Various things that I meant to write about, but didn’t, until too late. Happily, everyone else has now said most of them.
His transgression cannot be condoned, regardless of his motives – JEB, quoting Michael McPhaden being a bit po-faced about Gleick. This almost turned into a discussion on the philosophy of science with SE’s comment: Science works not because we trust each other, but precisely because we don’t trust each other, and we’re continuously finding and addressing the weaknesses in each other’s work. I don’t know about you, but I think most of my colleagues are deficient in intellectual rigor, truthfulness and integrity.
Totally unrelated, but if you row in Eastern England you want to come to the Head of the Cam, April 28th. Speaking of which, the crew I stroked came 4th in the Novice VIII’s category in the Winter League. I’m hoping to be not-a-novice by the time I’m too old to row, though many people retire virgin.
There was a long trail of deep stupidity (what else?) at WUWT about sea ice; Tamino took them to pieces in three parts: I, II and III. I joined in over at WUWT for part III but they weren’t really playing: Jeff Condon barely even attempted to defend his stuff, and had no answer to me pointing out that other people have done a far better job of defining first-year ice – and it doesn’t involve an arbitrary latitude.
Not to be outdone, Willis Eschenbach then proceeded to make Curry look good, by attempting to criticise a paper of hers, but making it painfully clear in the process that he hadn’t read it (its the one about recent-snowy-winters, which he misread as recent-increases-in-total-snow-extent; I’m vaguely interested in this as I have anecdotal evidence for enhanced snow over the last, say, 5+ years here).
The image I used above came from Tar Sands vs. Coal at ClimateSight.
Meanwhile, on the subject of plagiarism, Science has a story about an ecologist having nicked someone else’s words. That came via RetractionWatch, which usually covers medical stuff, but also covered Wegman recently.
Update: just in (thanks RN) is A view of climate “on the ground” from a reporter who was there at the beginning:
I worked as a journalist in the late 1980s in Colorado… I clearly remember the tone of articles on global warming during the 1980s. Most of the concern came out of the National Center for Atmospheric Research… The problem with NCAR’s interpretation on the ozone fluctuations were that some, like Hanson, took an immediate ideological tone to explain the ozone shifts – not once mentioning the Sun or the Interplanetary Magnetic Field effect on Earth’s ozone layers. For some reason, there was a resistance to even mentioning the Sun’s effects on earth by these new climate scientists getting jobs at the science agencies. It was odd I thought.
He can’t tell his ozone hole from his global warming. This is heavy-grade stupidity. And WUWT have fallen for it. Just in case you’re in any doubt:
in short, when I wrote pieces on the climate, I refused to write on the theory that chlorofluorocarbons were the sole cause of worldwide warming because that had never been proved
Aiee!
And I nearly forgot: Lindzen: what a lying toad, eh? [Update: but he has now apologised. Mind you, he is still wrong – the dataset URLs were different.]
Refs
* So, is it a fake?
* HBOS and the banking crash