Research and Scholarship

Addendum: “Gee What a Surprise: NOAA ‘Adjusts’ Its Historical Weather Data Just As ‘Climate Change Deniers’ Claim They Do

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As it happens, the day that I posted on NOAA’s inherently ethically dubious “adjustments” to historical climate data, a blog post by The Manhattan Contrarian turned up in my email following up on the same ABC News story that sparked my post. It is well worth reading. His conclusion:

“If the NOAA data adjustments cannot be tied to specific metadata like station moves or instrumentation changes, then they are not really scientific “data,” but rather just opinions of people who are interested in promoting the global warming narrative. They are completely unusable for purposes of making public policy.”

Yes, but the manipulated data does make charts like the “hockey stick” graph above seem convincing, even though all those data points come from after-the-fact guesses about what the real data should be.

Gee What a Surprise: NOAA “Adjusts” Its Historical Weather Data Just As “Climate Change Deniers” Claim They Do

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Of course, the corrupt news media sees no problem with this. As ABC helpfully points out, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information “adjusts weather data to account for factors like instrument changes, station relocation and urbanization, and it does so through peer-reviewed studies that are published publicly through its federal website.”

And factors like the need for climate scientists to show that the climate change apocalypse that they constantly predict for us is based on convincing data, when in fact it is based on flawed data, as the scientists admit once you cut through the jargon. For example, traditional glass thermometers have been replaced with more precise digital sensors warranting “adjustments” to accurately compare readings between the two instruments. Sea surface temperatures used to be taken manually from a bucket off of a boat, unlike the network of buoys and satellites that are used to gauge water temperatures today. Then there is the “urban heat island effect”: Cities heat up more than rural areas due to human activity, infrastructure and the concentration of buildings, roads and other heat-absorbing materials, causing higher temperatures in cities compared to surrounding areas. This can distort temperature data, making an area appear hotter than it is. So the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration makes adjustments to account for that too.

Continue reading →

Today’s Unpleasant Ethics Question: How Can We Justify Trusting Today’s Scholars and Academics To Train Our Rising Generations?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I want to state at the outset that the ridiculous research paper I’m about to make fun of is only one horrifying example of institutional insanity, and it would be unfair to use it to characterize the entire higher education complex. However, I do believe that a healthy and functioning scholarly sector must have a way to reject, condemn and shun such abuses of position and authority.

I’ll have more to say on this matter after revealing the head-exploding product of University of San Diego professors Diane Marie Keeling and Bethany O’Shea.

These scholars have published a study titled “Conceptualizing Black Humanity Through Geopoetic Intimacy and Resistance: Memory Making-with Geologic Materials” Here is the abstract:

Amplifying the importance of geologic processes in subject formation, the study asserts that geological time is important for understanding memory and memorials. In the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Projects and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, materials of geologic composition like soil, and those made from earth materials, such as steel and bricks, are employed to trope the bodies of lynching victims and weather racist geologic formations of subjecthood. The holding and eroding of violent memories crafts an intimate and resistant geopoetics of Black humanity.

Oh. What???

Continue reading →

Cognitive Dissonance Scale Lesson For Senate Democrats

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I have mentioned here frequently that one of two things I learned in college that have been most useful in my life and career is Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Scale. The concept illustrated by the scale is also one of the most useful tools for ethical analysis, often essential to answering the question, “What’s going on here?” the entry point to many perplexing situations. Check the tag: it just took me 15 minutes to scroll though the posts that got it. I was surprised to find that I didn’t use the tag until 2014, when the scale helped me conclude that the Tea Party, then in ascendancy, was “doomed by a powerful phenomenon it obviously doesn’t understand: Cognitive Dissonance.” Heard much about the Tea Party lately? See, I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says… I wrote then,

As psychologist Leon Festinger showed a half a century ago, we form our likes, dislikes, opinions and beliefs to a great extent based on our subconscious reactions to who and what they are connected with and associated to. This is, to a considerable extent, why leaders and celebrities are such powerful influences on society. It explains why we tend to adopt the values of our parents, and it largely explains many marketing and advertising techniques that manipulate our desires and preferences. Simply put, if someone we admire adopts a position or endorses a product, person or idea, he or she will naturally raise it in our estimation. If however, that position, product, person or idea is already extremely low in our esteem, even though his endorsement might raise it, even substantially, his own status will suffer, and fall. He will slide down the admiration scale, even if that which he endorses rises. If what the individual endorses is sufficiently deplored, it might even wipe out his positive standing entirely.

