[Wednesday-morning update]
I have a piece up a PJMedia about the latest climate fraud.
[Below was posted yesterday]
“…has just jumped upward a big notch.”
Also, Peter Gleick’s remarkable confession. Remarkable in the sense that it’s probably continued lying.
[Bumped]
Ross Kaminsky called it:
If those climate alarmists who went after me (for what I said explicitly in my note was “my speculation”) had any honor, they would not just apologize, but feel some guilt for being associated with the religion of climate change whose high priests could sink to identity theft because they feel “frustration” at not being able to get the rest of the country to join their rent-seeking, anti-human cult.
In the meantime, I take some satisfaction in believing, though I’ll never know for sure, that my article gave Mr. Gleick some incentive to confess, before the FBI agent came to his door. Or perhaps he just didn’t want to spend the money on a new (non-Epson) scanner.
Note also the comments from Judith Curry, who has been one of the few people in the climate community actually acting like a scientist.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Johann Hari of climate “science.”
Kind of funny the sort of people they’ll hand out “Genius Awards” to.
[Update a couple minutes later]
But it was only a first offense: Gleick has apparently been removed from the AGU Task Force on Scientific Ethics. Gee, I’d have thought he’d be a poster boy.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Don’t know much about science books.
[Update a while later]
In apologizing, Gleick blames his victims:
Once you begin to believe that the success of the Cause justifies deceit and theft, how long until you begin making excuses for other crimes committed on behalf of the Cause? I do not accuse Peter Gleick and his fellow fanatics of any Stalinist ambitions, but when we see them engaged in Stalinist methods — publishing forged documents to smear their critics – aren’t we justified in suspecting that they are not otherwise honest?
Actually, I suspect that some of them harbor Stalinist ambitions (e.g., Holdren). What a piece of work this guy is.
The event, which sold out all 4,000 tickets in 25 minutes, offers something to make every swine lover swoon: unlimited bacon samples, a bacon-eating contest, educational lectures, a bacon-themed songwriting contest and crowning of a new bacon queen. Organizers plan to serve up about three tons of the fatty strips.
They’re also prepared for a bit of oinking from outsiders.
A group of vegetarian doctors has been skewering Iowans over the event for months. Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, says he wants to publicize the flip side of bacon.
He says the PCRM plans to hand out fliers with warnings about how bacon “rotting in your mouth” potentially has various health risks, including cancer and diabetes.
I am aware of zero scientific evidence that anyone has ever gotten diabetes from eating bacon. And this is great:
Growing up in Fargo, N.D. …Dr. Barnard chowed down on bacon.
Both his father and grandfather were cattle ranchers. His palate changed, though, when he went off to Washington, D.C., for medical school.
A pathologist told Dr. Barnard, then 22 years old, to unlock a morgue freezer, pull out a body and help him examine the patient, dead from a heart attack.
The patient’s arteries were “hard as a rock,” Dr. Barnard recalls. The pathologist replied: “There’s your bacon and eggs, Neal.”
Soon, the medical student began to leave his carnivorous ways behind.
Primitive thinking like this is how ignorance is propagated. “You are what you eat.” “Big chief make crops grow.”
And we’re supposed to rely on these people for nutritional advice? And then let them force-feed our kids awful meals?
Hey, if you have ethical problems with eating animals, then be a vegan, but don’t delude yourself that it’s healthy, or that even if is for you that it will be for others. Now I’m curious as to what his cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood glucose levels are.
In light of all that’s happened, including continued UVA stonewalling, I say that he is the Jerry Sandusky of science.
[Update Saturday morning]
For those wondering, here are the parallels, that John O’Sullivan pointed out in November after the Sandusky case came to light:
Mann was never exonerated because the charges against him were never investigated. In both the Mann and Sandusky controversies the following points about Spanier’s stewardship are equally valid:
1. Both the Sandusky and Mann cover-ups involved a poorly executed investigation.
2. Both investigations saw the president making untrue statements.
3. Both involve an ethos that successful men can do no wrong; and the more famous and powerful they are, the more immune they are from scrutiny.
