5 ms·
Thanks, that helps. So when you said "There is literally nothing to the entire worldwide "global warming skeptic" movement that is not completely based on and
by glenra 15y ago
Thanks, that helps.
So when you said "There is literally nothing to the entire worldwide "global warming skeptic" movement that is not completely based on and funded by these well-funded and completely unscientific propaganda campaigns.", are you claiming that everybody who is a skeptic is getting their info from Amy Moritz Ridenour or some similar person?
My guess is that you're defining "the global warming skeptic movement" in a limited and essentially circular way. You're defining anybody who comes by their AGW skepticism independently or as a result of reading scientific papers or thinking things through from first principles or following the blog debates...as not part of the "movement".
As one contrary data point, I consider myself a skeptic, have followed the AGW issue for at least a decade, and I'd never heard of Amy Moritz Ridenour or - so far as I know - been influenced by her. People I have been influenced by include Steve McIntyre, Craig Loehle, all the IPCC reports, Richard Feynman, Michael Crichton, and the whole gang at RealClimate (both positively and negatively). I do tend to assume politicians are going to (a) tend to be morons, (b) tend to get their talking points from PR firms and think tanks. So if you just look at what Republican lawmakers say you might have a point. But AGW skepticism as a whole is something that has been independently invented by a great many people, including scientists who publish papers and get in debates and even get involved with the IPCC. Including people who aren't republicans.
One can surely explain some AGW skepticism as the result of astroturf organizations that fear carbon taxes, just as one can explain on the other side some AGW boosterism as the result of groups that expect to profit from Carbon Trading markets. But to explain all of it that way misses the mark. People believe what they believe based on what they know and have seen. AGW boosters and AGW skeptics tend to have different priors. They had different values going in, which flavored how they perceived the case being made by the two sides.
Some AGW skepticism is organic and perfectly reasonable, given the information available to the people involved at the time. There are lots of conflicting theories one could point at to explain the same data; some of these theories have been published in peer-reviewed literature and haven't been well-addressed.
I don't care to defend Ridenour, because I don't know her and even if she were squeaky-clean, I'm sure you can find somebody who is what you say she is. But being able to find one example of somebody in a movement who makes mistake X is different from saying that everybody in that movement makes mistake X. I think the burden of proof is still on you to support that your claims weren't ridiculously overbroad.
UPDATE: Some people become skeptics when they see alarmists engaging in shenanigans that go beyond the science or deliberately downplaying uncertainty in the science, and always doing so in the same direction. For one such instance, consider Chris Landsea's resignation letter. Was it, in your view, unjustified? Is it unreasonable for someone who has read Landsea's letter to thereafter take IPCC conclusions with a grain of salt? ( http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/LandseaResignationLetterFromIPCC.htm http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/La... )
- bfe 15y agoI'm going to leave it at that except to say I think you'll be better served spending more time with Feynman than your other sources of inspiration.
- glenra 15y agoI'm especially thinking of Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" lecture. His idea is that you should bend over backwards to expose any possible flaw in your own ideas. If you find an intellectual opponent who has made logical mistakes, fix those mistakes and try to answer the best possible version of the opposing argument. The opposite of that - the lazy thing to do - is to focus only on your opponent's weakest arguments and use them as an excuse to dismiss his views entirely. That's kind of what I see you doing in pointing at Amy whatsername. (For Crichton, I'm mostly thinking of his "Aliens Cause Global Warming" talk, which did in my view capture some of the relevant dynamic on modern "consensus"-building.)
- bfe 15y agoYes, Feynman's Cargo Cult Science lecture is an old favorite of mine, and anyone who doesn't bend over backwards to repeatedly question every assumption and bit of evidence and source of information is never going to reach the best available analysis. And doing that is hard, and all of us humans have huge limitations in our analytical abilities, and as a result I find it tremendously important to nurture an intellectual humility about my own understanding and knowledge and analysis. At the same time I find it important that at some point when you've done a lot of analysis on a lot of evidence over a long time, not to waffle about contradictory opinions that a hard look will show have little to no substance, because it's just a giant and completely uninteresting waste of time, and trying to debate every person who is wrong on the Internet who demands you provide a complete body of analysis and evidence that the Earth is not in fact flat, could easily absorb and completely waste every waking moment of one's life. I also find it tremendously important to respect every person, even when I don't believe or respect an analysis or opinion of theirs, both as a basic axiom of human existence and because doing so makes me happier and because it's the only way to open the other person to a reasoning dialog, and obviously I haven't quite mastered that yet but I am practicing. I admire that you kept to an honest effort at reasoned debate after my exasperated flame. With that said, I'm puzzled how after citing Feynman's Cargo Cult Science lecture and the importance of looking to rebut the strongest evidence rather than the weakest in an opposing view and looking straight to original scientific findings instead of to meta-meta-opinionating, the one real argument you bring up is Landsea's resgination letter. The worldwide efforts to study the Earth's climate and to study what we might want to do about it involve untold thousands of people around the entire world for years on end. What are the chances that some one human being somewhere in there doesn't spend every moment of their life behaving in an absolutely rational and honest manner? And if the chances of that are non-zero, how much do all the molecules in the Earth's oceans and atmosphere care about that? And if those molecules don't care, what would you find a more useful focus of inquiry on which to spend your brain's finite operational lifetime?