25 Jul 2006 Global Warming and Censorship, Part III

Continuing the followup to my post about climate scientist Dr. James Hansen, global warming, and censorship (which began here):

1) Commenter Wayne Hall on the RealClimate blog suggests that my blog entry about Hansen is so bad, the entire National Center for Public Policy Research “should be excluded from such debate on account of their dishonesty…. [as] toleration of disingenuous input exploiting public ignorance is an unaffordable luxury.”

He also says that in the European Union, groups like the National Center and “other NGOs of this kind… would not have access to the deliberations of the Social Forums of the international movement.” He recommends enhancing this “censorship mechanism.”

RealClimate is no ordinary blog. It is the online home of paleoclimatologist Michael Mann of “hockey stick” fame, and one of two blogs — the other being ClimateAudit — whose sparring in part led to two Energy and Commerce Committee hearings this month on global warming. I think it is interesting that RealClimate allows the post to stay there (not that we mind, being believers in transparency ourselves), as RealClimate has a reputation for deleting comments it doesn’t like.

To Mr. Hall’s views in context, view comment #256 on this page. Don’t be confused by the fact that Mr. Hall thinks my name is “Anne.”

2) Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. has a post on his superlative Prometheus blog discussing Dr. Hansen’s boycott of the Committee on Government Reform hearing. Dr. Pielke, as it happens, testified at that hearing. (For those interested, Dr. Pielke’s written testimony can be downloaded here (pdf)).

In his post about Dr. Hansen’s decision, Dr. Pielke says, in part:

Coming from someone who complained about being censored, it sounds like he’d like to do a bit censoring of his own. It also seems a bit odd for a high ranking government employee to refuse to offer testimony when called upon by Congress to do so…

The comments left by others to this post also are interesting.

3) Writing in Blogotional, John Schroeder gets straight to the point: “In science it not supposed to be about who thinks what, you are supposed to be able to tell true from false from the data!