Threats against climate scientists: Phil Jones' inbox

The looney right did this up themselves, as a "joke."

Glenn Tamblyn at Skeptical Science flags the University of East Anglia's release of threats and hate mail sent to Phil Jones. PDF here, examples below:

1. “Subject: Kill yourself scum
Fuck you for your lies and deceit. You deserve to die. And if you don’t take your own life, I fucking hope somebody does it for you.”

2. “Your children and family will know because we know where you live. expect us at your door to say hello ^\-(”

3. “Faggots like you will be dealt with, as now people know what you need and will beat the living shit out of you every time you show your socialist ass in public. I’d kill you in a second if given the chance. . . . I’m now going to take physical action against you. You deserve it you fucking prick!”

4. "If anyone of those perverted assholes ever steps within the boundries of the U.S., they decimated [sic]. We have 2nd amendment [sic] and you as a stupid Briton probably don't know what that means. We have a right to bear arms and these perverted assholes will be wasted. We will have plans for you as well. If you bring your family all the merrier.

You fuck prick! [Sic.] Britain needs to kill these scam artist [sic]."


 5. "Keep this in mind. Not all will tolerate your thieving lying ways when it impacts their family.

Beware of retribution upon yours.

Someone some where [sic] will hurt you down."

6. "wanker you wanker you nead [sic] to be killed"

7. "i [sic] hope you fuckers die slowly and painfully.

you are the scum of the earth and should be put in front of a firing squad."

8. "update your google search, it should say, widely known group of cocksuckers and liars that tried to enslave the world through a huge scam perpetrated by a bunck of fuckin cocksuckers, if was i charge [sic] you would all be lined up againt [sic] a wall and shot."
----------------------

So what is the significance of this, besides telling us something important about the character about a certain group of "climate skeptics"?

I think it puts the question to people like Judith Curry and Roy Spencer, who still have a foot in the world of science, but derive much of their hit counts and claim to public notice from "climate skeptics" who regularly air similar paranoid ideas and abusive language in their comment threads.

Let me be clear; I am not calling for them to moderate with a heavier hand. What I am saying is that if you put yourself at the head of a mob waving pitchforks and torches, you have some responsibility for the kind of people who take you as an inspiration. I have no hope for people like Anthony Watts, who is merely a "shock jock" of the internet. But I would like to see more grown-up climate deniers and lukewarmers taking pains to isolate and marginalize the violent, paranoid, homophobic and neofacisist elements of their fellow travellers. If they and other vocal opponents of strong mitigation cannot grow up, as a movement, enough to denounce their bigots and terrorists, then they and their movement will be defined as a movement of bigots and terrorists in the public mind, and deserve to be.

The academic that launched a thousand insults.

Earlier posts on threats against climate scientists: 

 

Threats against climate scientists -- a glossary

Coward deniers continue threats

  

UPDATE: Supporting documentation here (h/t Quark Soup).

Roy Spencer: the unacknowledged legislator of the world

This quote has been making the rounds, but for anyone who missed it:

Roy Spencer: “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.”

Seriously. He said that. He doesn't even deny saying it. And is apparently deaf to the irony.
This the guy who raged:

Politicians formed the IPCC over 20 years ago with an endgame in mind: to regulate CO2 emissions. I know, because I witnessed some of the behind-the-scenes planning. It is not a scientific organization. It was organized to use the government-funded scientific research establishment to achieve policy goals.

Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But when they are portrayed as representing unbiased science, that IS a bad thing.



The most vocal climate scientists defending the IPCC have lost their objectivity. . . .
ClimateGate doesn’t prove their science is wrong…but it does reveal their bias.

 This is a classic terrorist/freedom fighter cognitive blind spot. Spencer sees his mission in science as defeating the campaign for certain policy choices . . . specifically emissions cuts. Yet he does not see his own explicit political goals as making him "biased." They did it first! You are hysterical, he is passionate! Roy destroyed scientific objectivity in order to save it!

"I don't have the votes. Time for a filibuster!"

