Monday, February 22, 2016

My Shrill, Fire Breathing Rant to Andrew Revkin is in Moderation

From this post from the NCSE blog, I found a link to an article by Andrew Revkin. It's a long, rambling account of his personal journey through the climate issue. Now Revkin is more respected than most climate  writers by climate skeptics and lukewarmers and has even angered some people on the alarmist side such as Joe Romm. Still, I see him as part of the big government, academic and press climate establishment and I think he ignores a lot of legitimate concerns. So I wrote a rather long shrill comment in order to give him a  piece of my mind. It was immediately put into moderation.

(Update: I asked Revkin if he would allow or axe my comment in a tweet and he liked the tweet, but still left my comment in moderation. I just cleaned up the typos and resubmitted my comment. I also tweeted my question again.

https://twitter.com/DombroskiMike/status/703673534577565696
)

(Further Update: Made new hashtag. 
)

Here's my comment (as it appeared with all its typos):


February 20, 2016 at 8:08 am

Your comment is awaiting moderation.





Mr. Revkin, I’ve read your big long whine about people not being interested in your pet issue. I won’t say it’s not a serious issue or that there are no actions that should be taken, but I’ve really got a problem with the scientific establishment and science journalists like you and Chris Mooney! I started reading extensively on climate and energy about five years ago and I feel I have a pretty good handle on what the major authors, activists, pundits, magazines, blogs and major scientists are saying. You Climate people have become a parody of a banana republic status quo!
When you are proposing major changes to our economy and energy supply based on “science”, there are a lot of smart technically savy people who are going to want to check this science. And they have! And many of them have found it wanting! An obscure young scientist (Michael Mann) comes up with a stunning hockey stick shaped graph that practically becomes the logo for the IPCC third assessment
report. He gets to be a lead author, full professor and funding magnet. Competent people are
suspicious of the long straight handle without a Medieval Warm Period, disect it and find out that it is bad science and publish papers showing it is bad science. And it’s not only bad, it’s hilariously bad! He made up a technique that mines hockey sticks! This ought to be an interesting story for a science “journalist” — a cautionary tale about overzealousness getting in the way of good science.
So what does the scientific establishment and press do when confronted with this? Well, in congress there are members on both sides of this issue and they hold separate investigations. There is the NAS
panal that gets touted as vindicating Mann and the Wegman report that is scathing of Mann’s statistical methods and it is downplayed. Do these reports contradict one another? Gerald North, head of the NAS panal says they agree with Wegman’s assessment! It looks to me like the big climate, academic, journalistic, governmental funding complex is trying to put a clean face on things.
Then comes Climategate! A bunch of emails between paleo climate scientists are either leaked or hacked and made public. They show cherry picking, gaming of peer review and other bad behavior. A bunch of inquiries are convened that supposedly show that the scientists did nothing wrong. One of the emails is an actual crime! It’s a request to delete emails subject to FOI requests. Chris Mooney interviews Michael Mann and askes him, “You never did do that, right?” Mann says “no” and that he “never had any intent at all to”. The actual email asks him to pass along the request to Eugene Wahl. In his response, Mann says he’ll contact Gene ASAP! And Wahl, who was not contacted by these inquiries, did tell federal investigators that he recieaved this request and complied.
I can understand that you may feel some solidarity with Mann over your views on climate or perhaps just don’t want to turn on a friend, but then you’re not being a journalist. Your being a PR hack! Mann is now being quoted as a top “climate scientist”, writing editorials, hobnobbing with celebrities and suing a pundit (Mark Steyn) for referring to his hockey stick as fraudulent in a freaking blog post for an opinion magazine! The ACLU and a whole bunch of news organizations wrote amicus briefs against him. No one wrote one for his hurt feelings. As a science journalist, Mr. Revkin, don’t you think this might be an important issue to comment on? And if you think this is a legitimate defamation case, please explain how Mann not disclosing that his R squared results failed is not fraud.
I see this phsycologist who for all the world resembles a left wing academic version of Jimmy Swaggart, write a transparent hoax of a paper that slimes climate skeptics as conspiracy nuts in which the data only includes a trivially small amount of skeptics or conspiracy nuts. He then has a follow up paper retracted, yet he still gets a paper published in “Nature”! Chris Mooney credulously interviews him and hangs on his every word. I also notice Mooney dutifully reports on Willie Soon’s failure to fill out a line on some form about his funding source while completely ignoring Regenda Palchuri’s sexual harassment charges.
A shrill nasty ethics position holder named Peter Glieck steals a bunch of documents from a think tank and appears to forge one when he can’t find any dirt.He’s then allowed to go on his merry way. Twenty “climate scientists” write a letter calling for RICO investigations of skeptics. The instigator turns to be scamming huge salaries for himself and family members.
There are these 97% consensus studies. One gets tweeted by the president. They turn out to be gamed
by activists. And it’s never made clear what they are agreeing on. It’s the same with their pejorative hate label, “denier”. What exactly is being denied?
What really bothers me is the refusal to debate. Burning hydrocarnon fuels is increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and is causing warming. Is there really that many people disputing this? Everything else, sensitivity, how dangerous, best policies … is debatable!
______________________
I used my real name since I did address him by his in a couple of instances. I like my "Canman" handle and have been using it for years. I've recently started using twitter and my identifier contains my real name so I'm no longer anonymous. One of these days I may update my blog profiles.
The next day when I went to check if it was out of moderation or rejected, I got a 403 forbidden error. I thought maybe I was being blocked from viewing the site, so I went to the library to see if I could view it on their computers and got the same error. I figured it was some glitch, but considered the possibility that he decided to pull the post because of second thoughts about personal details that it contained (it does have some personal medical details). But now I see that it is back and my comment is still in moderation.
The site is for a science and technology magazine and not all the posts in the table of contents have live links, so I'm pretty sure it was a glitch. I hope he will read and post my comment.

