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There are groups out there that insist that vaccines are responsible for a variety of problems, despite all scientific evidence to the contrary. We (the office of Secretary of Health and Human Services) have reached out to media outlets to try to get them not to give the views of these people equal weight in their reporting.
and then
read thisThere is a well-orchestrated and fairly successful effort under way to confuse and sometimes cherry-pick information," Lubchenco said.
The best response, she said, is to provide information from trusted sources such as NOAA, which operates the National Weather Service and collects and distributes data on weather and climate.
"I don't view our role as trying to convince people of something," she said. "Our role is to inform people."
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26 comments:
Heh, spooky. Good post :)
Hugh Hammond Bennett would probably have a lot to say about the musings of Roger Jr. I dare say there would be a few expletives involved.
I heard that you still practice your Swedish and thought that this might still your thirst of oil...
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http://uppsalainitiativet.blogspot.com/2010/03/brist-pa-olja-och-kol-raddar-inte.html&sl=sv&tl=en
Pielke, the honest broker, ehe? Must be getting exceedingly difficult to maintain that pretense.
The basic problem with this particular argument is that even though the well-orchestrated campaign of disinformation to claim that temperatures aren't rising, that it is all urban heat island, that the rising levels of carbon dioxide aren't due to anthropogenic emissions, etc. is clearly just that -- a well-orchestrated campaign of disinformation. Responding to that campaign with well-established scientific facts may be a response to something which is essentially political and even ideological in nature without itself being political or ideological.
Furthermore, Pielke once again shows that what he wishes to criticize isn't the campaign of disinformation put out by ideologically-motivated political operatives. Instead, what presumably deserves outright condemnation is any attempt by scientists to "provide information" (as she states it) and defend scientific knowledge in the public sphere in the presence of such a campaign.
Their use of empirical evidence and citing of conclusions arrived at in peer-reviewed literature is somehow worse... Than the literature manufactured by various ideological think tanks being paid by various fossil fuel interests and right-wing/libertarian organizations that are usually funded by Scaife-, Koch- or Bradley-owned foundations?
It would appear that Pielke is out there to defend the think tanks as they are "honestly" engaged in fraud. Against what? Any attempt to address their disinformation as it must somehow worse -- since it must be political as it is responding to something political and must therefore only be wearing the fraudulent fig-leaf of scientific respectability?
I doubt that he could get much more explicit than this. How can anyone take this fellow seriously any more? Thank you for pointing this out, Eli.
I don't know where to put it... a bit sad to spam a thread that show Pielke for what he is...
But I can't help to ask if it is common for bull like this getting published because of bad supervision?
http://etd.ohiolink.edu/etd/send-pdf.cgi/Kolan%20Sreekanth.pdf?acc_num=osu1259613805
Let's change this slightly and have a look at it:
"There's a strong campaign to try and confuse people into thinking that Pi = 4. We feel we should inform people that this is not actually the case and they should get their values of Pi from trusted mathematical sources."
Now, I realise that the wanting stuff to work, or buildings to stay up, aircraft get into, and stay in, the air etc., is just a value judgement and is probably politically motivated...but would wishing people to want to know/use the true value of Pi, be stealth advocacy?
Skanky, at one point a state legislature, I believe it was Louisiana, passed a bill which declared pi to be 22/7! Your example is not as far fetched as you might think...
In a similar vein, Willis shows that 288 - 255 = 8.
And finally Magnus, did you have to post that link? The stupid, it burns! A look at the citation list includes Watts, Jaroworski, Climate Audit, E&E and another energy related rag, Energy and Fuels. Although he cites Gavin, he keeps getting the cite wrong calling him "Gavin, S.A.". Did this guy actually get his degree in mechanical engineering(!) for this piece of junk?!
Speaking of stealth advocates, have you guys seen the verbal knotting done by a Andreas Bjurström, Esq. at RC?
After being told off by Gavin - and rightly so - for confusing the IPCC's role of advocacy, he comes back with a post that clearly shows that he is a RP Jr. clone.
Rattus Norvegicus I think I half-knew that (from the dim and distant recesses of my memory), or that some King did it somewhere and somewhen.
That said, it wasn't supposed to be that far-fetched as it was an attempt to make a point. :)
Former skeptic, I also noticed that....
MapleLeaf
Re: 288-255=8
I loved the post by the guy who wanted to use the ideal gas law to calculate the temperature of the atmosphere. He said he used standard pressure (apparently forgetting that pressure changes with altitude) and used an altitude of 100 km to find the volume. I wonder if he remembered to subtract out the volume occupied by the (non-gaseous) earth. The lack of knowledge and ability there is just appalling!
From my observations of various people's writings, the problem is something like this.
When a reality-based science (i.e. a science that is based on real data) arrives at a finding that is well supported by the reality but that has strong implications for human belief systems (eg religion, politics) then people have a choice. They can either make adjustments to their belief system to accommodate the new scientific finding, or they can try to reinterpret (spin, twist, deny) the science in order to keep hold of their previous belief system.
