Someone called Andrew K is using the excellent Bishop Hill’s blog to help him to compile a database of environment correspondents, complete with educational qualifications or lack of them. Says Andrew K of this project:
This is as much as anything an appeal for information: to do a little crowdsourcing.
Commenter MikeE is not sure he likes the tone of this post:
… I am not sure I like the tone of this post.
Yes, interesting. One of the biggest frauds in the whole history of our species is still being attempted, but don’t let’s be too nasty to the newspaper cheerleaders still trying to promote it. Let’s not get the tone wrong. I say that Andrew K’s tone is spot on.
Bishop Hill himself defends his guest-blogger:
One of the most interesting aspects to the history of AGW is the sheer unquestioning awfulness of the media coverage. This is an attempt to explain that phenomenon, and is not unreasonable.
Well, I think it goes beyond that. This is indeed quite nasty, as MikeE says, but only in the same sort of way that a prison sentence is nasty for a criminal. It is nasty but thoroughly deserved. Nasty but still the exact right thing to do. Just as I am in favour of prison sentences for criminals, I am also thoroughly in favour of the spotlight being shone on these (mostly) ridiculously unquestioning environmental correspondents. I said when Climategate first broke that once the “science” had been given a good seeing to, then next in line would be people like the idiot journalists who had been passing this “science” on with such enthusiastic credulity, them being a big part of the story itself. Excellent. What a difference an internet makes, eh?
So, if you can help with relevant information, please go to the Bishop’s blog and provide it. Comments about the general goodness or badness of compiling lists of bad people can go wherever that makes sense to commenters. Personally, as I say, I am all for it.
Just from looking at the (incomplete) list, I am struck by just how incestuous the group of journalists is. They all seem to have been hanging out in the same places and talking to one another for the last 20 year. Just like the scientists, in fact.
Those ‘same places’ would be a bar, Michael. That’s what journalistic peer review consists of.
The problem with a lot of the current generation of scientists is they are not really capable of logical thinking. Somehow they are able to deduce from the (debatable) fact mathematics is a science that all science is mathematics. So they stripped out of their research anything that could not be mathematically analyzed and ended up with an equation that had CO2 on one side and rising mean temperatures on the other which is a catastrophic oversimplification.
As James Loveslock has written, climate change is too complex for science.
We shouldn’t be too harsh on journalists who toe the line on climate hysteria, especially if they work for government financed organisations like the BBC. They only get one life, they know which side of the argument their bread is buttered and they want to buy nice cars, holidays, education and houses either for themselves and their familes.
It’s up to every individual to make their mind up about the matter and anyone choosing to uncritically believe the governmentor its financed broadcaster only has themselves to blame for that.
Personally I choose to look just a little deeper. Al Gore, Prince Charles and the likes of Bono all live in energy extravagant luxury. Only an idiot would think that they actually belive in the climate energency they claim the rest of us need to avert by energy frugality.
re: Ian Thorpe @ 08:41 pm
While science is nothing without maths, mathematics is definitely not a science. On what do you base your claim?
(based on the starting axioms) True mathematical statements are provable. OK, I’ll accept the Goedel argument. No science is provable; it has merely yet to be disproved.
Pete is both right and wrong. The journalists peddling this nonsense ( and it won’t become science unless and until the raw data has all been published, details of the method and apparatus with which they were obtained have all been published, and all calculations have been published ) are largely caring only of their mortgages, like the rest of us.
However, just as it was necessary to kill and impoverish a lot of similarly human Germans in order to get rid of Hitler, it is necessary to trash (rather less drastically one hopes) a lot of simple journalists if our grandchildren are not to live in caves.
It is absolutely astounding that so called green groups, with minimal public support continue to get fawning media attention for their stunts. And their stunts are necessary of course simply because they have so little backing from the public. If they had huge membership numbers they would use them on the streets to make their demands.
Thank God for our ability to bypass the MSM.
Greens are accorded status because they are a non-profit lobby group. By which i mean that they are not in it for the cash- though they are rewarded in terms of power and influence and charisma. We should call them Non-cash-profit groups, but that doesn’t sound as romantic.
