Climategate: The Shaming of “Scientific American”
Pity Scientific American. Little did the magazine’s editors know when putting together their February issue that their boneheaded article Negating “Climategate”: Copenhagen Talks and Climate Science Survive Stolen E-Mail Controversy now reads as if it were written by David Biello somewhere around 1993. Oh, well, back when this nonsense was written (December?) some people still believed the Himalayan glaciers were about to disappear, not to mention the Amazonian rainforests. Nor did we know that not just the East Anglia CRU, but also our own NASA had been playing fast and loose with AGW temperature facts, for some reason needing a FOIA to cough up data that should be public record in such a scientific endeavor. The poor editors of SA are taking a drubbing in the comments, which they richly deserve.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, Bin Laden is apparently jumping on the “global warming bandwagon.” I think we should give him an Oscar!
Sigh.
Remember back when Scientific American refused to review Hermann Kahn’s Thinking about the Unthinkable because, they said, if it was unthinkable there was no point in thinking about it?
Scientific American has long had a decided left-wing and green tilt. In the ’80s, they spent lots of their pages telling us why anti-missile systems couldn’t work. When Bjorn Lomborg published “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” they devoted 14 pages to attacking him – 14 pages which were devoid of science and consisted only of ad hominem attacks. When he put the pages on his blog to “Fisk” them, they threatened him with copyright infringement (even though it was arguably “fair use”).
Some years back, when they needed a new person to write “The Amateur Scientist,” they hired Forest Mimms. When they discovered he was a creationist, they promptly withdrew their offer. This in spite of the fact that, creationism aside, Mimms was a well known and respected amateur scientist with a good publishing record.
Scientific American is like the New York Times. There’s lots of good stuff in there, but they intentionally mix editorializing with reporting with no shame. And, like NYT, they are shrinking. I don’t know their numbers, but my copies seem to be getting smaller and smaller.
It’s a shame. They have a long proud history. But, like so many institutions, they have succumbed to O’Sullivan’s law and put leftist politics ahead of their mission.
Remember when Roger described himself as an agnostic on AGW?
man – I sure hope people are getting it. Errr, I mean HOPE.
I’m sorry #2, but when there is “lots of good stuff in there, but they intentionally mix editorializing with reporting with no shame”, what they are doing is called a ‘loss leader’. They provide facts to cover their prevarication.
Credibility is defined by the least of your lies, not the most egregious.
My advice is to stop buying Scientific American, and tell them exactly why.
You value facts, and they don’t provide them.
Scientific American’s left bias goes back to the 60s when Gerard Piel was editor/publisher. When I was a medical student at USC, we had him out as a speaker. He was at least as far left as Dr Spock at the time. It’s too bad and I gave up my subscription years ago.
AGW has been an emotional boon for a segment of leftists. It represents the “scientific” vindication of their beliefs about the evils of capitalism. The solutions proposed by the hard core AGWers always involve some sort of collectivist wet dream. There are believers in AGW who are not of this ilk, but far too many in positions of power or of fame are major watermelons.
And then I saw the science, NC Mountain Girl.
But… do I know if there isn’t any AGW? Of course not. But do I think it’s settled science? Pshaw!
I used to subscribe to “Discover Magazine” until the GW propaganda began to appear. I demanded and got my subscription money refunded. You have to admit these wackos hang on until the bitter end. I came up with some arguments such as the oranges are freezing in Florida, but to no effect. This was at least ten years ago.
Your journey from agnostic to skeptic shows an open and inquisitive mind Roger. So rare in these perilous times. You have both my admiration and my insignificant but heartfelt gratitude as well. I hope and pray you represent the thinking of millions. That is hope I WANT to believe in! This dishonest drama of AGW has gone on far too long.
Hopefully climate science will join marxist economics in the halls of academe.
As a teen in the 70′s I liked Scientific American; the magazine had detailed articles on complex scientific issues, but somewhere in the 80′s or 90′s they started developing a leftist social agenda on some articles. They then gave up any claim to “scientific” completely when they went whole hog for climate change as an accepted fact. Not unlike what has happened to NY Times and CBS and other formerly reliable media companies.
I cancelled my subscription in the early 1980s when they published an article about hunger and homelessness in America as a Reagan-bashing exercise. The article contained no science whatsoever — no data, no analysis, just polemics.
I think they’re long past being capable of shame. It’s been a couple of decades since I started calling it “Scientifictive American.”
I’d like to repeat John Moore’s quote:
“When Bjorn Lomborg published “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” they devoted 14 pages to attacking him – 14 pages which were devoid of science and consisted only of ad hominem attacks. When he put the pages on his blog to “Fisk” them, they threatened him with copyright infringement (even though it was arguably “fair use”).”
Now, I’d like to thank Scientific American, because it was this incident that planted the seed of doubt in me about AGW, a skepticism that’s been fully borne out in the East Anglia e-mails.
You see, I happen to believe in science in the same way that many men like sports. It can be argued passionately, but there’s also an undercurrent of facts that can be used as debating points. If you argue over who was greater, Babe Ruth or Ted Williams, you’d better be prepared to back it up with the stats.
When Scientific American went after Lomborg, it told me that the facts behind AGW weren’t there. That statistics were being manipulated to make the case. Else, why go after him?
When it came to 9/11, Popular Science published a book refuting the arguments of conspiracy theorists. When it came to the “moon landing was a hoax”, there were plenty of sites that conveyed, in words anyone could understand, why the landings actually happened. The few sites I’ve read about AGW went into great detail about quoting from the IPCC reports, but in a way that made it difficult to understand, and which mostly boiled down to “the science is settled.”
This is not the way you go about convincing the public that you’re right. Unless, of course, you’re wrong.
I’m another former SciAm lover — they had great stuff in there back in the 70s. In the early ’80s they seemed to get more political, and clearly leaned left. I cancelled.
A couple decades later with bright teenage children in my house I decided to try it again. It took only a few issues to demonstrate that things had gotten much worse at SciAm. Clueless pieces by social ‘scientists’ non-stop global warming agitprop that wasn’t even well written. Subscription was not renewed. In my mind the editors of SciAm are as big a disgrace as the frauds at CRU.
Another former multi-decade subscriber. I gave it up when it switched from Scientific American to Sociological American.
I recently relinquished my subscription to “Scientific” American after a worthless exchange of emails with columnist Steve Mirsky over his left-wing trashing of John McCain and Sarah Palin in the name of “science.” His comments were inappropriate to a “Science” magazine irrespective of his or my political views. One or two issues later, a picture of John McCain was juxtaposed with a picture of a monkey; imagine if that were done with Obama. They have long ago lost their objectivity. I’m embarrassed to see how long it took me to realize it.
The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect is well known, but AGW hoaxers (not too strong a word now, I think) were denying it, so that they could drop rural stations and claim that introduced no warming bias into their data.
We now know about the oceanic oscillations that have about a sixty year cycle time, which explains the warming we had up until 1998, the cooling period before then, and the warming period before that. It’s going to be interesting to see if the uncommonly quiet solar cycle amplifies the cooling phase that’s started.
Decades ago Scientific American magazine was a leader in hysterically fear mongering US nuclear power plants. They continued as students of Lysenko and became the ‘climate change’ hustling rag they are today.
The same thing is happening to The Economist. I have been a faithful reader since 1989. In the last two years it has become painfully watered down with feel-good Lefty populism, especially on AGW, beginning to resemble Time Magazine. It now causes me great pain to write the check to renew my subscription.
I subscribed to SA for many years and found many of their articles, particularly those about mathematics and physics to be terrific, but the whole global warming topic has beclowned them. Too bad!
Sad how they, “professing themselves to be wise, became fools”…
I remember as a high school student in the early 70′s how cool it was to finally be able to afford my own subscription to SA – which was THE science mag for us aspiring science-techie types. Devoured every issue, cover to cover.
I also remember the gradual decline the magazine seemed to suffer over the next two decades, as they continued giving us valuable and interesting things such as the physics of missile-mounted lasers mentioned above, but more and more accompanying those fact-based (and welcome) tutorials with their own personal pronouncements on the morality of those missiles. I knew why I valued their professional expertise; I never did understand why they assumed we readers would value their moral pronouncements.
The final straw – long after subscriptions had ended – was the gratuitous and substanceless trashing of Mr. Lomberg. That made clear to me what I had been avoiding – that The Science Magazine was gone, run off along with The Economics Magazine, replaced by some Hare Krishnas who took over the name. I’ve not opened another issue since 1999. It’s too much like visiting the once-brilliant uncle now confined with Alzheimer’s.
I imagine they’ll be the first ones to begin warning us to change our evil ways before all civilization collapses as a result of Anthropogenic Climate Stasis.
Like others here, I finally unsubscribed to SA after 10+ years of continuous subscription. I can handle some bias, but it became so decidedly left-wing at some point that it was no longer “science” and simply “politics”. They also made the decision to turn their magazine into a high-class Discover graphically, which didn’t help.
There was a time when I read the book cover to cover each month. Sadly, I didn’t miss it after the last issue came here.
On account of their lefty nonsense I canceled by SA subscription in the 1980s. Then in the 2000s my kids made me subscribe again — a magazine drive at school. Still full of lefty nonsense, so I had the pleasure of canceling my subscription a second time.
Lots of good science writing out there. Scientific American ain’t it.
When I was in school I loved getting SA… Now sadly, I wouldn’t even buy it for my kids because they might actually believe some of the trash they publish.
John Moore: I remember reading some of their anti-antimissile articles back when I was in high school. I recall thinking to myself, “I don’t see their point. Given enough money I could build one.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGGsGqO8dss&
You actually take Scientific American seriously? Way way back, in the 1960′s and 1970′s they published real science articles with actual science in them. Selected articles were required reading in my college science courses. Sometime in the 1980′s they decided real science was too difficult for their readers and their staff, and they became a science version of USA Today. I dropped my subscription sometime in the late 1980′s. I haven’t read them for 25 years.
I certainly would not believe a word of what they say about Global Warming.
Anyone have suggestions on science magazines worth reading?
And if they weren’t in trouble before, now Osama Bin Laden (allegedly) has come out on their side. When you’ve got Binny whinnying about “climate change,” you know it’s all over now, baby blue.
Subsribed for decades. Gave up after their review of “The Bell Curve”.
It has long befuddled me how such obviously intelligent people such as the editors of the major media, and SA, could be so mind-bogglingly stupid and self-destructive when it came to pushing a leftist agenda over fact.
I’ve come to the conclusion that radical ideology is like an illegal drug addiction, one knows they are killing themself, but is seemingly incapable of stopping.
SA embraces postmodern scientific thought; there is no objective truth, it’s all social context. Perhaps Prof. Sokal can now submit a paper.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
I was so completely disgusted by the hatchet job Sci Am did on Bjorn Lomborg in 2002 that I canceled my subscription (after 20 years) and contacted them to let them know why. I was amused yesterday to read an interview with Burt Rutan, the legendary aeronautical engineer. He rarely gives interviews and started by asking whether the reporter was from Sci Am. He won’t talk with them because of their biased (unscientific) coverage of global warming. Apparently he is a passionate global warming skeptic. Maybe Bill Whittle could get an interview with him.
Whenever they covered something I really knew about they got it wrong or only partly right.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant and the internet does this very well. Alot of reputations will wrecked when this is done.
