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My thought: ridiculous false equivalency. Conservatives don't distrust science carte blanc. Many of them will chuck money at asinine bullshit as long as it's b

My thought: ridiculous false equivalency. Conservatives don't distrust science carte blanc. Many of them will chuck money at asinine bullshit as long as it's billed as a way to kill the other team. Check out some of the more ridiculous stuff to come out of DoD. They distrust climate science. And they don't distrust the actual science, just the conclusions. And increasingly not even the most basic conclusion, just the most obvious causal theory behind that conclusion. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.

theWatcher37 10y ago
Meanwhile, anti-vax is huge in liberal soccer-mom only-shops-at-whole-foods cities. The left has its fair share of science-denying morons as well.
- skj 10y ago
  Plenty of anti-vaxers on the right, and the left makes plenty of fun of the ones on the left. Not really the same as climate deniers.
- mtberatwork 10y ago
  > Meanwhile, anti-vax is huge in liberal soccer-mom only-shops-at-whole-foods cities. Is it really "huge"? Some links to polling data might help here otherwise I would also be reticent to proclaim that it's comparable to climate denial-ism. After all, we have a president that has publicly proclaimed climate change to be a hoax and sitting members of congress that eagerly attack climate scientists on their research [1]. [1] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/lamar-smith-unbound-lays-out-political-strategy-climate-doubters-conference http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/lamar-smith-unbound-l...
  - MagnumOpus 10y ago
    That same president has of course also publicly proclaimed vaccines to cause autism. He and his tens of millions of followers are the antithesis of the liberal soccer mum, of course. [1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/trump-vaccines-autism-wrong-2017-1 http://uk.businessinsider.com/trump-vaccines-autism-wrong-20...
- viggity 10y ago
  The difference between vaccines and climate change is that we have hard evidence on vaccines. You can create a hypothesis and do a randomized double blind experiment. The results are conclusive. Climate Science is a bunch of computer models are not testable. When they're run and compared to what actually happened they're always off. e.g. Name a single climate science model that predicted "the pause" starting in '98? Climate Scientists don't release their model's code. They don't release the exact data that went into their model. Shit, isn't that one of the complaints about Wansink? That he isn't sharing his data? I'm not saying climate change isn't real, I'm saying that the level of certainty that climate scientists proclaim is problematic. I'm saying that labeling dissenters as deniers (reminiscent of holocaust deniers) is beyond the pale. I'm saying that fossil fuels have done more to advance the human condition than anything else in history of mankind.
  - nonbel 10y ago
    >"The difference between vaccines and climate change is that we have hard evidence on vaccines. You can create a hypothesis and do a randomized double blind experiment. The results are conclusive." I tried to find this a few years ago in the case of measles and it turned out to seem no such studies existed. Have you seen one?
    - viggity 10y ago
      it took a little searching, but I found one for an alternative manufacturing process of the measles vaccine. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01536405?term=AMP&rank=12 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01536405?term=AMP&ran...
      - nonbel 10y ago
        Thanks, it looks like this one was done after I was searching. This study doesn't really have the outcomes we need to measure though. There is no placebo group, they didn't check for measles diagnoses (by doctors who didn't know whether they were vaccinated), and they only measured antibody levels for 1.5 months after 1 vaccine dose in children 12-23 months old (ie before going to school when exposure usually occurs). Unfortunately, I really don't think this study offers us anything about whether "vaccines work". You can see that the main concern is whether doctors are much more likely to diagnose measles when they do not believe a vaccination occurred, and whether introduction of the lab tests made the diagnostic definition more stringent: “This was not a blind study, since the investigators knew which children had received measles vaccine. It seems probable that the occurrence of so much ‘measles-like’ illness in the vaccinated children was a reflexion of the difficulty in making a firm diagnosis of measles in the African child at one visit.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2134550/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2134550/ “A likely reason for this is that the case may have been misdiagnosed as a non-specific viral illness. Measles has become relatively uncommon in Singapore with two decades of widespread measles vaccination, and especially after the second dose policy was implemented in 1998. Many primary care doctors may not even see a single case of measles in a year. This makes diagnosis more difficult. [...] As only approximately 7% of the clinically-diagnosed cases of measles reported locally turned out to be measles by laboratory testing, there is a need for laboratory confirmation of measles to avoid misidentification of cases and improve disease surveillance.(2)” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17609829 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17609829