(Update: Here is the resubmitted version.)

Mike Dombroski

Your comment is awaiting moderation.



Mr. Revkin, I’ve read your big long whine about people not being interested in your pet issue. I won’t say it’s not a serious issue or that there are no actions that should be taken, but I’ve really got a problem with the scientific establishment and science journalists like you and Chris Mooney! I started reading extensively on climate and energy about five years ago and I feel I have a pretty good handle on what the major authors, activists, pundits, magazines, blogs and major scientists are saying. You Climate people have become a parody of a banana republic status quo!
When you are proposing major changes to our economy and energy supply based on “science”, there are a lot of smart technically savvy people who are going to want to check this science. And they have! And many of them have found it wanting! An obscure young scientist (Michael Mann) comes up with a stunning hockey stick shaped graph that practically becomes the logo for the IPCC Third Assessment Report. He gets to be a lead author, full professor and funding magnet. Competent people are suspicious of the long straight handle without a Medieval Warm Period, dissect it and find out that it is bad science and publish papers showing it is bad science. And it’s not only bad, it’s hilariously bad! He made up a technique that mines hockey sticks! This ought to be an interesting story for a science “journalist” — a cautionary tale about over-zealousness getting in the way of good science.
So what does the scientific establishment and press do when confronted with this? Well, in congress there are members on both sides of this issue and they hold separate investigations. There is the NAS Panel that gets touted as vindicating Mann and the Wegman report that is scathing of Mann’s statistical methods and it is downplayed. Do these reports contradict one another? Gerald North, head of the NAS Panel says they agree with Wegman’s assessment! It looks to me like the big climate, academic, journalistic, governmental funding complex is trying to put a clean face on things.
Then comes Climategate! A bunch of emails between paleoclimate scientists are either leaked or hacked and made public. They show cherry picking, gaming of peer review and other bad behavior. A bunch of inquiries are convened that supposedly show that the scientists did nothing wrong. One of the emails is an actual crime! It’s a request to delete emails subject to FOI requests. Chris Mooney interviews Michael Mann and asks him, “You never did do that, right?” Mann says “no” and that he “never had any intent at all to”. The actual email asks him to pass along the request to Eugene Wahl. In his response, Mann says he’ll contact Gene ASAP! And Wahl, who was not contacted by these inquiries, did tell federal investigators that he received this request and complied.
I can understand that you may feel some solidarity with Mann over your views on climate or perhaps just don’t want to turn on a friend, but then you’re not being a journalist. Your being a PR hack! Mann is now being quoted as a top “climate scientist”, writing editorials, hobnobbing with celebrities and suing a pundit (Mark Steyn) for referring to his hockey stick as fraudulent in a freaking blog post for an opinion magazine! The ACLU and a whole bunch of news organizations wrote amicus briefs against him. No one wrote one for his hurt feelings. As a science journalist, Mr. Revkin, don’t you think this might be an important issue to comment on? And if you think this is a legitimate defamation case, please explain how Mann not disclosing that his R squared results failed is not fraud.
I see this psychologist who for all the world resembles a left wing academic version of Jimmy Swaggart, write a transparent hoax of a paper that slimes climate skeptics as conspiracy nuts in which the data only includes a trivially small amount of skeptics or conspiracy nuts. He then has a follow up paper retracted, yet he still gets a paper published in “Nature”! Chris Mooney credulously interviews him and hangs on his every word. I also notice Mooney dutifully reports on Willie Soon’s failure to fill out a line on some form about his funding source while completely ignoring Regenda Pachuari’s sexual harassment charges.
A shrill nasty ethics position holder named Peter Gleick steals a bunch of documents from a think tank and appears to forge one when he can’t find any dirt.He’s then allowed to go on his merry way. Twenty “climate scientists” write a letter calling for RICO investigations of skeptics. The instigator turns to be scamming huge salaries for himself and family members.
There are these 97% consensus studies. One gets tweeted by the president. They turn out to be gamed by activists. And it’s never made clear what they are agreeing on. It’s the same with their pejorative hate label, “denier”. What exactly is being denied?
What really bothers me is the refusal to debate. Burning hydrocarbon fuels is increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and is causing warming. Is there really that many people disputing this? Everything else, sensitivity, how dangerous, best policies … is debatable!
Links:

http://ncse.com/blog/2016/02/what-we-re-reading-0016934

http://issues.org/32-2/my-climate-change/

https://twitter.com/DombroskiMike

http://issues.org/


3 comments:

  1. Mike:

    The debate should really be about whether CO2 is actually causing any global warming. It is still just a theory, with no physical evidence that it is correct-it is all theoritical.

    According to Karl Popper "scientific theories must be falsifiable (that is, empirically testable), and that prediction was the gold standard for their validation".

    CO2 causing global warming fails both tests.

    On the other hand, I have developed a model based upon the removal of anthropogenic SO2 aerosols from the atmosphere due to Clean Air efforts that is essentially 100% accurate in projecting the average global temperature expected for any year 1975 - present, and which has already been empirically tested (by nature).

    Because of its precision in projecting average global temperatures, the model completely eliminates any possible additional warming due to greenhouse gasses.

    And it passes both of Karl Popper's tests.

    If the planet is to be saved from excessive warming, it is essential that the correct cause is addressed!



    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The IPCC estimate of sensitivity at 1.2 with no feedbacks or other effects factored in sounds pretty compelling to me. Natural variability, feedbacks and other effects don't appear to be very well understood. Maybe someday they will be -- maybe your model! Best of luck.

      Delete
  2. Mike

    did it ever get published? I hope so. It's great.

    ReplyDelete