Keith Kloor

I hadn't really planned on writing again about everyone's favorite conspiracy theorist and promoter of quackery, Mike Adams, at least not so soon after the last time I did it, which was only last week after Adams appeared on Dr. Oz's daytime television show to push his "laboratory." Adams, as you might recall, goes by the Internet moniker the "Health Ranger" (which would really more appropriately be "Health Danger") and is the man responsible for one of the quackiest sites on the Internet, NaturalNews.com, a repository for nearly every form of medical pseudoscience known to humans, mixed in…
Keith Kloor says that this "concisely expressed" his thinking on climate change: I categorise myself as somebody who recognises that additional CO2 in the atmosphere as a result of man's activities (fossil fuel burning and land use change) will have an effect on the balance of radiation coming into and leaving our atmosphere. I do not have a confirmed view as to exactly what the impact of the CO2 will have (feedbacks etc being uncertain) but I know that it must have an effect - that's physics. Monckton would not disagree with any of this. This seems to be an example of The View from Nowhere…
So over at Keith Kloor's place, we see Keith read a comment of Michael Tobis', (read it for your self here) in which he says: "Adaptation is crucial" and "adaptation and mitigation are not a tradeoff. They are two faces of the same coin." along with a whole bunch of, typical for Tobis, nuanced and intelligent points. What does Keith want his readers to take away from that? That Michael Tobis is a hypocrite who does not really care about suffering humanity and his whole schtick is "the typical zero-sum talking point, that mitigation (curbing carbon emissions) has to take precedence over…
Arthur Smith details a pattern of deception in Keith Kloor's writing. Kloor's response in comments completes the case -- he takes offence at the very first sentence and uses that as pretext for avoiding the criticism. Update: Kloor responds again, projecting: I sense their intent is to harm my reputation
So the blogosphere has been abuzz over a recent Q&A Keith Kloor did with Judy Curry, the lengthy comment thread is where most of the interesting stuff is. I actually wish to opine on the whole sorry mess but that will be in a later post. Her biggest beef is about what she sees as "tribalism", but I only want to highlight with this post a comment on a follow up thread that really jumped out at me: Kate says: This is the fight that will define the twenty-first century as either a time when mankind advances due to honest enterprise, quality science, and technical achievement...or we are…
Andrew Bolt comes up a killer argument to refute the findings of Oxburgh's committee: Oxburgh's "choice of transport to the press conference". You see, Oxburgh drove there in an enormous SUV, so obviously he doesn't really believe that the CRU scientists' work is sound, else he would have come on a bicycle or something. Oh wait, Oxburgh did arrive on a bicycle, so Bolt deploys a slightly different argument: Surely Oxburgh's choice of transport to the press conference on his Climategate findings should have made some journalists there wonder about his impartiality: ... You see ... Lord…
At the ScienceOnline 2010 conference next month, I'm going to be on a panel about "Rebooting Science Journaiism," in which I'll join Carl Zimmer, Ed Yong, and John Timmer in pondering the future of science journalism. God knows what will come of it, as none of us have the sure answers. But that session, as well as the entanglement of my own future with that of science journalism, has me focused on the subject. And two recent online discussions about it have piqued my interest. One was the reaction, on a science writer's email-list I'm on, to a recent Poynter interview with Times science…