New Zealand is dealing with it’s own Climategate too. One of it’s top scientists, Dr. Jim Salinger, has also been cooking the books it seems. http://nzclimatescience.net/images/PDFs/global_warming_nz2.pdf

And now, besides the top level scientists involved in Climategate here in the US, NASA itself is hiding the data they used to come up with their claims. ” Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.”

In light of what we now know about Climategate, I think it would be quite prudent for NASA to come forward with the uncooked data. This might help to rebuild trust with the public if their data hasn’t been cooked. However, the fact that they are refusing to release it doesn’t bode well for the Global-warming clan. Perhaps they would be better off it if wasn’t revealed. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/03/researcher-says-nasa-hiding-climate-data/

Kirshenbaum has aptly entitled her blog “Unscientific America”. Nasa’s actions here provide hard evidence to support that claim. The film “Expelled” also provides hard evidence for that claim. It seems that dogma rules and opposing opinions are squashed in the name of “science”. “Let’s stay on the message and not allow anyone or any facts to derail us!” Is this what Kirshenbaum wants? How unscientific! How is that going to help anything? There you have it. Just more of the same old thing. If that is what she means by staying on the message, she still has a lot to learn. “Squash the dissenters! Fudge the data! Stay on the message!” If these science type people like Kirshenbaum really think that is the right approach, then she and her “Big Science” cronies must think the general public is extremely stupid and gullible. Granted she does admit that this is not the public’s fault, but her solution is not for more accountability among scientists, not for more openness, not for a re-evaluation of the real data or anything like that. She doesn’t even question that one iota it seems. She simply says the media distorted it. And that politicians have used it for political purposes. And that scientists stink at PR.

I agree that scientists have not done a good job handling the fallout. They should be up in arms about this. They should be calling out these scientists on the carpet and heads should roll. They should be calling for more accountability. They should be petitioning NASA to open their books. They need to be open to the truth even if it might go against their dearly held beliefs.

Perhaps, in light of these recent scandals around the world, she should expand the name of her blog, changing it to “Unscientific World”.

tj

Pro for Politics: The deniers were never arguing the science. The facts don’t matter to them. Skeptics may be won over but deniers never will yield.

Pro for Science: It’s home turf for the scientists and the comfort zone. Politicians really cannot dominate this world because it’s alien to them. Scientists can take home court advantage and carry the day at will.

I suspect that the political battlefield will prove too daunting for most scientists. Politics rewards those who are quick with a joke, who play (pander) to their audience, who are slick and successful and are worthy of envy.

The problem with this is that Science can win every battle and still lose the war. It’s politics that prevails at the national (and international) level. Therefore I suggest that science needs to ally with willing and able politicians, but not itself become political.

Sheril, I hope you’ll consider that the folks who strayed off message were the scientists at CRU.

The message they strayed from is succinctly described by Feynman in “Cargo Cult Science”,

(and less succinctly by Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend and the collective works from Newton, Gallileo through Einstein, Watson, Crick, Franklin and beyond. The behavior of the CRU has shamed all of these people and set the public perception of science back decades.)

Once again the media has shown that it considers only 9/11Truthers to be truly deserving of a freeze-out, and that anybody else with a conspiracy theory about anything else will be welcomed with equal time. Heck, Pat Buchanan is still allowed to argue that Hitler didn’t really want a war.

And once again, M&S, I wish you would stop blaming the scientist victims of this. It has nothing to do with “how scientists frame their message.” The message itself is so complicated that there is no quick, easy, friendly way to “frame” it. The liars are lying quickly, and the media is letting them get away with it. If you want to talk “framing,” tell a news anchor that they themselves are acting as a megaphone for fraud and are complicit in the lies of the radical fringe. Put THEM on the defensive. Ask THEM how they judge an issue to be worthy of having “two sides.”

I think you are over estimating the percentage of the population who are Beck-Joe the (phony) plumber fans.

Rather than fetishizing (or would it be mytholizing) “The People,” I prefer to look at what the people actually are and actually do. I’m not saying that they are unable to be informed, I’m saying that they are unwilling to be informed. Rather than being informed, huge swaths of them prefer to be teabaggers and birthers and anti-vaxxers and tarot-card readers and creationists and climate change denialists.

Nor am I calling for an oligarchy, because the same plutocrats who now run things by manipulating the suckers and the boobs would be even more entreanched. What I’m calling for to strip the moneyed class of their political power, by eliminating their ability to legally bribe the people’s “representatives” coupled with a call for those representatives to work to the benefit of the public at large, and not for the benefit of corporations making massive donations to the politicians.

Nor am I opposed in principle to right wingers. There used to be a defensible (if, in my opinion, wrongheaded) intellectual tradition on the right. It’s not my fault that they’ve thrown that tradition in the trash in favor of the likes of Glenn Beck and Joe the Plumber. (Although I find it odd that you seem to defend the right wingers at the same time as decrying corporate personhood, seeing as how, if there is any serious debate in this country to eliminate the latter, the forces to opposed to doing so will come from the former.)