REPOSTING: The following was originally posted April 8, 2007. (Note: the first dozen comments are also from 2007.) I am hoping to see recent numbers. I imagine the 2010 budget will show some improvement but as far as I know the annual US budget for climate science research (as opposed to data collection or impacts…
The denial group is behaving in a very revealing way. The denialists are now trumpeting a very silly argument that El Nino (a quasiperiodic oscillation with energy in the 2-10 year band) is dominating secular trends in global temperature by an argument that I summarized in seven steps recently. I would like to start the…
This is something of a rant about science journalism and my place in it. The core of the matter is this. In our peculiar circumstances, science writing has an ethical component. Although speech is free in a free country, individuals or corporations aren’t free of ethical responsibility for what they write. The problems we face…
The prolific (and arguably indispensable) Joe Romm has a terrifying summary about global warming which appears to me to be pretty much on the mark. Joe believes that people who understand the situation in this way should stick together. Given the scope of the problem, and the vast difference between the perspectives of those few…
It looks like Lubos Motl gets credit for the first notice in the blogosphere of Lindzen’s astonishing new rant about the state of climate science. As is often the case with people who are too sure of themselves, he turns out guilty of some of the things he accuses his opponents of. He politicizes and…
The New York Times has a story about the astonishing decline in sea ice this summer. An interesting twist appears. If sea ice continues to vanish, it’s a fertile research topic, likely to be funded, likely to be published. Unless, that is, it goes away altogether. When the ice cover becomes purely seasonal, it becomes…
Good news for a change: President George W. Bush signed a major science and technology bill this morning at a White House ceremony. Just before it recessed last week, Congress passed the bill calling for multi-billion-dollar increases in federal support for science, math and technology funding over the next three years. Among provisions, the bill…
If the question “is climatology a real science?” is fair game, the question “is economics a real science?” cannot just be dismissed as subversive. What we really know, how valuable our conceptual models are and how reliable our computational embodiments of them are, are questions everyone offering expertise should be willing and able to answer….
[Factored out of the previous posting for clarity.] There are two meanings of the word “frame” that are getting confused here; one is the Overton Window stuff (the limits of what society tolerates as acceptable opinion can shift, and a good way to influence history in the long run is to move the perceived frame)….
Orac’s view gets it right as far as it gets it at all. Orac demonstartes that scientists who are threatened by N&M’s position can’t possibly be very introspective, because every communication is framed (and windowed too). Everyone I’ve read on this lately seems to be missing a key point, though. It’s about trust. Scientific communication…
Courtesy of Jim Torson who writes a lengthy diatribe to the globalchange googlegroup. Here’s Nisbet and here’s Mooney. Also Jim points to Blog around the Clock/Coturnix. I’m not sure whether Jim endorses this article, but I surely don’t. Consider this: The result of training is that scientists are uniquely trained to be poor communicators of…
It’s often a good source of creativity to take a question and flip it around. About when I pulled out of science, (and before I honed my political skills, at least a bit, in the private sector) I was at a meeting of paleoclimate modelers, when I kept saying “flip the question”. They were trying…