Here’s a Newsweek.com bloggy profile hailing the tough-to-dispute successes of a leading nemesis climate progress, Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com:

With “Climategate”—the release last month of thousands of hacked e-mails showing debate about climate change may have been stifled—[Morano] is now getting more attention than ever before. As of last Friday, according to one the many e-mails this—and probably most—reporters get, he’s currently stationed at ground zero of the climate-change debate, Copenhagen, which he points out in e-mails, “is extremely cold.” (Several independent reviews of the hacked e-mails conclude that some scientists were engaging in embarrassing and at times unethical discussions, but the scientific consensus showing anthropogenic global warming was neither compromised nor fabricated).

He has been on countless news shows lately, including the BBC and CNN where he’s engaged in what he described to me as “lively and hostile debates.” He’s also appeared on the national radio shows of Sean Hannity, Fred Thomspon, and Lars Larsen. One of his fans (and a former boss of Morano’s) is Rush Limbaugh, who last month inadvertently shut down Morano’s site by urging listeners to follow his coverage of Climategate. The race to Morano’s site came after Rush gave this blessing: “Morano’s probably single-handedly, in a civilian sense, the guy?other than me, of course?doing a better job of ringing the bells alarming people of what’s going on here.”

Rush is absolutely right. The two of them are driving waves of outrage against climate scientists that are significantly influencing the media and thus, probably, public opinion. And there is, in my mind, little effective counter.

Yesterday, James Randi posted an entry on the JREF’s Swift blog about global warming. In it, he expressed some doubt over the consensus that humans are causing global warming. He does not doubt that warming is happening, as he made clear, just the role of humans in that change.

Unfortunately, one source he used in his essay was the Petition Project. This was an attempt by global warming denialists to muddy the climate issue, and one that has been thoroughly trashed — it’s really just as awful as the similarly ridiculous, and just as thoroughly nonsensical, attempt by the Discovery Institute to get a petition by scientists who doubt evolution. Randi also made a claim about the complexity of global warming, and how difficult it is to model, casting some uncertainty on it. As he said, this makes it very difficult for someone not well-versed in the field to come to a well-informed decision on climate change.

I was unaware that Randi had just posted his essay when, yesterday, I wrote a post asking for donations to the JREF. Obviously, the comments focused on Randi’s post. While some were fair, I was taken aback by the vitriol of many of the comments; some people were out-and-out calling Randi a denialist, which is ridiculous. Other comments were worse.

Needless to say, this made quite a splash in the skeptical blogosphere as well. Posts and comments sprouted up everywhere about it. Some were thoughtful, others, um, not so much. I was surprised by how many skeptics were quick to vilify Randi, again accusing him of being a global warming denialist. I got emails from people fearing for the skeptical movement as a whole!

Instead of rending my garments over this, I read Randi’s post carefully, and then sent him a note outlining why the Petition Project is a crock, as well as saying that yes, mathematical models of climate are very complex, but that doesn’t change observations indicating the reality of global warming or our role in it. Randi told me he was writing a followup, so I decided not to say anything about it here until his new post went up. I wanted to make sure I had all the facts before commenting.

Randi posted that followup blog entry today. As I expected, he took the new information into account, admitting that he was unaware of the dubious nature of the petition, and re-affirming that he is not denying global warming is occurring.

So what are we to make of all this?

One is that anyone, everyone, is capable of making mistakes, from grand to minor, from basic ones we never should have made to ones that are inevitable. Skeptics make these same mistakes, too. Even noted skeptics. I’ve done it, Randi’s done it, every human has done it. Apropos of exactly this, Michael Shermer changed his stance on global warming after sufficient evidence swayed him.

Another is that even skeptics can be quick to jump to conclusions based on our own preconceived notions and methodology. Randi made an error, yes. Pointing that out politely and clearly is fine, as can be seen by the fact that he followed up on his post once he was given better data. But the ways in which many people attacked him were, in my opinion, unfair. If someone has a history of spinning the truth, of lying, of distorting reality for their own agenda, then sure, have at them. But when it’s someone who has devoted their life to prying the scales from everyone’s eyes, I think they’ve earned a modicum of decorum when they make a mistake.

Of course, on blogs (either writing them or commenting on them) it’s very easy to simply react. Again, we have all done this, and usually with some regret later. I’ve had to go back and retract things I’ve written when better evidence has arisen, or simply when someone has pointed out where I blew it.

Part of being a skeptic — and it’s a big part — is admitting when you’re wrong.

And finally, there is a really good takeaway point from this: when it comes to reality, no one and no thing is sacrosanct. If something is wrong, it gets called out. That’s what skepticism is all about. If Randi makes a mistake, he gets called on it. If scientists do, or the Pope does, or anyone, then it is up to all of us to speak up. And I think that how we do it is just as important as the content of our claims.

I’ve known Randi many years, and I know that for him, truth trumps all. May all of us be so inclined.

It is clear that the GOP now has a new denial spokesperson–Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. I already blogged her misleading radio address on “ClimateGate” and Copenhagen; now, watch her in this CNN debate with Ed Markey:

It’s all here, folks: We’ve got the massive over-interpretation of “ClimateGate”, global cooling claims (both about the 1970s and about the present), the assertion that “climate change is cyclical,” that it is “unsettled science” and “it depends on whose science you’re looking at,” and so forth. It’s bad, bad news.

Blackburn is quickly becoming the new James Inhofe….

For soldiers and civilians alike, insurgency wars are not only deadly but also frustrating in their apparently random spikes of violence. In a study in Nature, however, researchers put forth a mathematical model that shows terrorist attacks and insurgencies are not so scattershot as they seem.

The team searched for statistical similarities across nine historic and ongoing insurgencies including those of Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland [BBC News]. That meant compiling more than 50,000 acts of violence. And despite the fact that these events happened in different countries in different times, Neil Johnson and his team found a relationship between the size of an attack in casualty terms and how often it occurs.

By plotting the distribution of the frequency and size of events, the team found that insurgent wars follow an approximate power law, in which the frequency of attacks decreases with increasing attack size to the power of 2.5. That means that for any insurgent war, an attack with 10 casualties is 316 times more likely to occur than one with 100 casualties (316 is 10 to the power of 2.5) [Nature].

Researchers have used power laws to try to find order in natural phenomena, like a size vs. frequency pattern in earthquakes or avalanches. Johnson and his colleagues argue that the pattern arises because insurgent wars lack a coherent command network and operate more as a “soup of groups”, in which cells form and disband when they sense danger, then reform in different sizes and composition [Nature]. Also, he says, terrorist groups compete for media attention, which could help drive the pattern.

Other researchers doubt the reliability of the model. For one thing, terror cells battle one another and probably aren’t as free to break up and reform as the study suggests, terrorism modeler Roy Lindelauf says. And the number of insurgents in a fight might not stay close to constant, as the model presumes. But the math could have real-world practicality, team member Michael Spagat argues. “We could never say with certainty that there were going to be 10 attacks on one day, for example,” [BBC News] he says, but the model could predict whether a given day carried a lighter or heavier probability for a deadly attack.

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Image: flickr / :.phoenix.: