Monday, September 17, 2007

Hors Categorie

Eli has added a new feature to the blogroll. There are some things that are beyond expectation, and the blogs of two friends of furry bloggers fit into that. Hors Categorie, for those who don't know is a classification of climbs in the Tour de France, that are so difficult that even the pros get off their bikes and walk. The English translation, beyond category, was a description that Duke Ellington used to describe the music he loved best.

As Michael Berube pointed out there are lots of dishonest grifters out there making a living off science denial. Our job, (climate changes inserted to Berube's rant) therefore, is to contest their legitimacy, and to find a way of dealing with them that denies what they want: namely, (1) important concessions or (2) outrage. They feed on (2), of course, and uses it to power their Climate Audting Center and Massive Persecution Complex and most of the time, we give it to them by the truckload. Realists need to try (3), mockery and dismissal, and thereby demonstrate, that when someone tries to blame global warming increases on hockey sticks and hibatchis, that person needs to be ridiculed and given a double minor for unsportsmanlike bullshit.

Visit Nexus and Horatio for some of the good medicine.

28 comments:

Dano said...

Realists need to try (3), mockery and dismissal, and thereby demonstrate, that when someone tries to blame global warming increases on hockey sticks and hibatchis, that person needs to be ridiculed and given a double minor for unsportsmanlike bullshit.

This sounds like tactic #1 for the Dano character.

I have, somewhere, a number of the standard responses Dano gets for comments along these lines. Perhaps in a few weeks I can throw some together into some sort of Coby-like list.

Best,

D

Anonymous said...

Call me a denialist, but no the pros don't get off and walk.
Nosmo

Anonymous said...

Mockery is good. Dismissal might work, but it's a tactic that the other side uses as well, and so a neutral person (if any still exist) might well be suspicious of anyone who uses dismissal; unless they already have reason to respect the dismisser's judgment.

The other side tries to use mockery, too, but they are usually too heavy-handed to be funny.

guthrie said...

Many neutral people still exist, although not so many on blogs like this. The main battleground is large public forums such as at newspapers for example. Here are myself and some others in action today:

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/letters.cfm?id=1485622007#new

Gareth said...

I continue to use the term "climate cranks" on Hot Topic. My general policy is to ignore them, unless they poke their heads up above the parapet and demand a spot of whack-a-mole, and then I try to have some fun.

Anonymous said...

Hey rabett, I'm here with this one. You as self described not quite failed professional fool; Dano with his irregular tablet taking; little Stevie Bloom trying to play bigboy games at serious blogs and having his bottom smacked everytime;TCO now in a permanent state of melancholy as he tries sees the other side argument but cannot quite accept it; marion delgado as pretentious twit who thinks we should go looking at his site for wisdom;(sorry Boris no room here for you) And you say you're only referring to others blogs for this, when the clowns have running your site all this time.

This is wonderful. A set of characters who deserve every bit of mockery and dismissal are now going to use such to damn their foes. Talk about being thrashed by a feather duster.

Bring it on boy monsters. Lets ruck.

Feeling the tingle to be better than better than best

JohnS

EliRabett said...

As Holly Stick said too heavy handed to be funny. Add to that a total lack of introspection and you have teh definition of boorish.

Anonymous said...

holly stick,

Were you thinking of JohnS when you wrote this:

"The other side tries to use mockery, too, but they are usually too heavy-handed to be funny."

Au contraire, it is quite amusing to see the juvenile taunts JohnS who thinks he's really accomplished something by scoring 50% on the Wit-O-Meter.

And he does it with such remarkable consistency, too.

Anonymous said...

JohnS is about as good at introspection as JohnA is at intro thermodynamics.

Anonymous said...

See, this is what I mean: mockery is completely fitting. Actually, it is a step higher than treating "their" "ideas" seriously, as at least they get attention with mockery.

Best,

D

Anonymous said...

I wasn't thinking of John S. in particular, since I haven't read many of his comments. But I do appreciate the way he illustrated my point. QED

Anonymous said...

Come on Rabett, flesh wounds at the moment. You drew people to the name calling sites and somehow you and the others think you are above it all. Boorish- nah, Rabett you're looking in the mirror.

What was it holly stick- QED- thats right for illustrations isn't it.

Bestest regards

JohnS

Anonymous said...

"I wasn't thinking of John S. in particular, since I haven't read many of his comments."

If you've read one, you've read them all. They are like a Klein bottle, with no contents.

His lack of imagination seems to know no bounds.

The only thing he changes from one comment to the next is his "signature", and even that is not original. He stole it from Dano.

He's a mockingbird mimicking a Dano parrot.

Anonymous said...

Mockery is good...

Once again, I wish for the days of USENET KILLFILES.

I've been using newsgroups since mid-1980s, and I offer the following rule-of-thumb, which has served me well for 20+ years.

Once you decide that interactions with identity X are useless, (you'll learn nothing from them, and they nothing from you, add them to your KILLFILE, and NEVER, EVER reply to another post. NOT EVER, no matter how much your blood pressure goes up. [Of course, without general KILLFILEs for Blogs, you have to simulate this manually.)

Also, it certainly applies to DBATs (Drive-By Anonymous Trolls).

If people don't follow this rule, almost any *unmoderated* discussion's signal-to-noise ratio asymptotically approaches 0. This is a Gresham's Law for on-line bulletin boards: bad drives out good.

As a result, old threads that might contain useful info for a new reader, become much less so, i.e., it takes too long to wade through the junk.

Rob Dawg said...

