When debating climate deniers, often they will bring up the names of the few scientists with actual credentials who remain skeptical that climate change will be disastrous for the planet. Roy Spencer is usually high on the list. The self professed “Official Climatologist of the Rush Limbaugh Show”, Spencer is most famous for being conspicuously, repetitively, and stubbornly wrong with regard to some of the most critical satellite temperature measurements. Roy has a new book, which is not about climate, but is rather some kind of manifesto of his free-market economics beliefs.
The book was recently announced on his website, and in a curious answer to a comment, Roy Spencer let slip what he’s really been doing all these years.
The complete comment-
Nicholas, I would wager that my job has helped save our economy from the economic ravages of out-of-control environmental extremism.
I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government.
If I and others are ultimately successful, it may well be that my job is no longer needed. Well then, that is progress. There are other things I can do.
And here we thought the most important thing was the objective, scientific truth.
In the video below, you can hear him fessing up to messing up the most critical observations of his career.
Key section starts about 5:44 in.
You forgot to mention that the name of the book is “Fundanomics”, which I presume is derived from “Fundamentalist Economics”.
not wanting to promote his book for him…
but, yeah.
Or FUNNY economics – because a satellite temp guy writing on his true believer Bachman-level economic understanding, is well, pretty funny.
Right. And Tom Ridge ISN’T a fracking lobbyist, either! He’s just trying to help the people of Pennsylvania. With friends like Spencer and Ridge, who needs enemies?
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/389134/june-09-2011/tom-ridge
Agree on Spencer, the new book is just…weird. Although Hansenn getting arrested in front of the White House is no better – neither side in this seems to practice good science.
As for good science, any comment on this:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/07/05/the-ipccs-alteration-of-forster-gregorys-model-independent-climate-sensitivity-results/#more-3924
I think that’s a false equivalence.
It makes me think of Einstein’s warning to Roosevelt about Hitler’s nuclear program – and the later organizing of atomic scientists against nuclear proliferation.
There is a role for scientists to play in public debate, just like doctors, lawyers, economists, and clergymen – each has a perspective that is valuable.
When the scientist happens to be a crank who has been proven wrong for 20 years, it is incumbent upon those scientists of real achievement to speak up and set the record straight – even if it means being arrested.
have no fear that Spencer will ever be arrested.
I have to disagree, there must be a separation of the scientists from the true believer, as science must be practiced without overt or unstated bias as humans just aren’t very good at separating their belief system from the facts that they purport to support it. Namely, humans accept facts that agree with their world view much more easily than facts that are just as supported on the other side of the argument – the whole goal of science is to get away from the Socratic debate and find truth separate from it.
A great article on scientific bias:
http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/92prom.html
I read through Martin’s paper, and I would have to say he needs to apply his thought process to his own thought process. He has a marginal case about many points, and everyone would do well to avoid even the appearance of misconduct. But I believe he misrepresents the severity and exaggerates the prevalence of any degree of what he calls fraud.
For example, he says “One of the most common misrepresentations in scientific work is the scientific paper itself. It presents a mythical reconstruction of what actually happened. All of what are in retrospect mistaken ideas, badly designed experiments and incorrect calculations are omitted.” The exaggeration is that “misrepresentation” and “mythical reconstruction” are way too strong here since they suggest a deliberate deception about what really went on in the scientific work, whereas the more likely truth is that all the messy details of mistakes along the way are not as interesting to the audience of the paper as the good parts are. But sometimes mistakes are illuminating, and you’ll find those written up as well.
Yes, we need to be very careful about how we do science and the institutions that we set up to support scientific investigations. But I would claim that Martin goes overboard in his criticisms to the extreme of being unjustified. As a result, it is easy to read this paper as if he is a supporter of all the anti-science bigots who need to rationalize their beliefs about the large-scale corruption of science.
I searched for some criticism of Martin’s paper, but didn’t find much more than lots of citations by those using it as justification for arguing that all of climate science must be corrupt. It is also listed in places that are more balanced, acknowledging that such corruption could exist, and it is usually labelled pseudoscience: http://www.chem1.com/acad/sci/pseudosci.html
Meanwhile, I have seen nothing but gross and fairly obvious disregard for careful thinking from those attempting to appear scientific in their denial of global warming. You, Mr Just, who I don’t know more than what I have read here, would do well to start by acknowledging the fraud of the likes of “Lord” Monckton if we are to believe you about anything else you might claim. Apply just a fraction of the critical thinking advocated by Martin and you should be able to see through the flawed arguments of global warming deniers.
Make up your mind. Are you for true science or against it? Are YOU merely accepting “facts” that agree with your world view? How do you know?
There is no pure science, no one is perfect, and we all make mistakes. The question is how do we do science better collectively than any one of us can do separately. Not perfect, just better.
