Scientists And Public Discourse

As I’m a software developer I follow several big names of the trade, one of them being Robert Martin.

Yesterday one of his tweets caught my attention:

@badastronomer @absolutspacegrl @rationalists Snide political innuendo is unworthy of scientists. Honor your profession by speaking plainly

Which was a response to the following tweet by Phil Plait:

Via @absolutspacegrl: MT @rationalists: Santorum won 11 states. Remember that when you wonder why America ranks 27th in math and science.

Essentially a slap down of Santorum, his supporters, and the social/political environment it creates. I have no problem with a scientist commenting on politicians and issues that impact what they do. Which I tweeted to Robert Martin:

.@unclebobmartin Strange how scientists aren’t allowed a shot at a science denier. But Santorum is allowed to smear their professions/work.

This led to a small exchange of ideas on the subject between Martin and me. He even wrote an article which gives a good insight in his position and why he has a problem with scientists responding in such a way.

No, It’s Not About The Hockey Stick

Peter Sinclair has released another excellent video about climate change science, this time about the simplistic view some have that all global warming science has its foundation on the hockey stick.

There’s a persistent delusion out there, that you hear a lot from people who should know better – that global warming boils down to a simple minded correlation between temperature graphs and CO2 rise.  Climate deniers are sure this is true, and that if they just attack the most famous temperature graph, Mike Mann’s “Hockey Stick”, they can knock down the whole thing.

But our understanding of climate is, of course, based not on a graph, but on the radiative properties of greenhouse gases – which have been well known for 150 years, and got seriously nailed during the 1950s when the US government was working on building heat-seeking missiles that had to pick out long wave radiation at all altitudes in the atmosphere.  We realized that CO2 was blocking heat – and as Richard Alley points out here, that means something.

A Look Into Our Climate: Past To Present To Future

Almost everyone who follows the climate change ‘debate’ has heard of Michael Mann, and if not would have in the very least heard about the “hockey stick graph” he produced.

This graph is the result of extensive research about temperature trends over the last thousand years, and shows that the current warming is unprecedented for at least the past thousand years. It was, and still is, heavily criticized by opponents. Although over the years other teams have confirmed that this graph is correct and have even extended our knowledge about how unprecedented current temperature trends are.

The Failure of Climategate 2.0

It has been a few days since the release of a new batch of emails that were obtained by hacking servers at the University of East Anglia. And the usual suspects have been in a complete feeding frenzy digging through them to see if they can find some damning quotes/evidence.

Climategate 2.0? Not really

Well it seems the hacker(s) behind the original release of the so called climategate emails have released another bunch. This time releasing about 5,000 not previously released emails, and also admitting to having another 220,000 emails.

I venture you won’t need much guessing who immediately jumped on this to proclaim that “here comes Climategate II“, indeed none other than James Delingpole: