Cracking Down.

Today I saw this in the News:

Police Raid Climate Blogger's Hone. 

Now the raid itself isn't exactly news to me since I did see an earlier report simply reporting the fact.  But the analysis  by Mr. Birdnow did get my attention.  Why start going after skeptic bloggers over this?  Why now?

Mr Birdnow Quotes Ron De Haan on that:

This time the e-mails contain the names of political leaders, government departments, institutions and... a potentially explosive content.

Yes, I would say that is plenty of reason to care now.  It was never about science on any level, it was about politics.  Now  that folks with some real power are threatened, it's time to reach out and do something.  It's a story as old as time.  Go read the blog I linked, there is something in there which shoul.d scare everybody in the form of an e-mail sent to various Climate skeptic blogger by the DOJ.

Strawmen, Strawmen Everywhere.

Well, we're getting to the close of the Durban Conference:

It's been pretty predictable.  For weeks now we've seen the claws come out as one media report after another has blasted us "Climate Change" deniers as everything from stupid Bubba to greedy Simon Legree in the pay of the oil industry.  In the interest of setting the record straight right now, I don't see a dime from them.

Climate Change, that's the new buzzword since warming took a hike for the last decade or so.  It's also a strawman since informed "climate change deniers" are nothing of the kind.  Long before that name was coined we busily pointed out that the climate changes all the time instead of going through the kind of warming the IPCC was promoting ala Mann and his hockey stick graph.  In fact, we've pointed out that the planet has been warming for three-hundred years. 

Three hundred years ago we began to emerge from the Little Ice Age, something the IPCC cites Mann’s graph as proof never having occurred.  Yet three-hundred year plus ago the Hudson used to regularly freeze over solidly enough people walked back and forth over it.  Accounts of the time tell us that the water between Long Island and the mainland froze over just as solidly as well.  The Mississippi froze over solidly enough as late as 1834 that families used to cross it in their covered wagons in the wintertime.  When Washington took his army across the Delaware River the crossing was difficult for them, because the river was practically choked with ice flows and the situation was dangerous.  In fact it was so much so that the British hadn’t even bothered to post look outs along the rivier.

During that time the Thames regularly froze over solidly enough people could travel up and down it on the ice.  Londoners used to have ice festivals right on the river itself until part way into the nineteenth century.  Other major rivers through out Europe did the same.  That’s how cold the world was before warming occurred.  But you wouldn’t know it to listen to the folks at Durban and the IPCC, much less their minions in the media.
Then, starting about three-hundred years ago, things started warming up.  By the end of the nineteenth century all the aforementioned rivers had stopped freezing over regularly, and didn’t do so solidly enough for people to safely cross on foot.  Those are historical facts.
So the climate does change and has been for three centuries now.  And most of that warming occurred well before mankind supposedly started upping the CO2 concentration of the earth’s atmosphere in a major way.  While I disagree with the premise that mankind is the major contributor to the increase in CO2 concentrations for reasons I’ve already blogged about, the global warming activists are still left with the fact that before mankind could’ve been a factor the planet was already warming.
So, we are not climate change deniers, they are because they deny the climate changed before the modern age in spite of the massive evidence it did.  They point to two graphs based on cherry-picked tree ring data and deny any change occurred in the climate until man started loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.  We “deniers” are the realists since we admit the climate changes in cycles which aren’t fully understood, but documented in the historical age as well as by proxy.
Still in the face of the evidence otherwise the denial still goes on and the warmists still propose the same old worn-out solutions like a broken record, kill our economies with crippling CO2 reduction policies.

Here is a post on weather conditions during the Maunder Minimum, which couldn't have been a significant factor in the weather of the contemporary Little Ice Age if we take the position of warming scientists as to the significance of the sun's effe3cts on warming:

Weather During the Maunder Minimum.

More on Muller

I blogged earlier about the Berkley study which was hyped as the final refutation of Global Warming skepticism.  Well, Anthony Watts, who has had access to the study for some time now has blogged on the much hyped paper:

Berkley Surface Temperature Project Puts PR Before Peer Review.


I am gratified to see Watts express early on some of the same concerns I had with the paper.  Watts tells the story behind the scenes so to speak about how this whole thing was turned into a planned major media event where they forged ahead in spite of warnings about the quality of the data.  Just as I thought, the data used was seriously flawed, though not in the way I thought it might be.  In this case the uncertainty of the data is so high, 70% of the stations with an uncertainty of almost five degrees, that it is useless for reaching the conclusions arrived at.

There is another article, a polemic, which puts the paper in terms easily understood by the layman.  It also addresses the straw-man argument which was advanced by the media.  Watt's touched on that.

The Death of Global Warming Skeptics, Or The Birth of Straw Men?

Carbon Dioxide and Global Warming.

I just finished listening for about and hour to a fascinating discourse given by Professor Murry Salby given in Australia:

Global Carbon Dioxide Emmisions: The Contribution Of Natural Sources.

I sat there wishing I had access to the graphs and charts he kept referring to.  This was basically the same presentation of a paper he gave at an international climate conference which apparently has caused some stir which hasn't been well reported on.  What happens is Prof. Salby breaks down the constituent compositions of Carbon dioxide world wide, including two of its isotopes and arrives at Mankind's contribution to the assumed problem.  Salby estimates that contribution at approximately 5 out of about 160 gigatons of CO2 emissions world wide annually.

See where this is heading?  As if this weren't enough he further mentions that the chief global areas of CO2 emissions are undeveloped areas, including...drum roll...Africa, as I mentioned in another post.  So mankind contributes very little of the emissions and net increase of CO2 in the atmosphere world wide, but it doesn't stop there.  The professor further tells us that his analysis shows that the relationship of atmosphere in the atmosphere to temperature is the opposite of what the "settled science" alleges.  Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are driven by temperature, not the other way around.

This presentation is worth the effort to listen to it.

My, my:

Berkley Professor Changes His Mind On Global Warming.

Good for him! If that is where his research leads him by all means he should reverse his position. I have no beef with that and I am looking forward to going over his work if I can get a copy when it finally reaches publication.  and that is the funny part; we've got all of this hype going on with the research being touted and then the repentant global warming skeptic returning to the fold leading up to the crescendo of the release of the report itself via publication, probably in one of the more prominent journals.  I did notice one little gem buried on down in the article which many probably missed. ""Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate."

Well, I don't recalling writing that global warming isn't real.  Added to that I don't recall many of the prominent folks in the skeptic community saying so either.  Global warming is real, all we have to do is look around us to see it.  History records ice floes and freezing over of the Hudson River.  We don't see that anymore.  A passage through the Arctic Ocean, the famed Northwest Passage, has opened up for the first time in my life.  Temperature and weather conditions have been warmer, with the exception of the last ten years, than earlier in my fifty-five years of life.  I'm not idiotic enough to deny that and I certainly haven't met another skeptic who is.  Well, Richard Mueller, by his own admission, was.  So I guess I stand corrected.

No, where we skeptics are coming from is that we question both the extent and proposed cause of the warming.  So far I don't see anything in those sensational press releases and stories to make me change my mind.

Berkley Study

Today an announcement was made of a new study from Berkley:

Global Warming Confirmed By Independent Study.

Before going on to the study itself I have an issue with the BBC's header.  One of the myths promoted by Global Warming activists is that skeptics are global warming deniers that we deny any warming has occurred.  That is patently untrue on its face.  Oh, I don't doubt there are a few folks who do, but most of us in the "denier" community accept that there has been warming over the long term.   Where we beg to differ is as to the extent and cause.  Those two issues go to the heart of the matter and are why a number of prominent scientists are jumping ship.  We contend that the research is sloppily or even fraudulently done and does not form a reliable foundation upon which to base policy.

First, let me point out that the study is being prematurely reported on since it hasn't been peer-reviewed and published yet, the claimed gold standard for acceptance by the establishment.  The it is being so widely trumpeted tells me that the fix is in on that score and they just can't wait to publicize what they think will be a refutation of us skeptics.  That the ending of the articles calls for an "apology" on our part to Dr. Jones and his climate change colleagues is telling as to the whole purpose of the exercise in the first place, all denials on that score not withstanding.

