Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?

Blake · March 23, 2010, 7:30am

How does that compare to the resources invested in lobbying for GW legislation and advertising by groups such as Greenpeace, WWF, Al Gore, PETA etc? I’m betting it’s chickenfeed in comparison.

Shagunathor · March 23, 2010, 10:46am

From what I’ve found so far, environmental groups combined spend less on lobbying than Exxon-Mobil alone. I haven’t yet found figures for advertising. I’m having trouble finding what I’d call very good sources, but here is a NY Times article that gives figures for spending during the third quarter of 2009:

Shagunathor · March 23, 2010, 11:48am

Actually, it turns out that a lot of the environmental groups have their IRS form 990 online, so you can browse what they tell the US government about their financial activities. Looks like the WWF operational budget for 2009 was about $130 million. Greenpeace ~$15 million. PETA ~$13 million. Registration was required to look at the Sierra Club’s, but other web pages put their budget at ~$100 million. Looks like we’d have to add up a lot of environmental groups entire budgets and assume that they are entirely for lobbying and advertising before they would dwarf oil company spending on the same. But I’m oversimplifying and looking at this from an American-centric perspective.

Poptech · March 23, 2010, 12:15pm

There about as open as allowing a five year old to come in at anytime and delete the database. There is nothing remotely open about SourceWatch as they strictly control content. Global Warming information on Wikipedia is controlled by alarmist scientists,

Wikipropaganda On Global Warming (CBS News)

Ever wonder how Al Gore, the United Nations, and company continue to get away with their claim of a “scientific consensus” confirming their doomsday view of global warming? Look no farther than Wikipedia for a stunning example of how the global-warming propaganda machine works.

As you (or your kids) probably know, Wikipedia is now the most widely used and influential reference source on the Internet and therefore in the world, with more than 50 million unique visitors a month.

In theory Wikipedia is a “people’s encyclopedia” written and edited by the people who read it - anyone with an Internet connection. So on controversial topics, one might expect to see a broad range of opinion.

Not on global warming. On global warming we get consensus, Gore-style: a consensus forged by censorship, intimidation, and deceit.

I first noticed this when I entered a correction to a Wikipedia page on the work of Naomi Oreskes, author of the now-infamous paper, published in the prestigious journal Science, claiming to have exhaustively reviewed the scientific literature and found not one single article dissenting from the alarmist version of global warming.

Of course Oreskes’s conclusions were absurd, and have been widely ridiculed. I myself have profiled dozens of truly world-eminent scientists whose work casts doubt on the Gore-U.N. version of global warming. Following the references in my book The Deniers, one can find hundreds of refereed papers that cast doubt on some aspect of the Gore/U.N. case, and that only scratches the surface.

Naturally I was surprised to read on Wikipedia that Oreskes’s work had been vindicated and that, for instance, one of her most thorough critics, British scientist and publisher Bennie Peiser, not only had been discredited but had grudgingly conceded Oreskes was right.

I checked with Peiser, who said he had done no such thing. I then corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so.

Peiser wrote back saying he couldn’t see my corrections on the Wikipedia page. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again. I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made.

Turns out that on Wikipedia some folks are more equal than others. Kim Dabelstein Petersen is a Wikipedia “editor” who seems to devote a large part of his life to editing reams and reams of Wikipedia pages to pump the assertions of global-warming alarmists and deprecate or make disappear the arguments of skeptics.

I soon found others who had the same experience: They would try to squeeze in any dissent, or even correct an obvious slander against a dissenter, and Petersen or some other censor would immediately snuff them out.

Now Petersen is merely a Wikipedia “editor.” Holding the far more prestigious and powerful position of “administrator” is William Connolley. Connolley is a software engineer and sometime climatologist (he used to hold a job in the British Antarctic Survey), as well as a serial (but so far unsuccessful) office seeker for England’s Green party.

And yet by virtue of his power at Wikipedia, Connolley, a ruthless enforcer of the doomsday consensus, may be the world’s most influential person in the global warming debate after Al Gore. **Connolley routinely uses his editorial clout to tear down scientists of great accomplishment such as Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service and a scientist with dazzling achievements. Under Connolley’s supervision, Wikipedia relentlessly smears Singer as a kook who believes in Martians and a hack in the pay of the oil industry. **

Wikipedia is full of rules that editors are supposed to follow, and it has a code of civility. Those rules and codes don’t apply to Connolley, or to those he favors.

