Check out Climategater Mike Hulme’s howler of a letter in the new Nature (Dec. 1).
Hulme and co-authors (Mathis Hampel and Martin Mahony) write to Nature:
Your discussion of the media’s interest in the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) study — which released its results before peer review — implicitly acknowledges a change in the public authorization of scientific knowledge (Nature 478, 428; 2011). Yet few scientists would accept your branding of them as “purist” or “renegade” for their stance on the study’s approach.
BEST members seek to promote a progressive image of science in a demanding, open and transparent society. Stimulated by an erosion of public trust in science, the publication of research before peer review aims to satisfy calls for greater public engagement with science.
About that “erosion in public trust”, check out these Climategate 2.0 e-mails featuring Mike “God-Greenpeace-Goldman-Sachs” Hulme:
I fear you are correct. The human reaction to distrust all of a thing when shown that parts are a decpetion is a natural one, but one that must be fought. Science is the savior of mankind. Bad science is its demise.
Michael Kahn is right about the effect that the AGW scam is having on the public’s view of scientists. Unhappily, however, this may not translate through into reduced funding for these charlatans. Politicians will still continue to provide funding to those scientists whose ‘research’ results indicate a need to raise money via taxation in response to the latest convenient ‘threat to the world/peace/our way of life’ OR which gives the nanny state the legitimacy to restrict personal freedom or choice (and thereby increase control).
The AGW scare forms part of a larger political movement to restrict the power of that highly annoying and vexatious body – the voters. For some years there has been a guided global narrative to detune the input of the ordinary man and woman into sovereign decision-making.
In the UK, for example, we have more and more trials being conducted without a jury because 12 good men and true are not capable of understanding the ‘complexity’ of some cases. The UK also has to suffer the actions of a cadre of public school-educated politicians who see membership of a federated European Union as an end goal in order to preserve peace and prosperity.
Thus we end up with a growing number of unelected people wielding enormous power over people who have no opportunity to remove them from office. The President of the EC – unelected. The President of the EU – unelected. The ‘Foreign Secretary’ of the EU – unelected. The Prime Minister of Italy – unelected. The Prime Minister of Greece – unelected. The corrosive nature of this process is particularly highlighted by the appointment of Baroness Ashton to the post of EU Foreign Secretary (they call it something else but it amounts to the same thing) – she is a Socialist peer partly representing a Coalition Government in Britain composed of Tories and Lib-Dems because the UK KICKED OUT the Socialists at the last General Election.
Because of state influence in the media – notably from the BBC whose shameless bias in AGW reporting will be familiar to most readers of this blog – the public are kept from the truth and so continue to elect those mainstream parties who follow this dogma.
We are at the beginning of an Orwellian dystopia.
A large part of the very real “erosion of public trust in science” is caused by the Global Warming Alarmists. As more and more people begin to realize how wrong these alarmists have been, especially after being told that they represent an overwhelming scientific consensus, they stop trusting ALL scientists. The result will be dramatic decreases in the funding for science and a fewer students taking up the sciences. To me, this is by far the worst result of the entire global warming scam. Of course, those who have raked in stacks of cash in this scam don’t care. Real scientists the world over should have been tarring and feathering these AGW junk scientists from the start; that they ignored the bad science because it was outside their own fields will hurt them in the long run.
“progressive image of science” – I thought science was about the truth, not politics.
“transparent society” – withholding data supporting your findings is transparent?
“erosion of public trust in science” – I do not recall any public erosion in trust of physicists, biologists, chemists, etc.
Seems he is whining too much and trying to turn science into politics and religion.