Since it's not been published up to this point all we really have to go on are the purported conclusions of the study, that we skeptics are now rebutted.  there is nothing on the exact methodology used to gather data and arrive at their conclusions.  Where did they get their data?  Was it Hadley CRU's data?  Did they go out and collect the raw data from the stations themselves?  We are not told in the article how the data was collected.  Since the Hadley CRU has admitted the raw data has been destroyed and only their "adjusted" data is available, use of that data on the part of the Berkley team would indicate a lack of seriousness in addressing the issue since they would only replicate CRU's conclusions by default.. Unfortunately we have to wait for the publication of the research to get our answer to that question.

CRU Data Loss Not An Accident.

For those who are new to the study of global warming CRU and NASA collect temperature data from thousands of weather stations around the world.  In theory they take that data and compute a global mean or average temperature for days, months and the year.  But that is not what happens in practice.  Instead the data is changed, or "adjusted" to conform to what the scientists think it should be.  Various justifications are used for the "adjustments," change in weather station locations, recalibration of equipment and installation of new equipment. This is done in the name of consistency of data.  Steve McIntyre has noted that more often than not the raw temperature data is revised upwards in the case of recent data.he has also noted a history of multiple revisions of temperatures before 1960 downwards.

The effect of such revision of the raw data can be noted by looking at the graph given as evidence in the BBC article.  for sake of reference an anomalous cold year in the late nineteenth century, 1880, is set as the standard for a "normal" global temperature.  That year's average is the standard against which warming and the rate of warming are judged.  When we look at the graph what sticks out is that the year 1960 appears to be the "normal" since it is the only one which firmly sits on the zero temperature deviation line.  1880 is about .3 of one degree below normal.  With 1880 being the definition of a "normal" global average temperature it should be on the zero line.  That would give us a very different picture than what global warming advocates want us to have as to the global temperatures and rate of increase.  I won't state the obvious here.

we are also informed that the new study refutes the contention of skeptics that the urban heat island effect is a significant factor in the apparent rise of temperatures in the data.  For those new to this the heat island effect is the contention on the part of those who question the data that the change in urban environments and building materials through the years has skewed the actual temperatures upwards over time.  Materials, such as asphalt absorb heat and then radiate it into the surrounding local atmosphere.  Anyone who's ever been in the middle of an asphalt parking lot on a hot day can testify anecdotally to the truth of that effect.  Global Warming activists have contended for years that such a phenomenon is minimal and irrelevant.  We'll have to wait until formal publication to see how they arrive at that conclusion in this study.  I do find it ironic, however, that the BBC places a picture in the story which proves one of us skeptics' contentions, that weather stations are often now placed in environments which artificially drive up the temperature readings.  There is no way that temperature station sitting right in an airport and within proximity of jet exhaust is recording anything other than temperatures skewed upwards.  Sadly, that weather station isn't unusual; it is far more common than it should be.

So in conclusion, what we have here is a sensationally reported on study which hasn't even been peer-reviewed and published yet.  It is more than likely based on seriously flawed data to begin with, though we are going to have to wait for publication to find out.  It is reported to come to conclusion which may not be justified by the data and methodology of the research.  Again, we are going to have to wait on its publication to find out.  Yet, it is being trumpeted by the climate science community and the media as a definitive refutation of skeptics.  Since I can't afford the expensive subscription prices for the journals it is likely to be published in, I'm going to have to wait for Steven McIntyre or Anthony Watts to review the published piece when it comes out to find out whether I'm spot on or not. 

Nobel Laureate Resigns Over Global Warming Endorsement.

The News is reporting today that Physicist and Nobel Laureate, Dr. Ivar Giaever, has resigned from the prestigious American Physical Society (APS) over their ringing endorsement of Man-Made Global Warming:


http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/09/14/nobel-prize-winning-physicist-resigns-from-top-physics-group-over-global/?test=latestnews


It seems that Dr Glaever so strongly objects to the use of the word incontrovertible in describing Man-made Global warming "science," that he preferred to leave the APS and remain and lend his prestige to what he considered a misleading statement.  I don't blame him.  In my own field, Criminal Justice, we were taught that words like incontrovertible were so strong that they should only be used when one was so sure of the position taken that it was unimpeachable.  In fact, we were taught that only one finding in Criminal Justice Science was considered incontrovertible, that a perpetrator faced with a potential victim he or she suspected was either armed or capable of defending themselves and willing to do so would move on to another.


