“but, Professor Phil Jones…”

Didn’t he, rather famously, celebrate the death of one of his opponents?

“Pro life they are too. or something.”

Meh. “Pro-life” is shorthand for “pro-life of the unborn child” (or z/e/f if you prefer), just as “pro-choice” is shorthand for “pro-choice of women to abort said unborn child” (normally within certain boundaries).

Pro-choicers are not absolutely in favour of choice generally than pro-lifers are absolutely in favour of life generally.

“Pro-choicers are not absolutely in favour of choice generally than pro-lifers are absolutely in favour of life generally.”

I think if you google “pro-life correlation death penalty” you might find evidence to the contrary…

Easy to get side tracked in comments. These threats are disgraceful, but its what happens when people’s faith conflicts with the evidence, faith often wins, leading to violence.

“Didn’t he, rather famously, celebrate the death of one of his opponents?”

Yes, because a private email to a friend saying that the death of someone you dislike is ‘cheering news’ is *exactly the same thing* as sending death threats to someone you dislike…

Climate sceptic Richard Lindzen has been getting hate mail and death threats for ages. The Canadian climatologist Timothy Ball got death threats for questioning some minor technicality of the Warmist Gospel.

But surely you knew that and have long ago written a blogpost condemning it…… haven’t you?

@2 Yes, reminds me of animal rights activists.

Death threats against scientists who are carrying out legitimate research are totally unnacceptable but libel actions or even threats of libel action are potentially more damaging to science as a whole.

Free enquiry is as vital as free speech.

due to the near-total tolerance of “freedom of speech” in the US

Er, are we not supposed to approve of “freedom of speech” instead of (as seems to be the case here) condemning it?

Oh how terrible, it’s not as if the warmist have ever threatened anyone who disagreed with them is it ?

good to see the brownshirts defending threats and violence against people they don’t agee with. Nothing like defending free speech they always bang on about, or how they are pro life.

WHATEVER!

Free speech doesn’t cover direct threats.

‘I am going to kill you’ is not an opinion, scientifically informed or otherwise, it is a statement of intent.

It’s not even like shouting ‘Fire!’ in a theatre, it’s like shouting ‘I’m going to burn this theatre down!’

It’s not even like shouting ‘Fire!’ in a theatre, it’s like shouting ‘I’m going to burn this theatre down!’

Steady on, all this talk of fire and burning is sure to raise the temperature 0.6 of a degree, and lead to a rise in sea levels which will drown the last surviving polar bear.

Of course it is wrong to send threatening e-mails but it is also wrong ti imply that doing so is a particular tactic of climate sceptics, when the warmists are up to it too. It is also hypocritical to make a song and dance over threats made since last November while remaining silent about the many threats that antedate the scandal at East Anglia.

It is wrong, hypocritical but not entirely unexpected. After all, the habit of partial presentation of carefully selected pieces of evidence is what characterizes the alarmist movement.

“Of course it is wrong to send threatening e-mails but it is also wrong ti imply that doing so is a particular tactic of climate sceptics, when the warmists are up to it too.”

Cite for this please? Closest I found after a quick google was a SPPI interview posted last January:

‘[Q:] Have you received death threats, like some of your colleagues who have expressed their skepticism publicly?

[A:] Yes, there were a few emails that told me to go to hell, but that is not a death threat.

Which doesn’t really cut it if you ask me.

Also whilst there may well be contemptible death-threat sending nutters on both sides of this particular argument, scale *does* matter – if the poster children for one side are getting many times the volume of death threats compared to the other then this is relevant. This is especially so if the death threats are qualitatively more threatening (more heated rhetoric, letters vs email etc etc).

Regards
Luke

“After all, the habit of partial presentation of carefully selected pieces of evidence is what characterizes the alarmist movement.”

ROFL – projection much?

“I think if you google “pro-life correlation death penalty” you might find evidence to the contrary…”

Um, think you misread my post there. I’m saying lifers are pro-death in many ways and choicers are anti-choice in many ways. The point is that the terms can only be sensibly be applied as regards the abortion debate.

“After all, the habit of partial presentation of carefully selected pieces of evidence is what characterizes the alarmist movement.”

If you’re using ‘alarmist’ to mean ‘people who believe in climate change’, that’s the most hypocritical statement since creationists started talking about ‘the religion of evolution’ and ‘Darwin-worship’.

If not, not.

@ 17

Not. Alarmists and catastrophists are a subset of those who believe in climate change (which is just about everybody).

@14

Cite for this please. Closest I found after a quick google was a SPPI interview …

Here’s 2 of the 728 results when I googled Richard Lindzen AND “death threats”:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1545134/Scientists-threatened-for-climate-denial.html

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/cover031207.htm

if the poster children for one side are getting many times the volume of death threats compared to the other then this is relevant.

Phil Jones said in February he had been getting 2 death threats a week and that they began after the November hack.

Even if the hate mailers kept it up through the Christmas holiday, that would suggest he got around 12.

Tim Ball complained about getting 5 at once.

Not much difference.

scientists today have been cleared in the so called e mail scandal, invented by right wing fools.

Showing once again that you can’t believe a single word the Right wing flat earthers say. Note to trolls. Do keep up.

Sally,

Are you making things up now? I just ask because your last post relates to no facts I know about, and I’m sure that if it was the case, then Sunny might have mentioned it…

Of course, a link might help me know what you are talking about. There have been two enquiries on this after all – one of which found the science (although not the science that was challenged) was generally sound, and another of which has not yet reported that I know about. Neither was public or particularly open to being called balanced.

Watchman @ 20

or particularly open to being called balanced.

Eh? In what way? Have some anti science people report on it would make it ‘balanced’. Surely that would actually make it ‘unbalanced’?

@20: I guess you missed that the report of the Muir Russell review was published today. Of particular relevance to the most common “challenges”:

On the allegation of withholding temperature data, we find that CRU was not in a position to withhold access to such data or tamper with it. We demonstrated that any independent researcher can download station data directly from primary sources and undertake their own temperature trend analysis.

[...]

We do not find that the way that data derived from tree rings is described and presented in IPCC AR4 and shown in its Figure 6.10 is misleading. In particular, on the question of the composition of temperature reconstructions, we found no evidence of exclusion of other published temperature reconstructions that would show a very different picture. The general discussion of sources of uncertainty in the text is extensive, including reference to divergence. In this respect it represented a significant advance on the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR).

Of course, I don’t expect you to accept the findings…

@22

On the other hand:

On the allegation that the references in a specific e-mail to a „trick? and to
„hide the decline? in respect of a 1999 WMO report figure show evidence of
intent to paint a misleading picture, we find that, given its subsequent iconic
significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the IPCC Third
Assessment Report), the figure supplied for the WMO Report was
misleading. .

@23: That sentence continues: “[the figure supplied for the WMO Report was
misleading] in not describing that one of the series was truncated post 1960 for the figure, and in not being clear on the fact that proxy and instrumental data were spliced together. We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice data.”

So yes, the labelling on one specific graph for one specific report should have been clearer. Accepted.

Doesn’t exactly change the basic underlying scientific facts of the matter though, does it? Remember, this was supposed to be the smoking gun that proved the whole of climatology was a massive conspiracy to institute a Communist One World Government, or some such nonsense. And this is what it comes down to – a chart was slightly mislabelled. Big fat hairy deal.