Paul Krugman Takes Will to Task Over Hacked Scientists' Emails-Not a Single Smoking Gun
By Heather Monday Nov 30, 2009 12:00pm
Looks like George Will is at it again. This time carrying some water for James Inhofe on the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia. Paul Krugman reminds Will that there was no "smoking gun" in those emails and also asks Will why he hates the free market so much with his opposition to cap and trade.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And meanwhile, he is also going to be dealing with health care, right now on the floor of the Senate. He announced this week to Copenhagen to deal with climate change. And it comes at a time when the politics seem to be changing a little bit in this.
Let me show our latest ABC News/Washington Post poll. It shows whether people believe global warming is occurring. That number is going down. July 2008, 80 percent of the public; down to 72 percent now. And there's been a sort of a real partisanship. Look at Republicans, 74 percent believed global warming was occurring back in 2008. Now, a 20-point drop to 54 percent.
George, there has been a partinizing of this issue, and let me turn to one more complication we've had over the last week. This Climate Research Institute at East Anglia University, someone hacked into their e-mail account and showed a bunch of emails between scientists, which opponents of climate change legislation said proves that they are rigging the science and trying to hide information that runs counter to their theories.
WILL: It raises the question of -- we're being asked to wage trillions of dollars and substantially curtail freedom on climate models that are imperfect and unproven. And the consensus far from being as solid as they say it is, and the debate as over as they say it is. The e-mails indicate people are very nervous about suppressing criticism, gaming the peer review process for scholarly works and all the rest. One of the e-mails said it is a travesty, his word, it is a travesty that we cannot explain the fact that global warming has stopped. Well, they shouldn't be embarrassed about that. It's a complicated business, and that's why we shouldn't be (inaudible).
KRUGMAN: All those e-mails -- people have never seen what academic discussion looks like. There's not a single smoking gun in there. There's nothing in there. And the travesty is that people are not able to explain why the fact that 1988 was a very warm year doesn't actually mean that global warming has stopped. I mean, that's loose wording. Right? Everything is about -- we're really in the same situation as if there was one extremely warm day in April. And then people are saying, well, you see, May is cooler than April, there's no trend here. And that's what -- the travesty is how hard it has been to explain...
WILL: One of the emails, Paul, said he wished he could delete, get rid of the medieval warming period. That lasted 600 years...
KRUGMAN: It's not -- read -- this has all been explained. What he meant is they want to put a start on it. We have an end to it, we don't have a start on it. There's a lot of loose use of language when you're just talking among each other. And what the deleting really meant, the deleting would be meant that, you know, we don't know when this thing started, because we don't have very good data back then. There weren't any weather stations. And that's what the context was.
[...]
WILL: But what I was going to say there is that the United States pledges to reduce its carbon emissions 83 percent below the 2005. That will not even be seriously attempted, and here is why. That would mean we would have total carbon emissions equal to the United States in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. Furthermore, our per-capita carbon emissions in 2050, when he says this is going to happen, when there's going to be 420 million Americans, would be on a per-capita basis what we had in 1875.
STEPHANOPOULOS: (inaudible) credibility problem as well. I mean, I think the issue is, I think the president had to go to Copenhagen. It was the only way to get the Indians and the Chinese to go as well. But, Paul, as he goes, he'll be making a commitment that he can't necessarily keep unless the Senate follows through.
(CROSSTALK)
KRUGMAN: Everyone understands that. And I just want to say, I'm surprised, George, that you lack faith in the power of the marketplace. All this cap-and-trade is about is putting a price on carbon emission, and people will do amazing things given a market incentive.
WILL: Speaking of the marketplace, the biggest industry in the world right now may be fighting climate change. There are billions, trillions of dollars on the table, and when you say, well, they are academics and they are scientists and they talk in funny ways -- academics are human beings, and the enormous incentive to get on the bandwagon on global warming, the financial incentive, the market driving this, is huge.
KRUGMAN: There is tremendously more money in being a skeptic than there is in being a supporter. It's so much easier, come on. You got the energy industry's behind it. There are 20 times as many believers as there are skeptics in the scientific community. They get almost equal time in the media.
