University dumps professor who found polar bears thriving despite climate change
washingtontimes.com
washingtontimes.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_J._Crockford
She was paid by a conservative think tank for years and didn't disclose her conflict of interest.
The question should be weather the research is replicable, not who funded it.
Keep in mind that peer review is the lowest bar for academic quality. It's barely table stakes.
Nobody took issue with her political affiliation.
The Washington Times does not skip research to get their publication out first, they deliberately craft misleading and false stories in order to serve their conservative narrative.
Sibling comments are correct:
The Washington Post is a reputable newspaper with a slight liberal skew.
The Washington Times is a conservative rag.
See: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-biased-is-your-news-so...
It sounds like you're not very familiar with the media landscape in the US, or with how libel laws work here (hint: there is no potential libel on my part, that's ridiculous).
When you publish a story about someone that fails to mention a relevant detail that is present on that person's Wikipedia page, that is not an accident, that is a deliberate omission. In this case, the relevant section was highly visible, and was five sentences long. Nobody writing this article could have missed this.
Then there's the detail itself. When the detail undermines the author's argument, or changes the narrative of the story they're trying to tell, the author needs to address this. They need to mention the detail, and if they have other evidence that might move me to put less weight in that detail, then they can present it here. But to leave the detail out entirely, and hope that I don't google the person is dishonest, and assumes that their readers are stupid and uncritical.
When the editors at a publication exhibit a pattern of such sloppy, deliberately misleading journalism, and when that pattern happens to perfectly fit a specific political narrative, then the educated public is more than justified writing off the publication in the manner that I have done.
tl;dr: Google stuff. Look for problems with the way the argument is presented, not for things you disagree with. If it doesn't pass the sniff test, you're allowed to write it off. If there's a pattern of not passing the sniff test in a particular way, you're allowed to call bullshit. I can't believe I have to fucking spell this out, but here we are.
You also have in the news industry what is acceptable fact. There are facts, which if any one party find them negative to anyone reported, simply won't be reported. This is why the ideologies of China (blocking or discrediting news) fit so well with the US right now - we're already basically doing this.
Have you looked?
The New York Times issues corrections almost every day: https://www.nytimes.com/section/corrections
Literally two seconds of googling.
Just not having jokes/clickbait allowed makes HN special.
An example for the strong bias that I know of is how much HN crowd thought that the iPhone would flop.
One is a description of which tribe you belong to, the other is, "my salary depends on producing results these people like."
I'm really not an at all costs kind of guy. If my tribe ideals are good and needed, they should be elected.
However there's this ... "Crockford is a signatory of the International Conference on Climate Change's 2008 Manhattan Declaration, which states that "Carbon dioxide and other 'greenhouse gas' emissions from human activity...appear to have only a very small impact on global climate," and "Global cooling has presented serious problems for human society and the environment throughout history while global warming has generally been highly beneficial." Between at least 2011 and 2013, she received payment from The Heartland Institute, in the form of $750 per month" [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindsay_Shepherd [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_J._Crockford
That said, the Washington Times' bias issues aren't a secret.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#Political...
That website is garbage, it's just some amateurs slapping ratings on things. It should not be treated as authoritative in any way.
> “There is no evidence to suggest that Dr. Crockford’s adjunct appointment was not renewed for ‘telling school kids politically incorrect facts about polar bears,’” said Ms. Parkin. “The University of Victoria, in both word and deed, supports academic freedom and free debate on academic issues.”
vs
> Ms. Crockford accused officials at the Canadian university of bowing to “outside pressure,” the result of her research showing that polar bear populations are stable and even thriving, not plummeting as a result of shrinking Arctic sea ice, defying claims of the climate change movement.
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I guess I was hoping for a better argument given the headline? Is there a strong basis for cause-effect here?
It doesn't seem like Ms. Crockford was a tenured professor either. Her former position was as an "adjunct professor". I admit that I'm ignorant to college-politics, but hopefully someone can fill me in on some of these facts.
I don't know anything about the case being discussed here, but my expectation is that the non-renewal of an adjunct status cannot be compared with getting fired as a tenure or tenure-track professor.
Disclosure: I own her book.
Stories can't be downvoted, but they can be flagged.
It's always been here I feel. It's just now, many of the traditional conservative institutions (like Washington Times) are waking up to it.
> University of Victoria economics professor Cornelis van Kooten warned of the threat to free speech on campus. “I think the climate change movement has done extreme harm to academic freedom,” he said, and the movement isn’t alone.
Why are we interviewing economics professors about suppression in the Climate science?
Then we get to Judith Curry[0]:
> Her Polar Bear Science blog came under fire in a 2017 study in the journal BioScience by 14 academics, including Penn State climatologist Michael E. Mann, decrying the influence of “denier blogs,” which Georgia Tech professor emeritus Judith Curry blasted as “absolutely the stupidest paper I have ever seen published.”
On whom Wikipedia says:
> In 2019 she stated that she would not “bother with” peer-reviewed journals, in favor of publishing her own papers so that she could editorialize and write what she wanted “without worrying about the norms and agendas of the ‘establishment.’”[1]
It's very hard for me to find a source here in support of her that isn't spending a lot of time using coded language for, "the establishment is corrupt, you can't trust mainstream scientists, you can only trust this fringe group and the reason no one agrees with us is because they hate us, not because we're wrong." It reminds me a lot of when I was growing up in a Creationist community, and I'd hear regular reports about the 'brave' scientists that would get fired because they rejected fossil record evidence.
I'm not going to outright say bias doesn't exist in climate science, but if a publication like the Washing Times wants to claim it does, I'd expect to see much more compelling evidence than this article provides.
I'm not, personally, familiar with WT but seems there are a lot of jumping to conclusions happening here.
I don't wanna say that EVERYONE is bias, just curios about what really happened.