- throwaway729 10y ago
  > The left has its fair share of science-denying morons as well. Sure. Stupid knows no political affiliation, other than strong and unsubstantiated belief. Meanwhile, the right (in America) also has its fair share of unscientific beliefs about vaccination: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2016/12/trump_s_endorsement_of_slow_vaxxing_explains_his_appeal.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa... FWIW the only two anti-vaxxers I know in person are a retired west-coast life long democrat, and a super neo-conservative soccer mom. It seems to be more of an "anti-establishment" thing than a "left/right" thing.
- TheCoelacanth 10y ago
  The closest the left has to mainstream anti-vax politicians are the Green Party. They got a couple percent of the vote in the last election. On the right, virtually all mainstream politicians deny climate change.
averagewall 10y ago
Climate science is totally inaccessible to lay people. All we can do is trust. I'm a science teacher and when I teach climate change, it's just the bare basics and a few subjective facts. We can make cardboard greenhouses and draw pictures of IR rays getting absorbed in the atmosphere. But that's not what's in doubt. That's the stuff everyone's accepted for decades. The part people don't trust is the "it'll destroy the world". For that, I haven't got the faintest clue how right it is beyond trust. In most of high-school science, you can measure forces yourself, you can mix the chemicals yourself, you can observe stuff doing what the text book says it should. But not climate science. Unless it can be made accessible to even science graduates to actually reproduce the results from a critical point of view, it's always going to have a lot of sceptics. Not everyone has so much faith in scientists.
- MarkMc 10y ago
  My understanding is that there isn't really a scientific consensus that "it'll destroy the world". But there is a consensus that "human activity is causing global warming" - yet this is something that a significant minority of people do not believe.
- throwaway729 10y ago
  EPA has a website describing the mid and long term effects of climate change in N America. With plenty of citations a dedicated student or teacher could follow up on. Very accessible, and did not include "will destroy the world". Incidentally, your critique also applies to literally most science, including very good and obviously successful science. Can you really prove to your students that Intel doesn't have magic pixie dust it uses to speed up its processors? Probably not without expensive equipment your classroom cannot afford. And can you reproduce the LHC experiments? Of course not. edit: Here's the EPA website: https://www.epa.gov/climate-change-science/future-climate-change https://www.epa.gov/climate-change-science/future-climate-ch... There are 5 references, all larger reports which themselves link into the actual literature. The National Climate Assessment in particular is presented in the form of a slick website with hundreds of citations into the literature for curious readers: http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report The information is there, in extremely digestible form, and at the top of google search results. Naturally, reproducing the results of literally hundreds of cited papers is going to take you a while, but in most cases, there's nothing actually stopping you... And here's a list of climate models, some of which you can download. The others have links to contact info: http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2009/06/getting-the-source-code-for-climate-models/ http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2009/06/getting-the-source-c... It's also worth noting that scientists are usually fairly transparent about when they're guessing WRT effects of climate change and when they're pretty certain. The near-term stuff (~hundred years) is largely guess work based on simulations -- we can't do much better. The most certain prediction is that weather will become harder to predict. The longer-term stuff (~hundreds to thousands of years) is much more well-understood because there're historical records relating GHG levels to climate.