SA’s review of “The Bell Curve” in 1994 blasted the book based on mis-representations of what it actually said. I was a bit shocked, because their assertions could be so easily refuted based on the actual written words.
After graduating in 1973, I kept subscribing to SA until the 80′s when there was an almost monthly article about how stupid the Star Wars concept was. Cancelled subscription and never went back. Now I go with Science News, but even they’re getting close to “double secret probation”.
This is a very interesting thread. My experience has been similar to many of your’s. I started reading SA back in the mid-70′s. I consistently read it from cover to cover until the early 80′s when the editors started devoting the first article in each issue to a politcal theme–always left wing. My solution for the next 20 years was to simply skip the first article. That worked until about 10 years ago when the first two articles became overtly political in theme–always left wing. The last two years it has become 90% politically slanted–always left wing. So last month I dropped my subscription–I can get the science from the web without all the silly Gaiaist-collectivist nonesense.
I’ve always wondered why no one has tried to make the case that climate should be stable. They go on about how bad global warming is, though it seems likely to be less bad than global cooling. But this claiming of climate change as a crisis implies that it should be stable and unchanging. Where is the climate stability crowd?
“But, like so many institutions, they have succumbed to O’Sullivan’s law and put leftist politics ahead of their mission.”
I seen this happen in a number of publications. What I think happens is that a publication gets launched by some hard-core enthusiasts who are really into the subject matter; with them, their publication is a labor of love. But eventually the publication grows, and the original core of enthusiasts realize they need some help managing the now-larger beast. After all, their expertise lies in the subject matter, not in the details of managing a publication itself. So, they hire on folks who know how to manage pubications, but are not necesarily knowledgeable about the subject matter.
And where do they find such people? Guess. Folks schooled in the liberal arts. Non-science people. IOW, people who more than likely were raised in leftist academe.
Eventually, the publication managers take over the pub as the original cadre of enthusiasts retire or move on, and their world view then drives pub content. This is what I think happened to Scientific American.
What I think happens is that a publication gets launched by some hard-core enthusiasts who are really into the subject matter; with them, their publication is a labor of love. But eventually the publication grows, and the original core of enthusiasts realize they need some help managing the now-larger beast. After all, their expertise lies in the subject matter, not in the details of managing a publication itself. So, they hire on folks who know how to manage pubications, but are not necesarily knowledgeable about the subject matter.
And where do they find such people? Guess. Folks schooled in the liberal arts. Non-science people. IOW, people who more than likely were raised in leftist academe.
Eventually, the publication managers take over the pub as the original cadre of enthusiasts retire or move on, and their world view then drives pub content. This is what I think happened to Scientific American.
Last time I checked (years ago) American Scientist was pretty good, much more scientific than Scientific American.
It must be an ego-driven blindness that convinces people – people whose brilliance and knowledge and insight we so highly value when confined to their area of expertise – that their brilliance isn’t just the seemingly narrowly-limited brilliance within their one small section of molecular biology, or guitar playing, or emoting on a stage, but is instead a general brilliance, causing others to value their any and every pronouncement on any subject, simply because it was made by THEM.
It’s what makes a Sean Penn or a Bono or a Phil Jones assume that we’d look to them for something beyond what they’ve done very well at in the past. Sorry, but having accomplished expertise at acting or singing or computation signifies nothing in terms of the value to others of your thoughts concerning whitewater rafting or pigs or principles of sociological guidance.
8. Roger L Simon:
“And then I saw the science, NC Mountain Girl.
But… do I know if there isn’t any AGW? Of course not. But do I think it’s settled science? Pshaw!”
WOW! You put yourself in the position of proving a negative, and if you haven’t proved the negative (which, tho you don’t know it, HAS actually been done) then the affirmative must be true — even without any proof or even any credible evidence to back the original claim?
With this back-asswards point of view, why would anyone care whether you “saw the science”? You clearly wouldn’t recognize actual science if it kicked you in the gut.
I have this hypothesis that gravity is actually the activity of extra-dimensional elves who always wear green mittens pulling on invisible cords of catgut. Go ahead, disprove it. HAH! You can’t. Therefore, it must be true.
I read (that’s past tense) SciAm for nearly 40 years and then came the Lomborg pile-on.
I could not stand the thought that in some Publisher-Editor meeting they’d might be discussing how things were going and, with my subscription included in their circulation figures, conclude that all was okay . . . so I let my subscription lapse. I regret that I did not CANCEL with an explanatory note.
Ironically, one of my favorite sections had been SciAm “50, 100 and [then, later,] 150 years ago.” Many of those items described theories that had been confidently asserted when originally published but which had been later shown to be utterly mistaken.
Interesting. If “creationism” is a religious belief (as many evolutionists claim) then Scientific American may have been guilty of religious discrimination. Would they have treated a Buddhist, Hindu or a Muslim the same way? Would Scientific American have dumped Mimms if he had expressed a belief in, say, reincarnation? Is there now a religious litmus test for scientists who want to be published in Scientific American?
As a mathematician, what has fascinated me about the scientific community is the growing hostility some scientists have about dissenting views. Even more alarming are other scientists who seem not to notice what is going on.
For all their talk about “dispassionate search for scientific truth”, some scientists react like members of a fundamentalist cult when their beliefs are questioned. Certain advocates of evolution and AGW are good examples of this.
I bailed on SA a bit earlier, before the AGW nonsense became de rigeur, when all the articles on molecular genetics started to seem exactly the same. Sounds like I haven’t missed much since.
Uriel -
That’s not at all what Roger said. His statement is simply a distillation of basic scientific skepticism. You seem confused.