Awesome reply Daniel. As a non-scientist I respect the work scientists do into trying to remain objective, and I for one am kind of glad that the Denialist’s are out there testing and retesting the truth of the rather alarming findings of climate science. However, it’s just so sad that they show so much contempt for not only science, but common sense.
I mean, Monckton now thinks he can cure HIV/AIDs and MS? (Shakes head in amazement).
Oh, and, got any facts to refute the above or just spittle and belittling comment?
also, here is another paper showing errors in key climate change papers (you asked for them):
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2010JCLI3656.1
right. I also asked for an explanation or apology for your grossly misleading posts of late.
Grossly misleading? You can’t even answer the basic science posts I have put up. If you don’t understand it, I guess that makes it grossly misleading.
All you did was copy and paste a link to a paper that you almost certainly don’t understand.
If you want anyone here to take you seriously, try explaining *in your own words* why the authors of the above paper are right and Steig at al. are wrong.
And we’ll be googling your reply for any evidence of copy-paste plagiarism — just wanted to give you a fair “heads-up” notice…
typo notice: should be “et al.”
Do I hear crickets chirping????
Thought so….
Oh, and got any facts to refute the above?
The abstract seems to say that Antarctica is warming. This is also what the earlier papers found. The errors you and the authors suggest exist change estimates are about how much warming and in what regions of Antarctica. In the larger picture they agree that Antarctica is getting warmer. Why refute it when it essentially quibbling about details.
Eeerrr, Justsomeguy, so what? What’s your point? As far as I can tell from the abstract, this is common knowledge. Some parts of Antarctica are — counter-intuitively — getting colder and that this illustrates global warming! As extra energy is trapped in the global system we find certain unusual side effects. One is that the Antarctic ‘vortex’ (constantly spinning storm around the South Pole that has helped distribute so much of that Chilean Volcanic ash across Australia’s airways, playing havoc with our airline traffic recently) speeds up.
Side effects:
1. Horrible droughts across southern Australia increase in magnitude. The southern storms that used to soak our southern coast are now simply missing us. We get measurably less rain. (In El Nino conditions. In La Nina we get unbelievably, record breaking and destructive rain!)
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s948858.htm
2. Trapped snow-storms that dump extra snow in certain parts of Antarctica, making it colder.
Are you saying the study you linked to contradicts something in the consensus findings? We’ve known some of this since 2003, maybe this paper is just refining it somewhat? Just trying to understand what you think the problem is.
I notice the good doctor has chosen a .org top level domain (tld) for the website of his book – the tld intended for non commercial, not-for-profit organisations. But being such a market fairy advocate it couldn’t possibly be that he thought the association with non-profits lent his work an additional air of reputability over and above what he might get from a commercial Internet domain?
Also, purely as an aside, the substance of his arguments in that thread is
unsupportable nonsense. Here’s a good one:
“The government can only help others in need by taking money from those who produce. In other words, govt. doesn’t pay for it…you do. But since government is so inefficient and wasteful, more poor people would be helped if charity was coordinated by the private sector. ”
~Roy Spencer
Comparing the relative efficiency of Private and Public sector endeavours is actually quite difficult in an apples and oranges sort of way (and usually boils down to half full vs half empty type semantics depending on political persuasion), but it happens that the US provides a unique opportunity to do so because of the way that power and decision making has been decentralised and devolved to individual states. And in the US, publicly owned utilities almost always out-perform their privately owned counterparts.
I quite fancy acquiring a copy of Fundanomics – if only for sport.
Whenever a scientist does something really outrageous like joining the board of directors of the Marshall Institute (a non-thinking “think tank” who still deny the linkage between smoking tobacco and poor human health)
http://www.marshall.org/board.php
…or is a paid speaker at other non-thinking think tanks like the heartland institute
http://climateconference.heartland.org/about-2/speakers/
…then that scientist has lost all credibility and may as well crank out booklets and pamphlets about other things they know nothing about like Economics. I noticed that page #1 of Spencer’s book contains an introductory line by F. A. Hayek (Friedrich August von Hayek).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_hayek
Republicans and TEA party supporters seem to do this all time to raise the apparent value of their publications. They also like to misquote the U.S. Constitution, the Bible, and Thomas Paine.
p.s. when Hayek uses the word “socialism” he is not applying the same meaning we use today. He was referring to state owned factories which most people today would associate with communism. But since Hayek published in German, not too many people are aware of this. Likewise, I find it amusing when god-fearing Republicans quote Thomas Paine whose beliefs were somewhere between Deist and atheist.
Reply to this post, I may have forgotten to click the Notify button on the above post, and might not get your reply. (Oops.)
Roy Spencer: And all this time, we thought you were a scientist. Weird.
http://climateforce.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/roy-spencer-and-all-this-time-we-thought-you-were-a-scientist-weird/
Peter check this out
The 1847 lecture that predicted human-induced climate change http://climateforce.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/the-1847-lecture-that-predicted-human-induced-climate-change/
amazing.