“Peisers crap shouldn’t be in here,” Connolley wrote several weeks ago, in berating a Wikipedian colleague during an “edit war,” as they’re called. Trumping Wikipedia’s stated rules, Connelly used his authority to ensure Wikipedia readers saw only what he wanted them to see. Any reference, anywhere among Wikipedia’s 2.5 million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the consequences of climate change will be bent to Connolley’s bidding.

Nor are Wikipedia’s ideological biases limited to global warming. As an environmentalist I find myself with allies and adversaries on both sides of the aisle, Left and Right. But there is no doubt where Wikipedia stands: firmly on the Left. Try out Wikipedia’s entries on say, Roe v. Wade or Intelligent Design, and you will see that Wikipedia is the people’s encyclopedia only if those people are not conservatives

Propaganda indeed.

BrainGlutton · March 23, 2010, 1:27pm

Actually, that’s from National Review Online.

Poptech · March 23, 2010, 1:49pm

Posted on the CBS News website.

Grey · March 23, 2010, 2:00pm

Well I skimmed the Nov 2008 article from arxiv.org. It looks more like an overall discussion paper about his disagreements with people and institutions than about climatology.

The core of his argument seems to be that the theory/experiment approach to science is being replaced by a model/experiment method which allows for increased self delusion. He then couples that to big science and the potential for non-experts to represent scientific organizations as experts. I think he omits the potential for people to be lazy and attribute expertise where none is explicitly claimed.

The argument around theory/experiment vs. model/experiment has some validity however I’m, not sure what his point is. There are complex systems where reduction of variables and the ability of performing controlled experiments are simply not possible, particularly where nonlinear effects come into play. Since no one is going to give you a planetary climate to poke and prod in a controlled manner you have to model it. The problem is the baseline model we have (the world) is continually being changed while the “experiment” is being run. So we have multiple models producing multiple possible paths and then a statistical profiling of potential futures. Which brings us to our second problem; the majority of people are unfamiliar with non definitive science. SCIENCE to may people is simply plugging in a few numbers and knowing where a 100 kg piece of metal is 30 million km away. They’re not so familiar with statistical analysis and degrees of uncertainty. Error bars are completely foreign to them.

GIGObuster · March 23, 2010, 2:13pm

Lawrence Solomon is the author of The Deniers.

That is an opinion piece BTW, not a news article. And after I saw the incompetence that he showed in the Deniers book, I will have to dismiss him.

MrDibble · March 23, 2010, 2:49pm

look, Poptech, you’re not our first denier. We’ve had this runaround of biased industry front organisations, 10 year-old Lindzen citations even the man himself no longer cites, and especially the attempt to declare only denier sites as worthy.

How about you, yourself, in your own words, tell us why “climate science” is not “currently designed to answer questions”. You’re making an assertion - back it up.

MrDibble · March 23, 2010, 2:59pm

I’m betting not.

But you’re shown you’re perfectly capable of digging up your own cites, don’t let me do your homework for you. I’ll throw you a bone, though - start here. See if you can see Greenpeace or WWF anywhere on that list. The one where Exxon-Mobil is at No. 9. It gets better when you see individual years, believe me.

MrDibble · March 23, 2010, 3:20pm

Blake, hereare some more anti-climate change figures to check against. Let me know when the environmental groups (and Al Gore) are spending more than $234.7 million a year on lobbying.

Poptech · March 23, 2010, 3:32pm

Or people can look at Connelly’s wikipedia edits to confirm what Solomon is saying.

GIGObuster · March 23, 2010, 3:48pm

Unfortunately you want to defend the use of Wikipedia as a dumping ground of misinformation, Lawrence Solomon would love to be able to add that misinformation to Wikipedia.

In her on-air dismemberment of the disingenuous National Post columnist Lawrence Solomon last week, Anna Maria Tremonti, host of the CBC radio show, The Current, asked Solomon this:

“In your book (The Deniers), you write that the scientist you talk about are not actually deniers, that most of them quibble with some of the details but not with the fundamental question of whether climate change is happening or whether it is caused by human activity. Do I have that right?”

Solomon responded: “No, you don’t have that right at all.”

Yet, on Page 45 of his book, Solomon says: ""As these dramatic reversals for the doomsday view mounted, I noticed something striking about my growing cast of deniers.

“None of them were deniers.”