The hypothesis is that man’s activities, specifically the burning of fossil fuels, is leading to an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that this is creating an increase in global temperatures. The proponents of this hypothesis are required to provide data that support the hypothesis or disprove it. We have been told for years that “the science is settled,” suggesting that experts in the field were seeing substantial evidence that proved the hypothesis. What we are learning is that there has been some data that has been manipulated to agree with the hypothesis. Additionally, we are learning that the climate science community has taken direct action to keep opposing views and inconvenient data out of peer-reviewed publications.
What Roger is saying is that the science is clearly not as settled as we have been led to believe, but that there may be some validity to the hypothesis. The history of science is filled with experiments that DO disprove hypotheses, so your rant about proving a negative is just silly.
I can’t add much except an annecdote. The ad hominon attack on Lomborg was the last straw for me, too. I did not renew after having subscribed for 30 years.
About 18 months later, after innumerable mail pleas, Sci Fi Am called and asked me to renew. I demurred, and further commented that “I could hardly recognize the magazine any more”.
The call center guy said, “We hear that a lot”. And he graciously thanked me for my time.
Reminds me of Spinal Tap: “Our careers have taken a new more satisfying path playing smaller clubs. We are focusing on our core audience, now”.
The former MSM has a business model problem. How to survive while attacking the majority of Americans. Now wonder the Internet exploded.
One question for the assembly: if SciAm and Discover are too left wing, what are the best periodicals for the intelligent layman wanting to keep up with science?
I also used to subscribe to SA. On AGW, I’ve found it very difficult to find reliable science. I’ve ended up doing my own analysis (Leave CO2 Alone!).
It’s taken millenia to develop an approach to discovering truth and I still wonder why SA and others would abandon science. Maybe it’s because science provides truth, truth creates power, and power attracts weasels.
@ 47 “If “creationism” is a religious belief (as many evolutionists claim) then Scientific American may have been guilty of religious discrimination.”
When Francis Collins was appointed head of the NIH by Obama, there was an outcry against him by scientists on the lefty blogs. He has a record as an outstanding scientist and administrator, but he’s very public about his Christian faith, and that alone disqualified him in the minds of many scientists. Never mind that it’s against federal employment law to discriminate against someone on the basis of his religion.
There is a sickness in science nowadays. Ironically, many leftists call conservatives like me “anti-science” (despite my science degree), but we are the ones who want to preserve the integrity of science and save it from irrational groupthink and politics.
I grew up on SciAm and was a faithful reader for several decades. When the Lomborg debacle took place, I read his works and their responses. I concluded that with the drift away from real science to “how do you feel about science” it was no longer a worthwhile expense. Scientific American should change its name to Scientific Fiction.
Sadly, the Sci Am became another NY Times. More and more, the Economist is becoming another bastion of “relevance” and “an agent of change.” It too has become a former expense for me.
Too many publications seem to follow a similar trajectory. They start out with an important idea, grow larger, think that they must grow gigantic and no longer want to produce real value in real reporting of news. They want to become “agents of change” or “make a difference”. In doing so, they become less valuable and useful and former expenses for their readers.
Virtually all of the existing “science magazines” are completely overrun with leftist ideology. The constant pounding of the AGW “meme” in articles and documentaries is so pervasive that it has become a foundational element in “science.” The virulent Bush hatred that was on regular display in SA, Nat Geo, Astronomy, etc. got so bad that I simply stopped buying any of them years ago. I can get my science fix from the web without having to wade through vicious left-wing propaganda and anti-conservative hate on page after page of sanctimonious, self-righteous posturing.
If SA, Nat Geo, Astronomy, et. al. cease publication, I will be disappointed not because they failed as a publication, but because they long ago failed as an objective rational source of information about actual “science.”
I wrote a comment on the original article but I thought I would post it here as well.
I find it interesting that Biello fails to note that he questioned the methodology of the IPCC study when it was first published:
By excluding statements that provoked disagreement and adhering strictly to data published in peer-reviewed journals, the IPCC has generated a conservative document that may underestimate the changes that will result from a warming world, much as its 2001 report did.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=conservative-climate
Biello might wish to clarify the incongruity between his statements and recent published reports.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ipcc-chief-blames-lack-of-knowledge-2010-01
As noted in the Times article linked to by the article above, there is no evidence that the article below would qualify as “peer-reviewed.”
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16221893.000-flooded-out.html
I cancelled SA many years ago. The editors are arrogant no nothings. Their articles are little more than political theory. There’s a wealth of high quality science reporting on the web from many other sources.
We get American Scientist at our house, it too is becoming more and more liberal, although lately there has been some backing off on that. Maybe we are just noticing and getting more critical of it. It has never been a popular science publication as Scientific American actually is. It is a magazine of Sigma XI,the Scientific Research Society.
SA has a long history but it is reaching its nadir.
Makes one dream of some conservative rich guy buying the place and installing solid editors who would eschew politics and focus on science and technology.
As a teenager in the 60′s it was an inspiration. Now, it just irritates.
Let’s face it, science is hard.
Writing about it is harder.
I think, as brought up earlier, that the current staff finds it easier to parrot political talking points than evaluate and report on real science.
Either that, or they’re convinced they have to “Make A Difference”, regardless of the facts.
For our own good, of course.
I have been a reader of Scientific American for over 40 years. Yes it has gone way left. It is time for them to be honest and rename themselves – Mother Jones.
I held my nose and stayed with SciAm after the Lomborg smear-fest.
But I canceled soon after when they published a two-page adulation of Henry Waxman, one entire page of which was a glam shot of Waxman in one of his Capitol Hill inquisition chambers.
The Lomborg/Waxman twofer convinced me that SciAm’s editors had become deeply anti-science.
Climategate:
The Shaming of “Scientific American”
“I used to be much older then;
I’m younger than that now.”
