Scientists Study How Non-Scientists Deny Climate Change (theguardian.com) 680
A new research paper suggest climate change opponents are "simulating coherence by conspiracism".
Slashdot reader Layzej says the paper "examines this behavior at the aggregate level, but gives many examples where contradictory ideas are held by the same individual, and sometimes are presented within a single publication." From the paper:
Claims that the globe "is cooling" can coexist with claims that the "observed warming is natural" and that "the human influence does not matter because warming is good for us". Coherence between these mutually contradictory opinions can only be achieved at a highly abstract level, namely that "something must be wrong" with the scientific evidence in order to justify a political position against climate change mitigation...
In a nutshell, the opposition to greenhouse gas emission cuts is the unifying and coherent position underlying all manifestations of climate science denial... Climate science denial is therefore perhaps best understood as a rational activity that replaces a coherent body of science with an incoherent and conspiracist body of pseudo-science for political reasons and with considerable political coherence and effectiveness.
"I think that people who deny basic science will continue to do so, no matter how contradictory their arguments may be," says one of the paper's authors, who suggests that the media should be wary of self-contradicting positions.
In a nutshell, the opposition to greenhouse gas emission cuts is the unifying and coherent position underlying all manifestations of climate science denial... Climate science denial is therefore perhaps best understood as a rational activity that replaces a coherent body of science with an incoherent and conspiracist body of pseudo-science for political reasons and with considerable political coherence and effectiveness.
"I think that people who deny basic science will continue to do so, no matter how contradictory their arguments may be," says one of the paper's authors, who suggests that the media should be wary of self-contradicting positions.
No they aren't denying it (Score:3, Funny)
These scientists are wrong! Liars! They don't respect our religion!
Re:No they aren't denying it (Score:4, Insightful)
These scientists are wrong! Liars! They don't respect our religion!
That's basically it. If your personal magic sky-daddy says one thing 2,000 years ago and those tricky, unreliable scientists say something different, who ya gonna believe?
I mean, a book written by ignorant, desert-dwelling sheep herders 20 centuries ago couldn't possibly be wrong about anything, could it? Never mind that these people knew nothing of science, biology, astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, chemistry, zoology, botany, astrophysics, climatology, cosmology, hydrodynamics, hygienics, immunology, magnetics, neurology, oceanography, palaeontology, or geology, and never mind that most of them had never been more than about 10 miles from the place they'd been born in their entire lives, they just couldn't be wrong about complex scientific stuff, could they? OF COURSE NOT!
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Sorry this may be feeding a troll, but this one makes too good of a point. How could such people know such things!!
http://biologos.org/blogs/brad-kramer-the-evolving-evangelical/no-modern-science-is-not-catching-up-to-the-bible
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Re:No they aren't denying it (Score:5, Insightful)
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How dare you malign The Fountainhead?!
Re: No they aren't denying it (Score:4, Insightful)
Agree that some scientists have hidden motives, but so had those who wrote the bible. The point of writing a religious book is to control people, and ride a gravy train of donations (and in some cases, church taxes) A side activity of comforting people and talking about "morale" lets them keep such control for a long time, as some people really believe the stuff.
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Re: No they aren't denying it (Score:5, Interesting)
Climate science is entirely falsifiable - it just hasn't been falsified despite all the fortunes spent on trying to do so. Nobody has yet managed to do a real experiment that showed CO2 NOT acting as a greenhouse gas (that would falsify it). Nobody has yet found a single shred of evidence that disproves the theory - while there are thousands of independent sources of evidence that all support it, and nobody has yet come up with a better explanation for the observations than that offered by climate change theory.
Any of these things would:
1) Falsify the theory
2) Win you a nobel prize
3) Guarantee you tenure and an endless supply of grant money for the rest of your life at any academic institution of your choosing.
Basically EVERY incentive is to disprove climate change.
The failure of those trying to actually falsify something does not imply it is not falsifiable. It implies the theory is almost certainly correct.
At this stage, the most single most tested scientific theory in the history of science is so unlikely to be false - that we will almost certainly never see it replaced, modified and gradually improved - yes, replaced probably not. At least not for the next several centuries. Because at this point the only thing that could do so is an observation that actually does not fit the theory. It took 500 years for technology to give us a measuring device that could pick up the things that didn't quite follow Newton, and I'd say it will take about twice that long before something fundamentally alters climate science.