(CROSSTALK)
WILL: Is there a larger venture capital firm in this country than the Energy Department of this government, which right now is sending out billions and billions of dollars in speculation on green energy?
KRUGMAN: Oh...come on.
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and they won't let paul save them from their stupidity.
All of the Bush Cheney emails and see if they too have:
"... a lot of loose use of language when you're just talking among each other."
I mean really. As if.
Does anybody read George Will who isn't already predisposed to being insane?
*crickets chirping*
Scientists (and most everybody else) keep their private correspondence private so that their remarks can't be taken OUT of context. Rove and Cheney deleted their emails and removed the hard drives from their computers and crushed them so that their private correspondence could never be taken IN context.
Nevertheless, what these people fail to understand is that using these dirty tricks is usually a bad idea because it A) shows the other side how effective they are, and B) gives the other side moral cover for using them too. One of the main reasons the Democrats won the last election was because they adopted some of the Republican dirty tricks. Following a candidate around with a camera waiting for him to say something stupid, and then keeping it secret and releasing it months or years later during an election campaign for maximum effect used to be a Republican trick. Democrats eventually learned it and used it to take down George Allen. Ditto for Mark Foley.
Now that the anti-climate change crowd has used this dirty trick to smear the global warming crowd the next obvious step is for the global warming crowd to hack into the computers at the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, and post a bunch of emails on a non-traceable russian website showing Heritage and AEI organizing the hacking and smear campaign. Probably at the behest of Haliburton and COP.
Conservatives understand that believing something makes it true.
The only industry I see that can save the U.S. is energy independence and the Republicans can only see buying oil from the Middle East as an answer to all ills. God help us if the Democrats don't have the ba!!s to stand up and lead!!!
Probably the reason why only 6% of scientists are Republicans. Dogmatism doesn't mix well with the scientific method.
http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=1549
My favorite study regarding the concensus of global warming:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/30...
Science Magazine looked at the nearly 1000 scientific articles published on climate change over the ten year period of 1993-2003. 75% of those articles came to the conclusion that global warming was real and caused by human activity, 25% dealt with methodology for measurement and offered no opinion on cause, and NOT ONE ARTICLE claimed that global warming wasn't a reality. (Fortunately, this covers the period before the journal "Climate Research" was taken over by the Global Warming Hoax crowd.)
If this is a "V-Style" conspiracy, where all of the scientitsts got together on their secret island and decided to say the same thing to maintain their monopoly on power for the sake of the New World Order, it's the most leak-proof conspiracy I've ever seen.
Will: "One of the emails, Paul, said he wished he could delete, get rid of the medieval warming period. That lasted 600 years..."
Will apparently missed recent literature regarding this so-called medieval warming period, which was followed by the Little Ice Age.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/475...
According to Dutch researchers, the Little Ice Age was the anomoly. They posit that human activity (rampant deforestation in Europe and Asia, intentional fires, agricultural and other farming activities) was vastly diminished as a result of deaths caused by plague, thus leading to a cooling period.
When the Villagers -- especially those on the right -- accept that we were lied into the first Gulf War (Google "Iraq Kuwait incubator Hill Knowlton") and the second, and all the other outrageous hoodwinking that goes on inside the halls of power, then I'll believe that they only want what's best for America when they pick and choose which "scandals" deserve airtime.
Remember, the Pentagon "experts" appearing on network news who had agendas to sell got no media attention, but ACORN deserved wall-to-wall chatterboxing.
... disputes that human activity can have an impact on the environment is welcome to pour antifreeze on their lawn and feed carbon monoxide into their living room.
..so they have a closed environment, just like the Earth, and then be allowed to breathe all that healthy non-toxic, CO2 they expel. After all, O2 can appear as if by magic in a closed envir...oh wait, its a closed environment and they would die wouldn't they? I wonder if they understand the irony of that?
Murdoch's media machine proves that lies, repeated ad nauseum, are accepted by many as the truth.
that they are popping the tops off too many gin bottles and Kentucky bourbon jugs. Their followers are popping the corks of the old white lightning.
