Thursday 18 May 2006

Climate confusion

Try this exercise: Type in www.climatescience.org.nz. Do it, and you reach the NZ Climate Science Coalition, the recently formed group of scientists and global warming skeptics "aimed at refuting what it believes are unfounded claims about man-made global warming" (Their formation was reported here and here.) So far so laudable.

Now try typing it in with a different suffix, say .co or .net. What do you find? Why, you find Greenpeace cybersquatting. "Underhanded" is how the Climate Science Coalition describes the squatting. Says Owen McShane on behalf the Coalition:
I never thought I'd see the day when a once proud international environmental organisation would stoop so low in an attempt to divert attention from its own false message... We can but wonder why Greenpeace has stooped this low, unless it is because they want to divert people from our website, www.climatescience.org.nz, which debunks the claims Greenpeace and others are making about dire consequences of so-called greenhouse emissions. We can only conclude that Greenpeace do not want the public to find out that these claims are not supported by the science.
What other conclusion can be drawn? Perhaps this is the sort of thing that caused Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore to quit and start his Greenspirit organisation. As he says about his departure from Greenpeace:
I now find that many environmental groups have drifted into self-serving cliques with narrow vision and rigid ideology. At the same time that business and government are embracing public participation and inclusiveness, many environmentalists are showing signs of elitism, left-wingism, and downright eco-fascism. The once politically centrist, science-based vision of environmentalism has been largely replaced with extremist rhetoric. Science and logic have been abandoned and the movement is often used to promote other causes such as class struggle and anti-corporatism. The public is left trying to figure out what is reasonable and what is not.
True enough. It rather puts the strategy of confusion that people claimed for Theresa Gattung in perspective, doesn't it.

UPDATE: The Greens FrogBlog says it's all the nasty Coalition's fault. How dare they "claim ownership of a term like 'climate science'."says the Frog. How dare they! It’s too broad, and their attempt to brand themselves this way was misleading in the first place." So there. The nasty men had it coming.

LINKS: Greenpeace slammed for "underhanded " tactics - Climate Science Coalition
Greenpeace accused of "passing off" - Climate Science Coalition
NZ global warming sceptics coalesce - Not PC
Climate science - both sceptics and septics online - Not PC
Climate Science Coalition website
Greenspirit website

TAGS: Global_Warming, Politics-NZ, Science, Environment

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Green peace and the Green party are all nutters. They don't know anything about science and at the same time trying to be expert in science by nitpicking on certain science publications that suits their anti-modernist pathetic one-dimensional view of the world. I can't be saying that I am an expert in climate, however some of the mathematics used for modelling climate change that Dr. Augie Auer (former head of NIWA) mentioned in his article on the NZ Herald earlier this month, I am familiar with. One type of modelling called Non-linear dynamical systems. Basically, the modeller can think of many causation variables that interlink with other causes or effects. These parameters are then wired via arrows (exactly the same as the block diagrams that electronic engineers are using to depict circuit flow diagrams). The arrows represent the dynamics of block variable that the arrow originated from, which terminates in another block variable. The functions used for the arrows can be either linear or non-linear. The input to the systems can be SISO (Single Input Single Output) , MISO (Multiple Input Single Output) and MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) signal. All signals are time-based, such as CO2 level as a function of time, temperature as a function of time, wind intensity as a function of time, and whatever variables which can influence the weather that the modeller can think of ,etc, etc,... When the simulation runs, then all input variables, whether it is a SISO, MISO or MIMO systems, can be tuned to vary across possible physical ranges. This means that you can't input the temperature as 1,000,000 degrees because that is unachievable on earth, but it is inside the Sun. By varying the parameters, then response of the system, which can be visualized clearly via the computer screen. Now, I don't know what the current level of CO2 at the moment, but in simulation, you can increase such level by turning the slider up to a very high level and see the response immediately. I mean high level, is that a CO2 level that the earth has not reached yet in its entire life of 3 billion years, but the modeller just interested in what is called 'What-If-Scenario'. Well the response of the imaginative high level of CO2 that the modeller has turned up on the screen using perhaps a nob or slider, is the response that the media and the doomsayer have picked up and say that we have reached a level of no return.

I have found a free Java library API (application programming interface) on the internet for doing System Identification modelling (http://www.ee.newcastle.edu.au/ident/), where I will be making contact with the "Climate Science Coalition" if they want to pay me a minimal fee (since I support them) so that I can develop an applet model for them using this API and be made available from their site so that doomsayers can go and play with it to understand the concept of "What-If-Scenarios". If they understand of what it means then they will see the light at the end of the tunnel and report it as extreme case rather than saying that it is reality.

Anonymous said...

"The Green peace and the Green party are all nutters."

*sigh*

With an opening gambit like that, I'm sure we can safely assume the rest of your diatribe is equally close-minded and hyperbolic, so why bother reading...?

And the Greens are right, why should someone have exclusive rights to a phrase like "climate science"?

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said:

"And the Greens are right, why should someone have exclusive rights to a phrase like 'climate science' ?"

It is not about exclusive rights. Sir/Madam or whatever your name is, the issue is not about who owns of what domain name. Can you see that? If you can't, then I take it that you can't add 1+2 = 3. It is the confusion of how they tried to hijack the name. Why do they did it in that way, if they have a valid scientific argument to present. I therefore concluded that you must be a nutter too or you must be a Green party supporter.

Anonymous said...

sheesh
how naive can people be??? That the climate science coalition didn't buy the .net.nz and .co.nz shows their inability to understand the web.

buying up the other domain names has become commonplace in the world of internet campaigning.

and, erm, perhaps the US Government's climate science programme might have something to say about the coalition here...?

http://www.climatescience.gov/

Anonymous said...

We did not claim net because we are NOT an infrastructure group, and we did not claim co, because we are not a company.
We claimed .org because we are an organisation.
We have very limited funds and so did not see any need to waste scarce money on buying "unlawful" domain names. Call us naive but we actually believed that we did not need to protect ourselves from anti-competitive acivity as we would if we were a company operating in highly competitive environment.
Anyhow the Domain name disputes resolution panel will make the final ruling.
We were not trying to commandeer the term climate name. We just expected fair play.

Anonymous said...

Strikes me that the so-called Climate 'Science' Coalition should be the one who are taken to task for 'passing off' as climate scientists - none of them are climate scientists!