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Re:No they aren't denying it (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you believe the Bible more than, say, Greek myth, Nordic paganism, or heck, an even older religion like Hinduism or Zoroastrianism?
And who said the Bible doesn't have motives attached to it? The entire book of Leviticus is about a pack of religious laws whose major purpose appears to have been social control. Seriously, do you think a law banning having sexual intercourse with your menstruating wife has no motive?
Re:No they aren't denying it (Score:5, Interesting)
There's precious little written evidence that can actually be linked to any contemporary of Jesus Christ. The Gospels are problematic, and the earliest of them can't be dated any earlier than decades after Christ's death, and the others appear to be rewrites of early versions, with inconsistenticies (like the two geneologies of Christ). The closest to a contemporary document is Josephus's writings, and when you get rid of the helpful "interpolations" of 2nd or 3rd century writers, you're left with what amounts to "there was a holy man named Jesus of Nazareth who had a number of followers, and was put to death by the Romans."
There's about as much evidence for Jesus healing the sick or raising the dead as there is for Thor causing thunder and lightning.
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There's about as much evidence for Jesus healing the sick or raising the dead as there is for Thor causing thunder and lightning.
There is more evidence for Thor causing thunder and lightning: We have never seen anyone raised from the dead but we have seen thunder and lightning. Just sayin'
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Speaking as a statistician, that's not logic and certainly not statistics. It also doesn't fit elementary probability theory. You might be able to craft a plausible argument that had that as an element, but it would need to be encircled by rules of deduction that aren't validiateable. There's no valid rule of deduction that says "a lot of people believe this, therefore it's probably true". It's easy to come up with historical counter examples.
Re: No they aren't denying it (Score:3)
Oh there is [youtu.be] not to say I am religious, but I just got into a flame war on that thread tonight with a fellow atheist.
Besides a few extreme not credible nutcases like Richard Carrier no biblical scholar agrees he never existed. Bart Ehrman in the link above is an agnostic atheist so no hidden agenda. But like what the previous poster said about Ron Hubbard existing doesn't mean I believe in Scientology.
Less than 3% of people could read or write and even less in rural areas so this means writtings for anythin
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This is why we should read books written by the great sea pirates. They know all those things, and more. They could navigate human biospheres for months to distant lands, come back, and do it more than twice.
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Desert-dwelling sheep herders weren't ignorant! They knew all about herding and breeding sheep, what kinds of food they need etc. But they couldn't write, and therefore they couldn't have written the Bible.
Re:No they aren't denying it (Score:5, Funny)
Oral tradition doesn't refer solely to that thing spouses do for their significant other on birthdays and anniversaries.
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riiiiight and since the Vatican is all in on climate change, I'm supposed to take solace that the SkyGod and Green Religion have joined forces? Really?
The pope may have finally realized that it's actually happening, but his followers? Not so much.
Re:No they aren't denying it (Score:4, Insightful)
Whilie the tactics of the pseudo-skeptics certainly have borrowed heavily from the Creationists (and the tobacco company-funded pseudoscientists), the intent isn't really to tap into belief that AGW is some sort of religious heresy. Rather, it taps into two streams; the tendencies of certain groups, particularly in conservative circles, to adopt a sort of kneejerk contrarianism to anything that requires a significant shift in the way society thinks, and in part of pure selfishness (i.e. I don't want to have to pay more for gas).
Note that not just conservatives are guilty of contrarianism. You see similar views among antivaxxers, who are often liberal or left-leaning.
For the pseudo-skeptics, having identified the audience they need to convince, it's simply a matter of tapping into the contrarianism via the classic path; associating the science with a "Liberal agenda". It probably hasn't helped that some of the chief advocates of AGW on the public stage have been liberals like Al Gore. This gives the pseudo-skeptics the target they need. When you couple that with a general Libertarian-style of anti-regulation, in which any attempt to price carbon will immediately lead to cries of government interference, well, you have a perfect mix; AGW is a Liberal lie whose sole purpose is to increase the power of the State. Finally throw in the pseudo-science itself; find a few like-minded scientists in related fields, get them to write articles in friendly papers, go on speaking tours and the like, and when they are inevitably critiqued, declare those critiques as attacks by the evil liberal scientific cabal.
Again, this was all worked out a very long time ago when the Creationists began their own attacks on science. Tap into inherent contrariarnism in certain groups, attach nefarious motives (those evolutionists are trying to get rid of God), and throw in a few friendly scientists (Michael Behe, for instance, the intellectual forebearer of Frank Spencer), concoct some scientific sounding word salads, and voila, you have your Creationist attack on science.
