Inconvenient Truth versus Inconvenient Swindle

[Brant Gaede]

Well, government funding of science is bad, private funding is good. Bad drives out good.

--Brant

[Greybird]

I am not going to get sucked into a debate defending something I don't hold. I don't remember claiming much "unambiguously untrue" in either film.

You said "Swindle" contained "pure bunk." That is what "bunk(um)" means: unambiguously, obviously untrue. It does not mean "spin," wherein something ambiguous is slanted in its presentation to support a particular position.

From the rest of this thread, I surmised you would be unlikely to defend your own statement with anything verifiable. That is, rather than your vague "impressions," which you've used too often from the beginning.

I admit to having doubted that you'd rise even to the minimal point of quoting one actual, supposedly "bunk" element for every twenty minutes of that program. I just wanted you on record about it.

This thread, I would say, has been remarkably civil, given how little you've engaged the substantive points of the rest of us. Including — most recently for me — a pointed response to your bald assertion of a nonexistent push, on the part of those debunking AGW, toward undefined "government-protected monopolies."

When you've been challenged about your actual words, you've more than once given them new ex post facto meanings. That gets frustrating.

And, yes, you did equivocate — if only to attempt a pithy-title effect — in your initial post. You've been clear about a major portion of your "intent": putting an affirmative case and a debunking of it on the same epistemological (there's that word again {g}) plane. Improperly so, as many of us have noted. As much as you've dismissed or ignored that point in later discussion, I believe you've been well aware of it all along.

You, however, as many Objectivists with whom you disagree are wont to do, added to that the spin of the word "evil." I neither hold this opinion of you nor ascribed this to you. And that phenomenon, too, gets frustrating.

Edited May 15, 2007 by Greybird

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Steve,

Whatever. I guess you showed me.

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

Well, government funding of science is bad, private funding is good. Bad drives out good.

--Brant

Not when the science is required to develop the weapons and instruments of national defense. How would the U.S. have ever developed nuclear weapons in a private non-governmental context in time to be of use in avoiding the horrendous casualties than an invasion of Japan would have produced?

Many of the conveniences we enjoy are spin offs and side effects of government funded science in connection with weapons development and intelligence techniques.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

Well, government funding of science is bad, private funding is good. Bad drives out good.

--Brant

Not when the science is required to develop the weapons and instruments of national defense. How would the U.S. have ever developed nuclear weapons in a private non-governmental context in time to be of use in avoiding the horrendous casualties than an invasion of Japan would have produced?

Many of the conveniences we enjoy are spin offs and side effects of government funded science in connection with weapons development and intelligence techniques.

Ba'al Chatzaf

I'm talking about science. You're talking about applied technology--engineering. You may be right about the Manhattan Project. I certainly did over-generalize to make a point.

--Brant

[Ellen Stuttle]

If you find the Newsweek information erroneous, I suggest you notify Lindzen immediately. Newsweek should retract, especially since this information was given in an article authored by Lindzen himself.

Here's what I in fact wrote:

I repeat that I don't know exactly what Lindzen's own grants are, or how current they are either. Something I think you misunderstood about that Newsweek quote of which you've made such a case was its purpose, which I take to have been to make clear that Lindzen is not "in the pay of the oil companies," an erroneous statement often made about him.

Brant comments:

Well, government funding of science is bad, private funding is good. Bad drives out good.

Brant, you then recognized -- partly -- that you were over-generalizing, at least as regards "technology-engineering" versus "science":

[answering Bob K.] I'm talking about science. You're talking about applied technology--engineering. You may be right about the Manhattan Project. I certainly did over-generalize to make a point.

I think, Brant, that if you'd stop to consider the issue, you'd realize the vast extent to which your remark still over-generalizes. The quality of research is in no way determined by how the research is paid for. It's determined by the quality of the research itself. There was even a certain amount of excellent work done by scientists under the Soviet regime, when literally the scientists' lives might be at stake on not coming up with anything of which the authorities disapproved. But in the U.S., even now, the situation with government-funded research remains that it's the scientists -- through the commitee process whereby the merit of research proposals is assessed -- who are the arbiters of what's worth funding.

