Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 02/26/2012 10:00:18 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
From Amazon’s list of Gleick book reviews here
Must read — for the real history of the climate debate and the war by deniers,
Michael Mann — a world class scientist and communicator about the seriousness of climate change — has finally put all of the recent history (sordid, indeed) about climate denial, attacks on climate scientists, and serial and intentional efforts by climate “skeptics” and “deniers” (a word many of them self-apply) into a book. As the title suggests, there IS a war on. That war is not really about the science, as Mann shows, but about efforts to confuse the public and policymakers by pretending the science is wrong (it isn’t) and by attacking the scientists who are willing to speak about it publicly.
Much of the contents of the book is old news: we know about the efforts to slander/libel the work of Mann, which led to seven public formal independent reviews, each of which confirmed the accuracy of his work (described well in the book); we know about the efforts of serial deniers to confuse policy makers and the public (in fact, take a look at how the trolls are being marshalled to insult and criticize the book here at Amazon!).
If you are up in the air about the science of climate change; if you are interested in the true history of the battles between scientists on one side and often-paid skeptics on the other hand, get this book. Toward the end, Mann talks about the misinterpreted, out-of-context emails stolen from a university in the UK, with the observation and famous quote “If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.” This describes the classic tool of using misleading, cherry-picked piece of information to argue against climate change — a tool used in bad data analysis, bad policy, and bad science. Mann carefully and clearly describes that episode in a way that — if you had previously been confused by the rhetoric — will convince you that the science is stronger than ever.
Glieck is definitely a true believer....
Yes, a War On Science being waged by the Warmers. No one has done more damage to the reputation of honest scientific efforts than the Glowbull Warming Cult.
Wearing out here,...time to shut down....nite!
Good night E.
Yup, a war. A war, that since Climategate 1.0, they are obviously losing. We are witnessing the collapse of a paradigm. A war with ever more desperate tactics with outright propaganda that they do not even try to disguise anymore. If we had a media worth its salt, we would already be witnessing an explosion the world has never beheld, but with the media on their side, we will only witness a slow quiet death before the next great crisis. The good news is slowly over time, we will be able to watch a really cool nature show without the obligatory last 10 minutes of “All the stuff you just witnessed is now under extreme threat from Climate Change”. We may be able to buy Scientific American again, without being bombarded with AGW propaganda even in the most unrelated article. Rest assured, the attention span and memory of the world has the duration of one fruit fly life cycle, so soon there will be a new catastrophe (ocean acidification) that can only be solved by a massive transfer of wealth to democrat campaign bundlers and third world dictators, but it will take time for the new crisis to stick, so we will get at least a short breather.
Though I am sick to death of the non-stop global warming religion propaganda, I am a little bit thankful for it...because I was able to learn a little bit about a cornucopia of subjects related to our natural world through years of daily reading of websites like WattsUpWithThat.Com, ClimateAudit.Com, JoAnneNova.Com and many others. All of which, including TallBlokes site just did a clean sweep of the best science blog awards, with not one alarmist site such as RealClimate even getting a mention.
This has been a good week
Thanks for all of your work, EB! Get some good rest.
Great point.
Wasn't this guys hockey stick graph predicated on cherry-picking only a couple of specific trees in a specific location?
“We may be able to buy Scientific American again” ? ?
Not until the cows come home. I remember reading Scientific American for the first time in the library while in the 10th grade. There were articles on how to build one’s own X-ray machine, and that was my science project, ‘cept that the school was in Carbondale, Colorado and it was 1958/59.
No Internet meant no way to find the rare tube needed for the project. As I read the magazine in following years I realized that a complete change had occurred, in that it was less oriented towards science and more “activist” infested. Given that “Dead Tree” media is collapsing, I’d suggest Scientific American is about gone because it is hardly scientific and is more anti-American than American.
Yeah I believe in Climate Change its going to be 50 Degrees today and it is going to Snow Tommorrow,Deal with it
Yes. Typical lib strategy. Accuse others of what you do.
>Wasn’t this guys hockey stick graph predicated on cherry-picking only a couple of specific trees in a specific location?
Actually it was worse than that. There were two parts to the nature of his deception:
A) He cherry picked data later on to “hide the decline”. Well actually that’s being charitable. What he actually did with tree ring data is that he used tree ring data as long as it supported his thesis, but when it came to a modern era when he could use weather station data that showed warming while the tree rings didn’t indicate it, he chucked the tree ring data. So thus he proffers graphs which feature disparate sets of data and claims they are valid. This is scientific garbage.
B) The hockey stick graph was utter and complete garbage. Steve McIntyre(a Canadian statistician) saw it and found some dubious aspects on first glance. When he looked into it in depth by going to the original papers, he determined it was complete and utter hogwash. The methods used would have put out the same kind of curve no matter what data was fed into it, even completely random data. Mann is a complete and utter fraud.
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