Solomon then spends a page going over quibbles and concludes that the people in his book are “Affirmers in general. Deniers in particular.”

That’s a little point that Solomon never seems to mention on the speaker circuit. At least, in the radio and television interviews I’ve heard - and in his endless series of quibbling trivia that he has written in the Canadian business flyer the National Post - he never seems to say something forthrightly honest like: “none of the people in my book are deniers, really. They just argue about tiny bits of science that even the IPCC admits remain unsettled.”

Neither does Solomon acknowledge the complaints that he has received (and rebuffed) from legitimate scientists whose work he has misrepresented.

He just sits, smiling for the camera, while someone introduces him as the author of a whole book and series on scientists who deny climate change - as if that were actually true.

Solomon’s next public “appearance” as a denier expert comes in an open conference call scheduled by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2008 at 10 a.m. (presumably that’s Inside-the-Beltway Standard Time).

Turn on, tune in and don’t hold your breath waiting for Larry Solomon to acknowledge what he so surprisingly admitted in his own text: that his book title, which implies fraud, is actually an example of fraud, and one that’s working out very well for this suddenly more-famous author.

PS: Getting Judged by the Company You Keep

Regarding the photo of Lawrence Solomon at a “CEI” lectern, it’s interesting to note that the Competitive Enterprise Institute is so discredited on the issue of climate change that Exxon Mobil agreed to stop giving them money.

Poptech · March 23, 2010, 4:55pm

Except it is not misinformation. It is the reality you want censored so people cannot read it.

Oh please not the smear site Desmogblog,

DeSmogBlog

$$$ Funded by James Hogan (James Hoggan & Associates) and John Lefebvre (Former President of Netseller Group)

Who is James Hoggan? (Financial Post, Canada)

So who is James Hoggan? He’s a public relations man, based in Vancouver. His firm, James Hoggan and Associates, is positioned as a feel-good local operation with clients in all the “right” public and private sectors. He also sits on the board of the David Suzuki Foundation.

One of his side efforts is a blog operated out of Hoggan and Associates. Funded by retired Internet bubble king John Lefebvre, the blog has one full-time and three part-time staff. They spend their time tracking down and maliciously attacking all who have doubts about climate change and painting them as corporate pawns.

There has been no mention on the blog, nor on The Fifth Estate, of James Hoggan’s client list. They include or have included the National Hydrogen Association, Fuel Cells Canada, hydrogen producer QuestAir, Naikun Wind Energy and Ballard Fuel Cells. Mr. Hoggan, in other words, benefits from regulatory policy based on climate change science.

But it is as a climate commentator that Mr. Hoggan gets carried away. On The Denial Machine, Mr. Hoggan is allowed to go on at some length about how climate skeptics are not true scientists, are not qualified, or have no expertise.

That takes some gall. Here’s a totally unqualified small-town PR guy making disparaging comments about scientists he says are unqualified while he lectures the rest of us on the science. “If you look in the scientific literature, there is no debate,” he tells Mr. McKeown. It doesn’t seem to bother Mr. McKeown that Mr. Hoggan has no expertise. It is also a little rich to have a member of the Suzuki Foundation board pronounce other scientists unfit and unqualified for climate assessments, while geneticist David Suzuki roams the world issuing barrages of climate change warnings at every opportunity.

Multi-billion-dollar charges for B.C. man (The Vancouver Sun, Canada)

Blog Funder Guilty of Money-Laundering (Heartland Institute)

GIGObuster · March 23, 2010, 6:20pm

Who is James Hoggan? (Financial Post, Canada)

Let be noticed that once again, you do not want to discuss the clear misrepresentation of the scientists by Solomon.

It is still a fallacy to shoot the messenger, specially by using the tactic of smear by association. You still need to explain why one has to respect anyone like Salomon when he misrepresents scientists.

MrDibble · March 23, 2010, 7:05pm

Wait, we’re supposed to not trust* David Suzuki*, now? The man is the greatest Canadian of all time (Tommy Douglas, who he?), never mind amongst the greatest TV science popularizers. There’s a holy triumvirate of Sagan, Attenborough and Cousteau, and Suzuki shall sit at their right hands.

GIGObuster · March 23, 2010, 7:25pm

And I forgot to mention that the article at DeSmogBlog is based on an interview made by the CBC that showed the mendacity of Solomon. Can we expect the next denialist effort will be to find a way to discredit even the CBC?