Yes, research priorities can and do become skewed because of the enormous extent to which government agencies are involved in funding. Fad emphases get going, such that there's more money to be had in certain lines of research than in others -- the "cancer research" emphasis in the 70s was an example; the AGW emphasis today is another. But the sheer fact that government money is footing the bill doesn't mean a thing one way or the other about the merit of the work done. The work is the work, however it's paid for.

(The peer process is by no means perfect, and research emphases can be skewed in other ways besides fads which lead to there being a lot of available funds for particular topics. There are also areas and cases in which theories acquire enough of a dogmatic status as to make it very, very difficult for alternatives to get a hearing -- or for a young scientist to get a career up and running researching alternatives to the reigning theory. The peer-assessment process has miscarriages and injustices. Nonetheless, it's that process not a dictatorial one which still arbitrates scientific merit in this country. The biggest concern many of the scientists opposing the current talk of "consensus science" have is fear of this situation changing.)

Re the immediate context, the odd thing, with Michael's denegrating Lindzen's getting government grant money, is that Michael isn't seeing this at all the way the scientific community by and large sees it. The suspicious source of funding, from the general scientific community's standpoint, would be if Lindzen's research was underwritten by oil companies. Whether correctly or not, scientists by and large think of government funding for research as neutral and private-company funding as suspect. Thus my belief is that the Nesweek article wasn't leveling a charge against Lindzen but was instead correcting against a claim which has often been made and has been perceived as a charge against him: that his funding comes from the oil business.

Ellen

___

Edited May 15, 2007 by Ellen Stuttle

[Brant Gaede]

Ellen, when Nixon declared war on cancer that's where government money went, huge amounts of it. I suspect many scientists working on other types of diseases turned to the new money abandoning their work.

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

Re the immediate context, the odd thing, with Michael's denegrating Lindzen's getting government grant money, is that Michael isn't seeing this at all the way the scientific community by and large sees it. The suspicious source of funding, from the general scientific community's standpoint, would be if Lindzen's research was underwritten by oil companies. Whether correctly or not, scientists by and large think of government funding for research as neutral and private-company funding as suspect. Thus my belief is that the Nesweek article wasn't leveling a charge against Lindzen but was instead correcting against a claim which has often been made and has been perceived as a charge against him: that his funding comes from the oil business.

Ellen

___

I think this is more of the liberal media attitude than from scientists. Plus Hollywood, of course.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

If you find the Newsweek information erroneous, I suggest you notify Lindzen immediately. Newsweek should retract, especially since this information was given in an article authored by Lindzen himself.

Here's what I in fact wrote:

I repeat that I don't know exactly what Lindzen's own grants are, or how current they are either. Something I think you misunderstood about that Newsweek quote of which you've made such a case was its purpose, which I take to have been to make clear that Lindzen is not "in the pay of the oil companies," an erroneous statement often made about him.

Ellen,

Here is what I wrote:

What's my remedy? Get the government out of the story altogether. That includes funding, tax write-offs and special legal protections of all, and I mean all, special interest groups.

But let's not quibble. Let's look. Here is an example of what I mean by the first person on your list: Richard Lindzen of MIT. And this was a simple Google search.

Why So Gloomy?

GUEST OPINION

By Richard S. Lindzen

Special to Newsweek

April 16, 2007 issue

From the article:

Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies.

From this source (Exxon Secrets FACTSHEET: Richard Lindzen), Dr. Lindzen is "a member of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and contributed to the Second Assessment Report."

Who funds that, I wonder? Need I go on?

So you tell me. Should I fight for Lindzen's government paychecks or the government paychecks of opposing scientists? How come there is such an issue when I say I don't want ANYBODY in climate science to have a government paycheck and that the fight for government paychecks is making the scientists unreliable?

Are you really asserting that the meaning of the Newsweek quote needs some kind of special interpretation to be understood? I find the statement "His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government" to mean, er... that his research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. In other words, he receives money exclusively from the US government for his research, and this is always. How on earth can anyone get that wrong or find that this means anything different than it does?

I don't find the Newsweek statement ambiguous in any manner nor in need of any interpretation whatsoever. Nor do I see how "an erroneous statement often made about him" about receiving money from oil companies somehow cancels that meaning.

I guess it depends on how we approach the use of the English language. I learned that words mean what they mean, unless thick with rhetoric. I fail to detect the rhetoric here. Maybe you do detect strong rhetoric?