I used to think that the takeover of Academia, and the schools, and the scientific/technical media, was done to gain a monopoly on Proof by Appeal to Authority, and to keep students ignorant enough to believe such “proof”.
After watching the ClimateGate scandal unfold,
I now think that the intended result was more
analogous to the old Chinese practice of binding
young girl’s feet, so that when they were grown
women, they would not be able to walk well,
let alone run; It seems to have worked.
P.S. Scientific American was one of the last
publications to admit that a couple of young
bicyle repairmen named Orville and Wilber had
succeeded where the greatest engineering minds
of Europe had failed; Plus ca change…
Oh, you mean the Scientic American that (long ago) published an article that proved heavier than air flight was impossible…in 1913, four years after the Wright brothers?
SA is a leftist political rag plain and simple. My wife had some frequent flyer miles that she had not been able to use, the airline sent a offer to redeeem the miles for magazine subscriptions.
She signed up for SA, thinking I would like it (I’m an Engineer). When it started arriving, I told my wife I didn’t even want the trashy magazine in our house. We tried to cancel the subscription, but had no luck.
After a year when the subscription was up, we started get renewal notices with the magazine – warning that this was the issue we would get unless we renewed. It went on for three more years.
I know that magazines make their money off of advertising and that it’s based on the total circulation. The more people “read” your magazine the more you can charge for ads. Clearly SA had to force people to take their rag, else they wouldn’t have much circulation.
Losers.
I am still a subscriber to SI, going back to sometime in the mid-80′s. I keep the sub now for one reason – to see what the leftist talking points are when distilled into pseudo-scientific jargon and the associated entertainment value therein. Also I enjoy the occasional non-political hard-science article. Unfortunately the current crop of SI editors can make an article on quantum mechanics lean left. I literally thumbed through the current issue in about 3 minutes a few days ago and set it aside. Sigh.
Early on in the AGW debate I had questions about the source of the data being used. I was familar with a great many comprehensive financial forecasts that never came to pass because of a bad assumption, an omitted set of variables or the occassional black swan so I was interested in how this climate modeling was being done. After all, accurate measurements of temperature, precipitation etc. on a comprehensive worldwide basis don’t go back all that far so a lot of secondary data had to be in use in these climate forecasts.
Like No. 16, I found the information being offered designed to obsfucate, not clarify. There was also a subtext that only really, really smart people could understand all of it. It reminded me way too much of the overly complicated explanations Enron’s managers gave about their supposedly new way to make money in the energy business.
I don’t read Lancet, but here is the editor of that periodical at a peace rally bad-mouthing George Bush: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csxvUzpIQ18
I couldn’t wait to join AAAS in retirement. Other professional responsibilities precluded membership. I dropped my membership ten or so years ago after three years as a member, primarily over Scientific America’s coverage of global warming. I have tried to recover a letter to the editor of AS and have had no luck. A French climatologist wrote that the trust in US climate research would be harmed if conclusions of climate papers continued not to be supported by the paper’s data. Kennedy was the editor and I told circulation that he was a problem for me. Nothing changed as results for grants continued and still does apparently.
For most of the 1980s and 1990s, you could count on Scientific American’s coverage being solid IF you skipped the first feature article… that was sure to be leftist drivel.
Now, the drivel has leaked throughout the entire magazine. Sad.
In terms of the timing of the decline of SciAm, as early as May 1961 I noted the review of “On Thermonuclear War”, which reviewed little actually propounded in the book, and denounced many things it described, as though Herman Kahn were in favor of them. That started me on an intellectual march away from academicism and an automatic willingness to give their “progressive” viewpoint a pass.
Finally, at the age of 14, I decided its attitude was intrusive enough that I’d do a review of the magazine’s articles on economics and on defense technology, from current 1965 articles back to World War II. I found that since October of 1945, not one major offensive weapons system had been written of in a positive fashion and Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) was trashed. As well, no major economics article had anything to say against a centrally planned economy and little good to say about freer markets. In short, SciAm was in the tank for “the socialist camp” from the end of WWII onwards, though quietly.
This got noisier in the 1980s, when the Tsipis article on orbital laser BMD had order of magnitude errors in its arithmetic, all of which just happened to make the concept look worse. Even though it had excellent articles on anything not affecting the world struggle during this time, its bias was evident.
SciAm has been a classical gramscian influence on generations of young people interested in technical matters. SciAm has done as much as it could to make sure Antonio Gramsci’s idea of “proletarian definitions” of cultural affairs dominated the minds of those who were happy with its technical articles. This followed trends in academia, and it is no surprise that by the 1980s many in the scientific community refused to work on defense projects, and found every specious excuse to believe they could not work, or if they could, they should not.
Regards,
Tom Billings
Many years ago SA ran an article by a cultural anthropologist who studied the flow of money in one of our poor neighborhoods (L.A., I think). He found to his surprise that there was as much money circulating in the poor neighborhood as in a typical lower middle class neighborhood, but in a different pattern. In the poor neighborhood, people were more impulsive; for example, hocking their TV’s etc for cash, then redeeming them when they got paid. A howling mob of commenters, as with Lomborg, set upon him for “blaming the poor”. So another helpful insight is obliterated by political correctness.
One of the neatest Amateur Scientist pieces I remember was how to use an operational amplifier circuit to regulate the pendulum of a clock. I never built it, but it’s still on my to-do list (if I can find the article on the intertubes).
45. Uriel:
Please re-read what Roger said, then what you said. Your comment doesn’t make sense.
Roger’s position was that he initially withheld an assertion until he saw the arguements and facts. That’s what scientists are supposed to do.
