Now the climate scientists get to suffer with the framing wars

I got so sick of dreary beancounting communications ‘experts’ telling me that we need to avoid fighting creationists … because the magical drone of framing was going to make everyone happy and persuade the jebus-loving ignoramuses that evolution was good. There are signs that these parasites are moving on now — to climate science.

Oh, great. Here’s a potentially greater material problem for us than even the sad state of science education, and now the good-haired knob-polishers are moving in to dispense their advice of indolence and tone. Dot Earth has an exchange between Matt Nisbet and Randy Olson on tactics. Nisbet does his usual blame-the-scientists routine, arguing that we out to lie back, shut up, and let the Expert Communicators smooth over public sentiment. Randy Olson is basically fed up with the faceless, passionless passivity that these guys insist is the scientist’s only allowed role.

So I’m tired of the lack of leadership and the overly academic analysis of what are the actions of basically thugs. You guys keep working on the polling data — that’s good and is equally important. But in the meanwhile, I am dragging people like Marc Morano out into the light of day for the community to get a good look at who he is, what motivates him and exactly how his technique manages to be so increasingly successful.

…

I wish it were as simple as just analyzing the situation endlessly and eventually coming up with some cool and subtle strategy where nobody ever had to get dirty. But I’m afraid there’s going to be a lot more Climategates in the near future.

I wish I could say I’m pleased to see these useless weasels have been drawn away from the science education problem, but it seems they’ve just decided to plague another science issue that needs strong activism, rather than feel-good puffery.

Climate change denialists = climate change liars

The denialists are at it again in the comments, parroting the latest lie.

UEA CRU’s Dr Phil Jones agrees there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995.

Wow. You’d think they’d realize that twisting the words of a scientist around 180° from what they actually said is a very bad strategy — it would be like trying to claim that I’d decided evolution was false. This is no exception. Deltoid has a wonderfully clear quote:

This led to a Daily Mail headline reading: “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995.”

Since I’ve advocated a more explicit use of the word “lie”, I’ll go ahead and follow my own advice: that Daily Mail headline is a lie. Phil Jones did not say there had been no global warming since 1995; he said the opposite. He said the world had been warming at 0.12°C per decade since 1995. However, over that time frame, he could not quite rule out at the traditional 95% confidence level that the warming since 1995 had not been a random fluke.

Anyone who has even a passing high-school familiarity with statistics should understand the difference between these two statements. At a longer time interval, say 30 or 50 or 100 years, Mr Jones could obviously demonstrate that global warming is a statistically significant trend. In the interview he stated that the warming since 1975 is statistically significant. Everyone, even climate-change sceptics, agrees that the earth has experienced a warming trend since the late 19th century. But if you take any short sample out of that trend (say, 1930-45 or 1960-75), you might not be able to guarantee that the particular warming observed in those years was not a statistical fluke. This is a simple truth about statistics: if you measure just ten children, the relationship between age and height might be a fluke. But obviously the fact remains that older children tend to be taller than younger ones, and if you measure 100 of them, you’ll find the relationship quite statistically significant indeed.

What’s truly infuriating about this episode of journalistic malpractice is that, once again, it illustrates the reasons why the East Anglia scientists adopted an adversarial attitude towards information management with regard to outsiders and the media. They were afraid that any data they allowed to be characterised by non-climate scientists would be vulnerable to propagandistic distortion. And they were right.

South Duh-kota, hang your head in shame

The South Dakota senate has been wrestling over an important resolution, HCR 1009. Here’s the original text. It will look rather familiar to anyone who has seen creationist bills roll through a legislature.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the House of Representatives of the Eighty-fifth Legislature of the State of South Dakota, the Senate concurring therein, that the South Dakota Legislature urges that instruction in the public schools relating to global warming include the following:

(1) That global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact;

(2) That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect [sic] world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative; and

(3) That the debate on global warming has subsumed political and philosophical viewpoints which have complicated and prejudiced the scientific investigation of global warming phenomena; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Legislature urges that all instruction on the theory of global warming be appropriate to the age and academic development of the student and to the prevailing classroom circumstances.

