We expect exaggeration, selective use of data and out right lies from activists and politicians. They are marketing people selling everything, including their souls, in part for beliefs and in part for personal advantage. But it's different, worse, when scientists do it since their sole claim to legitimacy is truth seeking. As noted in Social Dunces there's a problem with this view since scientists are often merely marketing people too.

. . . this incarnation of geoengineering is such a hot potato that scientists cannot even agree whether it should be discussed publicly.

"The knowledge that we maybe could engineer our way out of climate problems inevitably lessens the political will to begin reducing carbon dioxide emissions," observes David Keith from the University of Calgary in Canada.

Lessens political will! Isn't political will supposed to be informed? Does it have any value, much less legitimacy, when it is based on ignorance and lies from "authorities"? As outrageous as the suggestion to deceive the public may seem it is dead common.

. . . even if scientists are underestimating the degree to which hurricane intensity will change in the future, energy policies simply are not going to be an effective tool of hurricane policy. Thus we have often recommended keeping separate the issues of greenhouse gas reductions and hurricane policy.

For obvious reasons some people find this argument inconvenient. One response to a talk I gave on this last week was, “if we don’t have the imagery of hurricane damage it is going to make the task of selling greenhouse gas reductions that much harder”

That post does some simple arithmetic to show how the desire to deceive the public for political advantage is just plain stupid since it not only corrupts the social mind it leads to bad policy that ignores losses of over 300% in order to reduce them by 10%.

Politicized scientists have lots of support from politicized journalists who are more than happy to help deceive the public.

“Physicists forced to alter data?” asked the flyers handed out by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) to delegates today.

There is deep concern among scientists in the US that, under the current Bush administration, political appointees have interfered with the reporting of scientific findings. The issue has made it into the news more than once over recent months – when climate scientist James Hansen said he was stifled by NASA’s press office, for example, and after Nobel laureate David Baltimore spoke out at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in St Louis.

Hansen is famous for his ideas about the absolute need to politicize science, and he has done so for many years. He exaggerates the impact of climate change by developing and emphasizing extreme scenarios with little or no chance of happening, and does this on purpose to frighten the public in hopes of stampeding them into supporting authoritarian policies - or maybe just for the pleasure of scaring folks. It isn't clear.

Hansen isn't alone in this, indeed that's very nearly all there is to the UCS - Paul Ehrlich and fellow travelers. Whole careers have been based on serial exaggeration of imagined threats, each in turn fading to irrelevance as they are shown to be nonsensical.

The impulse to respect scientists because of their knowledge is misplaced. Too often they abuse their positions for instrumental reasons. It is better that we focus on review as the source of scientific legitimacy rather than authority or expertise. Authorities are often mistaken, expertise and $5.00 will get you a mediocre cup of coffee, and scientists have no intrinsic worth - their value is solely in their production of verifiable information.

This is unfortunate. Scientists - like journalists, lawyers, academics and environmentalists - have squandered their social capital for short term objectives of dubious worth. They may have stolen a few marches and won some battles, but they continually lose wars, and are of decreasing worth to society. Science has worth, but scientists are not trustworthy.

There has been some increased attention given to scientific misconduct in recent years but it has focused only on obvious cases of fraud - like the recent episode of data falsification in cloning studies. It will take far more than that to rehabilitate scientists, it will take serious peer pressure based in sophisticated ethical insights and bolstered by the dead simple social calculus that often seems too complex for scientists - you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Fool me once - shame on you. Fool me twice - shame on me. The open and casual deceitfulness of scientists these days means that every statement they make deserves heightened scepticism and diligent fact checking. In addition to honest error their statements are increasingly likely to be intentionally deceitful for instrumental purposes. What a mess!

Update:

Here's another example of journalists exaggerating and omitting information, and scientists making remarks about their work that do the same.

Warmer ocean waters are indeed a key factor in creating more devastating hurricanes, atmospheric scientists have found. The finding confirms what many have suspected: that rising temperatures are directly linked to the upswing in hurricane intensity seen in the past few decades. . .

And with sea temperatures set to rise still further, that means the next few decades could bring even more hurricanes like Katrina, which hammered New Orleans in August 2005. "The inference is that if you keep warming things up, you're going to get more intense storms," says Judith Curry, a member of the research team.

There's more commentary of that sort in the article. It's repetitious but they have a political point to make.