He then stated that he doesn’t claim there is no AGW at all. That’s not putting himself in the position of proving a negative, or a postive for that matter. It’s stating that he isn’t making a sweeping statement to claim AGW as an all or none. Even most AGW believers don’t claim all warming is from human activities. Roger simply stated that he, like most people, believe AGW isn’t 0 percent or 100 percent, but somewhere in between.
I’ll leave it to others to address fully your second point of confusion, upon which you appear to contradict yourself, upbraiding Roger for the formula of trying to disprove a negative to confirm a positive while stating parenthetically that someone actually did prove the negative. Huh? So are you trying to say proof or disproof of a negative is logically cogent or not? And if it isn’t, why are you saying parenthetically that someone did?
Re: agnostic on AGW.
there are at least 2 parts to AGW/global warming/climate change – and they get purposely conflated.
there’s the science, which is unsettled. and there’s the politics, which is bullshit.
i am agnostic on the science. i am convinced on the politics.
I decided to take a subscription to SA a few years ago when my kids were old enough to benefit from it. Like many other posters here, I dropped it a year later after seeing the political slant to so many articles.
A few months ago I picked up a copy in the eye doc’s office just to see if there had been any improvements. Sadly it has only gotten worse. Much, much worse. The “News” section announced that (paraphrasing) ‘After years in the wilderness during the Bush administration, scientists are finally being welcomed back in the White House.’ A couple of the articles written by actual scientists were good, but the rest of the magazine is rather pathetic and should be an embarrassment to the editorial staff.
I cancelled my Sci Am subscription and after seeing their hatchet job on Bjorn Lomborg. This is par for the course.
=darwin
“UPDATE: Meanwhile, Bin Laden is apparently jumping on the “global warming bandwagon.” I think we should give him an Oscar!”
Best “Jumping the Shark” of 2010!
National Geographic did the same thing. We cancelled our subscription, which we had since its inception, when it turned political in the eighties. I like my anthropology, like my science, straight up.
Keep in mind that the head of the AAAS until he became National Science Advisor last year was John Holdren- Paul Ehrlich protege and unhinged, shrieking Club of Rome lunatic.
With Osama bin Laden going “green”–as evidenced by his new embrace of AGW, in addition to his well-established anti-American and anti-Israeli views, I’d say that we have a new front-runner in the race for the next UN General Secretary.
hm, rather for the next peace nobel price winner.
Another SciAm ex-pat. Loved their stuff when I was a kid in the 60′s and 70′s — bailed out in the late 80′s when they stopped doing simple, clear explication of actual science and started publishing gobbledygook to ride as a hobbyhorse.
Roger L Simon:
“And then I saw the science, NC Mountain Girl.
But… do I know if there isn’t any AGW? Of course not. But do I think it’s settled science? Pshaw!”
I’m right there with you. Also, these emails changed a few things. For years I read these charges from the skeptics but I could not verify them… They were charges from some blog. Now it turns out most were factual…
Same is true of PBS’s NOVA. Granted, PBS has been biased from the beginning but I found NOVA to be relatively untouched by political bias in its early years. I was a devoted follower in the 70′s and early 80′s. Then, for one or two seasons, it devoted itself entirely to psychsocial crap and dropped physical science altogether. That’s when I stopped watching. I think their ratings suffered and they brought back physical science but much of it has an environmental overtone.
I might also mention Newsweek’s science writer Sharon Begley’s article on AGW skeptics 2 years ago. This set a new low point in science writing anywhere. Truly horrible article and hatchet job on anyone daring to question AGW orthodoxy.
I believe Scientific American is owned, now, by the Germans.
Yet another in a long line – loved SciAm in high school, saw it decline in the mid-70s and early 80s with its gradual dumbing down and increasingly doctrinaire lefty slant. I canceled some time around 1985. I miss the old Martin Gardner stuff, but that’s about it.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, Bin Laden is apparently jumping on the “global warming bandwagon.” I think we should give him an Oscar!
You mean Nobel peace prize, right?
It’s amazing how many of us grew up on Scientific American. Such a shame now. As someone noted, The Economist is having the same kind of problems. Consumer Reports is also in decay (more and more “consumer protection” bad economics, less and less product testing). In each case, leftwing politics is a growing cancer on the flesh of a great magazine.
“Selected articles were required reading in my college science courses. Sometime in the 1980’s they decided real science was too difficult for their readers and their staff, and they became a science version of USA Today.”
I recently read a comment by Jerry Pournelle, about teaching, and standards of literacy, that other faculty at Pepperdine when he taught there, had laughed at him, when he pointed out that the Federalist Papers were published mainly as letters to the editors of various newspapers. He commented that possibly they did not believe him (about the truth of that fact): IOW, they believed that the Federalist Papers could not have been published in newspapers, because they are too ‘difficult’ for today’s readers, and ergo, must have been too difficult for those readers. The (mis)logic in the assumptions are myriad.
As Jerry Pournelle points out, a Dark Age is not just when you cannot do things you once could, but when the memory of things you could once do is lost. Academentia is rapidly approaching that state.
And to NC Mountain Girl: Roger is just following Keynes example: When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
a glam shot of Waxman in one of his Capitol Hill inquisition chambers.
Wow ! A glam shot of Waxman has to be a triumph of editing or lighting or something.
It’s interesting to see the comments all having a similar experience to mine. I was devoted to the magazine in the 60s and we invited Piel in 1966 for that reason. He has been given credit for “reviving” the magazine, which probably is something like a politician “growing” after he gets to Washington. He was a hard lefty so I wasn’t surprised to see the swing to the left in the 70s. I stuck it out for a while and gave up. I also started it up again about 10 years ago but did not renew.
Roger-
I used to be a luke-warmer like Reason magazine’s science editor Ronald Bailey was, and still is. That means, man-made warming is real, and like later Bjorn Lomborg argues in “Cool It!” there are win-win actions to take to mitigate AGWs effects.