The implications of this phenomenon are many and varied, and sometimes complex. If a popular and admired politician espouses a policy, many will assume the policy is wise simply because he supports it. If an unpopular fool then argues passionately for the same policy, Festinger’s theory tells us, it might..

1. Raise the fool’s popularity, if the policy is sufficiently popular.

2. Lower support for the policy, if he is sufficiently reviled, and even

3. Lower the popularity of the admired politician, who will suffer for being associated with an idea that had been embraced by a despised dolt.

This subconscious shifting, said Festinger, goes on constantly, effecting everything from what movies we like to the clothes we wear to how we vote.

Here, for the heaven-knows-how-many-th time, is the scale in simplified form…

Continue reading →

Look! Another Study Showing That What Everybody Knew Anyway Is Probably True…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

A new study concludes that parents probably do have a favorites among their children.

Parents always deny this, of course. Such a preference would make any parent feel guilty, so they are in permanent denial. The favorite child reaps the benefits of his or her status, and the lesser regarded children are told that they are petty, jealous, and paranoid. Frequently, in my experience, the “Mom likes you best!” accusation works wonders, and the guilt-ridden parent will then bend over backwards to avoid any appearance of favoritism, even to the point of favoring the other child or children.

The study in question, however, seems pretty worthless. Lisa Strohschein, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta and the editor-in-chief of the journal Canadian Studies in Population, thinks that all the study does is confirm what most people already believe. The researchers acknowledged limitations in the study, and write that “the reasons why parents treat their children differently are likely more complex and extend beyond the factors explored.” Oh.

Continue reading →

Talking Dog Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I must confess that one reason for this post is to entice one of Ethics Alarms’ stars, the perceptive and sharp metaphorical-penned Mrs. Q, into commenting, since she is our resident canine authority (among other things).

The New York Times recently published a feature [Gift link!]about a new fad among dog-owners: multi-colored buttons one can lay out on one’s floor. The buttons can be set to emit the dog-owner’s voice saying a single word like OUTSIDE, WATER, PLAY, FRIEND, AFRAID, WALK, BALL and so on. Dogs learn to step on the buttons to emit the desired word…

Voilà! Talking dogs.

Well, maybe. Researchers disagree whether the dogs are really using the buttons to communicate or just giving a Skinnerian response when they figure out that, for example, pressing a particular button will result in a treat. Dogs using the buttons are all over YouTube and other platforms on the web: that’s Bunny the Sheepadoodle above, who supposedly makes complex remarks and even existential ones, like “DOG WHY?”

Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Critics of Federal Workers Telecommuting May Exaggerate But the Truth Is Bad Enough”

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

This Comment of the Day by new participant in the comment wars Dr. Blae cheers my pre-Christmas cockles more than most for two reasons: 1) I always love it when a first time commenter weighs in with a Comment of the Day. This is especially true since I spend so much time reading attempted first-time comments that read: “You suck, asshole!” 2) Genuine expertise on these topics is always a godsend. I am a pan-ethicist, meaning that I work in the ethics field regarding too many areas to count, legal ethics substantially but also business ethics, government ethics, sports ethics, academic ethics, journalism ethics, and more. I am neither a participant nor an expert in many of these fields themselves, so when ethics and one of them intersect, a specialist is especially welcome.

Here is Dr. Blae’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Critics of Federal Workers Telecommuting May Exaggerate But the Truth Is Bad Enough”:

***

So let’s break this down…

  • Federal agencies have been maintaining uninhabited office space in some of the most expensive real estate markets in the US.
  • The majority of federal workers, that can, telework/remote work and avoid coming into the office.
  • There is an assumption of a lack of efficiency due to telework/remote work, but the evidence is anecdotal or not directly relevant (e.g., office occupation).

Now for a couple of questions… prior to COVID:

  • When were government employees accused of being efficient?
  • What is efficiency? This is really important since the implication is a quantitative comparison, so we need some numbers.
  • Are all jobs/positions the same? Is there a single solution?
  • Where do most federal employees (in the DC area) come from?
  • How do you “drain the swamp” by reconcentrating employees in the swamp?
  • What is a comparison of costs between an employee doing telework/remote work v. being physically in the office?
  • Why do federal agencies continue to rent unoccupied spaces when according to GSA regulations/policies they are supposed to “right size” office space?

