate wars, puts his own spin on this for obvious partisan purposes:

Well yesterday, the former senator insulted the Jewish race with the tired old “denier” label, then set his foot on fire, then stuck it in his mouth trying to tell about half of the US population (according to recent polls) that he’s “coming after them” because they don’t share his opinion.

Please. People should be able to see through this for what it is.

Also, funny how Watts is offended on behalf of the “Jewish race” (interesting phrasing). Several days ago, Watts mentioned that he was “dismayed”  by Lord Monckton’s recent use of Nazi imagery, in a post titled

Note to Lord Monckton: this isn’t helping

In that post, Watts wrote that

putting swastikas in planned public powerpoint presentations, and linking that by name to a person,  is in my opinion, way over the top and in very bad form and totally hijacks and negates the important messages elsewhere in the presentation.

Evidently, such behavior doesn’t rise to the level of insult to Jewish people. It’s just “way over the top and in very bad form,” because it undermines the climate skeptic argument.

What’s very bad form is when partisan climate bloggers express phony, selective outrage.

Leo Hickman in the Guardian takes stock of some recent encouraging developments and muses:

Could peace talks ever end the ‘climate war’?

In his article, he wonders,

are there any shared goals between the two warring parties in the climate debate worth finding “peace” for?

Towards the end, he sums up:

When so much of this war is fought in anonymous online forums (see below for details!), would it be constructive to bring these two groups together in a room to begin tentative “peace talks” based on first trying to identify any common ground? Or is it hopelessly naïve of me to even suggest that this could ever bring positive results?

My immediate reaction to Hickman’s olive branch (before reading any response to it) was captured by the “BBD” commenter at Bishop Hill’s blog:

My own small experience – some of it in comments here – is that closed minds rule.

And indeed, a quick scan of the 100-plus comments on that thread bear this out. Hickman, in his comment at Bishop Hill’s, also noticed:

Thanks for responding to my Guardian article. Unless Andrew [Montford] has his own views, I’ll conclude from the reaction here that the answer to my headline question is a resounding ‘no’. It’s a shame that there doesn’t appear to be any common ground at all, but I’m glad I asked the question.

I have some ideas on why I think the hostilities between the warring camps will continue unabated, but first I’d like to hear from you.

Do you think the ‘climate war’ will grind on, irrespective of olive branches waved from either side? Or do you see some possible middle ground that can be agreed on?

This is an interesting and peculiar “conversion story” of a climate skeptic who is

now persuaded that anthropogenic global warming is real.

The piece offers some excellent advice to the left and right sides of the debate, but it also contains standard conservative hyperbole about Al Gore (“He’s clearly looking to ride global warming to greater wealth and power”), the supposed climate change stalking horse  (“The Left has seized on it as an opportunity to dismantle free markets and grow government”), and a certain flawed global institution (“The UN is a systemically-corrupt, left-wing political organization”).

Forget the climate change conversion, what does it take for a “skeptic” to realize he is viewing the world through an exaggerated ideological lens?

All in all, the piece is a mixed bag for those who would co-opt it for their side in the climate wars. Right now, it seems to have mostly rankled climate skeptics, for obvious reasons. Regarding the larger climate change debate at hand, this commenter helpfully reminds us what we should strive to do more often:

To clarify discussions about AGW, separate the topic into (at least) three parts:

1. The scientific evidence — what has been measured up until today — and the AGW scientific theory to explain this evidence.

2. Projections, predictions and scenarios of the future. This is based on the evidence and theory, but has not yet happened.

3. Debate, proposals and decisions about what we will do about AGW. This is the legitimately political part. It is, and will be, based on parts 1 and 2, but is distinct from them.

The AGW discussions I’ve seen that get most confused are those where the moderator/initiator has not taken care to clearly make such a division and/or doesn’t try to persuade commenters to do the same.

I’d say that much of the acrimony in the climate debate owes to these distinctions willfully not being made.

That’s the theme of this bizarre confab soon to roll into Los Angeles. Featured speakers include numerous climate skeptics, such as Lord Monckton, Benny Peiser, and Richard Lindzen. The organization sponsoring the conference, the American Freedom Alliance, has a few other other notable obsessions.  Leo Hickman at the Guardian reports that the group

has promoted intelligent design and seems to tread a very fine line indeed between fighting “Islamic fascism” and outright Islamophobia.

I guess they want to start guarding against the green jihad while keeping Darwinism at bay. Here’s more from Hickman:

The American Freedom Alliance is, perhaps, best known for its on-going legal action with the California Science Center over the cancellation of an AFA event to be held at the centre in 2009 at which it intended to screen a “teach the controversy” film called Darwin’s Dilemma, which explores the “Mystery of the Cambrian Explosion in Fossil Records”. At the time, Avi Davis, executive director and senior fellow of the American Freedom Alliance, said: “New scientific evidence makes it vital that we take a close look at the numerous inherent scientific problems of the Darwinian theory of evolution.” The AFA has subsequently fought the case on the grounds of freedom of expression.