Hey! Let's keep gin out of this. Gin is dedicated to being a very liberal drink. I know that for a fact. ;)
I'll have you know this liberal loves a little Kentucky Bourbon over ice.. :P
as much as the next guy but I don't soak in it every night on the beltway.
I can testify that gin came to my aid more than once during the hellish eight years of bush. Would a right leaning alcohol do that for a dirty hippy liberal chick?
You watch out, girlie. Those liberal alcohols only have one thing on their mind!
then inebriation must be right-leaning or centrist at best.
I wanted Paul to get up and go over to Will and yank him up by his tie and tell him to shut the fu*k up until he knows what the hell he was talking about.
The people quickest to not trust are those who can't be trusted. I would put a whole lot of talking heads and bullshiters in that category. They know that they lie can cheat all the time so they think everyone else does as well.
"yank him up by his tie and tell him to shut the fu*k up until he knows what the hell he was talking about."
That's part of the problem. Technically speaking NONE of them knew what the fu*k they were talking about. Krugman was the closest thing to a real scientist on that pannel. The closest George Will ever comes to numbers is when he compares batting averages for his baseball fetish.
I'm usually horrified whenever I turn on CNN and they trott out their panel of political pundits to discuss scientific questions. They bring out Donna Brazil, David Gurgen, and Mary Matalin to discuss whether flu vaccine adjuvants really cause autism, and whether human activity really causes global warming, and whether the Theory of Relativity is compatible with Quantum Mechanics. Then they bring back the same gang of political hacks to discuss military strategy in Afghanistan.
FU*K THAT!!!!!!!!!!!
It was bad enough in the old days when news outlets routinely committed the fallacy of equivocation when 99% of scientists believed one thing, and 1% believed something else, so they would give equal time to "both sides" of the argument, and also give the false impression that both sides of the argument were of equal value.
But now that seems like THE GOOD OLD DAYS, when they actually HAD scientists arguing about science. Now they have a bunch of political hacks arguing about science, meaning that real science has become irrelevant. Facts are irrelevant, science is irrelevant, and everything that used to be in the realm of science is now in the realm of politics and ideology. Want proof? The proof is the fact that all the major news outlets now bring in political partisans to argue about science. I thought the American political discourse hit rock bottom in 1979 when the networks held a prime time "debate" on NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT between CHARLTON HESTON and PAUL NEWMAN! Now even THAT seems like the good old days.
If this bullsh!t is allowed to continu,e America is pretty much finished. You can't sustain a functional democracy for long when the citizenry believes that facts and empirical research are irrelevant, and that political ideology creates its own reality, rather than the reverse.
Thank you for that comment and I'm with you all the way. My husband is a scientist and this sort of shit drives me crazy. Science matters and those who know nothing about it should never be asked about it. You're also right that it is damned sad that the public listens to talking heads when they should be listening to the people who are in the field of discussion.
When health care negotiations started, 70% of Americans were for the public option. Now half or less. The MSM is as bad as FAUX, because they pick up the spin and propell it rather than do their own investigative reporting.
In addition to flailing the public option, Murdoch's minions are going after cap and trade by telling the public how much it will cost them, etc . etc. The economy is so bad right now, all you have to tell people is that it is going to cost them and they are against it.
Unknown hackers this month stole thousands of e-mails and documents, dating from 1996 to 2009, from the United Kingdom's University of East Anglia
hello, crime?
The conclusion of some who have looked at the e-mails, including Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla
i wonder what the insane senator from OK would say if someone hacked into his email, passed it around, and commented on his emails?
the climate change deniers are getting pretty desperate. maybe exxon should start funding anti-science science again...?
Hello, Daniel Ellsberg?
ellsberg was charged with a list of crimes--incl espionage. but, due to govt misconduct all charges were dismissed...
so...
He decided to reveal the contents of the Pentagon Papers, not on the basis of whether or not he wasn't going to end up in prison (he expected to end up there), but figured the contents of the "Papers" was worth the risk.
