Nigel I think you are oversimplifying what I said so as to make it sound absurd and I wonder at your motives .. in the game are you?

"your suggestion is akin to 'I fly in airplanes every week therefore I can pilot a 737' or 'I read newspapers therefore I understand how the media works'.

Rather, I fly on airplanes, so I know you sit in a seat, I know how the safety briefing goes, I know where the heads are and I know some basic information and could probably tell someone who had never seen a plane some idea (That's me, I don't know if you could though)

To suggest that scientists who willingly deal with the press, write papers and books on climate and give press conferences as well as write blogs are mere communication innocents is fantasy.

Your attempt to trivialize what I said is reflective of our scientists communications, and the way they resort to distorting what others say when it suits them.

Thanks for the fine example of "spin" there ..

I agree with Amicus and others in decrying the tendency of scientists to complain that they are not good at PR.
As someone who has been harranged by scientists about climate change - and forcibly reminded of my occasional contacts with used car salesmen - I have no time at all for this excuse.
The reason they are losing debate now is because they wildly over exaggerated the danger and their powers of forecasting and, finally, a substantial part of their audience have realised this.
Forced onto the back foot through their own sillyness, instead of sheepisly admitting it (or perhaps just shutting up) the hardliners have the extraordinary cheek to pretend to be ivory tower dwellers who really don't know about PR. Global warming hardliners truely know no shame of any kind.

"The current CSIRO/BoM statement is not news in any real sense, since there is no new information, but it says that things are really bad, which is news."

Doesn't that just beg the question against your thesis? Surely the most obvious explanation for those statements from CSIRO and BoM, despite the lack of any significant new developments, is precisely because of a perception that the science was being unfairly maligned by The Australian, the IPA and CIS which have spearheaded the attack in Oz? Why else issue of release that does little but vindicate the science within an Australian context? Clearly they feel whatever implausible conspiracy theories are held here, that press about ClimateGate, Phil Jones, and Monckton has contained a poor signal to noise ratio that has managing to affect voters?

for BBoy:

On the evidence, the CSIRO/BoM statement is not an example of good science, but of advocacy of a point of view (I almost put that in when I wrote before).

The models on which CSIRO relies are not evidence of anything (models are exercises, and don't present facts), and there is growing doubt about the validity of the data that are used to establish 'average global temperature', not the raw data collected by the BoM, but the 'adjusted' versions of those data that are reported by GISS and HadleyCRU.

I do not think that either the CSIRO or the Bureau ought to be putting forward, authoritatively, statements that lack scientific validity. That is the problem. What we are observing here has been well described as 'noble cause corruption'.

>>Surely the most obvious explanation for those statements from CSIRO and BoM, despite the lack of any significant new developments, is precisely because of a perception that the science was being unfairly maligned by The Australian, the IPA and CIS which have spearheaded the attack in Oz?<<

BBoy,

It could be precisely for another reason too. That is, the scientist bureaucrats could have got a signal from somewhere that it is in their best career interests to push a particular line. While it's not Public Service policy to do so, it's not exactly unknown for the PS to get politicised on issues that are of electoral importance to the Government of the day. As they say, the first casualty in war is the truth.

Whilst that's possible, it's so implausible that you'd have to be pretty deluded to think it. Fact is, it's far easier to smear some remote UN bureaucrat or some gaggle of foreign scientists as part of the IPPC than it is to smear the CSIRO and BoM which are some of the most trusted public institutions in Australia. But when CSIRO and BoM agree with the science, and all other major elite scientific institutions, universities around the world also concur, it seems obvious that the perception of controversy outweighs the reality of controversy. This is effective like treating the noise from some loonies about intelligent design, or young earth creationism as equivilent to real disputation about evolution.

If the best account of this conspiracy theory you can manage is some vague unspecified, uncited, political pressure, or the allure of grant funding, I'm afraid your rhetoric will collapse under its own weight of nonsense.