“They only get one life…”
So do I and so do you – but where they are immoral is in wanting to “trash” mine and yours with their carbon regulations. So I agree with Pat – the destruction of their careers might be sufficiently just.
“We should call them Non-cash-profit groups…”
What does the “Non” stand for? Now-or-never?
Yesterday I checked out a link from the comments on the excellent climate blog WattsUpWithThat and discovered the work of Dr Ferenc Miskolczi. He is a former NASA scientist who rebelled against his AGW-mad masters and returned to work in his native Hungary.
Read the article and don’t miss the presentation at the end. It is also worth googling him for some reports of the opposition sceptics have faced.
The importance of Miskolczi is that he claims to have PROVED that the greenhouse effect is not infinite, ie that by adding more CO2 the effect goes up indefinitely. Rather, in an Earth-type atmosphere with clouds and a vast reservoir of water there is a theoretical maximum effect which we reached long ago.
In other words, global temperatures are not merely insensitive to CO2. They are independent of CO2! The climate changes we have experienced are due to other factors – some of which are of course in minor part anthropogenic.
The details of his maths are beyond me but his work appears to have predicted some measurable (and measured) effects to within the limits of experimental accuracy, which would put it at the highest order of theoretical physics.
The AGW media control would once have been able to bury this. Thanks to the blogosphere I hope that his work receives unprecedented scrutiny and peer-to-peer review, as if it holds up the entire CO2 scam explodes.
Sometimes I think there may be a God and that he does have a sense of humour.
RW: You got it in one, I would say:
Sometimes I think there may be a God and that he does have a sense of humour.
pete, yes, anyone looking at Gore/Bono/etc’s lifestyles, should be able to work out they are a lot more “carbon-heavy”.
I think this is an excellent idea, and could be taken a lot further. Perhaps we could have a database of ‘government spokesmen’ linking them with the lies they tell, and a database of senior officials and examples of their gross incompetence (there is no need to pretend.
We can push back against the database state by keeping a database.
The groups might officially call themselves “non profit no cash,etc.” but the individuals working in this booming industry are definitely attached to “filthy lucre” – climate change “officers” in local authorities, investment in green technology, etc…etc…And when scientists in university departments are dependent on favourable climate warming results for their continued livelihood it’s hardly surprising that so much heat was generated when the farce began to unravel. Could this wasted energy not be harnassed somehow?
True Science is about reproducible results, which result in WORKING MODELS.
That’s why we dont have cold fusion, we couldn’t reproduce it.
And working models dont even have to be exact. You can design aircraft with Newtonsl laws of motion without invoking relativistic effects and they work just fine.
The sun takes ABOUT the same number of days for it’s cycle each year – goodness gracious! we can plan crop planting!
The results of Skinner and Pavlov are reproducible by anyone, those of Freud are not. Anyone seen an “id” lately.
Both descriptive (eg plant classification) and predictive (eg newtons non relativistic laws of motion) sciences are reproducible.
Fudging your own results and coercing others in order to achieve reproducibility doesn’t give you a working model.
Without working models science is useless.
James Delingpole on his DT blog is “boasting” that if Liddle gets the editors chair at the Indy he’s going to be the Environment Corr. Now that would be fun to watch…lol
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100021983/delingpole-to-be-appointed-independents-environment-correspondent/
Interesting. I haven’t yet looked for actual names (which might be at best misleading anyway), but I have a theory that is consistent with this. It goes like this. Many (if not most) reporters consider themselves smarter and better informed that the general public. In order to sustain this opinion of themselves, they can never admit that they don’t understand the science once it gets past the 5th grade (or, say, A levels in the UK). Thus, they appoint themselves experts, and act like it.
What can be salvaged from the damage done by CO2 alarmism? Damage to science, to politics, to economies, to food production, to energy production, to the environment, to international relations, and to the mental wellbeing of countless millions seriously upset by it, not least children. The only good thing I can see is an improved understanding of the steps by which so many people and institutions were taken in by a very weak scientific theory, unsupported by observations and pushed primarily using computer simulations rigged to dramatise the effect of this trace, but very beneficial, gas on climate. The Club of Rome did it with ‘Limits to Growth’, some professor in London did with Mad Cow Disease in the UK, but the daddy of all these scams has been CO2 alarmism. The craven role of the media, and I would guess the vast majority of ‘environmental correspondents’ is a part of the jigsaw that needs to be studied if we are to reduce the chances of such severe damage being inflicted by the next scam to come along using computer models. One of my best instructors in computing told me ‘don’t use a computer to solve a problem unless you already know what the answer is’. Much wisdom there, much realistic humility on the limits of our abilities to program computers.
If people (like MikeE) feel that this is taking the wrong approach in looking skeptically at the environmental reportage that is being done, how do they feel about this:
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/opp/news/senate_minority_report_on_global_warming_not_credible/
CFI is an organization I like a lot, but I have vocally protested this “Credibility Project” as a kind of advocacy that is inappropriate. They are attacking ad hominem the skeptics of the “climate change” crowd rather than actually addressing the questions being raised by those skeptics. They dismiss any such questions or arguments as invalid and unworthy of debate because these people have not published “peer reviewed” papers in accepted journals. Since their people run the journals, such papers don’t get published. Thus these people lack “credibility” and are dismissed. Nice game if you can rig it like that.
I don’t care if it’s “fair” (tho it IS). I want them crushed.
One of the biggest unexplained holes in the theory is how much is the difference in the heat retention factor between a molecule of oxygen and a molecule of co2. Supposedly, the pre industrial age concentration of co2 was approx 288ppm where as now it is 360ppm, which amounts to less than .00009 increase in CO2, with a resulting increase of x for the heat retention (something less than .00004. You are essentially replacing an oxygen molecule for a CO2 molecule. With such a small increase in the heat retention, it is inconceivable that you would have such a large increase in temp due to the increase in co2.
Making a list of Gang Green’s cheerleaders should be considered a noble cause. However, it might be easier to create the much shorter list of “journalists” and politicians who haven’t been taken in. As for their educational qualifications, if they had educational qualifications they probably wouldn’t be “journalists” and politicians, hmm?
Kurt Godel asserted (1932) that mathematical constructs more set-theoretically complex than simple arithmetic –Euclidean geometry is “simple” in this sense– can be either consistent or complete, but never both. That is, no consistent set of axioms can ever be complete, while any complete set of axioms must inevitably encounter contradiction. This extremely liberating view of mathematical endeavor was anathema to 19th Century determinists, notoriously including Einstein and the great David Hilbert (1862 – 1943), who could not accommodate Godel’s “ignoramibus” (a formally undecidable proposition).
As for math as science: From at least 1970 creative types have used computers to derive hypotheses previously untestable. Edward Lorenz derived his seminal Chaos Theory; Mandelbrot originated fractal geometry, the basis for all digital animation techniques; John Horton Conway’s 1970 “Game of Life”, Andrew Wile’s 1995 proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, represent a “cognitive science” akin to the Gedankenexperiments of quantum physics and Relativity. In this sense, modern math (particularly in abstract topological realms of genomic biochemistry) has become an empirical discipline wherein accelerators and test-tubes verify well-modeled abstruse concepts.
We find such progress wildly romantic and await the era of complex/virtual (“imaginary”) quantum-processors with combined hope and dread. Should a self-emergent cyber-order, profoundly unintelligible to mortal minds, unite all hyper-links as an evolving, immaterial super-organism, World’s End may be closer than anyone suspects.
Well bung this dude on the list.
This is John Hurst, the Time’s environmental Correspondent.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6p6rsRr0m8&feature=player_embedded#
Hardly Country Joe is he?
Woops!
No it isn’t (following too many links at a time). This is John Hirst having a whine in the Times.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6988696.ece
The folkie is the Times correspondent though.
Heh. My local newspaper had an “environmental editor” a couple years ago who wrote thumb-suckers about AGW. I looked up her credentials; in her “day job”, she ran a “holistic therapy” practice featuring hot stone massage.
I know it’s slightly off-topic for this thread, but the point made (and link included) by RW in his post on January 15, 2010 at 08:23 AM is truly extraordinary, and worthy of its own thread. If (as has been posited, with apparent mathematical rigor which is far beyond me) Dr. Miskolczi is correct, that average global temperatures are completely insensitive to ambient CO2 levels, it is major news, a real game changer. This merits widespread attention.
“Greens are accorded status because they are a non-profit lobby group. By which i mean that they are not in it for the cash- though they are rewarded in terms of power and influence and charisma. We should call them Non-cash-profit groups, but that doesn’t sound as romantic.”
That plus hundreds of millions in grants allowing them to draw fat salaries just by requisitioning it from the rightful owners, the taxpayers. Taxpayers who got nothing in return but ripped off.
Laird,
I recommend caution. The sceptics over a Climate Audit seized on Miskolczi’s 2007 paper eagerly when it came out (I had a go myself), but found what appeared to be a flaw in it. I think somebody there did write to Miskolczi to ask how the problematic step worked, but no reply was reported. (Unfortunately, the forums seem to have died since Climate Audit was recently moved to new servers.) This document seems to be a rehash, and there’s no discussion of having filled in the gap.
Sceptics are sceptical even of AGW-sceptical papers. Don’t let me stop you following it up, but don’t get your hopes up too high, either. If he couldn’t convince the people at ClimateAudit, I don’t think it’s going to work on the AGW establishment.
A quote from a journalist friend:
“The reason we all got into journalism was that we couldn’t pass Grade 9 Algebra.”
First visit to this site. Excellent!!! The Green Gang OR
GANG-Green. We must “Amputate” to avoid further infection!!!!!
Pa Annoyed and Laird
I too recommend (and I thought recommended) caution. As Laird pointed out, I posted because I found the item extraordinary and worthy of wider attention.
I have looked at a critique of the paper. Its physics and math were beyond me and the review was negative, but from various comments the reviewer was obviously a biased “warmer” who ignored all climate forcings other than CO2 and glossed over the actual predictive success. There are other reviews and I haven’t gone into them in detail yet.
The CO2 theorists have IMHO reached their equivalent of the ultraviolet catastrophe: their theories have some truth but fail to fully correlate with empirical observations. What gives me hope is that if M’s theory, flawed though it may be, actually makes some accurate predictions, well then it is better than anything else out there and represents a major step forward. I hope someone, M or whoever, can take some more steps. That is how science progresses (I trust Michael J does not disagree).
For a good presentation of climate forcings other than CO2, here is a link to a video from CERN. It takes about an hour and shows some impressive correlations.
I don’t know why Godel was brought into this (by John Blake), but for the record the title of Godel’s paper is “On Formally Undecidable Propositions”. The emphasis is on “Formal”, meaning “formal mathematics”, in which mathematics is a subset of logic, a game with symbols, without any reference to the real world. No mathematician belives that mathematics is incomplete.
Dom,
I’m a mathematician, and I believe mathematics is incomplete. All it means is that there are always some statements that are true in arithmetic, but which cannot (even in principle) be proved.
It was a follow on from the question of whether mathematics is a science. Because unlike in science some statements can be proved there is a difference. But in practice mathematicians work with unproven hypotheses (except we usually call them ‘conjectures’) and questionable assumptions that are all subject to challenge. Consider the controversies around the validity of irrational numbers in ancient Greece, or negative and imaginary numbers in the 16th century. Do numbers like two or minus one have a square root? It wasn’t at all obvious at the time, and for all they knew it might have turned out the other way. And of course, mathematicians sometimes make mistakes.
I suppose I was wrong to say “no mathematician” believes mathematics is incomplete. But I don’t think the examples you gave are examples of incompleteness. For example, “mathematicians are sometimes wrong”. Not the same as “mathematics is incomplete”. The examples from ancient Greece more or less prove my point — the question of irrational numbers is now resolved.
And my point, in any case, is that Godel himself did not claim that mathematics is incomplete, only that formal mathematics, since it is a subset of logic, will be incomplete because of the problem with self-referential statements.
I think that it depends on what is meant by ‘mathematics’. If math is one of the many manifestations of the physical world, then it is not math that is incomplete, but our grasp of it (and, by extension, of the physical world itself). If, however, math is a tool which we use to analyze the physical world, then, like any tool, it can be incomplete. Of course math is both of the above, but it depends which of these two aspects are under discussion.