It's a common cognitive glitch, but it is still surprising to see it developed to the point at which he would be denouncing scientists for (supposedly) trying to "achieve policy goals" and then be calling himself "a little like a legislator."

"Seriously, dude, you went too far."

Nothing says scientists can't or shouldn't participate in the public debate. They are citizens, and the democratic ethos, since Athens, has held that whatever your day job, you have the right, and sometimes the responsibility, to be part of the discussion. But you shouldn't see that as your job, "supported by the taxpayer." The only people paid by the taxpayer to be policy advocates are politicians. Roy Spencer is paid by the taxpayer to do science. One wishes he would work a little harder at that, even at the expense of his legislative ambitions.

Spenser and Braswell; Hangover edition

So what did it all mean?

1. Why did this blow up all over the blogosphere?

Up until now, Spencer & Braswell's "On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedback" had followed the usual pattern of "skeptic" works -- the right celebrated it as the Second Coming, and climate scientists pointed out that it sucked.

What broke the PR stalemate was that the guy that let the thing through admitted publicly that it was garbage, and that it shouldn't have been published, and because it was his responsibility, he was quitting his post.

2. We're hearing all about Spencer and his "serial mistakes." Who is this William D. Braswell guy, and why is he getting off so easy?



I thought this was a throwaway question, but it is threatening to consume the rest of my pre-work breakfast blogging time. He's a frequent collaborator with Spencer and works at the Earth System Science Center with Spencer and Christy. He's written a lot of papers with Spencer and a couple with Christy. But he doesn't appear on wikipedia's list of scientific global warming "skeptics," I don't find him writing in the blogosphere. He doesn't have a Wikipedia page or a Sourcewatch page.

I guess he likes to do his science and not be labelled. Which is fine with me, and evidently fine with everyone else. No one seems to have hunted him down and persecuted him for writing "skeptic" papers.

3. Why did the letter by Trenberth et al stir the pot so furiously?

The answer isn't a rational one, as I address here. But maybe it's not that hard to understand. We all have times when behavior that seemed fine to us when we were directing it at other people drives us nuts when we are on the receiving end. A simple example: do you walk anywhere there's significant traffic? Do you also drive? And do you find how you feel about pedestrians in the road or cars barreling down the street changes depending on which role you're in?

Trenberth et al said a couple things in their blog post. They pointed to a history of serial mistakes. They pointed out that these mistakes all point in one direction. They let people make the inference that bias -- wanting an outcome that minimized the importance of global warming -- played a role in those serial mistakes. In terms of their claims, they stuck to the facts. Still, what they did was shocking to deniers. They called a scientist out. On a blog. They accused him of stupid mistakes, they all but accused him of bias.

Spencer's climate work got "audited," to borrow a phrase. Suddenly, the unfairness of that sort of critique impressed itself on certain quarters. Who were they to attack peer-reviewed science, the product of great toil and care, with a quickie blog post? Who were they to question not just a particular conclusion, but a scientist's general competence? How dare they suggest that bias played a role! And so on.

Obviously this is hypocritical. Do they have a point? If it were only a scientific debate, maybe. Then we would have the option of leaving the scientists alone to sort out their differences without the distraction of a debate in the lay press. But Spencer has done more than most to drag this subject into a partisan flame war. The option of not having this debate no longer exists, and that being the case, it's totally unrealistic to attack others' credibility, competence, and motives (a natural rhetorical strategy that's as old as the hills) and not expect your own glass house to see a few incoming.

4. What does it all mean? In the grand scheme of things?

Dr Braswell threw me off my schedule. Final summation after work.

UPDATE: As far as the quest to sway public opinion, this tempest isn't even going to rattle a teacup. Not enough people pay attention to things like the resignation of the editor of Remote Sensing for it to make waves. But there are some things we should take from this:

1. Coming up with anything remotely science-ish that undermines the case for aggressive mitigation of CO2, let alone the case for AGW itself, is fiendishly hard. Roy Spenser is among a tiny fraction of global warming "skeptics" who are actual climate scientists. The best he could come up with to challenge "the Team" was an argument so egregiously bad that it could only limp past peer review at an off-brand greenhorn journal. It then self-destructed so violently that the editor that midwifed this misbegotten mishap resigned in shame.

If they could do better, they would. The data just isn't there. There is no denier Santa Claus waiting in the wings with a paradigm-busting exposé.

2. There are a lot of crybabies out there, who have spent years spewing every kind of insult about world-class scientists, but are deeply wounded that the scientists might draw attention -- coolly, factually, almost gently -- to the clay feet of their own idols.

3. Scientists are getting better at communicating with the public. Part of what they are going to communicate to the public is who can be trusted and who, based on their demonstrable mistakes and evidence of bias, can't.

Nice simple explanations of complex science are all very well, but what we really need in this debate is an ability of climate scientists to express to the public that they really do know what they are talking about, and they know, better than the lay public, which scientists and psuedoscientists and scientist wannabes are writing checks with their mouths that their brains and their data can't cash.

Don't you think the scientists know better than anyone who's faking it? We should be glad that some of them are ready to communicate that very important aspect of their professional expertise. Bravo Trenberth. The era of the unilateral ceasefire with the bomb-throwers is over.

The Dukakis effect

By this time all climate nerds will have heard about Wolfgang Wagner's resignation from the board of Remote Sensing. His resignation letter lays out his shame at having passed Spencer and Braswell's awful "On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance" through peer review.

Eli has a growing list of responses:



Big City Lib

Climate Abyss

Climate Progress

Deltoid

Only in it for the Gold

Our Changing Climate

Quark Soup


Stoat



Skeptics are outraged. How dare Wagner resign . . . how dare he.

Adding to the uproar, three of our best pro-science communicators have put their oar in with a fantastic essay. Money quote:

Spencer, a University of Alabama, Huntsville, climatologist, and his colleagues have a history of making serious technical errors in their effort to cast doubt on the seriousness of climate change. Their errors date to the mid-1990s, when their satellite temperature record reportedly showed the lower atmosphere was cooling. As obvious and serious errors in that analysis were made public, Spencer and Christy were forced to revise their work several times and, not surprisingly, their findings agree better with those of other scientists around the world: the atmosphere is warming.

Over the years, Spencer and Christy developed a reputation for making serial mistakes that other scientists have been forced to uncover. Last Thursday, for instance, the Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres published a study led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory climate scientist Ben Santer. Their findings showed that Christy erred in claiming that recent atmospheric temperature trends are not replicated in models.

This trend continues: On Tuesday the journal Geophysical Research Letters will publish a peer-reviewed study by Texas A&M University atmospheric scientist Andrew Dessler that undermines Spencer's arguments about the role of clouds in the Earth's energy budget.

Needless to say, psuedoskeptics are absolutely furious that somebody would publishing an article at a blog accusing a scientist of making a bunch of mistakes or having a bias. That's the worst thing ever, probably worse than the Holocaust. No, I'm not kidding. No, they don't see the irony. No, I really don't know how that's possible.

The howls of dismay and anger at these fairly cool, collected, and measured contributions to the debate are not accidental. They reflect a double standard that deniers are desperate to maintain -- a set of rules of engagement in which they say absolutely anything about anyone in the most offensive way possible -- chewing the carpet and pounding the table -- but have the expectation that the people they are attacking are not going to defend themselves, are not going to answer back. Scientists are supposed to be above all that, cool, rational, impartial and detached. (That their own lack of such qualities might reflect on their ability to critique the state of the science evidently does not occur to them.)

When scientists answer back, there are invariably people who feel that they shouldn't, that they are damaging their own credibility by descending to their opponents' level. Take this post:

Regarding your opinion piece on Roy Spencer (see posts below) I am very disappointed at your lack of professional conduct. Your polemic politicizes science. You seriously harm the foundations of the scientific method of objective observation, model evaluation and searching for truth.