The study covered only a 35 year period though storm cycles are longer than that. Unfortunately, we don't have data from the past that is comparable to modern satellite data and measurements from planes, ships and shore stations. It's easy to see why a researcher would limit a study this way for practical reasons, but it's also easy to see that the results need heavy qualification since they only have a snapshot view of a dynamic system.

In 2003 NOAA finished updating its historical Hurricane database and noted some highlights.

1. Busiest hurricane season ever for the United States: 1886
2. Extremely busy decade for the United States Atlantic seaboard: 1890s
3. Cycles of hurricane activity: These records reflect the existence of cycles of hurricane activity, rather than trends toward more frequent or stronger hurricanes. In general, the period of the 1850s to the mid-1860s was quiet. The late 1860s through the 1890s were busy, and the first decade of the 1900s was quiet.

There's more of the same, and the point is that you have to look at a much longer period than 35 years to see the patterns, and that the pattern is cyclical rather than trendy. Other studies associate these storm trends with seas surface temperatures, just like the current study, but they note that the SSTs are cyclical too.

The notion that the measured increase in air temperatures in recent decades is accompanied by rises in SST is well established. Storm energies are bound to increase so long as that continues. But it may be masked if the SST cyclical begins to drop again since it seems to be a stronger signal. A similar 35 year study would then show falling SSTs and reduced storms.

The remark that "the next few decades could bring even more hurricanes like Katrina, which hammered New Orleans in August 2005" is ghoulish as well as instrumental, designed to mislead society to achieve a political purpose. The next few decades could bring fewer and weaker storms, especially in any given location since not all storms even reach land. There are so many factors that to attempt to link storm trends to a particular storm is irresponsible - something that never seems to bother politicians.

The damage that journalists and scientists have done to their credibility in recent years will last for decades. At the same time as the ethical standards of these professions have trended lower and lower, while their political activism trended higher and higher, computer mediated communication has become more pervasive and speeds have increased greatly. Just when these folks needed some darkness to slink around in someone turned on the lights, and it is plain for all to see that they are up to no good.

Update:

Prometheus has a different but not antithetical perspective.

A reporter I know sent to me a press release yesterday titled “Scientists Dispute Link Between Hurricanes and Global Warming.” The press release was disseminated by the TCS Science Roundtable. TCS – Tech Central Station – is often a very useful and informative site for analyses and opinions from a self-described perspective that values “the power of free markets, open societies and individual human ingenuity to raise living standards and improve lives.” As such TCS is very much a special interest group. People can choose to agree or disagree with TCS analyses, or share its values. But in this post I want to highlight the role that university and some government scientists play in the unhealthy politicization of science through their willing association with advocacy groups (like TCS, but also, e.g., environmental advocacy groups), and the increasing tendency for organizations that should serve as “honest brokers of policy options” to transform themselves into advocacy-like groups. . .

Let me emphasize that it would be utter nonsense to claim that this is only a phenomenon that occurs on the political right, where TCS is coming from. For instance, the Union of Concerned Scientists routinely uses university and government scientists to legitimize its views, generally viewed as coming from the political left. . .

It is this condition of dueling special interest scientists that leads to a second perspective, and that is an institutional approach to providing science advice in a way that is not filtered through a particular special interest agenda. It is this very condition that gives legitimacy to government science advisory panels, National Academy committees, and professional societies. But the role such groups as honest brokers is in my view endangered. For instance, consider a congressional staff briefing organized by the American Meteorological Society last fall on the subject of hurricanes and global warming (see this PDF). This briefing included the perspectives of:

• Kevin Trenberth, NCAR
• Judy Curry, Georigia Tech
• Kerry Emanuel, MIT

All distinguished scientists, but undoubtedly a subset of scientific views (and on its policy significance) on hurricanes and climate change. The AMS took on the characteristics of TCS when putting together this briefing by selecting participants to represent a narrow perspective that was all but certainly shaped by political considerations. In discussing this general issue with colleagues and here on Prometheus, some make the claim that such unbalanced perspectives are needed from the scientific community in order to balance what is considered to be the greater ability of the political right to get its message out. . .

Today, where does one go for the presentation of a comprehensive perspective on scientific views and their implications for policy? There are increasingly few outlets for such honest brokering, meaning that we all fall back on ideological filters, which means that science is increasingly subsumed to pure politics as a tool of marketing competing ideological agendas.

Judy Curry was the "scientist" in the initial article who did not hesitate to jump right into the Katrina gutter, illustrating that science has been subsumed by politics as merely a marketing tool for ideology.