THE SCIENCE JOURNALISM SCHOOL AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

Many issues of  The Daily Telegraph ago, in a galaxy far, far, away:

TELL THE REVIEWERS IT WILL ALL MAKE PERFECT SENSE IF THE EDITORS PRINT THE JOURNAL UPSIDE DOWN

Wondering how  Willie Soon's last paper  with the Connolly Brothers made it into print ?
Andy May's recent  post  at WUWT

My excellent adventure into the March for Science

inadvertently reveals the extent of the  data stretching  contrarians  protest while simultaneously practicing, 

Andy is a self-described 'petrophysicist'.  His bio  says he is in the honest-to-gosh business of producing not fossil fuel, but CO2  itself as:

Senior Petrophysicist at Kinder-Morgan Energy Partners
January 2013 - Present  (2 years 10 months) CO2 source field petrophysics, mainly in Colorado and Arizona

Kinder-Morgan  helps drill the carbon dioxide wells providing supercritical CO2 to enhance petroleum production in America's oil patch. But prodigeous as Andy's carbon footprint may be it has not served to inflate his climate science bibliography- he has none. His only publications are in petroleum engineering journals and conference proceedings.

Shunning more recent and disintested reviews of  temperature trends, like : Consensuses and discrepancies of basin-scale ocean heat content changes in different ocean analyses. Wang, G., Cheng, L., Abraham, J. et al. Climate  Dynamics  (2017),  Andy's blog post cites Willie's August version of Soon & Co's article in Earth-Science Reviews,150, 409-452: November 2015, Re-evaluating the role of solar variability on Northern Hemisphere temperature trends since the 19th century

But  Andy's 'preprint' take involves turning some published, but inconvenient, total solar irradiance trends  literally upside down. To  reverse  those  trends  in  re-rendering  the  original  data :  "the absolute values of the y-axes have been varied to fit."

No matter how you mirror it, solar irradiance variability has long been one of the unhottest fronts of the Climate Wars because :
1.There isn't very much -
2. The sun's overall irradience has downticked  even as global temperatures rise-

So Willie et al. tried to spice matters up by vertically stretching the irradiance numbers  during intervals of high solar variability, to  make them seem to rise  rather then fall  relative to an overall solar irradiance that remains too flat to matter,  leading readers up the down escalator in  May's mislabled WUWT post " figure 10".

The  figures in the real article, (  pardon the Elsevier copyright redaction ), end at number 8,  but the  sheer length of this Gish Gallop through the heliosphere in an unsuccessful search for Uncertainty Monsters - 43 pages makes one wonder less who Willie's patrons are these days, than whether they pay him by the word ?

The Truth That Sets Men Free Is Seldom The One He's Paid To Write

JAMES  DELINGPOLE   WRITES  AT  BREITBART:

Underpaid tradesmen seek alms at Paris Climate Hustle debut
None won a science journalism scholarship

Facts are sacred. The truth always makes the best story. You do not  make shit up.

Not only ought this stuff to be obvious, but it ought to come instinctively. Isn’t the whole attraction of joining an unglamorous, overworked, underpaid trade like journalism that you want to discover the truth about the world: all the stuff that they would rather you didn’t know?

That’s certainly been my own experience in the last few years covering the climate change/enviro-lunacy beat... I know I’m doing good and making a real difference: there are some devious bastards out there doing terrible stuff and I’m exposing their knavery and holding them to account.

For any self-respecting journalist, I’d call that “job done.”

Sometimes I get asked by people on the other side of the argument: “What if you’re wrong?”

Here’s  the  first  thing  I’ll  do  if  I’m wrong  about climate change.  I’ll write  a  big  piece  explaining  why  I’m wrong.   Then  I’ll  find someone who  is  prepared  to  pay  me  for writing the opposite of what I do  now.

This isn’t because I’m  a moral paragon. It’s because I’m lazy and  because  I prefer  the easier life:  writing  journalism where you have to keep making up your “ facts ”  is  much,  much  harder   than  doing  what  I  do  now ,  which  is basically, copying out true facts and then adding a few nice adjectives and thinking up a snarky final sentence."

Like : 
“It is not my job to sit down and read peer-reviewed papers because I simply haven't got the time..."

                                                 James Delingpole, 2011 BBC  interview with

                                                      Royal Society president Sir Paul Nurse

  Or:
“I feel a bit of an imposter talking about the science. I'm not a scientist, you may be aware. I read English Literature.”

                                                James Delingpole, 2011 Heartland Institute 

                                                     International Conference on Climate Change 

THEY DONT MAKE TERMINATORS LIKE THEY USED TO

           ANOTHER  PREDATOR'S  APPRENTICE  NEEDS  ARNOLDS ATTENTION:

IN ITS CLASSIC ERA THE CATO INSTITUTE STUCK TO CENSORING THE EPA

PC PRC COMRADE BOYCOTTS UCSD COMMENCEMENT SPEECH BY RUNNING DOG OF PLATE TECTONICS

NO  WONDER HE  LOOKS  TIRED- 
HE  HAD  TO FEND OFF  THE  WHOLE  INDIAN PLATE  AT THE SAME TIME 

CURRY DOWN UNDER

Judith Curry's defense of Trump's climate tweets on Australian public radio recalls Spicey's sound bites at a White House press conference. 

But the presenter sounds like NPR on steroids- his next program explaining this one features just John Church & Naomi Oreskes. 

Having listened for an hour to:

• Don Aitkin
  Former Vice-Chancellor
  University of Canberra
• Brian O’Brien
  Adjunct Professor of Physics
  University of Western Australia
  Perth WA
• Judith Curry
  Former Professor and Chair
  School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
  Georgia Institute of Technology
  Atlanta Georgia USA
• Freeman Dyson
  Former Professor of Physics
  Institute for Advanced Study
  Princeton University
  Princeton New Jersey USA
• Garth Paltridge
  Retired Atmospheric Physicist
  Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University
  Emeritus Professor and Honorary Research Fellow
  Institute of Antarctic and Southern Oceans Studies
  University of Tasmania
  Hobart Tasmania
• Andy Pitman
  Professor and Director
  ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science
  The University of New South Wales
  Sydney NSW
• Steven Sherwood
  Climate Change Research Centre
  University of New South Wales
  Sydney NSW

I really don't think so.
 Judge for yourself --
https://radio.abc.net.au/programitem/pe5DBwaVO3?play=true

T

SNL MAY BE IN RERUNS, BUT THERE'S STILL PLENTY OF STANDUP ON THE HILL

WHO'S HANDLING THE APOCALYPSE ACCOUNT?

Scores of foundations, NGO's and the United Nations Environmental Program have backed a multi-million dollar global effort to establish programs in  environmental journalism  and  climate  communication.

After TV Tobacco Ads Were  Banned  In 1969 Some
 Anti-Tobacco  PR Firms Turned  To  Planeteering

Yet  those PC  programs tend to be historically selective.  Few dare recall how some founders of Cold War era anti-nuclear movements transformed   themselves into postmodern  environmental activists and climate policy strategists. Those who do  invite denunciation by climate activists on the left, who resort to terms like 'anti- science' or ' this  is not  history  of  science', the words  authors Naomi  Oreskes and  Eric  Conway apply to political opponents who cannot sensibly be called "climate deniers" having always embraced CO2 driven anthropocene   global  warming as a  scientific paradigm, and  contributed to its progress with  peer-reviewed research  in such emblematic journals as Climatic Change. 

That  journal's founder,  the late  Steve Schneider  famously  observed that  climate science  is a contact sport,  but  what really brings out the brass knuckles  all the way from The Nation Institute, to the right hand side of K-Street is taking both sides to task when they indulge dubious historiography,  or try to  revive and renormalize  the bald propaganda of the Cold War era for the internet age.

Things can turn ironic fast when those doing the denouncing forget what high-profile  colleagues in the  climate  commmunications PR business may say if they wander off-script and into reminiscence elsewhere on TV:

An  Aeon essay  by former University of London social psychologist Alexandra Stein, whose ‘Terror, Love and  Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems’,  published  last year  by Routledge, focuses  on  the  seminal  work of  psychohistorian  Robert Jay Lifton, who knows a thing or two about communicating to the masses, having published  Thought  Reform and the Psychology of Totalism   in 1961. After  becoming   Carl Sagan's  sidekick on the Nuclear Winter lecture circuit, Lifton segued into a career of   global warming advocacy, most recently with  Mind and habitat:  Nuclear and climate threats, and the possibility of hope.