The AGW pseudo-skeptic community is also progressing towards the Creationists final tactic; accepting just enough of the science not to look utterly absurd. For Creationists, this was the creation of Intelligent Design, for AGW pseudo-skeptics it involves memes like "climate is always changing", or the newer "well yes, it is warming up, maybe we have something to do with it, maybe we don't, but we shouldn't do anything about it and instead should deal with the effects:.
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To me, there just isn't enough information left to be willing to pledge "my eternal soul" to, kill in the
Re:No they aren't denying it (Score:5, Interesting)
Climate Change is not a religious issue for those who "deny" it. (The other side, arguably yes...) You're confusing it with Evolution.
But interestingly, the "reasoning" and rhetoric of global warming denial is almost identical to that of evolution denial.
E.g., both promote the notion that they are up against a global conspiracy of scientists.
Re:No they aren't denying it (Score:5, Insightful)
Also see Big Tobacco's decades-long war on research into the dangers of tobacco smoke and nicotine, or the more recently revealed sugar industry's war on research showing the dangers of refined sugars to human health.
Creationism was probably the first really sophisticated propaganda war on science, but it has inspired several later pseudo-scientific propaganda wars. Creationism's intentions were more to protect Christianity from the perceived threat that if science could provide answers to the life we see today, it was going to chip away at the edifice of Theism until Atheism reigned supreme. I'd also argue that for at least some branches of Protestant Evangelism, there was the more real threat that the vast amount of social control those churches wielded being undermined if they were forced to accept that vast swathes of the Bible became understood as being metaphorical, and not literal.
The story is a bit different for the tobacco, sugar, and fossil fuel industries. For them, a general acceptance of science has material costs. People reducing sugar consumption would lead to significant drops in profits. Of course, we know just how much damage the defeat of the tobacco companies has cost their investors. As for the fossil fuel industry, well it's the biggest beast of all. The entire global economy, and some of the greatest accretions of wealth ever known to humanity, are tied up in the continued exploration, extraction and use of hydrocarbons. If there is a significant shift to alternative energy sources, the fossil fuel industry will find itself a lot poorer for it, with the long-term outlook not exactly healthy.
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Most of the ones in common worked for "the heartland institute".
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The U.S. is in a somewhat unique position because it's basicly the only country where climate change denial is not just a fringe position. Everywhere else, Climate change denial is at best some contrarian position for people who are contrarian to about anything.
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Exactly. Where is the option for "I believe in science in regards to knowing the theory behind why the earth is getting warmer but I deny that it is necessarily going to be a catastrophe and that it is the biggest threat facing humanity that needs trillions of dollars spent to reduce carbon emissions for an unknown future potential benefit."?
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That's not entirely true... the religious issue is that mankind is not supposed to have the power to destroy something that God told us to use as we please.
"Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created man in his image,
Re:No they aren't denying it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No they aren't denying it (Score:4, Informative)
Climate Change is not a religious issue for those who "deny" it.
Yes, it often is.
https://www.google.com/#q=reli... [google.com]
To say there's no religious component denying climate change to it is simply incorrect.
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For you, maybe. For others, it definitely is. There was a convention of Christians recently where Donald Trump's candidacy was hotly debated. One group said that since God let Trump win the Republican nomination, that was the sign that God wanted them to vote for Trump whatever his faults. Another group said that God was testing their strength to stand up to an unrighteous man. There were fairly prominent individuals in both groups.
I'm sure Climate Change is a religious issue for people like that.
Re:No they aren't denying it (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No they aren't denying it (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you seen any sign that the Roman Catholics don't believe in birth control? They may consider it a sin to practice it, but they believe in it as a fact.
You need to distinguish between what someone believes to be a fact and what they consider to be a moral or ethical good (or evil). The two can be nearly orthogonal. If the church didn't believe in birth control, they would probably be less active in arguing against it.
Thus, the Roman Catholic church not having the attitude towards the practice of birth control that you believe proper is not a sign that they have an unscientific disbelief in it. Until Ethics, Psychology, and Sociology become real sciences the church's current attitude is not unscientific. If they do, perhaps it will be able to adapt to them, also.
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Most people who consider themselves to be morally upright will become amazingly lazy once any degree of actual sacrifice is warranted.
For example, nobody wants to stand up and take action to hold their elected officials accountable. They all want someone else to do it for them.