Climate skeptics lending their names to an anti-evolution organization. The headlines write themselves.

Anthony Watts bites down hard on sour grapes after reading the big news yesterday in USA Today. More on that in a minute.

So Dan Vergano breaks the story and offers this helpful background:

The study, which appeared in 2008 in the journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, was headed by statistician Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. Its analysis was an outgrowth of a controversial congressional report that Wegman headed in 2006. The “Wegman Report” suggested climate scientists colluded in their studies and questioned whether global warming was real. The report has since become a touchstone among climate change naysayers.

Vergano cites what and who is responsible for the paper’s undoing:

Computer scientist Ted Kirkpatrick of Canada’s Simon Fraser University, filed a complaint with the journal after reading the climate science website Deep Climate, which first noted plagiarism in the Wegman Report in 2009. “There is something beyond ironic about a study of the conduct of science having ethics problems,” Kirkpatrick says.

There is also something predictable about this reaction from Watts, who plays down the journal retraction and instead focuses on the anonymity of the critic who exposed the paper’s plagiarism:

Well, congratulations to Deep Climate for being able to attack a man in another country without having having to put your name behind it. Such courage. You must be proud.

Fortunately, some WUWT readers exhibit more class and less partisanship than Watts:

I’m sorry, if the paper was sloppy enough to contain plagiarised text, then it is sloppy enough to contain other mistakes. Whether warmist or sceptic, we should be aiming for the highest standards and just because some annoying individual came out the blue and asked annoying questions which the journal properly investigated, we shouldn’t be supporting bad papers.

If Watts is truly offended by someone “being able to attack a man in another country without having having to put your name behind it,” then he might consider putting a stop to anonymous commenters at his site.

UPDATE: Bishop Hill is also not fazed by the journal retraction:

As far as I can tell, nobody is disputing the paper’s findings though.

How do you guys manage to twist yourselves into such contortions and stay upright?

UPDATE: On Monday, In a follow-up piece online, Dan Vergano probes beyond the issue of plagiarism:

But how good was the study? We asked network analysis expert Kathleen Carley of Carnegie Mellon to take a look at whether the CSDA study, a “bibliometric” critique of publishing links between climate scientists, was any good in the first place. “I see this paper as more of an opinion piece,” Carley says, by email.

Carley is a well-established expert in network analysis. She even taught the one-week course that one of Wegman’s students took before 2006, making the student the “most knowledgeable” person about such analyses on Wegman’s team, according to a note that Wegman sent to CSDA in March.

Be sure to read the whole article, which contains a Q & A with Carley.

The curmudgeons and scolds are braying at WUWT over this Australian rap video. How crude! How offensive! How naughty! How…unsurprising.

Once upon a time, lots of people got all riled up over this guy and his swiveling hips. Imagine.

These were bad boys, too (and one of my favorite all time bands).

Anyway, for Anthony or anyone at WUWT who wants to push back on your inner curmudgeon, I give you this George Carlin classic.

Via Desmogblog, I see there is an emerging anthropological investigation of a curious (some say hydra-headed) creature that is mostly haunting the American political landscape and the dreams of many in the climate concerned community.

Mooney has broken out the main findings over there, so no reason for me to duplicate. But if you skeptic creatures want to know why you are being studied, here’s the explanation provided in the paper Mooney references:

Some may argue that the climate skeptic movement is small and thus irrelevant to the debate on what to do about climate change, but as social scientists, we cannot endorse such flippant dismissal. If, as we suspect, skeptics invoke climate frames that resemble abortion politics, this has serious policy implications. As long as members of the skeptic movement are included in the policy debate and sway the opinions of some lawmakers, their discourse is critically relevant. The social sciences can help us understand the form of this debate as well as the outcomes that result from it.

I might have dismissed this rationale two years ago, before the rise of the Tea Party and its dismissal of climate science spread like a contagion throughout the GOP. Now I’m inclined to think that another form of culture war is underway that is definitely not healthy for a constructive dialogue on climate change. I do hope that the reasonable climate skeptics that visit Collide-a-Scape understand this.

So I’m curious to hear what climate skeptics think of James Delingpole’s shocking admission that he doesn’t have time to read peer reviewed climate science papers. (I think he said this with a straight face, too.) Delingpole said he relies instead on the “peer to peer” review that happens everyday on climate blogs. Well, no news there, I suppose.

But about those time-sucking peer reviewed journal papers. Anybody got a problem with Delingpole’s cavalier dismissal of them? I mean, it’s not like he’s a journalist, or something, right?

Calling Bishop Hill and Anthony Watts.

P.S. Go here for links to the BBC Science under Attack documentary.