Tom Nelson points out quite an admission:

“Blogging is affecting me profoundly. Obviously, Mr. McIntyre has profoundly affected my life”.

That’s from this video:

The General Public: Why Such Resistance? (to global warming)

(February 25, 2010) Ben Santer, a research scientist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, discusses the recent problems with the use of the freedom of information act for non-US citizens to demand complete records, including emails, on scientific research projects. Santer posits that this is a dangerous dilemma that will ultimately inhibit scientific research.

This course was originally presented in Stanford’s Continuing Studies program.

The video and several key points of interest in the video follow.

Nelson writes:

The video is 1 hour 46 minutes long. The best stuff is around 42:30 to the end.

Santer uses words like harassment, frivolous, nonsense, hatred, bullies, “forces of unreason”, abuse, and McCarthyism. He’d like to get some support/protection from the Obama administration.

Santer at 1:26:37 “Blogging is affecting me profoundly. Obviously, Mr. McIntyre has profoundly affected my life”.

More interesting stuff from Santer re: establishing human culpability, professional PR help, and nearly two dozen workshops (funded by NSF?) bringing together climate scientists and the media

▶ Chris Mooney and Dr. Benjamin Santer on Communicating Climate Science – YouTube:

“[Uploaded Sept 2010] Climate Science Watch spoke with climate scientist Dr. Benjamin Santer and Chris Mooney, a science and political journalist and author, about how climate scientists communicate complex research findings to the public in an atmosphere of fierce politicization and competing demands.”

At 1:38, Santer says “I had always assumed that if the science was credible, we could just rest our case on the science. It was enough to publish high-quality papers, to establish some human culpability in observed climate change, and that ultimately that would be good enough, and that policymakers would take the right decisions based on the best available scientific evidence.”

At 11:08, Santer says Lawrence Livermore National Lab has a “high-quality very professional public affairs department. They’ve been extremely helpful in my interactions with the media…They’ve given me a lot of advice and guidance…I’ve been very grateful that I haven’t had to face this on my own.”

At 12:40, Santer mentions “series of workshops organized by Bud Ward, a journalist who’s brought together the leading climate scientists with people from the media world-newspaper editors, news anchors, TV weathermen and women…a series of probably nearly two dozen workshops organized that enable each side to understand the problems of the others.”

More on the workshops:

Thanks to a series of workshops funded by the National Science Foundation, journalists and climate scientists have been able to address these barriers and develop recommendations for effective communication. These highly interactive workshop dialogues formed the basis of a new resource guide on communicating about climate change for editors, reporters, scientists, and academics.

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