Anyway, this is a side issue. Here is the statement by you that I was referring to about "erroneous information" (and I presume the later one you quoted was not meant to reverse this):

All his research can't be funded by government money, since he's on salary at MIT. I have no idea what research funds he gets.

The Newsweek article says "always" and "exclusively." You said "all" can't be (in other words, Newsweek presented "erroneous information"). Does your statement also need some special interpretation that I am not getting? Maybe you feel that "always" and "exclusively" mean something other than "all"? I fail to detect strong rhetoric here, so I interpret your words to mean what they mean.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Re the immediate context, the odd thing, with Michael's denegrating Lindzen's getting government grant money, is that Michael isn't seeing this at all the way the scientific community by and large sees it. The suspicious source of funding, from the general scientific community's standpoint, would be if Lindzen's research was underwritten by oil companies. Whether correctly or not, scientists by and large think of government funding for research as neutral and private-company funding as suspect. Thus my belief is that the Nesweek article wasn't leveling a charge against Lindzen but was instead correcting against a claim which has often been made and has been perceived as a charge against him: that his funding comes from the oil business.

Ellen,

I don't know why my meaning is so unclear to you. I am not "denigrating Lindzen's getting government grant money" as an isolated thing to attack him. He is the one who claimed that government money was the corrupting factor with all other scientists. I merely held him to his own standard. He did not present any reason for the claim that government money corrupts other scientists (especially the ones on the AGW side), but somehow government money does not corrupt him. I did get the general idea that he finds himself to be a man of integrity. Or let us use his language. He didn't say why he is immune to "behaving the way scientists always behave" when he receives government money.

I would be interested to know the reasons for the double standard. You seem to be comfortable with it. I am not.

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

Re the immediate context, the odd thing, with Michael's denegrating Lindzen's getting government grant money, is that Michael isn't seeing this at all the way the scientific community by and large sees it. The suspicious source of funding, from the general scientific community's standpoint, would be if Lindzen's research was underwritten by oil companies. Whether correctly or not, scientists by and large think of government funding for research as neutral and private-company funding as suspect. Thus my belief is that the Nesweek article wasn't leveling a charge against Lindzen but was instead correcting against a claim which has often been made and has been perceived as a charge against him: that his funding comes from the oil business.

Ellen,

I don't know why my meaning is so unclear to you. I am not "denigrating Lindzen's getting government grant money" as an isolated thing to attack him. He is the one who claimed that government money was the corrupting factor with all other scientists. I merely held him to his own standard. He did not present any reason for the claim that government money corrupts other scientists (especially the ones on the AGW side), but somehow government money does not corrupt him. I did get the general idea that he finds himself to be a man of integrity. Or let us use his language. He didn't say why he is immune to "behaving the way scientists always behave" when he receives government money.

I would be interested to know the reasons for the double standard. You seem to be comfortable with it. I am not.

Michael

Michael,

Once more, there is no double standard being employed by Lindzen (or me), and he is not saying that government money has corrupted other scientists (let alone "all other scientists"). It skews research priorities when there's a glut of money available for funding in a particular area, but this isn't being "corrupted." It's simply an issue of peddling your wares in a location and from an angle where they have a better chance of getting the funds. For instance, some extremely fine, pathbreaking work was done in the '70s by molecular biologists who worked a "cancer" angle into their proposals so that thus they could apply for some of the glut of funds earmarked to the N.I.H. for "cancer." The research wasn't bad research because it was only iffily related to cancer. What Lindzen is talking about is that there are currently all sorts of vaguely "earth science" people who are working a global-warming angle into their grant proposals so as to have a chance at some of the research funds available. Lindzen himself of course wouldn't have had to add such enticers to his proposals. Meteorology has been his area all along. (And btw, I doubt he's doing much if any research at this time; he's too busy trying to counteract the idea of "consensus science" and the outright false or misleading stuff being put around by Gore and others.)

And as I recall you certainly did denigrate his getting government funding, since you indicated that "spin" results from such funding, and that Lindzen is engaging in "spin." (Search back, for instance, for the post on the previous page where you wrote "government" in bold-face repeatedly.)

Ellen

___

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Ellen,

I really don't want to see the Swindle movie again (where Lindzen appeared), but one of the themes in the film was not the watered down version you are giving. The assertion was that scientists are being bullied by the government to format their proposals and conclusions to favor global warming. This does not mean falsify data, merely put a spin on the interpretation.