Ok let’s take into consideration a few points…

Continue reading →

“Monica Crowley and the Death of the Plagiarism Scandal,” The Sequel

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

President-elect Trump today nominated Monica Crowley to be “Ambassador, Assistant Secretary of State, and Chief of Protocol,” a position that will coordinate and oversee U.S.-hosted events of note such as America’s 250th Independence Day anniversary in 2026; the FIFA World Cup in 2026 and the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028.  The position requires Senate confirmation. In reporting the nomination, The Hill described Crowley as “a former Fox News contributor,” which is deceitful and a cheap shot: she was that, but her experience is much more varied than that would suggest, and Crowley has legitimate credentials for that job—more, in fact, than many other recent nominations announced by Trump.

Crowley also, however, is a serial plagiarist, and her latest assignment from Trump—the previous one was in 2019, when then-President Trump announced Crowley’s appointment as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs in the Treasury Department—is another canary dying in the ethics mine.

Continue reading →

Unethical Tweet of the Week: “The View” DEI Hispanic, Ana Navarro-Cárdenas 

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Navarro, a fixture on ABC’s “The View,” has been an embarrassment to all of her media employers; they have just been too foolish to realize it. She’s a fake Republican/conservative, initially hired by CNN as a token so she could bash Donald Trump and claim objectivity. She isn’t witty, analytical or smart and has a speech impediment: if she were a white male, she would be defending DUI cases.

That tweet is special. She’s allegedly a lawyer, and she doesn’t know what a precedent is? The precedent is a President giving a suspiciously extensive pardon including crimes that haven’t been charged yet that the President might have directly benefited from to his son. That’s never happened before because it directly benefits the President and has the appearance of impropriety.

The whole tweet, moreover, is based on a passel of rationalizations falsely applied, like “Everybody does it” (#1) and “There are worse things” (#22). “Every President” doesn’t pardon their immediate family. The closest analog was Bill Clinton pardoning his half-brother for a cocaine conviction, but Roger’s crimes were neither as numerous nor as serious as Hunter’s, nor did anyone think Bill had any connection to them.

Saying that Trump also appointed his father-in-law as French ambassador is as relevant to Navarro’s argument as writing, “And he has bad breath, too!” That factoid has nothing to do with the pardon.

Additionally, citing Wilson, Clinton and Trump as Presidential role models in a matter of ethics is idiotic strategy. They are three of the most ethically-inert of all our Chief Executives, and those pardons match their proclivities. Defending Biden by comparing him to that trio is desperate.

I saved the best for last, though: Navarro-Cárdenas is making Americans dumber by spreading Presidential fiction. Woodrow Wilson had no brother-in-law named “Hunter DeButts,” so he couldn’t have pardoned him.

This pure fiction, the results of Navarro being hoaxed or the victim of an AI “hallucination”: either way, it’s irresponsible journalism. She obviously didn’t check her facts before making a false statement, one that impugned a President (though one who earned a lot of impugning).

How Much More Evidence Will It Require For Climate Change Hysterics To Admit That The Field Is Corrupted By Uncertainty, Dishonesty and Hype?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

2024 has been a revealing one on Ethics Alarms regarding the climate change debacle. Let’s review, shall we? Here, we discussed the New York Times complaining that an action movie didn’t have enough climate change propaganda. Here, we learned that the Biden administration’s “climate adviser” is a lawyer, not a scientist, and engaged in fanciful, unscientific fearmongering, like claiming that cliamte change was causing the wildfires in Maui and California. Here, we discussed an esteemed British climate scientist who argued that the only way to control global warming sufficiently to save the world is to “cull the human population,” ideally through pandemics. Here, an expert testifying before Congress about the need to spend trillions of dollars that the U.S. doesn’t have to be “carbon neutral” revealed himself as a phony.

The introduction to all of this arrived in September of last year, when Patrick T. Brown, the co-director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute, essentially blew the whistle on his own colleagues, writing in part, “…it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals…[a]nd the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society. To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change…[This] distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”

Well, 2024 isn’t over yet. Now the BBC has formally admitted that all the hype about climate change killing off the polar bears was a deliberate falsehood. Responding to a reader complaint, the BBC wrote, “The article reported on the death of a worker who was attacked by two polar bears in Canada’s northern Nunavut territory, and said such attacks are rare because “The species is in decline, and scientists attribute it to the loss of sea ice caused by global warming – leading to shrinking of their hunting and breeding grounds.”

Oops! After the challenge, the BBC wrote, “Research carried out by the ECU confirmed scientists agree climate change will cause a reduction in sea ice, which is likely to have a long-term detrimental effect on polar bears and overall population numbers…. However evidence from the Canadian Wildlife Service and the Polar Bear specialist group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature appears to suggest numbers are stable overall at present and not in decline as stated.”

But wait! There’s more!

Continue reading →