What tenure is for:
John Whitehead writes at the Environmental Economist:
An email sent to my Provost and cc'd to my Chancellor:
In regards to the report titled "Measuring the Impacts of Climate Change on North Carolina Coastal Resources" by the Walker School of Business, I am curious to know if this document was peer reviewed prior to its release?
This report completely ignores potentially positive aspects of global warming from which Coastal North Carolina would benefit significantly. . . . . . .
Since Appalachian State is a publicly-funding institution, I am going to make my extreme displeasure known to my legislative representatives. I expect nothing less than a full retraction, public apology and discipline of the authors.
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They must have a pretty low standard for granting tenure to begin with:
"Since Appalachian State is a publicly-funding [sic] institution..."
Or, perhaps unlike most State Universities, they fund the public rather than the other way around.
Fair enough, but now please explain what emeritus is for. Recent events in Boulder are really making me wonder.
Actually I'm reminded of a James Bond movie scene where the hero escapes across an alligator-infested moat by rapidly jumping from alligator head to alligator head. Something similar seems to be happening in Boulder, except it involves sharks.
Promoting a professor to Emeritus status is kinda like putting a cow out to pasture after they have passed their useful (milk-producing) years.
Or is this what tenure is for?
It appears that Roger Pielke, Sr believes there is a vast NOAA conspiracy to keep the station data from himself and those on the Hackey Team.
Based on my understanding of federal privacy law, NOAA's stance is correct. That many or even most of the volunteer observers might not care about being contacted is beside the point. Roger and the Frauditors (think of them as the scientific equivalent of the Sex Pistols doing John Cage, with Roger on prepared piano) also don't want to understand that access to the station location information will lead a persistent person to that station's volunteer observer(s).
This reminds me a lot of Cold Fusion (but in reverse, of course). In both cases, the vast majority of scientists weigh in on one side, but you nonetheless have this small group of "revolutionaries" who claim to have overturned the conventional thinking.
Years after the scientific community had long since debunked Cold Fusion, there remained hold outs who insisted that there was something to it.
They continued to do their amateurish "basement experiments" and to insist that they were "onto something" that no one else had noticed.
They also insisted that the mainstream scientific community had conspired against them to keep them from getting a fair hearing -- ie, to keep their findings out of peer-reviewed journals, prevent them from attending scientific conferences, etc.
Cold Fusion seems to have died a quiet death. I don't know for sure, but I presume that it's now buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in the Utah desert.
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