Zany Zwick
Posted By Guy Smith on December 7, 2011
Email This Post
Print This Post
Malcolm Forbes is not resting in peace.
Malcolm, the previous publisher of a magazine bearing his family name, produced a quality periodical with content for thinking people. One could debate details or overlook Forbes’ unabashed preference for Capitalist Tools (which is what Malcolm named his personal Boeing 727). But rarely could you quibble over the soundness of logic and depth of analysis fostered by Forbes freelancers and full-time journalist.
Forbes now hunts with yellow dogs thanks to Steve Zwick’s bizarre waste of electrons.
The literary effluvium with which Zwick decorated forbes.com centers around a second set of emails lifted from a climate research center. Previously liberated emails and computer source code were a serious indictment of scientific and ethical perdition. So significant were the ethical lapses of climate scientists that various puppet masters constructed a mock investigation to downplay the hefty catalog of misdeeds. To say that the public subsequently lost faith in climate science and scientist in general is akin to saying the Congressional record is slightly boring reading.
What makes Stevie’s column unforgivable is his ham-handed propaganda techniques that are more transparent than climate science (but then again, what isn’t). Shooting The Bull provides a modern mode for propaganda identification, and Steve contributes to the ongoing process. One can almost admire deft application of propaganda tactics when performed by experts (which excludes Barack Obama, who is sliding faster down the credibility poll than strippers slide down the other variety). Stevie’s piece cannot earn admiration for it is at best inept agitprop, and at worst too amusing for serious consideration, though I’m certain Steve did not intend it to be a humor piece.
Foremost is Steve’s use of The Lie of Association (using invalid associations to demonize a person or position). Five times, Steve describes skeptics of the current shabby state of climate science as “wingnuts.” He also claims they are “crackpot[s] in the backwoods of Alabama”, though I’m sure the good folks at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville might decline Steve’s bigoted assertions. Yet Steve believes these hicks, wingnuts and crackpots have assembled themselves into a “massive denial machine … a Borg-like monstrosity” who also “dodge responsibility for the climate” as if it were their personal responsibility, and that it is within the power of Alabama dwelling crackpots rocket scientists to unilaterally change climate.
One of the first rules of effective propaganda is to keep your accusations consistent. Then again Stevie actually penned the line “Talk about the pot calling the dandelion black” … whatever in Hades that means.
Let’s ignore generalizations. Specifics are where Steve begins his disintegration. In attacking those who he claims to be attacking others (Steve must be part dandelion), he complains about the Climate Audit blog. It, among others, provides contradictory analysis of what Steve claims are “scientific issues on which there is broad consensus.” This use of The Lie of Authority (to speak with authority, though not fact, and by such presence keep others from questioning the information) obfuscates that there is no consensus about man-made global climate change. Outside of the United Nations panel on climate (which has published as fact unsubstantiated speculations about Himalayan glaciers disappearing) there is great and ever changing debate on the subject. Given that climatology is the most immature of scientific disciplines (we have only 30 years of satellite analysis, and the older raw data borders on worthless) and that climatologists attempt to model the most complex and dynamic system in which we humans have yet to personally participate, anointing as settled science the IPCC’s inaccuracies is delusional.
Hell, even MSNBC gets basic assumptions correct once in a while … about every blue moon according to my calculations. Steve’s accuracy batting average is substantially lower.
Stevie extends propaganda into slander by repeatedly calling skeptics “deniers.” We have to remember that the early days of mad-made global warming hypothesis came during the rise of Iran’s chief “wingnut” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a fellow who publicly denies that the holocaust occurred. People who pushed Al Gore into logic corners were branded “deniers”, leveraging concurrent public use of the phrase in another ham-handed propaganda push to brand non-believers as scientific heretics.
Seems that the Lie Of Association is Steve’s favorite gambit.
His second favorite is The Lie of Magic (redirecting the attention of the public away from the core of the topic to complicated irrelevancies). Steve’s use of misdirection might make for sloppy propaganda, but could cause Penn and Teller to do a double take. Steve’s preferred prank is to ignore the core issue and drive defensiveive/offenseive assertions. By playing defense for Climategate suspects while defaming legitimate skeptics, he distracts readers from the primordial problem – that core science has been misrepresented by the people proffering the hypothesis that humans have harmed the climate. In several instances Steve claims that the IPCC has clear rules for the peer-review process and that skeptics wouldn’t recognize peer-review procedures if they were tattooed in reverse on their foreheads.
First, let’s note The Lie of Peer Review (using bands of researchers who share the same biases to review and approve suspect research). Even people in the business know that peer-review has problems. Take Robert Higgs, a fellow with enough letters after his name to start an alphabet soup factory. Robert is troubled by the bias-induced weakness of the peer review system. He should know given that he has endured four decades in academia, during which he has been a peer reviewer for over thirty professional journals, and a research proposal reviewer for the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and a number of private foundations. “Peer review,” he writes, “on which lay people place great weight, varies from being an important control, where the editors and the referees are competent and responsible, to being a complete farce,” The main obstacle for a researcher to get published is to find a journal whose editors share the researcher’s bias. “Any journal editor who desires, for whatever reason, to reject a submission can easily do so by choosing referees he knows full well will knock it down; likewise, he can easily obtain favorable referee reports.”
If that doesn’t inspire confidence in the peer review process, then sanity persists.
More importantly, there are different forms of peer-review. There is the structured type that Higgs reports upon, where journals may-or-may-not be relied upon (and indeed, in Climategate we saw overt attempts to prevent minority report papers from being published via journal coercion). Then there is public peer review, whereby all interested parties partake in the Internet agora. Stevie may decry as deniers the folks at Climate Audit, Watts Up and other sources of reasoned skepticism, but doing so paints Steve as being the least scientifically astute of participants. There is nothing wrong with review, regardless of where it is conducted.
I could go on, but Stevie painted a portrait of himself in a hall of mirrors. Indeed, he deployed a variation of The Lie of Mirrors (constantly stating the inverse of a fact in order to steadily remove belief in that fact). Projecting pejoratives, Steve defends climate scientists/activists who in their leaked emails describe how investigative journalists should be recruited to “expose” skeptics, and then laying blame on skeptics for such asymmetric assaults. “That’s the game the Wingnuts have created,” Steve states while willfully ignoring the difference between open, transparent debate and back-door manipulation of the media.
It is to no avail Stevie. One conclusion in Shooting The Bull is that the media is no longer in control of the national conversation. This means neither is Steve Zwick, or Steve Forbes for that matter.
