Nice comment at the Bishop’s, on this, about “Climategate 2”, from “simon” (4:35pm):
I so hate it when my vicar quotes from the Bible. I can’t take such quotes seriously as they are out of context.
Perhaps the institution of the Samizdata quote of the day should be abolished. Time and time again, we here quote quotes, out of context.
Not all of the snippets that are now doing the rounds of the anti-CAGW blogosphere strike me as being as damning as some of them are. But, if anyone chooses to wonder about the degree of wickedness revealed by any particular snippet, it is the work of a moment for that person to find the context, this being one of the features of the internet. Provided, in presenting your preferred snippet, you supply the means of inspecting its context, then you have at least supplied the means by which your interpretation of the snippet may be challenged. And some of the snippets are very damning indeed.
If you are caught saying you are guilty only half as many times as the prosecution lawyer says you have been caught, that still makes you guilty.
Earlier in the thread, Viv Evans (4:02pm) says:
This ‘out-of-context’ excuse is favoured and generally used by shifty politicians who try to defend their misdeeds.
Indeed. And shifty politicians is exactly what these people are.
I trust that simon and Viv Evans will forgive me for quoting them out of context.
Except that “out-of-context” is probably the weakest defence ever seen.
If the context radically changes the meaning of the snippet, then stop bleating about “being taken out of context”: supply the ruddy context – it’s your own email being quoted to you FFS.
If you have been unfairly maligned, it is the work of moments to show that your adversary knew precisely what he was doing – that he MUST have been malicious in excising that crucial context.
Enough already.
To be troublesome, it is possible to justifiably claim “out of context”. Many people just won’t have time to click on links, and even now much of the information we get is not via the internet.
So the chances of getting away with even shameless lies by omission as to the context are well above zero, although the internet has made this harder (hence the steady leeching away of belief in the MSM as their tricks have become better known).
Noam Chomsky still is held in high regard by millions, despite the comprehensive debunking (by Oliver Kamm and others) of his habit of quoting people drastically out of context.
It is also possible to misrepresent quotees in a subtle way, where no one quote can be disproved but where the sum of them is deceptive. To get the right context in, er, this context, requires much reading.
I have some sympathy with the UEA people – but only some. I have read quite a lot of the context of the first tranche of emails and they usually still looked damning when you knew the context. My impression of their level of confusion and uncertainty actually increased.
I have some sympathy with the loathsome Phil Whatsisname from the UEA.
If you look at the context of even the “hide the decline” comment, it’s clear that the mail is addressing a specific anomaly which is quite resonable to wish to remove from the statistics, while the quote is generally used to suggest a much broader desire to hide a more general decline. I’ve also yet to see anything in the new mails which do more than prove that professional geography students are illiterate tossers, and I knew that already.
This matters because the argument with the Warmists is on shaky ground if we’re really trying to claim that no warming exists. The important point isn’t this, as Lomborg and others realised straight away. It’s the fact that pretty much all of the proposed mitigations to this warming are nothing to do with actually mitigating the warming, and everything to do with political control and a crackpot rejection of modern civilisation. Warmists aren’t interested in whether the warming might be beneficial (except to those of us who own property in marginal ski resorts), nor in any practical adaptations that we might make to an altered climate; they’re really interested in sticking it to all the ghastly proles with their cars and their cheap flights and their freedom, no matter how much it costs. We’re picking the wrong fight.
manuel,
There aren’t very many arguing that there is no such thing as “global warming”. Most have no issue at all with cyclical or random variations, both internal and driven by Sol. The more serious issue is with “Anthropogenic”.
The alarmists have been mischaracterizing the skeptics for years, much as Norman Davies mischaracterizes Eurosceptics in the SQotD for today.
“If you look at the context of even the “hide the decline” comment, it’s clear that the mail is addressing a specific anomaly which is quite resonable to wish to remove from the statistics”
Well, no, not really.
They are claiming that tree rings can be used to measure temperature fairly accurately over long periods of time.
By carefully selecting exactly the right trees, they’ve found a fairly good match for the period during which thermometers have existed. Except after 1960. It doesn’t match at ALL in the last 50 years.
They say “clearly something other than temperature has been affecting them recently so we are justified in cutting that part of and quietly substituting actual thermometer data since 1960”.
They don’t give any reason why trees suddenly stopped being unreliable thermometers after 1960 (which after all is when most of the “hockey stick” has occurred).
Even worse, they don’t give any reason why we should think that trees were reliable thermometers before man-made thermometers were invented. They just take that part on faith.
Which would be a lot less worrying if the match continued in the last 50 years, not only the 100 before that.
But it doesn’t. And they tried to hide that.
grrr
s/of/off/
s/unreliable/reliable/
People are starting to wake up to eco-imperialism here in Africa. The carbon tariffs they’re proposing to enforce on us will destroy any prospects for economic growth and development in the continent. I don’t wanna be like a leftie and be all righteous, but those tariffs will inadvertently kill alot of people here. The Greens know it, any one with a brain knows it. I mean how sick are these people?
MajikMonkee – do they know it, though? My guess is that when the unpleasant thought begins to form they are very good at switching their thoughts to higher things.
Bruce Hoult – although I haven’t got time to re-familiarize myself with the earlier release of emails, I remember noting a pattern similar to the one you describe. The bad-sounding quotes often did have a narrower context than just covering up global warming as a whole. But within that narrower context they were fudging, “tidying” statistics, ignoring inconvenient anomalies and hiding declines.
Lots of small, separately almost innocuous but nevertheless unscientific decisions all tending in the same direction can add up to a big error.
Since every single e-mail, every single data set produced by the UEA was produced on equipment paid for by the taxpayer, in time paid for by the taxpayer, why is it that the whole shebang wasn’t published for inspection by the customer- the taxpayer. There would then have been nothing out of context and no need to put context to alledgedly cherry picked e-mails.
In the same vein, if I had submitted an Alevel lab report without accurately submitting my data I would have been laughed out of court. How is it that Jones, Mann et al get lauded?
Do tell I could do with an A* in every scientific subject going.