I still find the proposition curious that Lindzen is immune to such bullying. Either he has some higher quality of character that the AGW scientists don't have, or the government has decided that he is so different that he does not need to be (or cannot be) bullied. He is the one who has been making the accusations. I say that if one makes an accusation, he should not operate on a different standard of evaluation for himself.

I call it a double standard when a person does that. Like I said, I am not comfortable with it.

Thus my conclusion is that scientists are the worst source for the general public to learn about global warming. They don't agree with each other (almost violently) and they use double standards and double speak all the time. I don't think politicians are any better, either, for the same reasons.

I stand by the spin charge.

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

Ellen,

I really don't want to see the Swindle movie again (where Lindzen appeared), but one of the themes in the film was not the watered down version you are giving. The assertion was that scientists are being bullied by the government to format their proposals and conclusions to favor global warming. This does not mean falsify data, merely put a spin on the interpretation.

I repeat that I haven't seen the whole movie myself yet, and I haven't seen any of the segments in which Lindzen appears. If what you say was asserted indeed was, I'd expect it was by the narrators of the movie. It isn't what Lindzen said in that brief segment from the interview I posted, and it isn't what he said more lengthily when I heard his talk at the U. Conn. coloquium March 23. In both cases what he was describing was just what I said in my previous post.

I still find the proposition curious that Lindzen is immune to such bullying. Either he has some higher quality of character that the AGW scientists don't have, or the government has decided that he is so different that he does not need to be (or cannot be) bullied. He is the one who has been making the accusations. I say that if one makes an accusation, he should not operate on a different standard of evaluation for himself.

I repeat, I don't know of a place where he made such an accusation. And as to whether he'd be immune to bullying -- were such attempted -- to put an AGW spin on his conclusions, yes, he damned well would be. He thinks the AGW hypothesis has no sound science to stand on. You think he's going to go around giving lecture after lecture, colloquium after colloquium, on the scientific details -- which he knows more compendiously than anyone else -- and then put a "spin" on interpretation in his own research so as to give the appearance of supporting a conclusion which he thinks is wrong?

I stand by the spin charge.

Do as you will, Michael. That's up to you.

Ellen

___

[Ellen Stuttle]

If you find the Newsweek information erroneous, I suggest you notify Lindzen immediately. Newsweek should retract, especially since this information was given in an article authored by Lindzen himself.

Here's what I in fact wrote:

I repeat that I don't know exactly what Lindzen's own grants are, or how current they are either. Something I think you misunderstood about that Newsweek quote of which you've made such a case was its purpose, which I take to have been to make clear that Lindzen is not "in the pay of the oil companies," an erroneous statement often made about him.

Ellen,

Here is what I wrote:

What's my remedy? Get the government out of the story altogether. That includes funding, tax write-offs and special legal protections of all, and I mean all, special interest groups.

But let's not quibble. Let's look. Here is an example of what I mean by the first person on your list: Richard Lindzen of MIT. And this was a simple Google search.

Why So Gloomy?

GUEST OPINION

By Richard S. Lindzen

Special to Newsweek

April 16, 2007 issue

From the article:

Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies.

From this source (Exxon Secrets FACTSHEET: Richard Lindzen), Dr. Lindzen is "a member of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and contributed to the Second Assessment Report."

Who funds that, I wonder? Need I go on?

So you tell me. Should I fight for Lindzen's government paychecks or the government paychecks of opposing scientists? How come there is such an issue when I say I don't want ANYBODY in climate science to have a government paycheck and that the fight for government paychecks is making the scientists unreliable?

Are you really asserting that the meaning of the Newsweek quote needs some kind of special interpretation to be understood? I find the statement "His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government" to mean, er... that his research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. In other words, he receives money exclusively from the US government for his research, and this is always. How on earth can anyone get that wrong or find that this means anything different than it does?

I don't find the Newsweek statement ambiguous in any manner nor in need of any interpretation whatsoever. Nor do I see how "an erroneous statement often made about him" about receiving money from oil companies somehow cancels that meaning.

I guess it depends on how we approach the use of the English language. I learned that words mean what they mean, unless thick with rhetoric. I fail to detect the rhetoric here. Maybe you do detect strong rhetoric?

