Discover Magazine Strikes Out

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/11/04/when-arguing-with-bots-use-a-bot/

He starts out by assuming intellectual superiority and dehumanizing skeptics. Strike one

Then he claims that other planets are not warming. Strike two.

In 2005 data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide “ice caps” near Mars’s south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.

Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.

“The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars,” he said.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html

Then he claims that scientists didn’t say the Earth was cooling in the 70s. Of course they did, because it was cooling. John Holdren wrote a book about it. Strike three

NCAR graph from the 1970s showing cooling

And finally he claims that scientists weren’t caught faking data. I guess that depends on what he means by “caught.”


About Tony Heller

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26 Responses to Discover Magazine Strikes Out

  1. PJB says:

    Or what he means by “faking”.

    When lacking facts, try semantics or the ultimate refuge, falsehoods.

  2. R. de Haan says:

    Discovery Magazine is a glossy and therefore less than toilet paper.

  3. Mike Davis says:

    At least they use a truthful name for the web site. Discover Bad Astronomy “read this site”.
    I see bits and pieces from that puppet site and tend to ignore the claims because what I have seen is Bad Astronomy. ChrisD and Lazaarus are probably members in good standing and subscribe to discovery magazine.

    • ChrisD says:

      FYI, the name comes from the original main focus of the site (and subsequent book), which was actual bad astronomy: astrology, hoaxed moon landings, popular misconceptions about space, etc.

      Regardless of what you think of his position on AGW, it’s one of the web’s great sites for anyone interested in astronomy.

    • Lazarus says:

      “ChrisD and Lazaarus are probably members in good standing and subscribe to discovery magazine.”

      No, but thanks for the recommendation.

  4. omnologos says:

    Plait is not an idiot, but feels obligated in substituting the IPCC for his own personal judgment, like the Judith Curry of old. That’s why IMNSHO so many otherwise educated people like him follow idiocies like the AI_AGW chatbot.

  5. Marcia, Marcia says:

    And finally he claims that scientists weren’t caught faking data. I guess that depends on what he means by “caught.”

    LOL!

    Will you be appearing all the week with the stand-up? 😉

  6. Amino Acids in Meteorites says:

    tweets automatic rebuttals

    And he calls up bots.

  7. ChrisD says:

    A note from the Accuracy Dept.:

    Bad Astronomy isn’t Discover Magazine, it’s just a blog in Discover’s blogspace. Discover has no more to do with its content than WordPress has to do with the content of this blog.

    • omnologos says:

      ChrisD – you are very, very wrong. Discover blogs are a community one gets invited to. WordPress is a site where anybody can create an account and publish blogs like there is no tomorrow.

  8. ChrisD says:

    I understand that. However, the content is not written by Discover, and it is incorrect to say that it is.

  9. omnologos says:

    Chris D – You wrote “Discover has no more to do with its content than WordPress has to do with the content of this blog”.

    That was and still is very wrong. People are invited by Discover Magazine to that blog community (actually, they call it a blog collective) and so there are written (and unwritten) rules they have to follow. Those rules are very different from the T&C of WordPress.

    As a matter of fact, one can safely assume that having provided the webspace and other facilities, Discover Magazine approves all of those blog entries “in principle”. If the BA were to go completely ga-ga and start publishing his own Vogon poetry, I am sure the blog would be closed. If I write my Vogon poetry in WordPress, nobody cares.

    Furthermore, the relationship between each blogger and Discover varies according to each person’s circumstances, but again there is little doubt that all those bloggers belong for all intents and purposes to the “Discover Magazine team”. Read this page if you want to know what I mean.

    Check also what Ed Yong wrote at the time.

    • ChrisD says:

      We will have to agree to disagree. No one at WordPress wrote, edited, or approved this post, and no one at Discover wrote, edited, or approved the Bad Astronomy post. In my view, that makes the page title inaccurate and misleading.

      If the title had simply said, “Discover Magazine Blogger Strikes Out,” that would have been fine.

  10. omnologos says:

    Steven – my reply to Chris D is currently held in the moderation queue, as it contains two links…

    • ChrisD says:

      I do. And if you’d stop messing up your page titles I could get on with it.

      This particular error–attributing what is essentially an op-ed to the publication in which it appears–seems to be a particular favorite of yours.

      • ChrisD says:

        Wrong reply link. That replies to “Surely you must have something better to do with your time?”

      • Mike Davis says:

        ChrisD is a Discovery Magazine Web commune Webbot!
        Is that right or is there a difference between Collective and Commune? If there is is it statistically significant? Or does correlation in this instance show causation?
        With proper homogenization would it be more consistent with? Or would that require adjusting past measurements to better fit the theory / opinion / Wild A## Guess?

  11. Russell C says:

    I believe I have a question that the ‘bot is incapable of answering, about those who claim skeptic scientists are corrupt. Such global warming believers cite a ‘1991-era internal coal industry memo’ as their smoking gun evidence against skeptic scientists, which supposedly proves they were under a directive to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact”. However, the memo in its complete context is NEVER seen anywhere on the internet. Try looking for it yourselves, and then ask any of our AGW friends to produce it – and don’t settle for some narrative that George Monbiot said it was put online for all to see. It wasn’t, when you follow his web links.

  12. Mike Davis says:

    I found it:
    Commune. From Meriam Webster
    : to receive Communion
    2
    : to communicate intimately
    Examples of COMMUNE

    1. a psychic who communes with the dead
    Collective from the same source:
    : denoting a number of persons or things considered as one group or whole
    2
    a : formed by collecting : aggregated b of a fruit : multiple
    3
    a : of, relating to, or being a group of individuals b : involving all members of a group as distinct from its individuals
    4
    : marked by similarity among or with the members of a group
    5
    : collectivized or characterized by collectivism
    6
    : shared or assumed by all members of the group

    It appears the Collective causes the commune and is statistically significant above 98%

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