But then I learned that the 1990s notion that warming and CO2 rises went together was overturned when paleoclimatologists technology could decipher historical evidence on decadal timescales showed that temperature rises precede CO2 increases by 800 years on average. In other words, CO2 appears to be irrelevant to thermal climbs. (Instead, it comes from outgasing from the oceans.)
And I learned that the prediicted accelerated warming around the tropics, based on the physics of the green house effect, cannot be found means that AGW has been falsified – I became a skeptic. (SEE “The Great Global Warming Swindle at youtube.)
Add to this, the broken Hockey Stick, the medias supine lies, and climategate’s pro-AGW-scientist’s deceptions, and I’m in Bill Gray (CSU’s famous hurricane climatologist) cynical terrain!
As MIT’s Richard Lindzen says, I’m a proud *Denier*. I proudly DENY there is any catastrophic threat from AGW. While there may be a few tenths of a degree from added CO2 (and few more this century), we cannot measure is with any certainty.
If there is some, is is swamped by 100 times the 50 degree temperature swings experienced daily in Denver. In other words, the reality is almost immeasurable and insignificant during the century-long term that these effects might actually become measurable.
My upshot, Roger-don’t fear being a skeptic of conventional fashion, nor a denier.
I went to the SciAm website and read the article — and the comments. That was a revelation. Perhaps 10% endorsed the article’s viewpoint. The attitude of the rest ranged from sad regret to foaming fury. I think SciAm’s subscriber rolls just dropped another percent or two.
The problem with Global Warmists isn’t that some actual scientists believe there is some global warming and human activities are somewhat contributing to it – never mind for the moment that popular models and data do not convincingly support the argument. There can still be discussion.
The problem is that a small group of overly influential con artists managed to falsely portray the current situation as dire, with a GW-caused catastrophe of epic proportions just around the corner if a UN-sanctioned New World Government does not take over and save us all. Just send money, of course, and don’t worry about any archaic concepts like scientific integrity, or national sovereignty.
I like to read well written science articles. Since we seem to agree that SA is useless what are you reading instead. I get the NYT, WSJ, The Economist, and the local Philly rag and a bunch of IT related stuff. Are the best sources web based or paper.
Tim
“Scientific American should change its” name to Scientific Fiction.
Sorry, Hugo Gernsback owns that name. And yet the possibilities are intriguing: lurid cover paintings of scantily-clad space hippie chicks threatened by giant bug-eyed climate deniers, while a steel-thewed Al Gore speeds to the rescue.
Maybe The Onion will investigate Scientific American next:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/science_channel_refuses_to_dumb
‘All the Science Stuff That’s Fit to Print’
Indeed.
Tim
Backstory trivia-
Forrest Mims is famous for hobby projects. (Don Lancaster, Steve Ciarcia and Forrest maybe the big 3 fun guys who are exremely educational too)
Forrest is also known for the Mims vs Pianka incident, as wikipedia records it – when he objected to ‘Dr Doom’, Eric Pianka, who made some provocative comments endorsing mass depopulation.
NOVA recently featured a show called The Lizard Kings which starred Pianka.
This elitist, narcissistic club permeates universities in many departments. It’s like a family and they all understand the ‘cosa nostra’. It’s what makes them ‘we’ as opposed to everybody else whom they must pacify.
They will never give this up. It could be 10 below on the fourth of July and they would still be droning on about this. These guys have too much invested in this venture to back out now.
So, to sum up…
According to this thread, a good Conservative should never read or subscribe to Scientific American, the American Scientist, NYT, Lancet, The Economist, National Geographic, Discovery, Newsweek, Time, or Consumer Reports – all of which are leftist rags.
Instead, we should rely on on “the internet”.
I have rarely been so proud to no longer call myself a Conservative.
Well, “a good conservative” should try to keep his head screwed on straight, and that’s going to be difficult if you rely on publications whose writers and editors are mostly Democrats or Labourites, as has been the case across a wide range of the MSM for some years now.
The Climategate affair reminds me of nothing so much as the “Arming America” controversy of 2001-02. Anyone who ever read “Huckleberry Finn” should have known that the main thesis of “Arming America” — that pre-Civil War Americans shunned firearms — was absurd, yet it won the 2001 Bancroft Prize as a leading contribution to American history, and was much celebrated in the press. It wasn’t till a few bloggers (Clayton Cramer leading), and later some credentialed historians, looked into the author’s “research” that the prize was withdrawn and he lost his faculty post. The episode made it plain that orthodox academics and journalists can easily credit scholarly apparatus over common sense in favor of a thesis, however implausible, that advances a favored agenda — and how little the public can rely on their endorsements in politicized matters.
If you look up “Arming America” on Amazon.com now, you’ll find that the two leading reviews of the book were written before it was discredited, and accept it as perfectly genuine. Expect the same sort of thing in the wake of Climategate.
Hey, me too. A SA subscriber beginning in the middle 50s. Wonderful stuff, scientifically illuminating. But then the decline began – all these ‘scientific’ arguments against the US side of the US/Soviet missle conflict. Then a fawning article on the enlightened urban planning evident to a ‘scientist’ visiting Pyongyang. Then their savage, unscientific attack on Bjorn Lomborg, who was pilloried for suggesting that the IPCC’s data was trustworthy but that the massive funds demanded to ‘correct’ AGW would benefit mankind better by investing them in clean-water supplies in the third world.
If ever there was a Gramscian success at subverting the concept of science (it was always a useful tool in debates, because most lefty activists were ignorant of it, couldn’t argue against it, but saw that it, or something posing as it, might be useful to them as an unchallengeable Authority), the editorial takeover of SA is it.
