Over at Steve McIntyre’s place. It’s a lot better than the “peer-reviewed” stuff, mainly because they aren’t drinking their own bathwater. And speaking of which, I’m disappointed, but not really surprised, at Jeff Masters, whose hurricane opinions I value a great deal, and his latest ad hominem attack. Delingpole needs to add this one to the list:
The history of the Manufactured Doubt industry provides clear lessons in evaluating the validity of their attacks on the published peer-reviewed climate change science. One should trust that the think tanks and allied “skeptic” bloggers such as Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit and Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That will give information designed to protect the profits of the fossil fuel industry. Yes, there are respected scientists with impressive credentials that these think tanks use to voice their views, but these scientists have given up their objectivity and are now working as lobbyists. I don’t like to call them skeptics, because all good scientists should be skeptics. Rather, the think tanks scientists are contrarians, bent on discrediting an accepted body of published scientific research for the benefit of the richest and most powerful corporations in history. Virtually none of the “sound science” they are pushing would ever get published in a serious peer-reviewed scientific journal, and indeed the contrarians are not scientific researchers. They are lobbyists. Many of them seem to believe their tactics are justified, since they are fighting a righteous war against eco-freaks determined to trash the economy.
Well, gee, which is it? Are they hired guns, or ideologues? And in what way does that differentiate them from the people who are taking grants from government bureaucrats whmo, if all of a sudden the supposed problem disappeared, would equally suddenly find better things to do with the money? Even Masters admits that the evil lobbyists have their value, in the very next paragraph:
I will give a small amount of credit to some of their work, however. I have at times picked up some useful information from the contrarians, and have used it to temper my blogs to make them more balanced. For example, I no longer rely just on the National Climatic Data Center for my monthly climate summaries, but instead look at data from NASA and the UK HADCRU source as well. When the Hurricane Season of 2005 brought unfounded claims that global warming was to blame for Hurricane Katrina, and a rather flawed paper by researchers at Georgia Tech showing a large increase in global Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, I found myself agreeing with the contrarians’ analysis of the matter, and my blogs at the time reflected this.
This is why I’m disappointed. Jeff has to take off the blinders, and recognize that much of what he’s been told by his colleagues in the climate-change industry is built on a house of quicksand. I hope that, on further reflection, he will realize that those “paid skeptics” (hey, some of us do it for nothing — are they supposed to be monks?) have it right on much of this.
[Update in the morning]
I’ll probably have more thoughts on Masters’ “Manufactured Doubt” industry versus the “Manufactured Crisis” industry later, but we’re flying to Denver today for a few days, and I may not get time till later in the weekend. In the meantime, you might want to see House of David for more on the subject. (Off topic, I’m not sure that sbcglobal.net is a very secure long-term domain for blog permalinks. He should consider getting his own URL)