theWatcher37 10y ago

Meanwhile, anti-vax is huge in liberal soccer-mom only-shops-at-whole-foods cities. The left has its fair share of science-denying morons as well.

skj 10y ago
Plenty of anti-vaxers on the right, and the left makes plenty of fun of the ones on the left. Not really the same as climate deniers.
mtberatwork 10y ago
> Meanwhile, anti-vax is huge in liberal soccer-mom only-shops-at-whole-foods cities. Is it really "huge"? Some links to polling data might help here otherwise I would also be reticent to proclaim that it's comparable to climate denial-ism. After all, we have a president that has publicly proclaimed climate change to be a hoax and sitting members of congress that eagerly attack climate scientists on their research [1]. [1] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/lamar-smith-unbound-lays-out-political-strategy-climate-doubters-conference http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/lamar-smith-unbound-l...
- MagnumOpus 10y ago
  That same president has of course also publicly proclaimed vaccines to cause autism. He and his tens of millions of followers are the antithesis of the liberal soccer mum, of course. [1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/trump-vaccines-autism-wrong-2017-1 http://uk.businessinsider.com/trump-vaccines-autism-wrong-20...
viggity 10y ago
The difference between vaccines and climate change is that we have hard evidence on vaccines. You can create a hypothesis and do a randomized double blind experiment. The results are conclusive. Climate Science is a bunch of computer models are not testable. When they're run and compared to what actually happened they're always off. e.g. Name a single climate science model that predicted "the pause" starting in '98? Climate Scientists don't release their model's code. They don't release the exact data that went into their model. Shit, isn't that one of the complaints about Wansink? That he isn't sharing his data? I'm not saying climate change isn't real, I'm saying that the level of certainty that climate scientists proclaim is problematic. I'm saying that labeling dissenters as deniers (reminiscent of holocaust deniers) is beyond the pale. I'm saying that fossil fuels have done more to advance the human condition than anything else in history of mankind.
- nonbel 10y ago
  >"The difference between vaccines and climate change is that we have hard evidence on vaccines. You can create a hypothesis and do a randomized double blind experiment. The results are conclusive." I tried to find this a few years ago in the case of measles and it turned out to seem no such studies existed. Have you seen one?
  - viggity 10y ago
    it took a little searching, but I found one for an alternative manufacturing process of the measles vaccine. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01536405?term=AMP&rank=12 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01536405?term=AMP&ran...
    - nonbel 10y ago
      Thanks, it looks like this one was done after I was searching. This study doesn't really have the outcomes we need to measure though. There is no placebo group, they didn't check for measles diagnoses (by doctors who didn't know whether they were vaccinated), and they only measured antibody levels for 1.5 months after 1 vaccine dose in children 12-23 months old (ie before going to school when exposure usually occurs). Unfortunately, I really don't think this study offers us anything about whether "vaccines work". You can see that the main concern is whether doctors are much more likely to diagnose measles when they do not believe a vaccination occurred, and whether introduction of the lab tests made the diagnostic definition more stringent: “This was not a blind study, since the investigators knew which children had received measles vaccine. It seems probable that the occurrence of so much ‘measles-like’ illness in the vaccinated children was a reflexion of the difficulty in making a firm diagnosis of measles in the African child at one visit.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2134550/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2134550/ “A likely reason for this is that the case may have been misdiagnosed as a non-specific viral illness. Measles has become relatively uncommon in Singapore with two decades of widespread measles vaccination, and especially after the second dose policy was implemented in 1998. Many primary care doctors may not even see a single case of measles in a year. This makes diagnosis more difficult. [...] As only approximately 7% of the clinically-diagnosed cases of measles reported locally turned out to be measles by laboratory testing, there is a need for laboratory confirmation of measles to avoid misidentification of cases and improve disease surveillance.(2)” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17609829 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17609829
throwaway729 10y ago
> The left has its fair share of science-denying morons as well. Sure. Stupid knows no political affiliation, other than strong and unsubstantiated belief. Meanwhile, the right (in America) also has its fair share of unscientific beliefs about vaccination: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2016/12/trump_s_endorsement_of_slow_vaxxing_explains_his_appeal.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa... FWIW the only two anti-vaxxers I know in person are a retired west-coast life long democrat, and a super neo-conservative soccer mom. It seems to be more of an "anti-establishment" thing than a "left/right" thing.
TheCoelacanth 10y ago
The closest the left has to mainstream anti-vax politicians are the Green Party. They got a couple percent of the vote in the last election. On the right, virtually all mainstream politicians deny climate change.

averagewall 10y ago

Climate science is totally inaccessible to lay people. All we can do is trust. I'm a science teacher and when I teach climate change, it's just the bare basics and a few subjective facts. We can make cardboard greenhouses and draw pictures of IR rays getting absorbed in the atmosphere. But that's not what's in doubt. That's the stuff everyone's accepted for decades. The part people don't trust is the "it'll destroy the world". For that, I haven't got the faintest clue how right it is beyond trust. In most of high-school science, you can measure forces yourself, you can mix the chemicals yourself, you can observe stuff doing what the text book says it should. But not climate science. Unless it can be made accessible to even science graduates to actually reproduce the results from a critical point of view, it's always going to have a lot of sceptics. Not everyone has so much faith in scientists.

MarkMc 10y ago
My understanding is that there isn't really a scientific consensus that "it'll destroy the world". But there is a consensus that "human activity is causing global warming" - yet this is something that a significant minority of people do not believe.
throwaway729 10y ago
EPA has a website describing the mid and long term effects of climate change in N America. With plenty of citations a dedicated student or teacher could follow up on. Very accessible, and did not include "will destroy the world". Incidentally, your critique also applies to literally most science, including very good and obviously successful science. Can you really prove to your students that Intel doesn't have magic pixie dust it uses to speed up its processors? Probably not without expensive equipment your classroom cannot afford. And can you reproduce the LHC experiments? Of course not. edit: Here's the EPA website: https://www.epa.gov/climate-change-science/future-climate-change https://www.epa.gov/climate-change-science/future-climate-ch... There are 5 references, all larger reports which themselves link into the actual literature. The National Climate Assessment in particular is presented in the form of a slick website with hundreds of citations into the literature for curious readers: http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report The information is there, in extremely digestible form, and at the top of google search results. Naturally, reproducing the results of literally hundreds of cited papers is going to take you a while, but in most cases, there's nothing actually stopping you... And here's a list of climate models, some of which you can download. The others have links to contact info: http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2009/06/getting-the-source-code-for-climate-models/ http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2009/06/getting-the-source-c... It's also worth noting that scientists are usually fairly transparent about when they're guessing WRT effects of climate change and when they're pretty certain. The near-term stuff (~hundred years) is largely guess work based on simulations -- we can't do much better. The most certain prediction is that weather will become harder to predict. The longer-term stuff (~hundreds to thousands of years) is much more well-understood because there're historical records relating GHG levels to climate.