Same is true for climate change. They don't want to do anything costly or hard. So instead they engage in amazing mental gymnastics to justify that nothing needs doing, and that doing something might actually be harmful.
It's how we
Re:Y'know... Actually... (Score:4, Informative)
Trees and plants only grow faster if we aren't also cutting them down all over the globe (and in many cases they are just burning the wood, which creates even more CO2).
Nature's ability to rebound is severely limited when we are attacking it from every possible angle (air pollution, water pollution, deforestation, soil-exhaustion, pesticides, etc).
The earth may be a big place, with lots of hidden stabilizers, but humans are an even larger and more destabilizing force
Re:Y'know... Actually... (Score:5, Informative)
XKCD produced this graph http://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com] to shows how temperature has changed over the last 22,000 years
Hiding the decline (Score:4, Informative)
XKCD produced this graph http://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com] to shows how temperature has changed over the last 22,000 years
xkcd is great, but the data he referenced follows the infamous "hide the decline" trick. The 'trick' is nothing more than using the instrumental temperature record to fill in gaps or quality in data. For the proxy records cited going back 20k years, the accuracy and precision over the last 100 is poor and the authors themselves state as much. Thus, to complete the data set through to today the instrumental record is included from 1900 onwards.
Nothing really wrong with that. The only caveat is in how you interpret the graph. If you look at the graph and observe that there is an unprecedented trend set off at 1900, the beginning of the industrial era you have to be careful. The unprecedented trend ALSO coincides with a change in methodology and data source in the graph. Ruling out how sensitive the proxy data is to short term spikes like today is vitally important to interpreting that part of the graph well, and we're still working that.
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I know that many people don't like xkcd, but he had a nice cartoon where you can see the difference between a natural changing climate and what we have right now: Timeline [xkcd.org]
It's Politics, Not Conspiracy (Score:4, Insightful)
Science is not immune to politics. It's really that simple.
Dishonest Arguments not Politics (Score:5, Insightful)
However they believe that this argument is not strong enough to prevent everyone deciding to cut greenhouse gas emissions so, although they really believe the science, their only option to prevent the economic problems they are worried about is to attack the science and try to pretend that it is wrong. So really this is simply a dishonest argument made be people who are so afraid of the impact of curbing greenhouse gases that they attack the arguments for this in the only way that has any chance of success even though they don't really believe the argument they are making themselves
When the chips are down so to speak it is amazing how overwhelmingly people will back science. One of the best examples of this which is often pointed out is despite all the arguments in US schools about whether to teach evolution vs. creationism (or whatever fancy name is the flavour of the day) everytime there is a concern about a new disease evolving an spreading e.g. SARS, bird flu, swine flu etc. no politician stands up and says that we should do nothing because viruses can't evolve. So when lives are on the line people really do believe in science to help and guide them but if they do not see an immediate threat to their well being then they'll happily undermine and ignore it to keep up their own standard of living.
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[citation needed}
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Sure, but that's true of anything that involves more than once person. So like a lot of know-nothings, you've mistaken "simple in principle" with "simple in consequences".
Re:It's Politics, Not Conspiracy (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is why science has built-in processes to deal with bias. It isn't perfect, and it can take time, but eventually fraud or bad science is caught.
And really, at this point, with so many streams of evidence for AGW, to deny that human-caused CO2 emissions are having a significant impact on global climate really is no different than denying that all life evolved from some common ancestor, or that eating high amounts of refined sugar is hazardous to your health, or that smoking cigarettes leads to cancer and lung disorders.
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Just make all the deniers move to the coast, they will be underwater soon enough.
Replicated Studies (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Replicated Studies (Score:5, Informative)
I've also heard that many of the global warming studies don't include the solar cycles the sun goes through as well.
You mean these cycles? [cabrillo.edu]
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Interestingly, the results in many of those studies have not been replicable.
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Didn't they recently say that many scientific papers/studies cannot be replicated? I've also heard that many of the global warming studies don't include the solar cycles the sun goes through as well.
I also heard that the reason Trump won't release his taxes is because it will reveal his donations to NAMBLA.
It's amazing what you can hear if you don't care about truth or nominating the source of where you heard it,
This isn't really that hard to understand (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with climate science is that it's so difficult. The average person the street has little hope of understanding all the data and how it interacts. They can never, therefore, have confidence in the results being reported to them. I'm largely in the same boat, btw; despite on and off studying over the past several years, I still don't really have a grasp on how all the data ties together and consequently I don't have a high degree of confidence in the reported conclusions of others.
