2013-05-27

AGW Warming Crowd Turns Up The Rhetoric As Scientist Comes Under Attack

As the case for AGW collapses, the rhetoric is turned up higher and higher in an effort to keep the cause alive.

Virginia Republicans Nominate Anti-Science Candidate for Governor
Last week, the Virginia Republican party nominated Ken Cuccinelli for governor, in an election to be held later this year. Just three years ago, in his current job as Attorney General of Virginia, Cuccinelli launched one of the most outrageous attacks on an academic scientist that I’ve seen in many decades. His actions would not be out of place in a totalitarian state such as the Soviet Union, or perhaps in the 1950′s McCarthyism era, when many Americans were blacklisted, denied jobs, and even fired because of their political views. But in a country where the freedom to speak is a fundamental right, Cuccinelli’s actions are frightening.

Cuccinelli used the power of government to intimidate a scientist with whom he disagreed. Not just one scientist, but 40 scientists and their colleagues, all working at the University of Virginia. His message was clear: if you disagree with me, I will come after you. Now Cuccinelli is running for governor, and in a state fairly evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, he has a good chance of winning.

Ken Cuccinelli is a climate change denialist, one of many U.S. politicians who think that the Earth is not warming, or if it is, that the warming is unrelated to human activities. The science is completely against Cuccinelli on this, but if he were simply scientifically ignorant I wouldn’t be writing about him. After all, he’s not the only politician who ignores science when he finds it inconvenient.
McCarthy! Denial! Blacklist! Ironic that most American universities operate under Stalinist rules. And which university did Cuccinelli target? Not a private institution, but the state funded University of Virginia, where the state and the people clearly have an interest.

Who did Cuccinelli go after? None other than the fraud of AGW, Michael "Hockeystick" "Hide The Decline" Mann.

ClimateGate Star Michael Mann Courts Legal Disaster
In an e-mail sent to Mann and others, CRU’s director Philip Jones reported: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [journal] trick…to hide the decline [in global temperatures].” “Mike’s” ( Mann’s) “trick” was to add in real temperatures to each series for the last 20 years from 1979 onwards and from 1961 for Briffa’s, show all of the proxy and surface measurement chartings in different colors on a single graph, and then simply cut off Briffa’s in a spaghetti clutter of lines at the 1961 date.

In the wake of ClimateGate e-mail revelations, two universities that have employed Mann have been called to task for insulating him from accusations of wrongdoing. Penn State has been broadly accused of botching an internal inquiry, and Mann is fighting a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking to compel the U. of Virginia, his employer during the period in question, to release requested documents. The FOIA was filed by Christopher Horner, Director for Litigation with the American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center.
This case is not an aberration, but the start of a major trend. Aside from global warming, universities are declining in stature due to debt, cultural Marxism and low standards. Scientists are also coming under increasing scrutiny in areas such as genetics as opposition to genetically modified crops increases on the left. It is the start of a general trend against scientists.

Number Of Published Cancer Studies That Can't Be Reproduced Is Shockingly High
Any one study may come to an interesting conclusion—"this chemical causes cancer" or "this drug works" or "penis size matters"—but the way scientists check if those studies are true is by doing them over again. When study after study gets the same results, you can be reasonably sure the conclusion is true. On the other hand, large numbers of irreproducible studies in the scientific literature indicate that something's wrong, reported Retraction Watch, a watchdog blog that first pointed us to the new survey.

The researchers involved in the irreproducible studies didn't always seem eager to make things right. Sixty-two percent of the survey respondents who tried to contact the original researchers found the study authors responded negatively, indifferently or not at all. Only one in three researchers in the survey, which a team of MD Anderson Cancer Center physicians sent to all scientists at the center, ever resolved the discrepancy they found.
The amount of fraud in science is staggering, but it's largely undiscovered because scientists hold a high social position in society. As social mood changes, the relative position of groups will shift as well. Science itself will also come under increased scrutiny, but the main targets in this social mood shift will be the scientists. They will try to make it seem like science is under attack, which might be the case at times, but overall the targets will be those peddling fraudulent results.

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