The article on fox News links to another at Climate Depot which reprints the entire letter.


DR. Glaever is hardly the only prominent physicist to do the same thing.  A year ago Harold Lewis, professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, resigned was well over the APS white-washing of Climategate.(most people aren't aware that Dr. Mann's credentials are in Physics, not dendocrinology, the field he so famously published on).  Mr. Lewis wrote:

"It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare."

Although I would echo this opinion, this is a prominent physicist writing the above, not this humble bachelorate in Criminal Justice Science. The whole article in The Telegraph is a good read:

The Telegraph: Global Warming Greatest Pseudoscientifc Fraud according to US Scientist.

Enjoy!

The Al Gore and Thomas Friedman Show.

Today is Al Gore's "24 hr" broadcast meant to shame us sceptics into realizing we're wrong about Global warming.

Of course along with that is a world-wide effort on the part of Gore sycophants to bash us at the same time.  One of the most prominent is the piece over at the New York Times by ever reliable Thomas Friedman entitled Is It Weird Enough Yet?  After seeing this little missive I could ask the same question myself.

Friedman’s big example for manmade global warming is the drought in Texas.  He informs us that it is a consequence of man made global warming because:

“The weather gets weird: the hots get hotter; the wets wetter; and the dries get drier. This is not a hoax. This is high school physics, as Katharine Hayhoe, a climatologist in Texas, explained on Joe Romm’s invaluable Climateprogress.org blog: ‘As our atmosphere becomes warmer, it can hold more water vapor. Atmospheric circulation patterns shift, bringing more rain to some places and less to others. For example, when a storm comes, in many cases there is more water available in the atmosphere and rainfall is heavier. When a drought comes, often temperatures are already higher than they would have been 50 years ago, and so the effects of the drought are magnified by higher evaporation rates.’”

Really?  When I followed the link he provided it led to the home page for the blog not the article which was supposed to enlighten us.  I don’t know about my readers, but I wasn’t about to wade through the mass of AGW propaganda to get to the article in question.  Let me enlighten my readers just a little.  Rather than Global warming, that drought, along with our current Atlantic Hurricane season is caused by, cooling of the pacific waters, what is known bas the La Niña.  As Dummies.com explains:

“In places like the northeastern United States that are accustomed to cold and snowy winters, La Niña often makes for especially hard winters. In the rainy Pacific Northwest, La Niña winters seem to bring even more rain and snow than usual...

Across the desert Southwest, often the season is even drier than normal. Tornadoes seem especially numerous during springs and summers of La Niña, and the Atlantic hurricane season can be especially long and dangerous. In 1999, for example, while La Niña conditions prevailed in the tropical Pacific Ocean, 12 tropical storms grew big enough to earn names, eight of them became hurricanes, and five became intense hurricanes.”

Sound familiar?  There was a hard winter in the Northeast this year, and conditions were dryer here in the Southeast, including Texas which is suffering from a drought just like the rest of us here in the South.  We also had a record tornado year, all the result of a La Niña not global warming.

Mr. Friedman’s explanation, which he calls “high school physics” also misses the mark in another important way.  Let’s let Mr. Harris over at Pajamas Media explain:

“Consider extreme weather, the main topic of 24 Hours of Reality. Gore promotes the concept that greenhouse gas-induced global warming is leading to increasingly severe weather. But this defies logic. If the world warms due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures at high latitudes are forecast to rise most, reducing the difference between arctic and tropical temperatures. Since this differential drives weather, we should see weaker midlatitude cyclones in a warmer world, and so less extremes in weather, not more.”

Check history and we find that to be anecdotally true.  Just about every period of known global warming in history was marked by a forward pace for humanity.  Arable land increased as Northern lands warmed up.  So mankind’s food supply increased; and along with it so did our human population.  The bounty in food made possible the advancement in crafts and the sciences.  That is true of the Roman period, the medieval warming period, several Amerindian civilizations and civilizations in the far East.  Surely that wouldn’t have been possible had the dire consequences Friedman and Gore warn us about had accompanied those warming periods, as they should’ve.  But, excuse me, Al Gore and Friedman deny such periods ever took place.  Dr. Mann and Dr. Briffa proved as much as far as they’re concerned.