It seems to me that RPJr has taken that process a step further, and is saying that scientists who are presenting their scientific findings that happen to implicate some political beliefs, that they are somehow "wrong" and shouldn't be presenting those findings because they "offend" other people's politics. In other words, his "stealth advocacy" is his way of saying "don't tell me any science that implies that my politics is faulty".
The honest approach of course, if reality-based science is saying something that conflicts with a "belief system", is to examine that belief system and adjust it to fit reality.
Rattus,
Well looking at his "supervisors" he probably past with the highest grade....
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ef800581r
Magnus, I got into a "newspaper debate" with Robert Essenhigh a few years ago. He wrote an op-ed in the Columbus paper saying that the warming was natural and the CO2 was coming from places like the ocean. I wrote a letter to the editor that was published saying that Essenhigh was wrong because the amount of CO2 didn't match up with what could come from the ocean. I got an email from a grad student in Lonnie Thompson's group thanking me for my letter. Essenhigh followed up with a letter that completely distorted my letter to make it seem as if I agreed with his original op-ed. I sent Essenhigh an email telling him that he had deliberately distorted my point, but I never received a reply from him. (No surprise) However, just a week later, there was a paper in Science (or Nature, my memory is fuzzy) reporting that the pH of the ocean had decreased, so the CO2 couldn't be coming from the ocean. It was fun to see nature smack Essenhigh down.
And the readers of the newspaper never knew about that. The Essenhighs of the world flourish with such tactics.
Thompson needed to write a letter, his grad students needed to write letters and more.
Magnus, I got into a "newspaper debate" with Robert Essenhigh a few years ago.
Sounds like Essenhigh has gone "emeritus": http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=313631
Steve L says: the thing at michael tobis' place right now is on topic (apparently from Hank) but on youtube -- a Scripps oceanography/paleo guy describing how just measuring something gets you labeled as an advocate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX9uvyF58U0
He ends up advocating that regular folks don't let such labelling continue.
Rattus Norvegicus,
Actually, it was Indiana that almost passed a bill decreeing pi=3. The bill made it only as far as second reading.
However, this pales in comparison to the S. Dakota Leg decreeing climate is influenced by "astrology". Ray L
Ray,
I noticed that after I made the post.
Reading the actual bill, it is difficult to derive a value of pi that was actually being proposed. As best as I could tell the number was somewhere between 3 and 5. The Guinness book says 4. The bill passed unanimously in the house but never got past the senate.
It really is hard to beat the SD lege for anti-science though.
Word verif sounds like a new drug: remodil. I should probably trademark it!
@RN:
Too bad, remodil is already a registered trademark for a drug. Let me take that back: for a supposed drug (herbal stuff, not tested and such):
http://www.iherb.co.nz/getCertainProducts.cfm?productId=142&affiliateId=2008077610
google "Jeremy Jackson" ocean Scripps for much more.
Belated hat tip to Tenney Naumer who posted about his work quite some time ago here:
http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2010/02/brave-new-ocean-talk-by-jeremy-jackson.html
And Simon Donner, here:
http://simondonner.blogspot.com/2009/09/slippery-slope-to-slime.html
And there's much more
http://www.google.com/search?q=jeremy+jackson+PNAS
@ Hank Roberts.
I like Jackson's quote, which I saw over at OIIFTG:
"I was ... labeled as an advocate because I ... measured something. ...
The dark side has labeled information as advocacy, and it's your job as citizens to understand that."
http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/
Eli, you're right, and when I wrote a letter to the Columbus paper complaining about their letting him distort my points, they politely said they wouldn't publish my letter because they didn't want a back and forth argument going on in their editorial pages. That, of course, let Essenhigh have the first and last words.
Hello guys...President Harding proposed a Department of Education and Welfare as early as 1923, and similar proposals were also recommended by subsequent presidents, but for various reasons was not implemented.It was only enacted thirty years later as part of the Reorganization Plan Number 1 of 1953, transmitted to Congress by Dwight D. Eisenhower on March 12, 1953. This was the only department of the U.S. government to be created through presidential reorganization authority, in which the president was allowed to create or reorganize bureaucracies as long as neither house of Congress passed a legislative veto. This power to create new departments was removed after 1962, and in the early 1980s the Supreme Court declared legislative vetoes unconstitutional.
ibrahim has turkey spam with many separate links.
He didn't forget to close a tag.
The text reads something along the lines of "voice chat voice voice sites" repeated over and over. The website, although prettier, is roughly as repetitive. Trying to spam the search engines. Doesn't realize that Google and the search engines that imitate it are too smart for something like this. Could damage your own rankings. I would delete it.
Done and done.
Eli does have a few standards
Well, please let me know if I ever impose upon them, or better yet just delete what you don't like. I don't bruise that easily.
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