Packing up for Copenhagen this morning, I glanced at Instapundit to see a link to The Voice in My Head, noting that the AP had assigned eleven fact-checkers to Sarah Palin’s book as against five to the Climategate emails and documents. I’m not sure about the exact word count differential but it’s probably somewhere between one and a thousand to one (or more) in favor of the Climategate material. (Note to AP: you can find it all here.) And that doesn’t even begin to include the “degree of difficulty” differential.
But no one ever said life – or journalism – was fair. More importantly, this is another indication that conventional mainstream media fact-checking is fake and insufficient (except in cases like Palin where they have what we might call “ideological avidity”). On scientific and technical matters, especially, the “wisdom of crowds” is vastly preferable. The number of blogosphere readers with the expertise to understand and parse the Climategate papers dwarfs the staff that even the AP can provide. And, as the brilliant – and now indispensable – climate blog Wattsupwiththat points out, the AP’s science reporter Seth Borenstein is far too cozy with his sources.
So what do we do? Well, keep on trucking online. And now back to packing for Cop15, where I will do many little bit. Much thanks to all those who responded to the post below – in public and in private. Any help you can give is deeply appreciated.
Pack your longjohns, Al will be in town.
Belongs with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer “fact checking” an Obama parody on Saturday Night Live.
Roger L. Simon will be observing people wasting their time in Copenhagen. Barack Obama has no political capital to push any of their extremist proposals in the United States—and we are the beginning and the end of all the nonsense. This train goes nowhere without enthusiastic American involvement. The world still revolves around us. All the other nations are secondary players at best.
The MSM bet the house on the Obama presidency. It is rapidly become clear that this was a losing wager. These professional journalists have jeopardized their incomes and future prospects on a president who presently has a 44% approval rating according to Rasmussen. He has nothing to give them. There is next to zilch chance that elected purple and red state officials in either house of Congress will dare attempt to fund them as non-profit entities. They would have been much better off satisfying the needs of their readers.
Roger,
This is a bit lengthy, but I thought I’d send it to you publicly anyway as I’ve gotten some good mileage out of it: a list to ask any AGW advocate who’s absolutely convinced of a scientific consensus on the issue. (In case you find any over there …
) The advocate should answer “yes, I’m absolutely convinced” to each question — recognizing, of course, that they build on each other:
o The world-wide climate is changing more than it “should”
o This climatic change is in the form of planetary warming – that is, the temperature of the entire planet is getting warmer
o This warming is primarily due to carbon-based emissions
o These carbon-based emissions are being produced exclusively by human beings
o These emissions must be reduced immediately to prevent additional planetary warming.
o This reduction must be mandated and enforced by governmental bodies, the more global and multilateral in nature the better
o This enforcement must necessarily trump all related economic considerations and possible government policy trade-offs – after all, it’s the planet’s very survival we’re talking about.
o Even if any of the previous argument have some holes, we must be preemptive in our action since the consequences of not acting are too great.
I’ve found this battery of questions extraordinarily handy for breaking down the AGW issue. It’s not whether one is a “advocate” or “skeptic” (or, gasp, *denier*) — but does one buy the whole package without the slightest question? If they equivocate on any point, ask them if we can possibly consider them just the tiniest bit (whisper this part) … skeptical.
Doesn’t always work, but I’ve had some good results. Happy trails — and please keep up the good blogging from there.
The good news is more folks are interested in Sarah Palin’s book than in the global warming controversy. David Thomson is correct in that no politician in the US will vote to cut emissions in a recession. Without the US this will go nowhere. No this conference will be as useful as a Mideast Peace Plan, sound and fury signifying nothing. So Roger if you like wasting your time reporting on the actions of powerful people speaking in hypotheticals, but doing nothing have fun.
More good news the Republicans will take congress in 2010 and the White House in 2012. They did such a good job the last time I’m sure we will see the error of our ways and bring them back. So cheer up fellas the tide is turning so big government of the right for the right by the right is on the way back. I know before you jump all over me big government of the left is no better. So with that fact established can we at least agree that companies that electrocute our service personnel in showers and protect rapists shouldn’t get sweet heart deals going forward? Can I get an Amen?
“Pack your longjohns, Al will be in town.”
Err, don’t you mean “pack your hip waders?”
Roger, I think that the crowd-sourced “army of Davids” approach that has worked so well in computer science will not be applied to the climate issue. It will be interesting to see how long it takes the scientific establishment to benefit from, rather than object to this approach.
One observation on the CRU work – their statistical approach is primitive. I am sure there are many statisticians hanging around who can improve on the simple Principal Components Analysis followed by Multiple Linear Regression methods, and the dividing the earth’s surface into grids rather than using a more robust averaging technique.
Unfortunately, nobody can really do open science until all the data is available – the most important of which (for thermometry) is the surface station histories used or usable for making adjustments). I suspect a lot of this stuff is in musty log books and other non-21st century forms.
Roger,
Much of the news these past two weeks has been dominated by Scandinavia:
1. Copenhagen “climate-gate” conference;
2. Oslo/Obama Nobel “Peace” Prize;
3: Gothenburg and the Tiger Woods “saga”.
Anyone see any common thread here?
The Political Dictionary
wisdom of crowds n. The fabled effect where the combined judgment of many people is better than any one individual. The successful experiments asked crowds to estimate the number of jelly beans in a jar, or the butchered weight of an ox. The averaged estimates came closer to the exact answer than any one guess.
Unfortunately, we routinely see the awful result of applying crowd-wisdom to electing politicians. Possibly, this is because the crowd is smarter than any jelly bean or ox, and the beans and ox are incapable of making promises.
George Carlin expressed this well: “Just think how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are even stupider!”
It is a waste of time to argue with the insane, but in this case we need to take action. These crazy people are cleaning us out. The budget has already been very successful against us. I am afraid that massive direct action is required and the sooner the better. I challenge anyone to argue a rational alternative.
Seth may feel differently today. At least about the management skills of the UN. He stood in line outside (freezing weather) for 7+ hours to get his credentials. Had to use suck/pull to get in then. Waaayyy Toooo Fuh-nee.
Heard Arnold talk smack about Sarah today. That’s one woman he best not bother or she’ll enlarge his gap-tooth grin.
Ya know, to consider Sarah, a lovely lady truly an interesting woman, to consider her as a serious person is laughable. The woman believes that man and dinosours were here prowling earth at about the same time. She said she had seen the fossils that prove it. This is woman you would have had as a vice-president. C’mon you guys, be serious. Happy holidays and be patient things will work out, they will.