And the 2011 awards for bad climate science goes to ... (Lamestream Media alert)

The 2011 “Climate B.S. of the Year Award” goes to the entire field of candidates currently stumping in New Hampshire for the Republican Party presidential nomination, the Pacific Institute announced Thursday.

The awards, in their second year, are intended to distinguish the most active among so-called climate change deniers.

In this case, “B.S.” stands for bad science, according to hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

“The choice among the current Republican candidates on the issue of climate change is scientific ignorance, disdain for science, blatant misrepresentation of facts, or naked political expediency.”

From Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" speech:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government. Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present, and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.
What Eisenhower dimly glimpsed has now come to fruition: we now face a monopoly of received truth. Not, as the Framers might have supposed, a received truth of religion, but a received truth of self-interest. A vast going along and getting along of not only politicians but of scientists. In retrospect the framing timbers, so to speak, of that great Establishment were plainly visible in 1960, and indeed in 1940. The framing timbers of that Establishment were already being erected in the Nineteenth Century while the guns of the Civil War were still cooling off. That Establishment is the idea of professional infallibility, the cult of the expert. And at the core of that cult is the idea of journalistic objectivity.
The advent of the telegraph in the middle of the Nineteenth Century led to the establishment of cooperatives to exploit the miraculous-seeming instantaneous transmission of information across vast distances which would have taken weeks or even months to transmit by traditional means. At the time of the founding era, and up to the founding of the Associated Press in 1848, newspapers were mostly weeklies, and some had no fixed deadline at all. Newspapers were only one of the ways that news was propagated to the public. The telegraph, and the Associated Press, changed that. Suddenly newspapers had much more information about recent distant events than the general public did. The Associated Press was, in that limited sense, highly "expert." But at a price. The price of "knowing" very recent events was and is, accepting the authority of the originator of the report you see.
Previously the newspaper was about the opinion of its printer, and you selected your newspaper according as you trusted its printer. All newspapers had a reputation for being highly opinionated. With the Associated Press in being, your choice was between believing that same opinionated old rag you were used to, if it still stayed in business as such, or believing the ghostly presence on the far end of "the wire." Newspapers, and readers, quickly adopted the new model, and the "authority" of the AP was established. If you reflect on it, you will see that the claims to authority of the newswire were always strictly temporary: later and more thorough reports could come in book form, and could travel at a leisurely pace to your home or office. And as Rumsfleld famously noted to President Bush when notifying him of the capture of Saddam Hussein, "First reports are always wrong."
So inherently the Associated Press (and any other wire service) is selling a low-quality product whose virtue is immediacy. The Associated Press and its member newspapers have a business model which depends on the superficiality of the news. If there is long-term significance to a story, after all, there will subsequently be far more complete, and far more accurate, reporting. But the natural tendency of the journalist is to prefer the immediate report, and to resist correcting the record. The journalist would far rather change the subject to something else that he now knows that you don't yet know. If you would be alert to expediency being foisted off as truth, the first place to look would therefore be at the journalist.
Unanimity in journalism, and between journalists and a political party, is not objectivity and it is certainly not a guarantee of wisdom. Anyone who takes for granted his own wisdom (or his own objectivity, if indeed there be any substantive difference between the two) engages in sophistry. It is not alone in actual misstatements and disinformation that one seeks to find bias and self-serving. As long as "Half the truth may be a great lie," blatant bias can lie almost exclusively in what is not reported which is more significant than what is reported.
It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing. - Adam Smith
Whenever the unanimous opinion of journalism, and of the Democratic Party, point in a single direction, the seeker of truth must be alert to the likelihood that that opinion is sheer, Bernie Madoff, P.T. Barnum, poppycock. It happens all the time.
In the instance of the "Man-Caused Global Warming" story, we are fortunate to have at our disposal the so-called Climategate Memos, a dump - now two dumps of self-incriminating e-mails among some of the chief propagandists of the convenient (for reporters and Democrats) story that we-the-people are destroying the planet by buying fuel for our cars and our houses. Every convenient story for reporters is a convenient story for Democrats, because Democrats' main principle is to have no principle which is not convenient for reporters. Their principle, that is, is that "nothing actually matters except PR."

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.