But then you already know my opinion of Dr. Mann.

Tea Partyers Racists?

I can only shake my head as I read something like this:

Academics Dub Tea Partyers Racist.

Stuff like this is the reason the Social Sciences have struggled for recognition among their scientific peers for generations.  That they would proudly present such research at a conference totally boggles the mind.  Check out, for instance, the following:

But like Mr. Jacobson, Mr. Abramowitz also said they were more likely to harbor racial resentment, which he judged based on their answers to questions such as whether blacks could succeed as well as whites if they “would only try harder,” and whether they agreed with the statement that Irish, Italians and Jews overcame prejudice and “blacks should do the same without any special favors.”

Really?  Notice the second question.  How does that objectively measure one's racism?  The truth is it doesn't.  It compares blacks with other minorities who have faced and overcome prejudice and asks a person if blacks should be held to a different, arguably racist, standard which demands special treatment for them.  I would argue that the question is design to elicit the opposite of what it purports to measure if I weren't aware of the sophist thinking which motivated it.  It is based on the specious assumption that the black experience is somehow so much worse than that of any other minority in U.S., so much worse, that they must be accorded special status and favors.  To think otherwise is considered in modern academia to be automatically racist.  As a part American Indian myself, who was tossed out of Restaurants in the South in my youth under Jim Crow laws, I beg to differ.

So why do we end up with stuff like this passed off as "science?"  Follow the money.  These studies are financed, just like Climate studies.  By far the biggest provider of money is we, the taxpayers.  Something I learned in college is that basically applicants for research money have to promise an outcome.  The government doesn't hand that money for pure research for research's sake.  Generally bureaus are staffed by folks with left-wing leanings in their permanent positions, much like universities.  These folks determine who gets the research grants and they don't tend to give that money out to those who don't expect to get the approved result.

Clearly a lot of money went into this blatant effort to smear the current administration's political opponents.  Look for this stuff to surface in the coming months as it makes its way in the appropriate academic journals where it will be used by media pundits to smear both the Tea Party and, by extension, Republicans.  That is what happens when science becomes the servant of politics.

The problem with Mann.

As I mentioned earlier, I have a bit of a problem with politically motivated science.

We saw it first manifested in the twentieth century under the banner of Eugenics, a pseudoscience which is repudiated in part because of where it ultimately led.  However, such abuse of science to serve a political agenda hasn't disappeared by any means.  My first encounter with what amounts to questionable science came as a college senior, when I first encountered the body of "science" published in medical journals in pursuit of a scientific justification for gun control.  Even many colleagues of those publishing their pseudo-studies objected to their work, publishing scathing critiques of their work.  Yet those periodicals ignored the objections and continue to publish such garbage to this day; and their "studies" get cited as authoritative by the media and the legal profession.

I first became aware of the "science" of man-made global warming around 2000 as a result of some of the sensational claims being made at the time about the dire consequences for our planet if we didn't gut our economy and take ourselves back to a nineteenth century lifestyle.  I began my own researches into the issue and came to the conclusion that the claims were overblown, to say the least, and predicated on flawed research, much of it in the mold of the same sort of "science" I encountered five years earlier.  Don't get me wrong, The evidence for our planet warming since the mid to late nineteenth century is indisputable.  The problem I have is with the claims as to the cause.  I think the warming is part of a natural process repeated throughout history and beyond, not man made as many claim.

To make the case that modern global warming was both artificial and unprecedented, history had to be rewritten.  Now I don't have a problem with rewriting history if it can be shown the current paradigm is inaccurate.  That is simply part of refining the story of man's history.  However, to revise history without a proper basis for doing so in pursuit of an agenda is fraudulent, and to do it in the name of science undermines scientific credibility, that''s why I get so bent out of shape with the bogus gun studies.  I was reminded of this today by the following article:

University Turns Over Some of Climate Scientist's documents.

This story reports that some of the documents surrounding the research of Michael Mann and his "hockey stick" graph were turned over in response to an FOI request by a "conservative" think tank, the American Tradition Institute.  That the university drug its feet and it took intervention by a judge to gain a partial release of the material is itself significant.  For those who don't know what this is all about let me give a little background.