Given this, attacking on the basis of "CLIMATE CHANGE" is the absolutely worst approach. The ignorance of your target audience will prompt them to respond contrary to your goals. Instead focus should be placed on the specifics; clean air emissions, water discharge standards, ect... Why? Because these are things people can understand, and they are immediately relevant to them. I don't want to live next to a factory dumping shit into the air/water, and neither does anyone else. That should be how climate change is addressed; not on the large scale, but rather the personalized one.
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If we pollute the land and water, not just to the point of being unpleasant, but actually to the point of being unable to support plant life or causing ecosystem collapse, then that is climate change.
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On a personalized scale, people see their energy bills increasing and their freedom diminishing, but they don't personally see harmful weather changes and they haven't personally had to deal with water encroaching on their beach house.
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I've seen articles psychologizing both sides(actually there are more sides), and the articles don't have to be wrong in order to be counterproductive. When you're reducing your opponent in the debate as being the mere product of psychological and social drivers, you're effectively dismissing part of the debate.
So you get polarization that loses sight of the main issues. So the public debate becomes a mass of lousy thinking where confirmation bias dominates everything.
At the same time the possibility to be i
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what amounted to a typographical error
If that's all you've got out of it, you're not worth talking to. I've looked into this in depth and have had this debate with others several times.
The blame can be shared (Score:4, Insightful)
Claim from the late 20th to early 21st century: Global Warming means that the planet it getting hotter. Temperatures will rise.
Life: Record lows in winter
Reaction: Change the term from Global Warming to Climate Change.
Claim from 2007 post multiple hurricanes: Global warming will only make hurricanes more frequent and more powerful.
Life: They haven't, they aren't.
Reaction:Just wait
Claim: Global warming will cause droughts.
Life: Flooding and heavy rains.
Global Warming Experts Reaction: Dry places will get drier, wet places will get wetter.
Claim: People who deny global warming should be discredited as scientists.
Life: Debate, discussion, new data and learning happen. Global Warming/Climate change has had its share of bad science and reckless predictions on both sides of the fence and it makes it easy for people to believe what they want OR what they SEE OR simply become resistant to the concept believing the issue to be more political than scientific.
Slashdot Reaction to this post: Predictable
Re:The blame can be shared (Score:5, Informative)
Bad Predictions: Claim from the late 20th to early 21st century: Global Warming means that the planet it getting hotter. Temperatures will rise. Life: Record lows in winter Reaction: Change the term from Global Warming to Climate Change.
Actually this prediction was right, the hottest years on record are all recent years. Temperatures did rise, on average. That doesn't mean that there isn't a town where it is colder in one month of the winter.
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"hottest years on record"
For how long have we had relatively accurate temperature measurement?
Globally, we have had direct measurements of air and sea temperature since 1850.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:The blame can be shared (Score:5, Insightful)
e.g. If the three months of winter on average way above normal, but I can find one day over the three month period that was unusually cold, I am going to pretend the entire winter was record cold.
e.g. Only hurricanes that make land fall in the continental US count because they're the only ones I hear about on the news
e.g. Ignore the widespread droughts, it's always raining somewhere.
Re:The blame can be shared (Score:5, Informative)
e.g. If the three months of winter on average way above normal, but I can find one day over the three month period that was unusually cold, I am going to pretend the entire winter was record cold.
Actually, it's more like "if it's cold outside my door, then the whole world must be cooler than normal".
It's worth noting that the "greenhouse effect" is much less pronounced in the winter than the summer, because in the winter there's less energy to be trapped. In fact in the polar regions there's practically none. So expect winters to still be cold, in fact you may get record cold as weather patterns are disrupted (e.g., 2014) by latitude gradients in energy trapped.
In fact models have predicted a pattern of both extreme highs and lows for twentyyears now. It's only when you integrate over the entire surface of the globe that you see "global warming". Consider this quote from a 1995 New York Times article [nytimes.com]:
A four-degree warming, some scientists say, could cause ice at the poles to melt, resulting in rising sea levels. It would also shift climatic zones and make floods, droughts, storms and cold and heat waves more extreme, violent and frequent
This idea that global warming is disproved by local cold snaps is just a straw man argument.
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There have been no "record lows in winter" for climate. Are you talking about local weather? I'm sure we could get you some remedial understanding of "weather vs climate" if you feel you need it.