Similar sentiments here:

It takes a great deal of composure to hold back ones emotions during a heated debate (I call the likelihood or not of CAGW a heated debate). Trenberth, Ray Pierrehumbert, Hansen, Mann, Jones… they all have a far greater responsibility to behave at the highest level because the work they produce and the ideas they promote are viewed at the highest level wrt influencing policy. The common flaw with all of them is their inability to bite their tongue when the pressure is on or when opportunities arise where they are better off being silent. The lack of personal composure ultimately hurts their credibility because it shows they have skin in the game.

This is where Michael Dukakis comes into the discussion. In a debate with George Bush, Sr, he was on the receiving end of a particularly lurid and loaded question:

Bernard Shaw, the moderator of the debate, asked Dukakis, "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis [his wife] were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?" Dukakis replied, "No, I don't, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life", and explained his stance. After the debate, Dukakis told Estrich he was sorry and didn't realize it was that question.[14] Many observers felt Dukakis's answer lacked the passion one would expect of a person discussing a loved one's rape and death. Many– including the candidate himself– believe that this, in part, cost Dukakis the election, as his poll numbers dropped from 49% to 42% nationally that night.

The failure to show appropriate emotion where a reasonable person would have an emotional reaction does not enhance your credibility, it undermines it. People make judgements about your credibility based on their ability to identify with you, to empathize with you -- a quality PR people call your "relatability." Striving to look and sound and write like Leonard Nimoy on lithum will not lead people to trust you; just the opposite.

Similarly, when someone acts in a biased or incompetent way, and you don't call them on it, or call them on it in a tepid, wishy-washy, Obama-against-Congressional-Republicans sort of way, people are not going to take those problems with your opponents' credibility into account -- if a normal person (like themselves) would have called their opponent out for that crap, and you didn't, people are going to assume it's not crap at all, otherwise why wouldn't you be drawing attention to it?

The same goes when deniers make ludicrous charges of incompetence, corruption, or bias by climate scientists -- a reasonable lay person would fight back against that kind of slander. If scientists' don't, people aren't going to assume they're above engaging with their critics; they are going to assume they have no answer to give.

Sure, if you push back, you may be seen as partisan. But people make that assumption anyway, based on the fact that deniers are screaming the allegation from the rooftops 24/7. At you have to guard your credibility, especially as a scientist, you have to be seen as someone who tells it like it is, not how you wish it was. But that's no reason you have to be a silent punching bag. It's OK to fight back, and it's OK to get a little mad -- deniers have given real scientists treatment that would make anyone mad. To be trusted by people, you have to act like people, and when an asshole loudmouth insults you or sells a line of bullshit far and wide, people get mad.

Let's tell it like it is, and not be afraid raise our voices at the really outrageous parts. Let's let liars be called liars and stand before the public exposed. Let's show the table the card up the grifter's sleeve, and if we're hurting his wrist, too bad. Let's bury the Dukakis effect.

Threat of the day: Spencer & Braswell retrospective edition

I was looking back at the history of the online reaction to the Spencer & Braswell paper, which has been so thoroughly exposed as worthless and dishonest that the editor that published it has now resigned in disgrace. Amongst the backslapping at WUWT, I came across this:

Enneagram says:
August 28, 2010 at 5:07 pm

Don´t you think “they”are in urgent need of a “feedback”, a direct hit on the plexus would work? :-)

Classy. That comment can be read in the context of another a ways further down:

JER0ME says:
August 28, 2010 at 7:01 pm

Loved the book, Dr Spencer, and I am sure I shall find the article fascinating, although much may go over my head.

I would also be very interested to see the history of the single hostile reviewer, should you feel able to release this information (and I fully understand if you are either unable or unwilling).

I also agree with Amino Acids: “This question occurs to me: where are the works validating positive feedback?”

Even in their moment of triumph, getting some of their crap past a napping editor, the petty, vindictive attitude, and menacing rhetoric of deniers stands out. Who dared to question the great and powerful Spencer! Track them down!

Apart from those that can't keep their hatred in check even when things appear to be going their way, check out the whole comment thread for many hilarious examples of premature celebration and pompous uncritical hyperbole.