Back in the last part of the 1990s the IPCC was preparing what was billed to be a major release in its report on man made global warming, aka Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).  The IPCC wanted to make the case that modern warming was not only caused by man, but historically unprecedented.  There was, however,  several little problems called the (WMP), a warm period from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries which anecdotal evidence from the time suggests was even warmer than today, and the Maunder Minimum, a cold period period from the 17th through the 19th centuries associated with a period of minimal sunspot activity from 1645 to 1715 by the same name.  The last is commonly called "The Mini Ice Age.  For the IPCCs case to be made it somehow had to be shown that global climate was relatively stable until modern times.  A little known scientist, Michael Mann, stepped up to the plate and provided what is now famously called the "hockey Stick" Graph purportedly based on tee-ring proxies, showing the very sort of stable climate the IPCC demanded through more than a thousand years of history with an exponential rise in temperatures right at the end.

Problems began after the report was released when a retired mathmetician smelled a rat and decided to examine the data for himself.  The mathematician noticed some irregularities, such as certain values normally reported in such works not being included in the paper cited by the IPCC report.  When Dr. Mann refused to give him access to the data, something normally done when a colleague examining another's research requests it, the stench got worse.  The mathematician, Stephen McIntyre would co-publish a paper with Dr. Ross McKitrich pointing out the flaws Mr. McIntyre could determine in Man's research in 2004.  I won't point out most of the flaws in the methodology since I plan to highlight one particular decision on Mann's part which came to light later, as a result of Climate gate.

We've all heard the "hide the decline" comment which came as a result of the hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University East Anglia which is the headquarters of the climate science community.  However, there is some confusion as to what went on.  It seems that Michael Mann had a little problem with his data.  Dr. Mann had based his proxy record on tree rings, a highly interpretive methodology fraught with flaws when it comes to determining annual temperatures since temperature is only one of many influences on annual tree growth.  Dr' Mann's problem was that his reconstruction of annual temperatures didn't watch with observed annual temperature, especially after the 1960s.  The reconstructed temperature went into decline instead of rising as they should.  Consider this for a moment, his interpretation of the tree rings for the historical period didn't match the known temperatures for the period, calling his entire reconstruction of historical global temperatures into question.

Dr. Mann's solution for publication is now immortalized by his e-mail comment that he would have to "hide the decline."  Instead of starting over, or admitting he was wrong, Dr. Mann decided to throw the unmatching data out and substitute it with the recorded temperatures.  Thus the report and its graph would give a misleading impression as to the authority of Mann's historical reconstruction.  Now I don't know about anybody else, but when I went through college and did my research classes I was told such conduct was higly unethical.  Apparently I was misinformed.  As the article I came across today states:

The release of the e-mail follows the release Monday of a report by the Inspector General of the National Science Foundation (NSF). It says Mann did not violate any codes of ethical research conduct in connection with the so-called Climategate e-mails, which unknown hackers copied from a server at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom in November 2009. The NSF investigation was the latest in a series of inquiries to find no evidence for allegations by critics, ATI among them, that Mann had falsified data or skewed calculations to exaggerate recent increases in global temperatures or humanity's role in causing them.

 Excuse me, when did it become ethical to eliminate data which contradicts ones conclusions and substitute other data in which doesn't?  By doing so didn't Dr. Mann in fact skew the data?  I guess those who taught me how to conduct research were sadly misinformed if this is the current state of affairs in research science!  What really gets to me is that this sort of attitude on the part of the "scientific establishment" undermines sciences credibility with the populace as folks aren't as stupid as the folks covering Dr.Mann's ass think they are.

Even worse, this sad state of affairs extends beyond the climate science community and academia in general.  I've already mentioned the skewed gun control research given the impremise of prestigious medical journals.  Michael Chrichton, who sounded the clarion call on the problems with climate science in his seminal book State Of Fear noted before that a similar attitude among historians when he wrote The 13th Warrior:

I mention this because the tendency to blend the boundaries of fact and fiction has become widespread in modern society.  Fiction is now inserted seamlessly in everything from scholarly histories to television news.  Of course, television is understood to be venal, its transgressions shrugged off by most of us.  But the attitude of “post-modern” scholars represents a more fundamental challenge.  Some in academic life now argue seriously there is no difference between fact and fiction, that all ways of reading text are arbitrary and personal, and that therefore pure fiction is as valid as hard research.  At best, this attitude evades traditional scholarship; at worst, it is nasty and dangerous.  But such academic views were not prevalent twenty years ago, when I sat down to write this novel in the guise of a scholarly monograph, and academic fashion may change again—particularly if scholars find themselves chasing down imaginary footnotes, as I have done.  (Final word in 1992 edition)

Michael Chricton's words almost twenty years ago serve to warn us to the depths to which both science and academia have fallen.  That is the crux of the problem, science is now, like history, being corrupted to serve a political agenda.  Because of that we, as consumers of information, can't be sure we aren't being fed inaccurate information.  This highlights the need for each and everyone of us to learn how to evaluate information for ourselves, we can no longer trust the "experts."

Introduction

Just by way of an introduction:

I’m new at this and looking forward to seeing where this takes me.  I’ve always been curious about the world around me and had many and varied interests.  Mother and father got tired of answering my questions and saved up for an encyclopedia so that they could tell me “go read about it.”  That was before I could even read.   My three biggest interests, the ones with the most passion, are the languages of the Bible and some of its earliest translations, writing, and the guitar.  The first is something I’ve pursued all my life as the resources became available to me; the other two are older passions and desires I’ve only begun to explore now, in my sixth decade of life.

The first is, of course, largely a part of my life as a committed Christian, now for some thirty-seven years.  I definitely cannot be called mainstream as far as being a Christian goes.  However, I follow the evidence where it leads me, with the Bible as the ultimate authority.  That should explain my interest in biblical related languages, I made the vow that one day no translator with his bias, no matter how honestly held, would stand between me and God’s word.  I’m amazed at the resources which God has now made available through the net, resources I could only dream of as little as ten years ago.  So I feel a bit like a kid in a candy store now as opportunities abound.  Naturally my faith informs my views in other areas, such as politics, however, do be careful trying to put me in a box there.  As I wrote, I’m not mainstream by just about any definition of the word.

I'm not too sure how much space here will be devoted to the other two.  Maybe just enough to keep friends updated as to going's on in my life where they are concerned.

Among my interests listed in my profile I mentioned one soapbox issue which will probably be written on time and again, the misuse of science in pursuit of an agenda.  I do hold a science degree in the social sciences.  So I do have a basis for examining the issue.  While in college I noticed a body of research which was being published in medical journals which had no basis for the lofty status it was being given.  The research I refer to was the research into guns and gun control published by such men as Dr. Arthur Kellerman.  That work was done using inappropriate methodologies and amounted to junk science.  More than one of the esteemed doctor’s papers have been debunked, even by other M.D.s within his own scholarly community and I find it amazing that this agenda driven work still gets cited as authoritative.

When I became aware of "Global Warming” science and checked it out, I found it to be on no better a foundation than the gun research.  So the misuse of science for political ends has become something of a soapbox issue for me. 

Before he died, Michael Crichton wrote the following in his notes on The Thirteenth Warrior:

“I mention this because the tendency to blend the boundaries of fact and fiction has become widespread in modern society.  Fiction is now inserted seamlessly in everything from scholarly histories to television news.  Of course, television is understood to be venal, its transgressions shrugged off by most of us.  But the attitude of “post-modern” scholars represents a more fundamental challenge.  Some in academic life now argue seriously there is no difference between fact and fiction, that all ways of reading text are arbitrary and personal, and that therefore pure fiction is as valid as hard research.  At best, this attitude evades traditional scholarship; at worst, it is nasty and dangerous.  But such academic views were not prevalent twenty years ago, when I sat down to write this novel in the guise of a scholarly monograph, and academic fashion may change again—particularly if scholars find themselves chasing down imaginary footnotes, as I have done.”

Unfortunately, things didn’t improve, not in the history discipline, and for sure not in the sciences, where we’ve seen the sad spectacle of scientists being outed for flagrant violations of scientific ethics.  That more than one panel found those violations to be consistent with current scientific practice is a sad commentary on the state of things in our time.

Well, that’s all for now.  I look forward to seeing folks around.

Stanley Loper