Stein digs deeper into history than Oreskes & Conway's Merchants Of Doubt , which  constructs a  narative  in  which  Republican  publicist Frank Luntz  takes  his  cues  on  climate denial from the  the tobacco industry's success in sowing doubt about smoking risks by hiring well credentialed shills  to  shift  opinion by calling  science  into question. The reality behind  this  haute vugarization  of  cultural  history  is far stranger :  Merchants Of Doubt  glides  across  thin  analytic ice  with barely a glance into the archival depths below.

When  Congress  banned  TV cigarette ads in 1969,  anti-tobacco Mad Men like Porter-Novelli principal William Novelli turned to Earth Day as the  Next Big Thing, and his firm's  Creative Department  was soon orchestrating ( and illustrating) environmental publicity campaigns for hot  tabloid science  topics like 'nuclear winter' and  acid rain, and this new  line  of  advertising expertise  prospered into the present century, and  branched  out  into  academe ,  witness  the  Green  Advertising Alliance  encompassing Ogilvy & Mather and Saatchi & Saatchi, or Edward Maibach  Ph.D,  former Porter-Novelli Worldwide  Director of  Social  Marketing, now directing The Center for Climate Change Communication at  George Mason  University,  and  coauthor  of the report  linked above.

It was  a  matter  of  entrepreneurial  survival.  K-Street  and  Madison Avenue's  greener denizens had a hard time persuading their corporate accounts  to bet  advertising  dollars on Captain Planet, and still had two decades  and  an  Energy Crisis  to kill before  The Climate Wars   began  in   earnest  as  an  advertising  cause celebre' , with  James Hansen's  warning   to  the  Congress that warming was on the way.

Oreskes is no stranger to TV, having long been an anchorwoman for Al  Gore's  annual  Climate Realty Project  telethon.  But  Stein  has discovered  that Merchants Of  Doubt  notwithstanding, the roots of Advertising 101 in  academic  psychology  reach  down  far  deeper than the Tobacco or the Climate Wars. She traces the idea that a single dissenter can create a debate to:

the  conformity experiments  of  the 1950s  by  the  social psychologist Solomon Asch, who demonstrated that, when faced with obviously incorrect information, 75 per cent of participants publicly denied clear evidence before their own eyes rather than buck the majority opinion. However, when just one other person disagreed with the majority and broke the unanimous bloc, the conformity effect almost entirely disappeared.

That is the central thesis of  both Luntz's infamous  memo, and Oreskes &  Conway's unoriginal book, and the made-for-TV movie of Merchants of Doubt   has  projected  it  into  the  realm of  cliche', alongside  black  and  white  images  of  cigarette selling  doctors anachonistically fast forwarded from the fifties, when they existed, into the Reagan era, when they did not. Stein arrives at a different conclusion without recourse to anachonism. One more resonant with the partisan selling and political discounting of global models by both postmodernist and Straussian polemicists that puts climate science's objectivity at risk today:

"Given the right circumstances, almost anyone is vulnerable to   the   psychological   and   situational   pressures  I  have discussed. The respected scholars in my field have repeated over  and over  again  that  the way  to  protect  ourselves is through knowledge. In 1952, Asch wrote:

‘The greater man’s ignorance of the principles of his social  surroundings, the more subject is he to their control;  and   the  greater  his  knowledge  of  their operations  and  of  their  necessary  consequences,     the  freer  he  can  become with  regard  to  them.'"

TV WEATHERMAN'S FALL INTO BLACK HOLE CONTINUES

     SO-CALLED "THEORY OF GRAVITATION CONSENSUS"  SUSPECTED  AS  HIGH

     DISINFORMATION  DENSITY  DRIVES BLOG  PAST  CHANDRASEKHAR LIMIT

 "... It only takes one finding in science to refute consensus, no matter whether it’s 97%, 99%, or 100%.  Science is not infallible.

