She’s a femmegogue.

Why the science is not “settled”:

The sad thing about the Great Climate Debate is that so far, there hasn’t really been a debate. The result is presented, but no one ever takes questions from the podium and is capable of defending their answers against a knowledgeable and skeptical questioner.

I can do that for all of my beliefs in physics — or at least, most of them — explain particular experiments that seem to verify my beliefs (as I do above). I’m quite capable of demonstrating their consistency both theoretically (with other physical laws and beliefs) and with experiment. I’m up front about where those beliefs fail, where they break down, where we do not know how things really work. Good science admits its limits, and never claims to be “settled” even as it does lead to defensible practice and engineering where it seems to work — for now.

Good science accepts limits on experimental precision. Hell, in physics we have to accept a completely non-classical limitation on experimental precision, one so profound that it sounds like a violation of simple logic to the uninitiated when they first try to understand it. But quite aside from Heisenberg, all experimental apparatus and all measurements are of limited precision, and the most honest answer for many things we might try to measure is “damfino” (damned if I know).

The Great Climate Debate, however, is predicated from the beginning on one things. We know what the global average temperature has been like for the past N years, where N is nearly anything you like. A century. A thousand years. A hundred thousand years. A hundred million years. Four billion years.

We don’t, of course. Not even close. Thermometers have only been around in even moderately reliable form for a bit over 300 years — 250 would be a fairer number — and records of global temperatures measured with even the first, highly inaccurate devices are sparse indeed until maybe 200 years ago. Most of the records from over sixty or seventy years ago are accurate to no more than a degree or two F (a degree C), and some of them are far less accurate than that. As Anthony has explicitly demonstrated, one can confound even a digital electronic automatic recording weather station thermometer capable of at least 0.01 degree resolution by the simple act of setting it up in a stupid place, such as the southwest side of a house right above a concrete driveway where the afternoon sun turns its location into a large reflector oven. Or in the case of early sea temperatures, by virtue of measuring pails of water pulled up from over the side with crude instruments in a driving wind cooling the still wet bulb pulled out of the pail.

Hubris.

[Late-morning update]

The Virginia Supreme Court says that the University of Virginia is not a “person,” and therefore doesn’t have to respond to a FOIA.

Huh?

So that means that UVA is immune from FOIAs in general? That it can’t enter into contracts? I think this will be appealed, all the way to SCOTUS, and they’ll lose.

But it raises the question: just what is it they’re hiding that they would fight this so tenaciously? And how is such a lack of transparency “scientific”?

…causes amnesia. Is there anything it can’t do?

[Update a few minutes later]

The unbearable Gleickness of being: a ClimateFake update.

[Update a while later]

Heh — from the link:

Second, it is beyond irony and parody to take in again the fixation with Heartland’s tiny $4.4 million budget last year next to the recent news that the Climate Works Foundation, one of the major climate campaign organizations, just got another $100 million fillip from the Hewlett Foundation. This brings the grand total of Hewlett grants to Climate Works to nearly $600 million. I believe this one grant history to just one organization rivals the total combined assets of all the main conservative foundations. And these folks get their knickers in a twist about Heartland and the Koch brothers? The paranoid climateers make the cliché Victorian woman standing on a chair afraid of a mouse look like a Spartan warrior by comparison. I repeat: what a bunch of losers.

Let’s hope they’re losers. So far the losers have been taxpayers and consumers.

[Update early evening]

A huge link roundup of breaking posts: the Gleick tragedy.

[Bumped]

…and the nature of fakery. Just what is it these people are at war with, really?

…is it like the Millennium Bug?

As he says, it’s pseudoscience in the service of politics. Of course, the nice thing about the Millennium Bug was that we knew to the second when it would occur.