Time for a nice Gilbertian purge. I’ve got a little list, and they never would be missed. No, this is not a call for murder, simply one for replacing those Editors at SA with, say, people of scientific honesty and curiosity. The current rabble would be better employed as honest ditch diggers, studying the scientific properties of soils. And they’d sleep better at night! Or Obama could hire them to preach leftist gospel in his stealth ArtsCorps, where their fiction-writing abilities would be more appropriately used.
Oh, Roger honey, Scientific American shamed themselves a loooong time ago.
“Then their savage, unscientific attack on Bjorn Lomborg, who was pilloried for suggesting that the IPCC’s data was trustworthy but that the massive funds demanded to ‘correct’ AGW would benefit mankind better by investing them in clean-water supplies in the third world.”
An “unscientific attack” indeed, Insufficiently Sensitive. But it’s what funny about it now is that Lomborg was wrong as well. THe IPCC has been shown to have been not the least bit trustworthy. Lomborg’s tentative criticism was half-baked in comparison to the much darker truth.
NC Mountain Girl (#3): “Remember when Roger described himself as an agnostic on AGW”
You’ll find that most agnostics have a healthy dislike for proselytizers, especially dishonest ones.
Well, my dear LaurenceB (#100), one thing Conservatives probably like conserving is money. A major reason for spending money on one of these periodicals instead of reading material on the internet for free is that these periodicals presumably are more reliable, with their reputation to protect, editors, fact-checkers, etc. If their truthfulness is now suspect (and is there any doubt of that?), then why should I spend money on them?
Ah, as a status symbol, so that I can pat myself on the back and feel proud not to be one of those “know-nothings” who don’t read the right and esteemed publications. Never mind.
“When it came to 9/11, Popular Science published a book refuting the arguments of conspiracy theorists.”
Incorrect. The book was written by the staff of Popular Mechanics. There is a magazine called Popular Science, but it’s published by a different company and had nothing to do with the book in question.
“Sorry, Hugo Gernsback owns that name [Scientific Fiction].”
Not possible. The only way one can own a name is as a trademark. Under U.S. trademark law, a trademark can only be maintained if it is continually used, and the owner responds to infringements with legal action. Gernsback died in 1967, so any trademarks he may have owned have not been defended for a long time.
Nice to see Roger Simon state in a wide forum what I’ve been long saying to everyone I could. Scientific American, long a great resource to the amateur interested in science, became seriously compromised when it went through an editorial shift in the late ’80′s. I held on for a while thinking it had to get better, but it only got worse. I finally cancelled my subscription (that I had maintaned for about 20 years). I refuse to buy the magazine. I simply cruise the web now. Science News is fairly untainted.
How disappointing.
Amazing how many quit the SA bus in the 80s, when the left-wing slant became more of an avalanche. Two articles finished it for me: “Minoan Palaces”, an astonishingly inept piece that a harried TA at a state community college would reward with an ‘F’; and a second one extolling the glory of Saigon (oops, Ho Chi Minh city), now that the nice, orderly, environmentally responsible communists were in charge. No more nasty taxis! No more throngs of people! No siree, just bicycles and quiet, abandoned streets. How anyone could possibly be so blind to the horrors unleashed upon the people of Vietnam while attaining those ‘goals’ was such an insult to the memory of those who died that I cancelled the subscription.
It is like a blight running through our media. If it casually says ‘climate change’ or even ‘global warming’ you know there lurks intellectual poison.
No surprise in Sierra Club Mag, but it is so many other places. This is the scarlet letter, this is how you will know them.
These publications are only bringing themselves down by their constant adherence to green propaganda – they foolishly treat the general public as stupid not realising the general public are the ones who ultimately fund them. I think we should be giving publicity to any science magazines who are exercising rigorous skepticism over AGW. Are there any out there?
I just sent this letter to editors@sciam.com:
My revulsion with Sci Am, my former favorite magazine of all time, has grown with every issue since Rennie was canned. This year, I waited until the last possible day to renew my 30+ year-old subscription. I’ve trained myself to skip all the liberal editorial drivel and go right to the astronomy/cosmology/physics articles, which, until this issue, have been mercifully free of political crap or foolish insistence that global warming can be reversed. So, I’m contentedly reading about neutrino astronomy, when all of a sudden the author has to throw in an analogy about neutrinos having properties that are like scientists’ political affiliations, of whom only 6 percent are Republicans! Of all the possible analogies to use, it’s no accident that a smugly political one was chosen, considering DeChristina’s in-our-face Editorial where she rejects reader’s complaints about the politicization of Sci Am.
Guess what? Those evil, rich republicans have the MONEY to BUY YOUR MAGAZINE. Wondering why your circulation is dropping? (Nature Publishing Group last fall, Scientific American has reduced the rate base for its U.S. edition from 575,000 to 450,000—a more than 20 percent drop.) Why your ad revenue is tanking? (Through the first half, Scientific American’s ad pages plummeted 42.3 percent, according to Publishers Information Bureau figures.) Why you are laying off staff? (In April, the Nature Publishing Group reduced its overall workforce by 5 percent—many of which came from the Scientific American staff. ) It’s because you are CLUELESS about the way POLITICIZING your magazine is DESTROYING it!
Here’s a burning scientific question you might want to consider: WHAT THE F IS WRONG WITH YOU?!?
This is the last straw. I’m not renewing. I’ll just subscribe to specialty publications like Science and Journal of Cosmology. F you and your IDIOCY. I’ll flip through your formerly excellent rag at the bookstore until I see that the editorial board has been purged of it’s current members, then maybe renew. Yes, there will be a gap in my Sci Am’s , that currently stretch > 3 meters on my bookshelf. So be it.
With more disgust that can possibly be expressed in an email that can make it past your spam filters,