Kevin Vranes, whose hockey stick post I discuss below, is part of a group of science policy bloggers at no/se/nada (well, it looks like the group is mostly Kevin). Added to the blogroll.
Now that I’ve got a “science policy” section over there, Chris Mooney’s been added. I’ve shared my discomfort with his work, but he’s still pretty much a must-read.
And before there were blogs, there was Bob Park. He used to fax around his “What’s New” every Friday.
Kevin Vranes pretty much nails it with an insightful analysis at Prometheus about the way the hockey stick debate has become such an odd sideshow:
Inaction was the political response to the 2001 SPM* presentation of the hockey stick. The hockey stick both as science and icon could not have been more hyped. But They saw it and They didn’t care. By that inaction, the HS lost its salience.
Now Michael Fumento’s editing his own Wikipedia page. Errr, I mean “Tracy Spenser” is editing Michael Fumento’s Wikipedia page.
Interesting piece by Sid Perkins (sub. req.) in the Oct. 29 Science News on the discovery of fossil sloths in Haiti and Cuba 4,000 years ago. In the longstanding debate between climate change and human hunting in the extinction of the big mammals in the Americas 10,000 years ago, score one for the humans with this bit of evidence, presented by Ross D.E. MacPhee at the SVP meeting in Mesa, Ariz.
Such a recent demise practically absolves post–ice age global warming as the cause of die-offs among these mammals and could undermine climate change as the trigger for extinctions throughout the Western Hemisphere since the last ice age ended some 10,000 years ago.
The argument is straightforward – people traipsing all over the continent, big mammals die. No people out on the islands in the Caribbean, big mammals live. MacPhee and a bunch of other people published a paper along these lines over the summer in PNAS.
Stuff from today’s bike ride, seen and heard:
Having thrashed around quite about over the last year in the issues raised by Dan Sarewitz’s scientization paper, I’m at a bit of a loss on something. Perhaps y’all can help.
There have been a couple of discussions this week on RealClimate (here and here) about the “false balance” problem – the allegation that journalists seeking to balance their coverage of science controversies create bias by quoting outliers and mainstream scientists, leaving the public with a false impression by giving the outliers greating standing than they deserve in contrast to the mainstream consensus on the issue at hand.
There’s an underlying premise to all this that has been unexamined: that what we in the press write does, in fact, matter. Does it? If so, how do we know? This is not a rhetorical question. Bob, in the comments to a previous post of mine, cited some interesting-looking literature.
In order to figure out how to function as a journalist in this scientized world, I need to figure out how to deal better with these questions. This is a lazyweb request. I know there are some very smart people who occasionally stop by here. Please cite more literature.
If I may, then, in my next breath criticize my good friend Tim Lambert whom I’ve never met, I think his post this morning on CEI bloviator Ian Murray’s remarkable global climate change conversation rather misses he point.
Murray used to be a serial denier of the consensus science on climate change. Now, in a breathtaking recantation, he’s turned the corner. Now he argues that the costs of greenhouse gas reductions outweigh the benefits of halting climate change. Lambert dismisses the argument with a quip, but really, that’s what the argument needs to be about. What are the costs and what are the benefits of various courses of action? We’ve all been off palavering about hockey sticks and MSU satellite data, studiously ignoring the elephant in the room. Until we get off the proxy arguments (pardon the pun) and get on with actually discussing the costs and benefits of various policy responses, we’re all just spinning our wheels.
In which my old buddy Michael Fumento (see also more from Fumento) gains an ally in yet his latest blubbering discussion with Tim Lambert.
Seems a character called “Tracy Spenser” started posting comments in Lambert’s blogs extolling the intellectual brilliance of Fumento and Lambert’s relative lack thereof. Spenser also seemed to be posting from the exact same IP address as Michael Fumento. Says Lambert:
It’s a Comcast IP address and Comcast provides one IP address per household, so there can be only one conclusion:
Tracy Spenser is a crazed Michael Fumento fan and is posting from the same house as him. Michael: GET OUT OF THE HOUSE. GET OUT OF THE HOUSE NOOOOW!!!
(It’s worth noting, just for posterity’s sake, that Fumento’s error that got me so exorcised in the first place, his blatant misrepresentation of the Lancet report last year on deaths in Iraq, remains on his excitingly newly redesigned web site. Despite Lambert, myself and others pointing out how the report’s text directly contradicts what he reported, he has not seen fit to correct his error. I stand by what I said last year: “We’re left with two possibilities here, neither of them pleasant. Fumento, who styles himself a journalist, either misrepresented the study’s conclusions, or he hadn’t read it.”)
Looks like Fumento’s placed himself in the running for the 2005 Golden Rake.
A discussion over at RealClimate about media coverage of climate change (an issue dear to my heart) sent me back to read a widely quoted paper last year by Boykoff and Boykoff – Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press.
Continue reading ‘The Media and Climate Change: Revisiting Boykoff and Boykoff’ »
The Barnett paper I quoted below talks about hydrologic changes “already diagnosed in some regions.” A reminder for those of you in the Western U.S. – we’re one of those regions.