Be known by your compatriots and deportment. Kudos to Dano for recognizing his special talent.

Anonymous said...

"someone tries to blame global warming increases on hockey sticks and hibatchis"

Good example of a strawman.

let's review the history.

(1)"someone" said, "we need to get rid of the medieval warm period"...

(2) mann et al 98 uses poor methodology to eliminate the MWP.

(3)mcintyre & mckitrick prove the hockey stick false, and NAS recommends that bristlecones not be used as proxies for temperature,
(without which there is no hockey stick)

so you see, global warming is not blamed on hockey sticks, but a false hockey stick is supposed to "prove" AGW.

no sale.

you can call me "anon #1".

guthrie said...

But anonymous 2:00pm, you do remember that the hockey stick shape is still there even after the statisticians reccomendations are followed? And that multiple lines of proxies still show a similar shape?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_past_1000_years

Anonymous said...

guthrie...

not if you leave out the bristlecones!

Anonymous said...

Yes, anonymouse, even if you leave out the bristlecones as per NAS recommendations.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

--Officer, I want to report a missing Medieval Warm Period. I'm desperately afraid that he's a victim of foul play.

--OK, ma'am and when did you last see your MWP?

--He was where he belonged, in northern Europe; I just went to check the thermometer for a moment, and when I came back, he was gone!

--Have you noticed him talking to any denialists recently?

--Oh, they were always trying to talk to him through the fence, telling him he was a worldwide phenomenon, and really hot. (Breaks down and sobs) I told him to ignore them, but I could see his head swelling up and he started to act like he was more important than he really is. Do you think they've taken him? He's just a little MWP, officer!

--(Gravely) Ma'am, we'll do our best to find him, but I'm afraid that once these denialists get hold of a concept, it doesn't look good. You need to be aware that you may not get it back in recognizable condition.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps you missed this, from Dr. Edward Wegman's report. (Wegman is the chairman of analytical statistics at NAS:

"Findings
In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and
the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling."

but I could be wrong.

EliRabett said...

John S there are little bunnies hereabouts, Eli strongly suggests you control your language.

Anonymous said...

Wegman also said that Mann's findings were not necessary to the main conclusion about human influence on the climate.

That's also what the NAS found.

The hockey stick debate was always a sideshow to the main event.

Same as the recent error found by McIntyre. It means nothing, but some people keep dragging it out and parading it around like it does because that is all they have.

It's really rather pathetic -- motivated by ego more than anything else.

"But. but, but... the Hockey stick is broken. It's broken, I say. Shattered."

Great. I'm glad.

Who really cares? (other than perhaps Michael Mann and Steve McIntyre and a few of the climate audit cheer-leading squad, of course)

Anonymous said...

With a nod to Lewis Page (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/02/terror_idiocy_outbreak/)

How about the appellation 'Climate-clown'?

Personally I'd be much more interested in discussions of the current climate change literature than the regular whack-a-mole.

Anonymous said...

anon 6:13 pm...

you were given an actual quotation from the Wegman report...and you respond with self-serving paraphrase...

i have read the Wegman report. I didn't read a quote like the one you describe. Could you actually quote the report, rather than paraphrasing the leaders of your belief sytem?

Anonymous said...

I suppose the part of the Wegman report that I found least convincing was the synthetic signal part. Wegman introduced a synthetic signal (looked like the IPPC AR1 estimate) into red noise and ran Mann's method on it. Guess what?! Mann's method extracted the signal! Wegman knew what his masters (Inhofe, etc.) wanted, so he gave it to them.

Yeah, McI's critque was correct in the literal sense, but everytime he made a critique Mann would redo the analysis and show that it made no difference. Only when the oldest data in his proxy set was eliminated (the bristlecones) did the MWP reappear. Even then the analysis which McI presented was clearly faulty, and the "hockey stick" during the 20th century still existed. The Wegman report was perfunctory at best (and yes I did read it). What was more emarassing was his testimony in front of Congress when he said that he didn't know too much about climatology; he said he thought that since CO2 was heavier than O2 that it would be concentrated close to the ground...

This is a prime example of a prominent scientist going outside of the bounds of his area of knowledge. The same can be said of Freeman Dyson's opinions of both AGW and evolution. He is (or was) brilliant in his area of expertise but he is clueless outside of it. Science is so specialized these days that the appeal to authority (in this case Wegman) just does not carry water. I'd rather see a reference to Von Storch than Wegman...

Rattus Norvegicus

Anonymous said...

Anon 10:12 said: "you were given an actual quotation from the Wegman report...and you respond with self-serving paraphrase...I have read the Wegman report. I didn't read a quote like the one you describe."

Then I'd have to conclude that simply can not read.

Here's what Wegman said:
"We do agree with Dr. Mann on one key point: that MBH98/99 were not the only evidence of global warming.
As we said in our report, “In a real sense the paleoclimate results of MBH98/99 are essentially irrelevant to the consensus on climate change. The instrumented temperature record since 1850 clearly indicates an increase in temperature.” We certainly agree that modern global warming is real. We have never disputed this point. We think it is time to put the “hockey stick” controversy behind us and move on.”
energycommerce.house.gov/reparchives/108/Hearings/07272006hearing2001/Wegman.pdf

And here's the quote from the NRC report:
http://dels.nas.edu/dels/rpt_briefs/Surface_Temps_final.pdf

"Surface temperature reconstructions for periods prior to the industrial era are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence.”

Compare that to my paraphrase above:

"Wegman also said that Mann's findings were not necessary to the main conclusion about human influence on the climate.

That's also what the NAS found."