Until you demonstrate you understand the distinction, your comments are not going to carry the impact you want.
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While as a scientist i know that climate change will be observable and is clearly cause by humans, I agree with your point.
In the media there is a representation of climate science which very often exaggerates, adds own interpretations and creates unjustified causal relations between observation and hypothesis.
I for my part would always like to consider the "null hypothesis" which means that if there is a big storm (or two in a row) i should ask how unlikely this would have been to observe it without climat
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'Climate change' was a term coined by a Republican to make 'Global Warming' seem less scary.
'Climate change' is a natural consequence of 'global warming', and many scientists still refer to it as such because that's the accurate thing to say.
"The second premise is also wrong, as demonstrated by perhaps the only individual to actually advocate changing the term from 'spherical warming' to 'climate change', Republican political strategist Frank Luntz in a controversial memo advising conservative politicians o
Apparently we shouldn't worry (Score:2)
Common for Cranks (Score:5, Informative)
Note that holding contradictory beliefs is fairly common of conspiracy theorists (link [wikipedia.org]):
Another study titled Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories managed to show that, not only will cranks be attracted to and believe in numerous conspiracy theories all at once, but will continue to do so even if the theories in question are completely and utterly incompatible with one another. For instance, the study showed that: "... the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered [and that] ... the more participants believed that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when U.S. special forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive," and that "Hierarchical regression models showed that mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively associated because both are associated with the view that the authorities are engaged in a cover-up".
Citation: Wood, Michael J., Karen M. Douglas, and Robbie M. Sutton. "Dead and alive beliefs in contradictory conspiracy theories." Social Psychological and Personality Science 3.6 (2012): 767-773.
It's the Science News Media's Fault (Score:5, Insightful)
Science news is largely presented by reporters with journalism educations who don't have any background in the science they're covering and as a result don't really understand the nature of what it is they're covering.
As a result, when they report an issue like climate change, they're completely unqualified to explain the actual science and instead of covering the work that scientists do, they cover the scientists instead. Instead of explaining the research that led Dr. Jones to conclude climate is changing, we get an appeal to authority.
So the reason non-scientists deny climate change is that the argument for climate change is largely being presented to them via non-scientific arguments.
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Science news is largely presented by reporters with journalism educations who don't have any background in the science they're coverin
The exception being, of course Science News [sciencenews.org], which I've subscribed to for over 30 years.
hal (Score:3, Informative)
Re:hal (Score:4, Informative)
Before Professor Lewis became senile, he held a different opinion:
Hal Lewis is 93 years old. He retired 25 years ago.
And Montford is a fiction writer and blogger whose crackpot conspiracy theories have been well and truly debunked.
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Professor Lewis' senility is not connected to his opinions regarding scientific theories.
His impairment is well-known in the UCSB and APS communities.
Re:hal (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell us more about the "(literally) trillions of dollars driving" the GW scam.
Re:hal (Score:5, Informative)
You need some form of citation to show there is a lot of money in the oil business?
Try google.
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
132 billion in a single years profits (2015) including only the top ten companies combined.
Re: hal (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, a *physicist* is telling us the climatologists are making it all up. Not based on data, of course, merely on the phrasing of some leaked emails (never mind that those "climategate" scientists were thoroughly cleared by *eight* independent investigations).
And again the old accusation of vast amounts of money tempting the scientists (though all the scientists ever see is a moderate salary), while desperately ignoring the *far* vaster sums thrown around by fossil fuel industries, who have already been caug
Crying Wolf (Score:2, Insightful)
Alot of the skepticism stems from the doomsday-esque presentation of the scientists. I lost count of all the embearded professors who predicted the world would be under water by now, or one big desert, etc. These people are extremists so of course, rational people tune this stuff out.
If they would present their case in a more level-headed manner I think most people would be receptive to what they have to say.
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Which "scientists" are these? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are the "scientists" conducting these "studies" psychologists or behavioral scientists? Because as far as I know, those are the only "scientists" who study why people would react one way or another to a situation. I mean marketing people do too, but that's hardly science. The cited article is unclear although what is clear, apart from the APA format of citation, is that it does not follow the standard format of SCIENTIFIC articles. Usually an article by SCIENTISTS doesn't go "1. Introduction 2. Conclusion". There's a whole lot missing on things like materials and methodology, discussion, etc.
