Keith Kloor: Compulsion for the formula of "He said/She said"

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http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2010/05/18/why-climate-journalism-is-a-rotting-carcass/

My God, threaten to take away their "he said/she said" journalistic device, and they become completely unhinged. Very embarrassing post from Keith Kloor. Taken with the comments below, the post is completely self-refuting.

Quoting Michael Tobis in the comments:

Is it any wonder the opposition starts down the road of exaggeration as well? There’s really no advantage to telling the truth here, and it is the fault of the fact that there is no institution delivering any news that isn’t political, in other words, nothing seriously resembling scientific or environmental journalism.

It’s as if all I had to do to get an innocent person I dislike condemned for murder is to accuse him of two murders. If the judge and jury were journalistically minded, it would be a pretty simple matter to get them to split the difference.

My own comment:

Keith, you turn criticism of the "he said/she said" journalistic device by your betters into an _example_ of the "he said/she said" device as you shrug off responsibility to differentiate the two sides.  [Following the link is not necessary, it is as bad as you would expect]

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/another-rock/

My lack of compulsion to frame the world as "he said/she said" makes it difficult to see equivalence between the extremes of  Joe Romm and Jeff Id.  The above by Jeff Id is classic bed-wetting 9/12 conspiratorial agitprop (if I may use the word out of historical political context).

Getting back to the beginning of my comment: the issue is shrugging off responsibility.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Here is a very important article by Jay Rosen of NYU Journalism school on PRESSthink:

Jay Rosen - He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2009/04/12/hesaid_shesaid.html

[Edit]

Kloor responds so:

[...] The irony is that if you really, really wanted to do something about greenhouse gases, you’d stop bitching about the things you can’t change (like msm journalism and skeptics) and start thinking of new ways to reframe the issue.  (Hint: Climate catastrophe is not working. So how long you want to stay with that one? Another couple of decades?)

If you see preventing climate disruption as a moral issue (and I think that is the proper way to view it), you will gasp at the moral bankruptcy displayed.

Whatever the irony is or isn't... some players are incorrigible; best to recognize those players early; embrace the moral foundation of the issue because only there is moral motivation to be found.

Poppycock from Keith Kloor, whining for the loss of Climategate "He said/She said" journalistic narrative

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Poppycock from Keith Kloor.

Collida-a-Scape: Choosing Sides

Nothing here except pouting from Kloor because somebody took his journalistic "he said/she said" narrative away from him, and now he is cranky.

"He said/she said" is for shit, when the Titanic is 15 minutes away from the last possible moment the boat can be steered away from the iceberg. If re-arranging the deck-chairs while the boat sinks is folly, how much more greater the folly if the re-arranging of the deck-chairs takes place when the wheel must be turned - folding/unfolding deck-chairs in the stead of saving the ship.

The only part worth reading is Michael Tobis's comment:

You mistake anger for gloating. I am angry. The harping on the sheer nothingness behind the accusations is not celebration. It is a necessary correction. There is nothing to the accusations against Jones. I am not dancing in the street. I am feeling somewhat vindicated for getting matters right in the first place, but my dominant emotion is outrage.

Does that mean science is constructed ideally? No, far from it. I myself advocate both for far greater openness and for formalisms that go to conduct rather than just to final publication. I think pure science should look more like applied science, and in particular climate science needs to wake up to being an applied science. I see the point about circling the wagons. I see the point about opacity. I see the point about arrogance. If seeing these things more clearly is a side effect of this charade, so much the better.

But positive side effects aside, it’s still a charade. There is no cause for vilifying Jones or CRU any more than there has been in the past about Mann or Santer or whoever the bete noir of the year is in denialist circles.

The only substantive question at hand is, when someone publishes someone else’s correspondence, which party committed the crime. I would have thought it was the party doing the stealing, not the party doing the having been stolen from.

If the press continues to get that wrong, it isn’t time to be talking about two-bit tribalism or wagon-circling in the scientific community. A criminal act was committed which resulted in the persecution of the victim. That is the story. It is a pretty interesting story. Why don’t you just run with that one for a while and then get back to us, mmmkay?

