More Ben Santer
December 8, 2010
If you watched in awe at Ben Santer’s bloodless but brutal beat down of Pat Michaels, you may have asked yourself why you’ve never heard of this guy. Here’s a long form talk delivered at Stanford, which fills in some of the gaps about the political infighting that climate scientists have had to engage in since the 90s.
For part of the talk he gets deeper into statistics than I could frankly follow – but what is valuable are the details of the ongoing denialist harrassment campaign against climate scientists, conducted by self appointed inquisitors like Steve McIntyre. Maybe I should start a series called “Climate Science 101”, for beginners like myself who want to hear more from the horse’s mouths. Let me know if you want me to dig out more.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
December 8, 2010 at 10:02 pm
Also, Santer gave a talk at Climate One, here is the mp3 . It’s an hour long. Here is climate one’s podcast URL .
by the way, thanks for providing the overview page with an index to your vids.
December 9, 2010 at 9:31 am
Vigilantes.
This McIntyre and crew reminds me of the Sea Shepherd affair with whaling. Sort of an unchecked power that proactively sets the agenda that has detoured from its initial goals. Of course the difference is that climate science research is on a much higher level than the Japanese cetacean research in regards to its quality of science and transparency.
One part that is still unconvincing is the thing about the source code. I get the replication part and that scientists shouldn’t spend a load of time to achieve unnecessary perfection, but it’s still shouldn’t be big problem to publish it anyways — whether idiosyncratic or not. Of course many will misrepresent it, but there is also a large infrastructure of non-“skeptic” blogs that will combat the noise. I think publishing source code may be a good deterrent to avoid FOIA requests and other paranoid misinterpretations. It’s more work than before, but less work than the frivolous attacks.
December 9, 2010 at 2:59 pm
If you’re looking for more info “straight from the horse’s mouths”, in video format, I have put together a Climate 101 collection at climate101.wordpress.com. There are a few items there that you might want to include.