Anyway, this is a side issue. Here is the statement by you that I was referring to about "erroneous information" (and I presume the later one you quoted was not meant to reverse this):

All his research can't be funded by government money, since he's on salary at MIT. I have no idea what research funds he gets.

The Newsweek article says "always" and "exclusively." You said "all" can't be (in other words, Newsweek presented "erroneous information"). Does your statement also need some special interpretation that I am not getting? Maybe you feel that "always" and "exclusively" mean something other than "all"? I fail to detect strong rhetoric here, so I interpret your words to mean what they mean.

Michael

Michael,

I quoted your whole post. Do you really not understand the point I was making? You referred to Lindzen as being on "government paycheck." He's a professor at MIT. He gets a salary from MIT. Alright, I can -- just barely, by virtue of an extreme stretch of imagination -- see that you might have been confused because of the "always been funded exclusively" in the Newsweek description and my saying he couldn't have gotten "all" his funding from the government, given that he's a salaried professor. I will say one more time that I feel sure the point being made in the quote from Newsweek was to counteract the prevalent false idea put around about him that he's in the pay of the oil companies.

If it's still not clear to you, I give up.

Ellen

___

[Ellen Stuttle]

Ellen, when Nixon declared war on cancer that's where government money went, huge amounts of it. I suspect many scientists working on other types of diseases turned to the new money abandoning their work.

--Brant

I didn't say otherwise, Brant. In fact I said: "Yes, research priorities can and do become skewed because of the enormous extent to which government agencies are involved in funding." But neither the skewing nor the source of the funding entails that the work done is therefore bad research. (I'm not saying that no bad research is done on government funding, just that one doesn't know from the source of the funds what the quality of the work is. I'm countering your previous implication that IF it's funded by government funds, it's bad work.)

Ellen

___

[Ellen Stuttle]

Re the immediate context, the odd thing, with Michael's denegrating Lindzen's getting government grant money, is that Michael isn't seeing this at all the way the scientific community by and large sees it. The suspicious source of funding, from the general scientific community's standpoint, would be if Lindzen's research was underwritten by oil companies. Whether correctly or not, scientists by and large think of government funding for research as neutral and private-company funding as suspect. Thus my belief is that the Nesweek article wasn't leveling a charge against Lindzen but was instead correcting against a claim which has often been made and has been perceived as a charge against him: that his funding comes from the oil business.

Ellen

___

I think this is more of the liberal media attitude than from scientists. Plus Hollywood, of course.

--Brant

I think that maybe you don't know as many scientistis as I do. ;-) I hear that attitude expressed time and again by scientists. (Not by Larry of course, but by his colleagues and in comments made in the journals.)

Ellen

___

[Ellen Stuttle]

Just to let people know: I'm unlikely to answer any further posts. I think that if the points I've been making aren't clear by now, they won't become so with further iteration, and I want to return to not posting. I only entered the fray again here because I feel that Dick Lindzen deserves better than to have allowed malignment of his character to go without response.

Ellen

___

[John Dailey]

~ This thread starts off with a comparison 'twixt two films: one, a pro-AGW argued/'spinned' film, and the other, an accusatory argument ('spin', if you will) against the argument-worth of the 1st film.

~ I've not seen the 1st film (but also haven't seen THE PASSION nor read THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION either), given all that I've read about it; ergo, I see no point in watching (nor analyzing the worth of) the 2nd. I mean, with all real 'data' and info available on the net/web...why bother? Such film 'documentaries' are now redundant re persuasive arguing of any point that's 'spinned,' whether GW ('A' or 'anti-A' ), evolution, govt-conspiracies or alien sex-fiends.

~ "The truth is out there!"...but...in films, never unmixed with falsity. Prob is: in films it's much harder to separate wheat from chaff without re-watching umpteen times (at 2hrs a shot!) than in printed text. I repeat: why bother?

LLAP

J:D

[John Dailey]

~ What's most unfortunate about this thread re these two films is how the 1st post starts, rather than a discussion about the worth of whatever alleged 'facts' each film has (and, the 2nd is mainly [correct me if I'm wrong] about the AGW allegations of the 1st, and is correct or not-correct re each of its allegations, as the 1st is correct or not re its about AGW), instead, starts a focusing on who meant what about whatever who said which or paraphrased what regarding...who meant what (reprise) about the 2nd film.

