If true, this report does the AGW cause no good at all.
Can’t disrupt the Consensus, can we?
Agreed. Even if your cause is the right one, do not concede the high ground. Scientists are supposed to respect those that challenge consensus, even if they think the challenges themselves have been disproven. Someone willing to challenge current scientific thinking is the one who can actually discover something new.
Or not. Indeed, more often than not, it’s the “or not” type.
For every Einstein, there’s a bazillion outpatients on day release.
Agreed that this is poor form–if true. It’d be helpful to see the original email, to make sure that neither the scientist nor the columnist are stretching facts. If they’re not, then certainly this move should not have happened.
It would be interesting to hear the story from somebody other than Christopher Booker.
From Wikipedia; with references.
I’m wondering if there’s a slightly different explanation:
Is it possible that the meeting is for members of the group, and that he tried to invite himself to the meeting and was declined, since he’s no longer a member?
Thanks for that. It’s pretty much all I needed to know.
That reminds me of a proposition that was on the ballot here a decade or so ago. A “yes” vote would have banned the use of cruel bear traps. Not all bear traps, mind you, just the cruel ones. The dissenting position held that if such traps were banned, bears in bandit masks would sneak in through your children’s windows at night and teach them about evolution.
Or something.
Agreed. And LHoD, if he were excluded for not being a member, why not say so say instead of saying that his views were not welcome? In a way, it’s even worse. I mean, from the article you cite, he’s concerned about polar bears and the way climate change is affecting their population; he just doesn’t think that it’s due to AGW as described by the IPCC.
From that cite, his own opinion of not being invited is quite reasonable:
Why he didn’t say so is the big question. What we’ve got is part of a sentence devoid of context in which his views were singled out. Was there a clause that followed, saying, “…and the obnoxious way you kept harping on them no matter what we were discussing, making it impossible to carry on a coherent discussion”? We don’t know: we lack context.
I can only assume Mr Booker has sources other than Dr Taylor to make his claim. Or is in error.
From my reading, it’s a meeting of polar bear experts. If there’s a thousand* polar bear experts and they all think this one guy is nuts, I can’t say that I’m in any position to naysay them.
- Random value
My experience has been that deniers love to make reports that omit important points so as to make scientists to be more at odds than what they really are.
Or to ignore important bits like the researcher not being invited for the pedantic reason of no longer being a member of the group.
Reading through the 2004 report by the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PDF), here’s what they say:
Or to summarize: We don’t know how many polar bears there are, but we’re gonna need to start figuring it out more clearly 'cause of this. Whether the warming will be a negative or a positive (for polar bears), who can say?
When, exactly, did the AGW bullies strike the first time?
- Fourth grade. Mean old Billy Ardsburger gave me a wedgie while saying, “The polar caps are too melting, you sissy!”
It’s just the latest in a series of violent science gang-related incidents, following similar donnybrooks caused by the Germ Theory Goons and the Relativity Ruffians.
Real scientists get their grad students to fight for them.
Really real scientists get their grad students to build semi-autonomous robots to fight for them.
No. That’s real engineers that get their grad students to build robots to fight for them.
Or, if they’re even more nefarious (dare I say it, “mad”), real scientists get the engineering grad students to build their robots for them. They must be stopped!