I think the problem is that the word “complete” is being used in a rather peculiar technical sense. Mathematicians do that – they use everyday words for bizarre concepts abstruse beyond obscurity.
In the sense used here, “incomplete” simply means that there are true statements that cannot be proved. Godel’s theorems not only prove that to be true, they construct examples – and we’ve found many more since.
(There are a few restricted systems where Godel doesn’t apply – but for any system sophisticated enough to contain arithmetic on the counting numbers it does. It’s not just formal logic, it’s everything.)
In general, the question of ‘undecidablity’ (whether there can ever be a general method for solving a particular type of problem) is an important one in modern maths, especially in subjects like cryptography. But nowadays mathematicians mostly regard it as an annoyance, but no big deal.
(Incidentally, the problem is not really with self-referential statements – most paradoxes can be re-arranged into forms that do not directly use self-reference, although the results are often even weirder. The root of the issue is that all the methods of mathematical proof can be modelled as arithmetical operations. This violates the separation of levels – instead of having numbers being basic and proofs operating on them, the proofs can themselves be considered numbers. It’s very fundamental to the way our universe works, and is the reason atoms and molecules can think. But that’s a long digression I don’t really have time for. If you’re interested, read Doug Hofstadter’s book ‘Godel, Escher, Bach’.)
If on the other hand you’re interpreting the ‘completeness of mathematics’ as the question of whether we have invented all the mathematics we can, or will ever need, then I’d would say absolutely not! New mathematics is being developed today at a faster rate than at any time in the past. There are lots of unresolved questions still. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever run out of new things to study.
Getting back to the weather, my Monday ‘The Australian’ newspaper has a frontpage article today about how one of the IPCC ‘prophecies’ was just uninformed speculation. The himalayas were predicted to have all melted away by 2050, apparently. The scientist who speculated about this in 1999 was just engaged in random speculation in a science which was not his branch of science, as he freely admits.
His comments were reported on Green sites as science, and these green sites were then quoted by the IPCC when it made its’ ‘scientific’ predictions!
If you check with glaciologists, they discredit anything like that happening, even in worst-case scenarios! Even if they were melting away, it would take centuries, on the current known science!
I wonder how many people still think the glaciers will all be gone soon?
Nuke,
Apparently, an Indian glaciologist speculated on the phone that they might be gone by 2350, and a New Scientist Reporter wrote it down incorrectly as 2035, which the WWF (cue wrestling jokes) included in a technical summary report on how AAARGH!! THE GLACIERS ARE ALL MELTING!!! MELLLTTTIIIIIING!!!!! in their usual calm and balanced manner, and the IPCC cited it.
The funniest bit, of course, is that when the Indian government said it was all a lot of nonsense, Pachauri the IPCC fraudster described them as “arrogant” for daring to contradict the IPCC’s settled science, and they knew very well what they were talking about, and had even given it a “very likely: > 90%” tag.
Even New Scientist, who are about as fanatically pro-AGW as you can get, are asking “What the hell just happened?!”
Un-dirty-word-believable.
Something else to mouth bad words over- ‘The Australian’ today has an article on the glaciers of the Himalayas, and glaciologists point out that glaciers have beeb retreating since we first studied them, in 1896, and onwards since then. Over a hundred years of gradual shrinking of glaciers, on average. I say on average, because some glaciers, like Chong Kumdan, have branches that have grown longer.
The glaciologists believe that this is all a legacy of the end of the last Ice Age, not carbon in the atmosphere. Human pollution in the atmosphere could be adding to this, but it didn’t cause it.
Oh, and ‘The Australian’ calls this IPCC scandal ‘Icegate’. Quite a good name, I think.
The first time I heard the AGW claim was shortly after I had read an article on the perils of using computer modeling for phenomena that are poorly understood. Global warming is based on modeling the entire planet over periods of decades and centuries. It couldn’t be more fraught with pitfalls. Years later, I read an article in Scientific American early in 2000 or perhaps in 1999, which featured vignettes from various experts about what new discoveries and breakthroughs would occur in the next 50 years. The one who wrote about atmospheric science proclaimed that by 2050 computers would be more powerful and able to model the atmosphere in greater detail.
That tore it for me.