~ Worse: things get personal about only 1 anti-AGW and any who defend (er, 'spin') his position because he may/must, also, get some govt monies one way or another, (as someone pointed out: what 'scientist' nowadays doesn't?)

~ I swear that most would rather discuss personalities than the subjects (in this case, of) GW, AGW and anti-AGW.

LLAP

J:D

Edited May 16, 2007 by John Dailey

[Brant Gaede]

Re the immediate context, the odd thing, with Michael's denegrating Lindzen's getting government grant money, is that Michael isn't seeing this at all the way the scientific community by and large sees it. The suspicious source of funding, from the general scientific community's standpoint, would be if Lindzen's research was underwritten by oil companies. Whether correctly or not, scientists by and large think of government funding for research as neutral and private-company funding as suspect. Thus my belief is that the Nesweek article wasn't leveling a charge against Lindzen but was instead correcting against a claim which has often been made and has been perceived as a charge against him: that his funding comes from the oil business.

Ellen

___

I think this is more of the liberal media attitude than from scientists. Plus Hollywood, of course.

--Brant

I think that maybe you don't know as many scientistis as I do. ;-) I hear that attitude expressed time and again by scientists. (Not by Larry of course, but by his colleagues and in comments made in the journals.)

Ellen

___

I guess scientists read the newspapers and watch TV news too.

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

Ellen,

I really don't want to see the Swindle movie again (where Lindzen appeared), but one of the themes in the film was not the watered down version you are giving. The assertion was that scientists are being bullied by the government to format their proposals and conclusions to favor global warming. This does not mean falsify data, merely put a spin on the interpretation.

I still find the proposition curious that Lindzen is immune to such bullying. Either he has some higher quality of character that the AGW scientists don't have, or the government has decided that he is so different that he does not need to be (or cannot be) bullied. He is the one who has been making the accusations. I say that if one makes an accusation, he should not operate on a different standard of evaluation for himself.

Michael

Michael, would you be immune to such bullying? Ellen knows the man. That doesn't count for anything? Do you think character is homogeneous throughout society or a group (scientists) and all one need do is look for the money or other existential influence? And did you not consider that some scientists outside their specialty might be as ignorant and incompetent or disingenuous as any layman concerning the work of other scientists?

--Brant

Edited May 16, 2007 by Brant Gaede

[Brant Gaede]

Ellen, when Nixon declared war on cancer that's where government money went, huge amounts of it. I suspect many scientists working on other types of diseases turned to the new money abandoning their work.

--Brant

I didn't say otherwise, Brant. In fact I said: "Yes, research priorities can and do become skewed because of the enormous extent to which government agencies are involved in funding." But neither the skewing nor the source of the funding entails that the work done is therefore bad research. (I'm not saying that no bad research is done on government funding, just that one doesn't know from the source of the funds what the quality of the work is. I'm countering your previous implication that IF it's funded by government funds, it's bad work.)

Ellen

___

I'm sorry for the implication. Both can be good, but good can be at the expense of gooder.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Brant,

I have nothing against Lindzen. I am merely against using a double standard when a person makes an accusation against a whole class of scientists and couches it in double speak. I am not trying to sound harsh, but there has been one hell of a parsing problem with what I write so far so I am trying to be as clear as possible. I am sure Lindzen is a serious scientist of high integrity.

Saying that "I am against" is a little imprecise. Hell, for all I care, the guy can even use more double standards than he already does in judging his colleagues. That's OK by me. I am only saying that I am not convinced by anybody when double standards are used. I don't like them and I don't use them. And I identify them when I see them.

See below for what I am talking about. Obviously, the very fact that Lindzen was asked the question in terms of corruption shows that the double speak is not convincing everybody. If there were no message being transmitted, there would be no question in that manner.

Double speak:

Q So you are not accusing your scientific colleagues of corruption?

A No, I'm accusing them of behaving the way scientists always behave. In other words, some years ago, when Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, almost all the biological sciences then became cancer research. I mean, I don't call that corruption, I'm saying you orient your research so that it has a better chance to get resources.

. . .

I get a kick out of statements like that. Let's translate.

Are the scientists selling out? Nah. They're just being scientists and scientists normally sell out, but not really. They are just selling out the way scientists do, which isn't the bad way of selling out. It's just being a scientist.