So if you want an additional tip as to why people (including scientists, for I am one) reject climate change "science" - here's a big hint: follow the scientific method. Note that I am not even discussing the actual data evidence for or against climate change. I am discussing the lack of credibility of people who call themselves "scientists" but clearly are not. The scientific method and the way scientific articles are laid out is not new and does not need to be reinvented.
Perhaps the confusion arises because social sciences people are actually starting to believe that they are "scientists" because they took Poli Sci.
The fraudsters are back! (Score:3, Informative)
Lewandowsky and Cook - back on track with another paper full of lies and bullshit.
Remember the '97%' lie? Where 72 out of 12,000 papers supported his position, 1 supported the opposition's most extreme position, so he eliminated the rest and called it "science"? The paper where he had his forum members performing analysis? The paper where dozens of other scientists pointed out he had failed to understand their papers? That one?
Or the 'Moon Landing Hoax' hoax of a paper? Where these two allowed their forum members to submit answers to their online survey of opposition beliefs? Where they claimed to have included hundreds of skeptics and skeptic websites, all of whom reported they had never participated?
Oh! What about the 'Recursive Fury' paper, where these two 'analyzed' responses from skeptics - most of which they made up themselves?
After they've had multiple papers withdrawn for ethical, legal, and methodology concerns, you'd think they'd have learned to stop publishing this type of BS, but here they are at it again.
This paper uses careful selected objections to modern climate science (such as, your model don't produce real world data) and then says that because the objector has not proposed an 100% accurate alternate model, the objector is insane.
No, that is actually what the paper claims. That skeptics are not sane, or rational, or capable of coherent thought. All because some of them admit they don't know what the correct answer is, when they point out that someone else's answer is wrong.
Exaggerations on both sides (Score:2, Insightful)
Much of what was in "documentaries" like Inconvenient Truth and Gaslands was obvious BS. And we hear claims that Earth will be a lifeless cinder within a couple of generations even though CO2 levels have been much higher in the past.
Most of the denials that the climate is warming goes against well documented measurements.
The truth is somewhere in between. The best approach to minimizing the problem won't involve wealth transfer to poor nations. But neither side is going to budge.
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Simple! (Score:2)
Small wonder.
Half of the population have an IQ under 100, who would have thought?
Breeders (Score:2)
This is a problem for all the breeders of the world. I'm not having kids, so go ahead and deny global warming (real or not) all you want. It'll be your spawn that fights for resources, not me or mine. I'll start caring when immortality is achieved :)
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The problem here is that people are willing to utterly ignore what has already happened. The Northwest Passage is open. The polar ice caps have shrunk. Every year is warmer than the year before. Miami Beach is flooding on clear days, they're building the streets higher.
Will humanity adapt and survive? Sure. But there will be crop failures, there will be mass starvation events, coastal cities will be lost, it will cost untold trillions of dollars.
With what we know now, CO2 emissions are the single bigg
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No, the problem is that some people have the attention span of a housefly.
A lot of "old folks" remember when cigarettes were healthy.
There was never,,,ever a time w
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"Never,,,ever"? Reason Magazine [reason.com] begs to differ - they found 18 SPECTACULARLY INCORRECT predictions from around 1970, including:
1) Harvard biologist George Wald es
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Read my statement. Now read your response. Do you see any connection?
I said this:
How many of those 18 (count 'em, eighteen!") SPECTACULARLY INCORRECT things scientists said in 1970 include an ice age?
A handful, you say? Speak up, I can't hear you. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: The predictions of a "new ice age" were concoctions of the media, rather than the result of scientific stud
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Climate change has become a political cause. That's both good and bad.
It's bad because politics and political agendas inevitably overshadow science, and causes often don't tolerate opposition.
It's good because if something needs to be done to stop/prevent damage to the ecosphere, it can only happen through political action. Scientists aren't going to, on their own, be able to effect, say, reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
In a rational world the scientific evidence would be acted upon by politicians in
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The NIPCC spent the time and effort going through the IPCC reports section by section exposing their fraud. An appropriate response to the NIPCC would be to prove them wrong, but instead they focus on smearing the authors and their institution. To me that shows they have nothing left to stand on and hope that nobody will read the NIPCC reports.
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Here's a news flash: the masses of people are ignorant. It's not an accusation, it's a simple observation.
Re:I'm just guessing they won't study the fraud (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the hallmarks of conspiracy theories is that they imagine huge numbers of people to act in ways that contradict their own interests, and for them to all do it with perfect (or near-perfect) levels of secrecy.
