Outrageous and incorrect claims about aliens

Greg Laden likes to malign those who are skeptical about catastrophic man-made global warming. He recently wrote about a post by Anthony Watts, that reported on a claim that extra-terrestrial life had been discovered in a meteorite. Watts was skeptical about the claim. But Laden selectively quoted him and outright lied to present a different picture. His article concluded with the following.

As Phil points out, this report is by a “scientist” who has made many outrageous and incorrect claims about aliens, reported in a journal that is famous for printing bogus and incorrect science, the methods are obviously bogus and anyone who knew anything about, say, climate studies (where fresh water diatoms are used all the time as proxyindicators) would at least be suspicious, and would know how to check for veracity of the claim.

Anthony Watts, the anti-science global warming denailist,[sic] was not equipped to recognize this bogus science as bogus. We are not surprised.

It is hard to find common ground in the heated climate debate. So it is refreshing to discover that there are some things Greg and I can agree on. “Bogus science” involving “outrageous and incorrect claims about aliens” is a bad thing and those who uncritically present or even promote them should be ridiculed.

Is Michael Mann a Zebra or the Walter White of Climatology? Part 2

This is the second part. If you haven’t read Part 1, you should probably go there first.

A quick recap of Part 1: Michael E. Mann is suing some of his critics for defamation. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) is the group backing his litigation. Jeff Ruch is the Executive Director of PEER. Mann’s case may have been compromised by his online exchanges with Kelly Anspaugh, former lecturer of English literature, Ohio State University. [P.S. Click image for larger version]

 

Fraudulent Equivalence
Kelly Anspaugh seems to think that PEER actually mean what they say in their mission statement. Regardless of the ‘merits’ of his case, I don’t think Jeff Ruch will be leaping to his defence any time soon. But PEER and their associates are on a mission.

On February 21, 2012, the day after Wamsley’s article at Crock of the Week, Jeff Ruch, Scott Mandia and Joshua Wolfe (on behalf of PEER and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund), published an open letter to Heartland, on the same web site (also reposted at ThinkProgress.org). After some gloating at the actions of climate-alarmist Peter Gleick, (who tried to pass off a forged document purporting to be a “Strategy Memo” of the climate-skeptic Heartland Institute) PEER and the CSLDF announced their plans.

… the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund views the malicious and fraudulent manner in which the Climatic Research Unit documents were obtained and/or thereafter disseminated, as well as the repeated blogs about them, as providing the basis for civil actions against those who obtained and/or disseminated them and blogged about them. The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund fully intends to pursue all possible actionable civil remedies to the fullest extent of the law.

We respectfully ask the Heartland Institute, all activists, bloggers, and other journalists to immediately remove all of these documents and any quotations taken from them, from their blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.

Is Michael Mann a Zebra or the Walter White of Climatology? Part 1

Dr. Michael E. Mann is a zebra. At least, that’s how he appears to see himself.

In August 1999, I attended a meeting in Arusha, Tanzania, as a lead author for an upcoming report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). From my hotel room, I could see one of the world’s great wonders, Mount Kilimanjaro, with its magnificent ice cap … After the meeting, I joined a daylong expedition to see one of the world’s greatest displays of nature: Serengeti National Park. … Among the most striking and curious scenes I saw that day were groups of zebras standing back to back, forming a continuous wall of vertical stripes. “Why do they do this?” an IPCC colleague asked the tour guide. “To confuse the lions,” he explained. Predators, in what I call the “Serengeti strategy,” look for the most vulnerable animals at the edge of a herd. But they have difficulty picking out an individual zebra to attack when it is seamlessly incorporated into the larger group, lost in this case in a continuous wall of stripes. Only later would I understand the profound lesson this scene from nature had to offer me and my fellow climate scientists in the years to come.
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, (Prologue)

The Serengeti Strategy
Mann is not the Ernest Hemingway of science writers. He goes on to explain that his critics are actually just picking on the “most vulnerable animal” of the climate-alarmist-herd, him. Portraying yourself as a dumb herd animal and your opponents as formidable hunters of the plain, is probably not the best metaphor to win an argument. But it is part of his ongoing victimhood narrative.