Saturday, July 05, 2008

Who deserves the credit, who deserves the blame, Naomi Oreskes is the name

Now sensible bunnies that you are you may wonder what Eli is going on about and what the connection between an eminent academic (Naomi Oreskes) on the left and a comic character in an old TV show, (Hogan's Heros) on the right has to do with anything at all.

As you may recall, Oreskes, in an article in Science pointed out that the denialists had nothing, nothing, and that Sgt. Schultz when confronted with reality knew nothing, nothing.


Our good denialist buddies have set out to remedy that situation but in doing so they are producing strange fruit. Because climate science is firmly rooted in basic physics and chemistry (even biogeo), to rip, for example, the greenhouse effect down, you have to take a fair amount of physics and chemistry with, and this produces grotesck results, such as we have recently seen from Gerlich and Tscheusner, Miskolczi, the relatives Robinson and Soon, and many more, soon to appear in such well known journals as Energy and Environment, JPANDs and the true journal of last resort, the Journal of Scientific Exploration. Indeed this is the point (and it is one that Michael Tobis has spent many posts on- give us a good link Michael), climate research depends on basic physics and chemistry, to deny the first is to cast out the second, and then indeed, you are left claiming that you know nothing, nothing. Which in the case of the denialists and delusionists, is probably right.

And who is to blame for this state of affairs, why Prof. (soon to be Provost) Naomi Oreskes. If she had not shown that there really was a scientific consensus on climate change, why none of this would have happened

12 comments:

  1. Well, maybe but the article title should spell Naomi correctly... Is there something funny in those carrots?

    Meanwhile, you've mentioned some of the real gems. Maybe it's time to establish a permanent top-10 list of bad articles? (& journals) or maybe, like Oscars, have several different categories in which deserving entries could compete?

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  2. "Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.

    Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers “implicit” endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no “consensus.”

    Read the rest of the story at the U.S. Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works"

    http://www.globalclimatescam.com/?cat=5

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  3. Hehe, E&E and the PR arm Dailytech.
    The Register has had some kooky stuff on lately also, although not as bad...

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  4. John, it was Saturday night.....

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  5. Oh, and btw, we already have the award here at Rabett Run, it is called the S. Fred.

    That sort of stuff used to be a cottage industry with a few ancient practicioners before Naomi bagged the cats. Now they even have a bunch of librarians drawing up lists.

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  6. It's true: all you Warmers are “.... no different than the guys sitting around waiting for the spaceship.”

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  7. I was fortunate enough to see Dr. Oreskes speak at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography about six months ago. Her lecture was entitled, "The American Denial of Global Warming"; it was a very thorough dismantling of anti-global-warming wingnuttery.

    I'd pay money to see wingnut deniers try to take on Dr. Oreskes in person -- there wouldn't be any big pieces left after she got through with them.


    Thanks to UCSD-TV, folks can view the entire lecture at http://www.ucsd.tv/search-details.asp?showID=13459

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  8. "Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.

    Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers “implicit” endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no “consensus.”


    What an incredibly brain-dead stupid post!

    If you were to search through a bunch of papers in biological science journals, you'd find only a small minority of them explicitly endorsing the scientific consensus regarding evolution. Therefore, there must be serious scientific controversy about the validity of evolution. That's exactly what the above poster is arguing, and it's just the sort of idiot reasoning that we've come to expect from global-warming deniers these days...


    --caerbannog the anonybunny

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  9. Eli, I'm afraid I have permanently warped my kids by letting them hear rather too many Tom Lehrer songs. My pre-K boy last year often headed to school singing his favorite: "So long, Mom, I'm off to drop the bomb, so don't wait up for me..."

    So, uh, thanks, I think, for the reference in your title, it certainly made me chuckle! And since the topic of the song is plagiarism - one sign of real-life plagiarism in science (which does happen) is people talking in impressive detail about things they really have no underlying understanding of, and cannot describe other than by repeating the same catchphrases over and over. Which we see all over the blogosphere these days in those who advocate for Gerlich, Miskolczi and friends (don't forget Dr. John Nicol - see climateaudit bb for a long thread on that one!).

    Your main real point here is a good one too - denying the CO2 greenhouse effect means getting something fundamentally wrong in the physics - and each of the above characters manages to do that in their own special way. Which is at least comforting to those of us who actually understand the science - but then, we were already on the "consensus" side anyway, so what do we know? :-)

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  10. Anonymous 12:57AM:

    The next time you need endocrine surgery to save your life, I assume you'd ask a climate scientist to do it.

    Schulte may be a fine endocrinologist, but he was totally incompetent in that paper, among other things, and that's been pretty thoroughly documented, if I do say so myself.

    Note: not only is Naomi's Scripps talk available online, but I have hopes that the next interesting installment (from a few months ago at Stanford) will go up soon (Western Fuels Association and Greening earth).

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  11. MarkeyMouse says: It's true. Naomi is one of the worlds finest solo debaters. It's just in that she has trouble in the "open" events.

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