4. Both demonstrate a strong inclination to circle the wagons and seemingly show no interest in truth or justice.
5. Both involve extensive evidence going back years from a number of different sources and involving a variety of issues which should have raised red flags.
6. Spanier’s ‘investigations’ never interviewed witnesses against Mann or Sandusky.
But other than that, there is absolutely nothing in common.
[Bumped]
…doesn’t affect drinking water.
I wonder what the self-denominated “Party of Science” that insists on blocking it anyway has to say?
Thoughts on the strange political bedfellows of bioethics, from Ron Bailey:
These progressive bioconservatives fear that the rich and powerful will use technology, especially biotech, to outcompete and oppress the poor and weak. In their view, human dignity depends on human equality. It turns out that “the party of science” really is just the old-fashioned “party of equality,” science be damned (unless its findings conform to egalitarian ideology). Left-wing biocons seem to believe that protecting human dignity requires the rich and poor to remain equally diseased, disabled, and dead.
It’s always amazing to me to see the people who claim to be the “party of science” so fundamentally in denial of human nature. But of course, if they recognized it, their entire ideology falls apart. But this conflict is one more reason we need to expand off planet.
…is looking faker by the minute.
I think that Megan is being a little too optimistic here:
Unfortunately, I’d imagine that this is still a sizeable set of people, and it will be hard to identify the author. I suspect that it will be easier to do if the climate-bloggers–who may well know this person as a commenter or correspondent–get involved in trying to find out who muddied the story by perpetrating a fraud on their sites.
Certainly, if I were in their shoes, I’d want to expose this person, so that they could refocus on the legitimate documents, and put to rest doubts about their integrity in this matter. But I’m not going to hold my breath.
…with a fake memo? Looks like it to me.
Funny, the climate skeptics have never had to resort to things like this — they had plenty of real proof of unscientific behavior. These people sound desperate.
My thoughts on the pre-school lunch confiscation, over at PJMedia.
Thoughts from Lileks on school lunches:
I’m trying to think of a situation in which it’s permissible for a government official – not a school employee, even, but someone representing an agency outside the school – ask my daughter what she had for breakfast, then send me a letter informing me I have fed her the wrong thing, and must correct my ways. I can’t even imagine a state official demanding to look in her lunch to see if it conforms with national standards. If this is true . .
A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because a state employee told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.
The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the agent who was inspecting all lunch boxes in her More at Four classroom that day.
The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs — including in-home day care centers — to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.
And I say “if,” because years of getting collar-hot over this or that, only to find out that the situation was 17% less objectionable, which converted the situation from Ridiculous State Imposition to Idiotic Overreach Compounded by Misunderstanding and Mulish Defensiveness. But it seems to be holding up.
If this happened to us I would have to have a conversation with some people. Her lunch is simple: a piece of whole-wheat bread, a slice of bologna, half a slice of cheese, a bag of grapes, a ration of almonds, and a Roarin’ Waters pouch of flavored fluid with no sugar. It doesn’t have a vegetable because she wouldn’t eat it. In the case of this kid, the school made her a new lunch that included a vegetable, and she didn’t try it, either. You can lead a kid to watercress, but you cannot make them them eat.
There are two issues here. First, the overreach in general of having a bureaucrat police the contents of lunches brought from home. But the second is that junk science involved. There is abundant evidence that grain is not good for everyone (and perhaps not really for anyone), and yet the federal government demands that it be included in every meal. So even if one thinks that it’s acceptable for the government to act as a nanny food policeman, the law they enforce should conform to actual healthy nutrition, rather than the discredited food pyramid. As Glenn says, we used to have a remedy for this sort of thing that’s unfortunately gone out of fashion. It involves hot thick hydrocarbons and bird coverings.