The very first time I heard about these emails I knew Inohofe was going to jump into them like a pig in mud. He already had nothing to back up his global warming "hoax" theory but he could screw around with these and try to fashion them into something he could use to prop up his bs. I totally detest that man!
God speaks to Inhofe in mysterious ways. That's good for him though. It's great to be able to explain those voices....those damn...voices...
i so agree
his BS needs some propping too
To me he is the Glenn Beck of the Senate.
What would Inhofe say if somebody hacked into his emails? How about "guilty" to the charge of conspiracy to commit electronic communications fraud when it comes to light that he knew about the email hacking and smearing campaign before it even started, and was involved in its organization?
and he has Shown that he is unable to put his faith in Americas Future. And thanks for ending before Cokehead Roberts had a chance to
Pollute the Conversation with her Bullshit.
This is what I don't understand: Conservatives argue that there is a great conspiracy to prove global warming. Okay, fine. Show me the duplicity: Show me ONE person who has personally gained from publishing an article 'supporting' climate change who would NOT have benefitted from publishing the opposite conclusion. Who is this great science conspirator?
Conservatives understand politics, but they are woefully inept when it comes to scientific research. Grant money comes PRIOR to any publications, based on the quality of your proposed research design. So grant monies aren't disbursed as a REWARD for your findings, nor are they revoked if the funding source doesn't like your findings. The idea that grants are conditionally based on outcomes is absurd!
Outcomes-based rewards occur in the private sector, idiots!
Just once, I want to see someone make these idiots be specific and ask: Are you saying federal grants are awarded based on outcomes? How is that possible, given that outcomes occur long after the grant is awarded?
have demonized "Science" for decades.
They are followed by the people who are just plain dumb, people who deny the Global Warming because it terrifies them, persons who believe Everything That Happens is God's Will, people who just Hate everything "Liberals" say or do; and of course, the people who Stand To Make Billions and Who Won't Be Affected By Global Warming Because They're so incredibly, disgustingly, criminally RICH.
continued grants don't happen unless you show some sort of conclusion, but yoiur conclusion doesn't have to be supportive of your original hypthesis. That's what these dipshits that aren't scientists that are trying to play gotcha with scientists don't understand.
watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNRW5qMRnIU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEFv4_OGY_o
He's the great conspirator behind all this. Don't you know anything about the topic? (He says, tongue planted firmly in cheek.)
"As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise."
George Will
I fear for Krugman's brain cells surrounded by so much stupid.
America so much, it will be spared from Global Warming....
but the rest of the world will not.
Never forget that God always roots for the good ole USA!!
As I understand it heaven is decorated in red, white and blue. American flags everywhere. It's so patriotic and all.
Too bad for all the other countries, they'll just have to go some place else when they die.
I'm sure the orchardists would appreciate expert cherry pickers like Will and his pals.
those that base their denial of the theory of climate change solely based on their local weather, on any given day, might just not get what the argument is about. forget the science, they aren't even sure what the overarching issue really is.
These "damning" emails were obtained by commission of what would be felony computer intrusion in this country.
These private communications were then posted to a Russian website.
Consider the provenance before frothing at the mouth over the contents.
What the hell is Krugman doing, trying to 'explain" this, when he should be hammering George Will for being an accessory to a felony?
There is no global warming, I know cause I live in Texas and it's really cold and it might snow! Who needs more proof than that?
I am not quite as old as will but I can see the results of global warming. I guess we can only hope that i effects the disbelievers first. If they have big houses on the ocean maybe they will get their just deserts.
republicanism/conservatism is a mental illness that is killing America!
Like many scandals, there isn't one smoking gun, but taken in its entirety there are enough pointers within the communications that a clear pattern has emerged of data being massaged to fit a predetermined conclusion. Moreover, even if there wasn't a deliberate attempt by certain scientists to make data say what they want it to say, the credibility of the data is highly suspect for the simple reason that there were consistent errors in the programming used by software developers to analyze the raw data. An example is where a “squared” value (that theoretically can never become negative) goes negative due to poor programming practice (more details here: http://www.neuralnetwriter.cylo42.com/node/2421).