                                                              Anthony Watts

Note: about ten minutes after publication the article was updated to correct a spelling error, add an omitted phrase, and add references"

HANG ON TO YOUR SCALP

Rick Perry's DOE has named a new Director  of  Indian  Energy, former Chiricahua Apache Nation Attorney General Brute Bradford. One whose Tweeting  habits  recall  those of the Great White Chief:

The Washington Post says the former :

"faculty member... at the United  Arab Emirates  National  Defense  College , Bradford  has  been  at  the center of controversies  in the past, these missives sent from his now-deleted Twitter account have not been previously reported. In an email on Thursday, Bradford acknowledged the Twitter account and apologized for his comments.

“As a minority and member of the Jewish faith, I sincerely apologize for my disrespectful and offensive comments,” he wrote to The Post. “These comments are inexcusable and I do not stand by them... 

In 2015, he resigned from his post at West Point after writing an academic paper arguing  the United States  should  threaten  to destroy  Muslim  holy sites in war

 “even if it means great destruction, innumerable enemy casualties, and     civilian collateral damage.”

Bradford  also  called  for  legal  scholars  “sympathetic to  Islamist aims”  to  be imprisoned  or  “attacked.”  He dubbed  such  academics  “critical  law of armed conflict academy,” or  CLOACA,  which is also a term for  the orifice out of which some animals defecate... 

 “I stand by my article,"

 he  wrote  in an email to The Post at the time."

THE SATURDAY NIGHT SCIENCE BOARD MASSACRE

            You have to hand it to Pruit for making the  EPA  fun to watch

HIS HORSE DOESN'T READ PEER REVIEWED PAPERS EITHER

“It is not my job to sit down and read peer-reviewed papers because I simply haven't got the time..."
James Delingpole, BBC 2011

"Then, of course, there is the great Anthony Watts – founder of the most widely read and important sceptical website of the lot... I owe Wattsy an enormous amount..."
James Delingpole The Daily Telegraph 2013

"Willie Soon, Pat Michaels and Tim Ball...drive the Greenies apopleptic... I’m against Ocean Acidification theory because I’ve done loads and loads of background reading... about the lack of credible scientific evidence that it represents any kind of problem... in the eyes of all those undecideds who can’t make up their mind whether they agree with me on climate science or whether I’m talking bollocks..."

James Delingpole,   Breitbart   2017

As a matter of fact, Willie Soon,Pat Michaels & Tim Ball are no more oceanographers that Watts or Delingpole, and none of the above, the horse included, has published a peer-reviewed word on how the oceans  acidify as they dissolve ever more man made CO2.

BUT ON REFLECTION...

                 AN INTERESTING MAP PAIR FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES  SUGGESTS 
       CLIMATE COMMUNICATION'S STRONGEST SUIT MAY BE  SCHIZOPHRENIA:

GREEN FIRE ?

WHILE   FLAMMABLE  INSULATION ,  RETROFITTED  IN  THE  NAME OF  ENERGY  EFFICIENCY,  FED LONDON'S  TRAGIC APARTMENT FIRE,  AND  CORRIDOR  BLOCKAGE BY A NEW  ENERGY EFFICIENT HEATING  SYSTEM  MAY  HAVE ADDED TO THE  DEATH  TOLl, .  A TENANT  WHO ESCAPED   SAYS THE  BLAZE STARTED  WHEN  THE  OZONE FRIENDLY , BUT  REGRETABLY FLAMMABLE,  HYDROCARBON  COOLANT  IN HIS  EU- APPROVED  'GREEN'  REFRIGERATOR   EXPLODED  

The Coroner's verdict may be Death By Energy Efficiency

BREITBART MOVES FORWARD WITH NEW 11th CENTURY CLIMATE JOURNALISM TALENT

The article below was contributed by Istvan Marko, J. Scott Armstrong, William M. Briggs, Kesten Green, Hermann Harde, David R. Legates, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, and Willie Soon.

On June 2, 2017, in a Letter regarding US withdrawal from Paris climate agreement addressed to the MIT community, Professor Rafael Reif, president of MIT, criticized President Trump’s decision to exit the Paris Climate Accords. In this refutation, we propose to clarify the scientific understanding of the Earth’s climate and to dispel the expensively fostered popular delusion that man-made global warming will be dangerous and that, therefore, the Paris Agreement would be beneficial...

