So powerful... it was easy after that whole 9/11 cover-up thing!
 Kevin Grandia |
"The death of global warming" - spoof puts the fun back into lying about science7 Nov 07
Hat's off (we think) to UK writer and consultant David Thorpe, the apparent creator for the impressive web-based spoof - a definitive bit of climate change denial as reported in The Journal of Geoclimatic Studies. Although the "journal" lists two volumes and some very tempting content*, the only research paper on the website is titled: "Carbon dioxide production by benthic bacteria: the death of manmade global warming theory?" The paper reports that rising volumes of CO2 are actually caused "by saprotrophic eubacteria living in the sediments of the continental shelves fringing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans." Unfortunately, this wonderful news is attributed to a group of scientists who can't be found, working at a series of institutions or departments that don't exist. For example, the JGS website is registered to Dr. Hiroko Takebe at Okinawa University's Climatological Department. Alas, there is no such thing as Okinawa University. The lead researcher is listed as Daniel A. Klein at the University of Arizona. A search of the University of Arizona's faculty database yields no Daniel A. Klein. Guess it won't surprise you that there's no climatology department at U of A either. Nor does there exist a Mandeep Gupta at the University of Arizona who is listed as a second author on the paper. The spoof has already caught a couple of guileless "climate skeptics." Rumor is that well-known skeptic Benny Peiser posted the paper to his discussion group, but an hour later (to his credit) sent a second message saying that it appears he was duped. This blogger has fallen for it and this blogger figured it out.
* Among the many other research papers touted on the site, this was our favourite: "Submarine lightning strikes in the Hadean Zone: an unacknowledged cause of fish mortality?" Dupe update: looks like this site popped it up and then dropped it. Here's a partial bit of their now-extinct post on google: » A blockbuster study from the Journal of Geoclimatic Studies Dupe update 2: this site is blindly linking to the study. Dupe update 3: Reason Magazine posted a story and then tore it down. Here's a partial blurb from a Technorati search: Are Bacteria the Cause of Global Warming? A new report in the Journal of Geoclimatic Studies by researchers from the University of Arizona and the University of Goteborg in Sweden argues that benthic bacteria are responsible for increasesDupe update 4: This blogger fell for it hook, line and sinker. Dupe update 5: Here's another bumbling blogger. Update 6: Quote from the web developer found here: We’re just the website design company,” said David Thorpe at Cyberium in Wales, listed as the administrator of the site. “I don’t know anything about the content. We were just asked to put the website up.” Dupe update 7: This blogger blindly cut and paste the whole thing into a post.
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 David Thorpe Journal of Geoclimatic Studies Benny Peiser climate change global warming |
The Dark Side is powerful!
Submitted by FEMACK on Wed, 2007-11-07 14:47.
The Dark Side is powerful!
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How can you tell?
Submitted by hud (not verified) on Wed, 2007-11-07 16:38.
Since so many arguments in the GW canon are discredited and/or logical fallacies, that spoof is more credible than the claims if the GW crowd.
Y2K anyone?
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Y2K
Submitted by Kevin Grandia on Wed, 2007-11-07 16:40.
Red Herring anyone? Yep, the IPCC -- bunch of no-brain Nobel Prize winners.
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you have it backwards
Submitted by truth machine (not verified) on Tue, 2007-11-13 02:17.
"Since so many arguments in the GW canon are discredited and/or logical fallacies, that spoof is more credible than the claims if the GW crowd."
So much for your logical abilities. This was a spoof of GW denial. If you can't tell the difference between fraudulent denial arguments and "real" denial arguments, then all denial is bogus.
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Google cache of one of the
Submitted by lee (not verified) on Thu, 2007-11-08 05:45.
Google cache of one of the missing pages:
http://72.14.209.104/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.environmentnc.com%2F%3Fp%3D310&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
The page reads:
"A blockbuster study from the Journal of Geoclimatic Studies"
"Clearly this study from the latest issue of Journal of Geoclimatic Studies by four climate scientists–two from the Dept. of Climatology at the University of Arizona and two from the Department of Atmospheric Physics, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, should be the lead story on the eveing news tonight. But it is more than likely that it won’t even be mentioned. the paper abstract speaks for itself."
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That's a riot!
Submitted by FEMACK on Thu, 2007-11-08 06:55.
Somebody had a lot of fun putting that site together. Have a look at the "contents" of the other issues, and the list of advisers. Too funny.
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Spoof exposure
Submitted by John Mashey (not verified) on Wed, 2007-11-07 14:23.
I saw this elsewhere ... but you know, this has been exposed *way too fast*.
