THE DAILY BLADE: Global Warming Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
The Washington Post marvels that scientists looking at the same data can come to wildly differing conclusions about whether global warming is real:
A year after Hurricane Katrina and other major storms battered the
Academics have published a flurry of papers either supporting or debunking the idea that warmer temperatures linked to human activity are fueling more intense storms. The issue remains unresolved, but it has acquired a political potency that has made both sides heavily invested in the outcome.
Paradoxically, the calm hurricane season in the
Both sides are using identical data but coming up with conflicting conclusions. …
Inevitably, the scientific debate has spilled into the policy arena. … Last week, environmentalist
On the other side,
“I don't think that says much one way or another about whether global warming causes hurricanes,” said Ebell, whose group receives funding from the fossil-fuel industry.
The Stiletto notes that The Post doesn’t mention where the Earth Policy Institute gets its funding. The article also fails to mention where James B. Elsner, of Florida State University, Judith A. Curry, of Georgia Tech, and Kerry Emmanuel of MIT – all of whom believe there is a link between global warming and hurricane intensity) - get the wherewithal to conduct their research. On the other hand, readers aren’t told where
Perhaps the reader is supposed to conclude that Ebell is less credible than the others because he is tainted by his association with, and funding from, an industry with a stake in the outcome of the debate. Unfortunately, readers cannot make similar inferences about the objectivity of the other experts quoted in the article who may also have a vested interest in the outcome of the debate.
It’s easy to figure out how the fossil-fuel industry benefits if global warming turns out to be a crock. But how do scientists on the other side benefit if greenhouse gasses are, in fact, causing cataclysmic atmospheric changes?
Here’s how: “Sexy” science (typically, politically correct lines of inquiry) brings all sorts of rewards from grant money, to well-appointed labs, to a veritable fiefdom of power and personnel within a university, to being on the cover of a newsweekly.
Like
† Elizabeth Goodwin, associate professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, resigned in March after six graduate students blew the whistle on what an internal investigation considered “compelling evidence of scientific misconduct” after she falsified data in three grant applications. Explains
† Hwang Woo-suk, a stem cell and cloning research superstar at S
† Eric T. Poehlman, a former professor at the University of Vermont College of Medicine (UVM), was sentenced to a year at a federal prison work camp for fabricating research data on menopause, aging and hormone supplements between 1992 and 2000. He pleaded guilty last year to making false statements in an application for a $542,000 National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, but the government contends he defrauded federal agencies out of $3 million. Poehlman asked the judge for leniency, saying he was under pressure to win federal grants, which “determined your academic wealth.”
Scientific misconduct has become so rampant that The Stiletto has learned to read research papers – including those on global warming – with a gimlet eye.
Empirical data is supposed to be impervious to slanting, shading or manipulation to fit a preconceived idea or result – and the scientific process depends upon allowing the data to lead to a conclusion rather than starting with a preconceived conclusion or bias and then “finding” data that support it. Once upon a time, this was how science was done. Thanks to greed, politics and vanity, not any more.
When In
Jose Tenas, owner of Cuna del Sol, a Guatemalan restaurant in Manassas, VA, has enrolled seven of his employees in English classes because, “I like to give good service to my customers. I have a lot of American customers right now, and we need to learn how to serve them,” reports The Washington Times.
Stephanie Williams, the director of the Spanish and English Regional Language Academy and Training Center – who worked her way through college as a waitress - created the class to teach restaurant employees “common English phrases to help them do everything from greeting customers to taking their checks.” She tells The Times that, “Hispanic immigrants frequently come to the United States with little more than a sixth-grade education, which gives them limited language skills, even in their native Spanish.”
Trackbacks
-
February 23, 2007
The Stiletto wrote:
After reviewing data published in scholarly journals, panel of experts pulled together by the National Research Council concludes that the extended droughts that have afflicted the Colorado River Basin over the past 10 years “are a recurrent and integral feature of the basin’s climate.” This finding is supported by temperature trends, direct streamflow measurements going back 100 years and tree-ring based reconstructions of the Colorado River’s flow over several centuries. According to the panel: For many years, scientific understanding of Colorado River flows was based primarily ... -
March 7, 2007
The Stiletto wrote:
The National Post of Canada is running a superb series on "scientists who buck the conventional wisdom on climate science." Here are brief summaries of each segment of "The Deniers" series thus far: † Edward Wegman believes that peer-reviewed climate science should be taken with a grain of salt, because the reviewers were often unqualified in statistics. He says that competent statisticians should reassess past studies and in the future, the climate science world should better incorporate statistical know-how.† Richard S.J. Tol doesn't think the evidence is in on global warming and its effects, that there's reason ...
Global warming is amazing to me. If you say something enough times, people start believing it. I heard a few months ago that we just had our hottest climate in 2000 years! 2000 years! The reporter added extra emphasis that it hasn't been this hot since Jesus walked the earth. So, 2001 years ago it was really hot huh? What caused it? No SUVs, no factories, in fact nothing really generating unnatural heat except perhaps the hot air from Al Gore's ancestors. I could picture them now getting overheated by whipping the slaves they had working their mines.
Reply to this