After I published this story:

NCDC’s Dr. Thomas Peterson: “It’s a knife fight”

I wrote to Dr. Peterson to advise him that he had WUWT available to him for rebuttal should he wish. Here is his response verbatim. – Anthony

============================================================

In response to your kind offer, I have typed up the three relevant pages

of the notes I spoke from at that meeting, which I would appreciate you

adding to your forum. I had three lessons that I personally took from

Climategate. Here are my notes verbatim for lessons 2 and 3, which are

the relevant ones to this discussion. You can agree or disagree with the

points I made, but let’s at least start with exactly what I said.

Regards,

Tom Peterson

Lesson 2: If the fight isn’t fair, then don’t fight – and maybe don’t

fight even if it is fair

Only a small percentage of Phil Jones’ emails on that server were released

-The subset that was released was not random

–So it didn’t give a fair representation

-Releasing additional selected emails would make the fight fairer

–But not civil

There is a lot of incivility and ad hominem attacks out there

-We can’t control that

But we can control how we respond . . . or not respond

-Perhaps don’t even fight if the fight is fair

-Fights are never fun

–Even if you win them

The unfortunate downside is that some pseudoscientific nonsense can go

unchallenged.

Lesson 3: Collaborate with communicators

An aside from a Congressman after a hearing:

-You’re in a knife fight and need to fight back.

A science communicator:

-All scientists need to have their own blogs.

A good summary of similar issue though on a different topic by Michael

D. Gershon, M.D. (1999)

-“The experiments I conducted to this point gave me a feeling of

confidence that my work could withstand anyone’s scrutiny, which I

assumed (foolishly, it turned out) would be both logical and reasonable.”

Collaborate with communicators, 2

A scientist’s response to both knives and illogic tends to be more science

-Sound, rigorous, peer-reviewed science

-What we do best

-And in the end it will win the day

–Just ask Galileo

But unlike heliocentrism, we cannot afford to wait a century for views

on climate change to catch up to climate science

So partnering with communicators can help bridge the gap

-From nerdy scientists like myself to regular people.

Share this: Print

Email

Twitter

Facebook

Pinterest

LinkedIn

Reddit



Like this: Like Loading...