Good stuff from James Annan on James’ Empty Blog: His transgression cannot be condoned, regardless of his motives. Includes a link to, and quote from, Mike McPhaden, president of the AGU, in his comments on Gleick: We must remain committed to scientific integrity.

See especially Annan’s comments in his blog post’s discussion thread, where he expands a little on his current thinking.

The biggest impact of this incident on me personally has been to shake up my taxonomy of the climate change debate. Before, I had just two boxes: scientists (the well-informed, rational, good guys) on one side, and deniers (the deluded, stupid, and/or bad guys) on the other. The former accepted that climate change was real. The latter didn’t.

Unfortunately, to paraphrase von Moltke, my taxonomy could not survive contact with the enemy. I now realize that the climate change landscape is more complicated. There are some intelligent, rational people who nevertheless question the mainstream scientific view. And there are some real bozos who accept it. I’m not making any particular assertion about the number of people in either of those categories. But they’re definitely there.

I liked this post from Tamsin Edwards’ blog, All Models Are Wrong: The Sceptical Compass. It includes this diagram:

Regardless of where I or the people I’m reading fall on the vertical axis, I want to spend less of my time on the left side of that graph, and more on the right.

This entry was posted by jbc on Friday, March 2nd, 2012 at 6:24 pm and is filed under global warming, Peter Gleick, science, Skepticism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.