There is no science unambiguously establishing that CO2 is the chief cause of the warming observed since the end of the Little Ice Age. The opposite has been repeatedly demonstrated.

... Professor Reif writes, “The scientific consensus is overwhelming.”

The late author Michael Crichton, in his Caltech Michelin Lecture 2003, said, “In science consensus is irrelevant. … ” Doubt is the seedcorn of science. Consensus is a political notion which, when pleaded, indicates that the pleader is totalitarian. As Abu Ali ibn al-Haytham said in the eleventh century:

The seeker after truth [his splendid definition of the scientist] does not place his faith in any mere consensus, however venerable or widespread. Instead, he subjects what he has learned of it to his hard-won scientific knowledge, and to investigation, inspection, inquiry, checking, checking and checking again. The road to the truth is long and hard, but that is the road we must follow...

EXTENDING  ITS CLIMATE TALENT SEARCH TO THE SUNBELT, BREITBART HAS FOUND 
A NEW COLLEAGUE  FOR ET AL. & SOON 

THE CLOSING OF THE OPEN ATMOSPHERIC SOCIETY

In 2014  Watts decided to lengthen the shadow of his treehouse by founding  The  Open  Atmospheric  Society,  a  climate  contrarian organization with all the academic bells and whistles of the decidely un-contrarian American Meterological Society & AGU.  Trouble is that these rely on acumen for their gravitas, and boards top heavy with academic department heads and scientific medalists for their street cred and media clout.

Sou relates that  years of trying  failed to produce anybody with such credentials willing to join the OAS board, collected a grand total of $330 from prospective dues paying members, and produced no journal She reports its website fell silent as  a Norwegian Blue  two years ago.

ANNALS OF CLIMATE COMMUNICATION: FLYING POPSICLES

THIS POPULARIZATION SEEMS TO HAVE LOST SOMETHING IN TRANSLATION FROM JGR

AN HONEST BROKER IS NOT AFRAID TO SAY: 'DON'T TRADE'

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Volume 40, Issue 2
June 2017
Pages 175–185 

1. Previous article in issue: Risks in the Making: The Mediating Role of Models in Water Management and Civil Engineering in the Netherlands
2. Next article in issue: Maria Marten, Carola Piepenbring-Thomas, Fogels Ordnungen. Aus der Werkstatt des Hamburger Mediziners Martin Fogel (1634–1675), (Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie, Sonderband 115) Frankfurt/Main: Vittorio Klostermann 2015. 336 S., € 98,00. ISBN 978-3-465-04230-3.

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Special Issue:Trading Zones of Climate Change 

Beitrag

Dealing with Climate Change: A Conversation with Paul N. Edwards and Oliver Geden

Authors

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• First published: 12 June 2017Full publication history
• DOI: 10.1002/bewi.201701848
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Edwards:...

The technocratic character of the IPCC has tended to center the debate on technological solutions, especially renewable energy. I'm not against technocracy; in fact I think it's absolutely necessary, more now than ever. So long as the subject is breaking our addiction to fossil fuels, I think the technocratic approach is really the right one, and the IPCC has played a major role in promoting that.

Yet agricultural practices, meat-based diets, and deforestation are at least equally important causes of climate change. In many respects, those are much harder problems than energy, where real and successful solutions are well along. Mike Hulme's great book Why We Disagree about Climate Change points to the deep connections between climate and culture, from religion and housing to clothing and food.

Eco-modernist techno-solutionism barely touches the holistic kinds of social change that would really be needed for drastic emissions reductions. Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything does a better job of sketching those solutions than the IPCC, but as Oliver points out, her vision – like those of many others searching for ways to move us off the path of self-destruction we are currently walking – would require revolutionary and extremely widespread social change of a kind that seems depressingly unlikely at present.

The dilemma is clear. Scientists’ greatest asset is the high degree of trust invested in them by the public, at least in much of the developed world. To participate effectively in building climate solutions, they must maintain that. Yet this trust depends on the perception that science seeks truth, not power. To the degree that scientists advocate particular solutions over others, they may be seen as partisans. The challenge for scientists is to retain what Roger Pielke Jr. calls the “honest broker” position: proposing as many solution paths as they can find, evaluating their effects from a neutral point of view, while never advocating any particular path over others.