There are more examples emerging of where raw data doesn't match with the 'official' line (e.g http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/uh-oh-r...). Personally I don't believe there is a conspiracy in the classic sense, but I do know for a fact that over the past couple of centuries that scientists have been known to lie, obsfuscate and manipulate data to give them the results that they wanted (cold fusion, anyone? or human cloning?), mainly for their own ego reasons rather than some grand international cover-up.
I'm all in favor of cutting emissions - after all, it can't hurt - but I believe it is more than fair to say that a good amount of the data that has been put out to back up claims of global warming is highly suspect. That's not to say that global warming isn't happening - I think changes in glaciation and sea ice paint a pretty compelling picture there - but to my mind there's no doubt that much of the scientific community is guilty of fudging figures.
Cold fusion was exposed as false within a matter of weeks. Nobody could replicate the results.
Hwang Woo-Suk's cloning work took a few months to expose as fraud, since cloning work is slower.
As a scientist I agree that the major journals often have a zeitgeist mentality, and are sceptical about results that run counter to the established models. (They set the bar for publication higher for results that challenge models that have been supported multiple times by previous research.) But if a dissenting view can be proved with evidence, smaller journals are more than happy to print the results. If the conclusions can be varified by others, the zeitgeist mentality is thrown out the window.
Yes, scientists have been known to massage figures to make them fit their theories, but the more accepted a theory becomes, the higher the reward is for somebody to come up with evidence to the contrary. Historically, published papers that contradict a well established theory have made a HUGE splash. So, yes, while there may be some minor pressure to make data fit into existing models for the sake of ease of publication, there is also strong incentive to find evidence that runs against conventional theory. That's how science is self-correcting. So far nobody has ever found compelling evidence against a long term trend in global warming that coincides with the industrial revolution.
... the lack of a smoking gun, and another thing altogether to address the specific questions brought up by the exposed emails. Pardon me if I am more likely to be convinced by the latter and not the former.
Actually the question is how were private e-mails hacked?
Have we become some blasé about our rights to privacy in this country?
It smells to me of industrial espionage by those most likely to be affected by the outcome of international climate change summits.
ame onestudy, one conclusion that was altered by anything in the emails. The ice caps show what is happening, the increasingly disturbed weather prove what is happening, islands going under in the South Pacific are another example.
Their case has been made, and casual emails years ago are hardly refutation against the proof we already have.
Also, perhaps you do not understand some of the terms programmers in science habitually use.
e.g. trick
e.g. elegant
...why, then, are the deep-pockets global reinsurers spending large dollars on the problem, eh? Check out the websites of, for example, Swiss Re or Munich Re, to see how much handwringing those guys are doing over it.
Googling "reinsurers" and "climate" just got me 2,360,000 hits. It's big and they know it and Will's full of crap and Murdoch shouldn't be pulling any ads anywhere from insurers and particularly reinsurers who are focused on catastrophes, etc. I haven't come across any of 'em yet who aren't into "catastrophe" modeling, by the way.
fossil fuel. Some of the other reasons to stop burning fossil fuels are:
1) We have a finite amount. We are already at peak oil, peak gas is around the corner and peak coal will eventually arrive.
2) It will soon be much too expensive. Everybody already forgot $200/bbl oil. Rising demand and lowering supply will drive the price of oil higher and higher.
3) The pollution from coal fired power plants kills and injuries people and damages the environment.
4) Conservation and renewables are right now cheaper and safer. And will get more and more economical as time passes.
(2) is a direct consequence of (1), and failure to adapt will take down quite a few nations in the coming decades.
If we're not a lot more careful than I think we'll be, America will be one of them.
I'd like to snatch the rug off will's worthless head and stuff in his lying mouth. Come on will be a man, baldness is a part of nature just like climate change is a result crapping in our own backyard, which thing do you not understand?
Never fails to amaze and astound.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE2Vdcv9Q_o
George Will fails to understand that the 83% cut refers to a reduction per unit of GDP. It does not mean that total emissions of CO2 would be cut by 83%.
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