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We toiled
Submitted by Kevin Grandia on Wed, 2007-11-07 15:43.
But made the call to do a story -- a lot of people just read headlines and move on - this spoof site definitely has a double-edge sword.
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More on spoof
Submitted by John Mashey (not verified) on Wed, 2007-11-07 20:05.
OK to do the story ...
it's just that I loved the Sokal affair, and it would have been lovely to see this website referred to, say by Morano.
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And it was Morano falling for it...
Submitted by Kevin Grandia on Wed, 2007-11-07 20:06.
... that had us toiling with whether to out this thing. I know it would have been sweet.
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Rush Limbaugh bought it...
Submitted by tidal (not verified) on Fri, 2007-11-09 13:40.
According to this - http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2007/11/rush-to-judgeme.html - Rush Limbaugh fell for it and broadcast the "truth" about "benthic bacteria and global warming" to his 20 million gulls... Would be sweet to get that transcript...
His site indicates that Rush put himself in the penalty box (suspended himself from the show on Friday) as penance for falling for the hoax http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_110807/home.guest.html
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a test of "the system"
Submitted by Steve L (not verified) on Thu, 2007-11-08 07:06.
I like the idea of this spoof; I want the fools to be shown for who they are. I think it was done incorrectly, however. If we look at the debunking, it was done based on the identity of the authors and the group that ran the website and how long the website had been up. As pointed out, some folks never read the science part (just the summary). That would be deadly if you could not look up the authors, institute, etc, in order to debunk the study -- if you had to debunk it on the merits of the science. In that way, such a choice of topic (perhaps the most ironclad, robust interpretation in atmospheric science: the rise in CO2 concentrations is anthropogenic) would have been the most devastating at showing which "skeptics" were only believing what they wanted to believe.
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Okinawa University
Submitted by Jeremiah (not verified) on Thu, 2007-11-08 08:55.
There is an Okinawa University. However, it indeed does not have a Climatological Dept.
http://sitesearch.uts.edu.au/iis/study/uni_detail.lasso?-token.id=32808
Okinawa University is a small private university with two faculties: the Faculty of Law and Economics and the Faculty of Humanities.
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You are still believing in
Submitted by ange (not verified) on Fri, 2007-11-09 04:15.
You are still believing in false temperatures series to support climate warming. The biggest spoofs: hockey stick graphics and temperatures series from 2000.
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hoax site offline?
Submitted by Jim Prall (not verified) on Mon, 2007-11-26 13:59.
I can't get to the original hoax site, as the DNS name http://geoclimaticstudies.info/ is not resolving, at least from here, presently.
If anyone else finds the site is still accessible, could someone please download the article and re-post it for posterity? (Preferably on a domain that doesn't end in .info in case that's a factor here)
I saw some excerpts from the math and was impressed with the inclusion of Cyrillic and Tibetan(?) characters in one sample 8-)
TIA
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nevermind - found a cached copy
Submitted by Jim Prall (not verified) on Mon, 2007-11-26 14:15.
Sorry for the bother. I just Googled a bit harder and found a cached copy of the paper. I found a copy of the PDF here:
http://www.cyberium.co.uk/downloads/Journal%20of%20Geoclimatic%20Studies.pdf
I wanted to go through it line by line just as a mental exercise. It has some great bafflegab, including one variable that stands for "vertical (neo-Falkian) benthic discontinuity" and "jy is the non-rectilineal harmonic regressivity of the constant Δ."
Not to mention the coffeegrounds ...
grins!
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unoriginal too
Submitted by meleager (not verified) on Sat, 2007-11-10 14:32.
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy “Red Mars”, Green Mars” and “Blue Mars”, Hiroko is the name of the leader of the “greens” segment of the party of 100 colonists to Mars. Mars is terraformmed into an inhabitable world. One tool they use is carbon-fixing, benthic cynobacteria.
The other side were the “reds” who wanted to keep Mars pristine. In the book anyway the reds were terrorists.
meleager
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On the contrary...
Submitted by Appreciative (not verified) on Tue, 2007-11-13 18:31.
Rather than dismiss the spoof as unoriginal, I give it extra credit for the sly sci-fi homage!
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PNUZAiSQshvuaV
Submitted by bob (not verified) on Wed, 2008-01-02 20:26.
KxwdCe hi nice site thx http://peace.com
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the horror
This is horrifying. Are you saying that "the establishment" so wants to suppress these findings that it has removed all reference to Dan and Mandeep from the U of A web site? And they were concerned enough to eliminate the Department of Climatology entirely?
The dark forces do run deep.