Milton Berle, a notorious joke collector, was busy stealing yet another joke when a comedian, he said, made him laugh so hard, "I nearly dropped my pencil." Today, though, standards are different : Jokes are a serious matter. It places food on the table for a fledgling comedian. To steal a vintage joke, actually demonstrates your own lack of understanding the humour crowd.
So what of people engaged in polar work, that do not actually do any polar work? Do they get so cold thinking of going to cold regions that they have to get up and tweak the thermostat, whilst contemplating the climate? Are these guys real researchers? Let me present a case in point.
That's Willi Dansgaard on the left, smoking his ubiquitous pipe, while not merely posing for a photo. Look at his clothing. Here is a man that not only came up with isotopic ideas that changed what people were able to do with ice cores, he also was excited enough to "be there". He did not doff those clothes for a photo. You can tell they are used. He does not just show up for a day to say he had been in a cold place to have his picture taken and then just leave - promoting the polar work in that manner (synthetically). Hmm, maybe Willi was onto something.
When a person borrows from one source they call it plagiarism, when they borrow from several sources they call it research.
This was once thought to be an apt idea. Today, though, in some circles, borrowing from one source is also called research (actually more like just a little reading), and published refe
reed articles are seldom reviewed properly, etc, etc. One person asked me, "If you paraphrase, is it really plagiarism?" How about if the person you borrow from doesn't care, or is dead? I responded by saying that someone who is so into publishing articles to pump up his count that he frequently plagiarizes should write for a scientist, not be the scientist. When familiar ideas appear in a slightly different guise, with a different name attached, I begin to wonder about these things. Do some people have a free license?
Dr. Richard B. Alley, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University and chairman of the committee, compared abrupt climate change to a light switch, while gradual climate -- what most climatologists study -- is like a light dimmer. Press upward on a dimmer, and the light brightens a little. Press more, and the light brightens more. With a switch, press lightly and nothing happens. Press hard enough, and the light abruptly turns on.
''What the research shows is that there are switches as well as dimmers in Earth's system,'' Dr. Alley said.
Alley is often given credit for discovering climate switches from his ice cores and one imagines someone refining cold room techniques to up the quality of observing cores. Actually these "switches" were discovered by Willi Dansgaard, but he called them Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Alley should have called them by the proper name. The credit belongs to them. Frequently Alley is given the credit mistakenly, because of the manner in which he presents information to people.
This is the book Richard threw together, like so many things he does, entitled The Two Mile Time Machine. Has he reached new conclusions in his ice core work about climate? If you are looking for it, do not be surprised if you cannot find anything, except the work of others summarized or reviewed by him. Hence all the work is dated, even at the time of his writing. Even the title rings of Willi, the man whose shoulders Richard stands. In 1971 Willi and Claude Lorius described ice cores as "going deep into the ice is like sticking a thermometer backwards in time." Where is thy grace Richard? He never mentions the Europeans in his book, at all.
If fact, Richard was so devoid of actual research results, he lied, and broadcasted that he worked on ice cores at the University of Wisconsin in his doctoral and post-doctoral program. In fact, he never did. Surely if he had, he would have published at least one paper about it, nes pa?
There is something poohy when there is no credit given and "scientists" act like illiterate animals. As Henry Paulson would say "Boys, lets get the credit rolling again."
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