The idea that there's more money to be made shilling against burning petroleum than there is shilling for it is simply farfetched. And leaving that aspect out of it for the moment, what scientists want more than anything is to see the scientific consensus overturned. When that happens it's like a gold strike: everyone rushes to the new fields and tries to stake his claim.
Once upon a time there was something called the "Central Dogma of Molecular Biology" (it was actually called the "central dogma"): DNA makes RNA, and RNA makes proteins. Except then Howard Temin and David Baltimore discovered reverse transcriptase, which explained how RNA from retroviruses were able to alter host DNA. Their reward for finding an exception to the dogma? A Nobel Prize, and a brand new area for research and technological development. Reverse transcriptase made the highly sensitive and accurate PCR test possible.
Any scientist who can conclusively disprove AGW would be able to dine out on that for the rest of his life. He would go down in history as one of the greatest benefactors of the human race. Most importantly, everyone would think he was waaay smarter than the other scientists.
People don't understand the function of scientific consensus. It doesn't represent a final version of the Truth; it represents a division between things statements that can be stipulated for the time being without recapitulating the entire lie of evidence (e.g. that matter is made up of atoms) and things that require citation of specific evidence (e.g. that there are stable elements with atomic numbers > 118).
Re:I knew some scientists are shameless (Score:4, Insightful)
It is a debate on how much data were fabricated to draw the conclusions on climate change in the first place
No, that is just people who've been duped by propaganda demanding that scientists pick sense out their nonsense.
If you've been following Earth science since the 70s (as I have), you'll realize that there was a decades-long, vigorous debate that has gone on that was largely decisively finished by the late 90s. That said indivividual results continue to be debated vigorously, simply because the nature of evidence in a complex system like climate is always contradictory. Some places will warm while others cool. Sometimes will be cooler in places that are generally warmer. Some consequences will not appear when expected and other, unexpected things will happen.
Some misunderstanding of this complexity of course was inevitable when this first became a public issue, but by now it's clear that misunderstanding is supported by a conscious program of propaganda. Like the claim that the world "hasn't warmed since 1998", which was later modified to "the world hasn't warmed *significantly* since 1998," and which will soon become "the world has actually cooled since 2016". The problem with those 1998 comparisons is that they picked the hottest year ever by far as their *baseline*. This doesn't happen by accident; it happens as a result of a conscious and sophisticated attempt to mislead.
So yeah, it's beyond the point where these kinds of objections are worth taking seriously. Science is hard, but you can manufacture bullshit out of thin air. If you don't like the fact that people are ignoring you, join the flat-Earthers and perpetual motionists.
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Calling it "mind rot" is pretty much a tautology -- it's just another name for what's happening, not an explanation of how or why it works.
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Tell that to the plain ordinary folks who are having to move because their house keeps washing away, and there is no food on the table because the fish are all gone (this isn't a prediction, this is daily life in the coastal parts of Asia)
Re: Certainty (Score:2, Insightful)
The precise CO2 sensitivity figure hasn't been nailed down - but we know with *very high* confidence it's well above zero.
The fact that the globe has been warming *is* black and white, because *we can see it warming!* Record land temperatures again and again, huge increases in ocean heat content, 50,000 year old ice sheets melting, sea levels rising - how much more black and white can you get? Are you still waiting for final confirmation from a burning bush??
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This one caught my eye based on sheer WTFness.
circumcision in decline
Following the links, this appears to be something reported by village elders in Nairobi who are having a severe enough food shortage that they entirely rely on aid. They're unable to provide enough food for the traditional ceremony.
That sounds pretty real to me. May I assume pretty much everything else on that hysterical list actually ties back to similarly mundane things that are actually happening?
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So a leg of your argument is that "this is what Nazi Germany and Russia engaged in". You lost it right there. And starting your argument with "I am a thermal engineer" is the same as saying, "I have some facility with math based models [maybe], but I have no expertise at all in climate science, observations, modeling or predictions, however here is my uninformed opinion..." We might as well take Jill Stein's (Green party presidential candidate) opinion on global warming, she's an MD, you know, and must b
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"The global warming scientists" seem to be virtually every climatologist out there, most of who were not working in the 1970s - 1979 was 37 years ago you know. Maybe they have all been brainwashed by their deluded mentors while in grad school, but working scientsts or age 40 in 1979 would now be 77 years old - and they would be the amoungst youngest of those group. Thus it seems unlikely that todays climatologist would be the "same scientists" you speak of from the 1970s.
Of course regardless of what you thi