Tobis continues on "Only In It For The Gold": Still Bupkis:

Until the innocence of CRU becomes clear to the casual observer, the press is complicit in a vile and inexcusable act of calumny. We won't have much to gloat about until the press examines its role in this absurd disaster.

These "science reporters"... with "friends" like these...

The take-away is:

• Scientists will have to blog their way the front line of the narrative, to reach the public with the ability to tell shit from Shinola.
• Pure science should look more like applied science.

Not Evil, Just Wrong (Mostly) - Moral analysis of Global Warming Denial

Michael Tobis does it again, a substantial moral analysis of global warming denial:

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Not Evil, Just Wrong (Mostly) - Michael Tobis - Only In It For The Gold: "I have no trace of a doubt that sustainability issues are ethical issues. Talking about ethical issues without mention of evil is a bit like playing hockey without looking at the puck.

[...]

Let me be clear. As the movie title (incorrectly I think) claims about President-elect Gore, it is possible to be 'not evil, just wrong' about issues of substance. I believe most of the people who are participating in the attacks on climate science are doing so more or less in good faith, having been led down a path of bizarrely twisted interpretations of who we climate scientists are, what we do, and how we got to where we are. The question is who has been doing the leading.

The confusion about climate science pretty much requires a complete ignorance of the tradition of Jule Charney, [...] and the profound and elegant depth of its achievements. People to whom the Charney tradition is invisible perceive a vastly less sophisticated science than actually exists. It's odd; you'd think the visible improvement in weather forecasting would carry some weight [...]

The Charney tradition (along with the related Stommel tradition in oceanography) is the intellectual core of climatology, but it's pretty much invisible to the outside world. It just doesn't reduce to a nutshell easily. (And at least when I learned the stuff, the pedagogy was lousy to make matters even worse.) So it's easy for people to have essentially no idea that a real and rich science exists. They will put climatology on a par with, say, ecosystem dynamics or economics in 'maturity'.

[...]

But this underestimation is not enough to account for our present dysfunction on this matter. The underestimation of the sophistication of planetary physics does not suffice to argue for 'no need to control CO2 emissions'.

Image by Geonostalgy for the future via Flickr

Consider what the evidence actually shows based on simple physics that predates Charney and Stommel. As is well-known, that evidence (based in radiative transfer and broadly confirmed in plaeoclimate observations) shows that greenhouse gases play a significant role in the energy flows through the system, so that once human perturbations on CO2 concentrations become comparable to and ultimately exceed natural CO2 concentrations, the balance would necessarily change. We also know from geological evidence that very large shifts in climate are possible in consequence of relatively small forcings. Consequently, large CO2 increases are risky. The less we stipulate that we know about the system, the less we can constrain those risks. The plausible worst case (say the 5% credibility scenario) gets more expensive the less we know. Thus the less we know, the more vigorously we ought to refrain from emissions.

[...]
[... We] are in trouble as a consequence of the success of this program of misdirection and fearmongering. The techniques being used to undermine the communication channels between legitimate science and competent governance will be with us forever. We will forever be challenged by the malicious techniques that have been developed in this trumped-up debate. We had better develop an immune system to this sort of bullshit or sooner or later some sort of spectacular disaster will result.

"

Michael puts a fine point on it in the comments below:

[...]

At issue here is a bunch of more or less innocent scientists, maybe splitting a hair wrong once in a while this way or that. It's about a scientific subculture supported in substance by every major scientific body on earth, and subjected to what amounts to the extreme libel and defamation.  [...]

[...]

If you compare this to a few dozen grumpy bearded green guys who'd love to be just as mean and nasty if they could, you are just resorting to the journalist's favorite hiding place, the middle.

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I don't even know if the bearded guys exist, frankly. But even if they do, what importance do they have in the face of this grotesque and successful organized lying, by major media outlets, senators, governors, CEOs and even preachers?

I know balance is your stock in trade as a J-school type, but some situations just don't balance. It's not a law of nature that bad guys are equally distributed on both sides. You actually have an ethical responsibility to pick this time, and to do it right.

Please. Get real. This matters.

The only thing in the favor of those who care about the truth is that the situation is not simply going to go away.