Now for parsing. Defense against a problem never stated or even insinuated, but presented as if it were:

And as to whether he'd be immune to bullying -- were such attempted -- to put an AGW spin on his conclusions, yes, he damned well would be. He thinks the AGW hypothesis has no sound science to stand on. You think he's going to go around giving lecture after lecture, colloquium after colloquium, on the scientific details -- which he knows more compendiously than anyone else -- and then put a "spin" on interpretation in his own research so as to give the appearance of supporting a conclusion which he thinks is wrong?

The problem as stated very clearly:

With government money, it is a little more subtle than an outright order. But in the end, I think Lizden is more along the State of Fear lines. (To be fair, I need to read more of him to make an evaluation that is more than a general opinion, which is all I am presenting here.) His brand of impending doom is Greenie totalitarianism. AGW's brand of doom is planetary destruction. All of it sells newspapers, elects government officials, and makes for good trial cases with large settlements.

(The misspelling of Lindzen's name is due to this being a post prior to the correction.)

Some people are fine with this kind of thinking and misrepresented presentation. I am not. I am glad others are waking up, too (as in the article I linked to earlier, but more is coming out each day).

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Michael, I'll go over this again tomorrow PM when I have the time and I'm cold sober. But are yose saying Lindzen is a man of high integrity and not, too?

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

John D,

The problem with the whole global warming issue is that it is a non-issue (and politics is involved). The problem with a Greenie takeover of the planet is that it is a non-issue (and politics is involved). And, of course, lots of government money is involved.

These issues are traps for the unwary. This thread is proof. I started it in all innocence.

Since global warming is a technical issue, it is pretty reasonable to expect that someone who does not know about it to ask questions as they arise in his mind and look at the information objectively as he comes across it. You can't do that on this issue. You can't even ask what is global warming or what a hockey-stick chart is. You will get your head bit off.

You will be intimidated to demonize or hero-worship this person or that, depending on where you are asking. How this works is that the hero is incapable of error (Gore on the AGW side and people like Lindzen on the anti-AGW side). You can express bromides like "Obviously, XXX is not perfect," or "XXX is not above making a mistake," but don't you ever (EVER) point to an actual mistake, omission or lapse. You will be accused of all kinds of bad things, threatened with loss of friendship, talked down to as if you were an idiot, receive a barrage of sarcasm, etc.

This also holds for saying anything good about the demonized person. You can do the bromides "Obviously, XXX gives out some correct facts," etc., but don't you ever (EVER) point to an actual valid point made by the demon. You will hear that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, or that he got lucky, or that he is slick and it's all an act, or he is on a smear campaign, or [fill in the blank].

This issue reminds me of discussing Rand with the Objectivist orthodoxy and Rand-haters.

Here is what I did. I actually went through a whole lot of stuff on both sides. I might even put up some more links later. You would be surprised at the sheer number of so-called scientific reports that exist solely to debunk other scientific reports. They are legion and they are on both sides. They are full of numbered or bulleted items with technical information, lots of facts and figures, and oodles of nebulous insinuations and outright accusations. The posturing is unbelievable.

After scanning over and/or reading a lot of that crap, the only real thing I felt was irritation at so many intelligent people acting like that.

My advice is that if you actually want to know about this issue, stay away from the scientists and their supporters. Try to find an intellectual who sounds reasonable and can sift through all the technical details laced with mind games. The best one I have found so far is Michael Chricton. He considers environmentalism to be a religion and that is pretty close to what I have been able to observe. Graphs, charts and reports take the place of Biblical quotations, leaders are heralded as save-the-world saints, there is lots of strong rhetoric and ghastly images, etc.

Where I add to that is that I see the same thing with anti-environmentalism, tit for tat.

My favorite part with Chricton is that his initial premise is to not accept the false dichotomy. He dismisses the whole issue as doomsday spin (he calls it State of Fear). His doomsday spin theory explains a lot more than it appears to do. The truth is that man is not destroying the planet. Another truth is that the Greenies cannot take over the world like the communists did. It's all doomsday spin.

My position is that you fight lies with truth. You fight spin with truth. You fight rhetoric with truth. Anytime your major policy is to fight lies with lies, spin with spin, rhetoric with rhetoric, you actually prolong the issue because you are not in a discussion any longer. You are in a tribal war, or in the present case, a religious war.

Michael