Notice the “just a theory” clause, and the “alternative theories” clause (which includes “astrological”! and “thermological,” whatever that is), and the “just an opinion” clause. That is one jaw-droppingly stupid resolution.

I wish it had been preserved in all its naked inanity, but somebody must have noticed how bad it was, and the resolution that passed has been amended. It’s still the same story, but the more obviously idiotic key words have been removed.

A CONCURRENT RESOLUTION, Calling for a balanced approach for instruction in the public schools relating to global climatic change.

WHEREAS, evidence relating to global climatic change is complex and subject to varying scientific interpretations; and

WHEREAS, there are a variety of climatological and meteorological dynamics that can affect world weather phenomena, and the significance and interrelativity of these factors remain unresolved; and

WHEREAS, the debate on global warming has subsumed political and philosophical viewpoints, which has complicated and prejudiced the scientific investigation of global climatic change phenomena:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the House of Representatives of the Eighty-fifth Legislature of the State of South Dakota, the Senate concurring therein, that the South Dakota Legislature urges that all instruction in the public schools relating to global climatic change be presented in a balanced and objective manner and be appropriate to the age and academic development of the student and to the prevailing classroom circumstances.”

They missed the irony of passing a political resolution protesting the politicization of a scientific issue, however. It’s still just a gang of conservative politicians trying to force equal consideration for discredited alternative nonsense in the public schools.

I’m still wondering if any South Dakota teachers will be presenting the astrological evidence against climate change in their classrooms, though.

Lomborg gets spanked

Bjorn Lomborg, the “skeptical environmentalist,” has always bugged me as a rather shady character. Now Howard Friel started fact-checking Lomborg’s footnotes, and found them to be wanting.

But when Friel began checking Lomborg’s sources, “I found problems,” he says. “As an experiment, I looked up one of his footnotes, found that it didn’t support what he said, and then did another, and kept going, finding the same pattern.” He therefore took on the Augean stables undertaking of checking every one of the hundreds of citations in Cool It. Friel’s conclusion, as per his book’s title, is that Lomborg is “a performance artist disguised as an academic.”

Read the rest. He seems to have had the habit of citing his sources as saying the exact opposite of what they actually said.

Alaska’s War on Science

Several people expressed surprise at Alaska’s high position on the list of non-religious states. We can’t have people’s expectations shattered, so here’s something to reassure you all that the world has not turned inside out: an Alaskan scientist castigates the state’s attitude on science.

Alaska’s escalating war on science should be a grave concern to us all. On climate change, endangered species, predator control, environmental impacts of industrial development, and other important policy issues, Alaska now has arguably the most anti-science government anywhere in the nation.

It just goes to show that simply leaving the church behind does not guarantee that a population will live the life of reason.

Spotting the black hats among the climate change denialists

Jim Lippard has put up an excellent post identifying the major institutions behind climate change denial. They are almost uniformly conservative and populated with old and unqualified cranks, although Jim is too genteel to put it that way. It’s useful information if you need a scorecard to keep track of the players.

It’s also amusing. Lippard makes this passing mention of a certain notorious crank in a discussion of the denialists with the best academic credentials:

The top-cited scientist, Lubos Motl, has 150 citations for his fourth-most-cited paper, but he’s a theoretical physicist with no publications containing the word “climate.”

Lubos Motl replies!

Commie,

I urge you to instantly remove the libels and lies from this blog, otherwise I will start to work on the legal liquidation of the criminal that you are.

These things may be common among the green trash in which you seem to live but I won’t tolerate it against myself.

Wow. “Legal liquidation.” I’m impressed. Although…did anyone spot any lies or libels against Motl? Does he have 151 citations for that paper, or what?

If you hadn’t realized that Motl is a freakish little sociopath before, that comment may just persuade you.