About the same time I had opened my browser window a week ago for this post on Bertrand Russell’s Liberal Decalogue from 1951, I had opened a page at The Inconvenient Truth by Guy McCardle on quotes that represent the very best aspects of skepticsim. It has taken me this long to get back to it.
This one in particular, strikes me as highly prescient:
A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence skepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone. – Denis Diderot
The short version takeaway is:
Skepticism is the first step toward truth –Denis Diderot
Given what we’ve seen in professional climate circles these past two weeks, I think that makes a great motto. Here’s the rest.
Since these are public domain quotes from multiple people, I’ve reproduced it in entirety here. Please give props to Guy McCardle at The Inconvenient Truth for collecting them.
Critical Thinking
Skepticism is the first step toward truth. –Denis Diderot
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones. – John Maynard Keynes
He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave. –William Drummond
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. — Albert Einstein
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. –Philip K. Dick
A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence skepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone. – Denis Diderot
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. – Martin Luther King Jr
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. –Richard Feynman
A scientist seeks the truth, wherever that may lead. A believer already knows the truth, and cannot be swayed no matter how compelling the evidence. – Author Unknown
But what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away. – McDonald/Loggins
Ridicule may lawfully be employed where reason has no hope of success . –Ed Brayton
If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. –Anatole France
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer. – Jacob Bronowski
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. – Voltaire
It is impossible to reason someone out of something that he did not reason himself into in the first place. – Jonathon Swift
Doubt grows with knowledge. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do so. – Bertrand Russell
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. – Galileo Galilei
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time. – James Thurber
That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be. –P. C. Hodgell
It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers. –James Thurber
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. –Bertrand Russell
The curse of man, and cause of nearly all of his woes, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible. –H. L. Mencken
The hard but just rule is that if the ideas don’t work, you must throw them away. Don’t waste any neurons on what doesn’t work. Devote those neurons to new ideas that better explain the data. Valid criticism is doing you a favor. – Carl Sagan
For, to speak truly, that superstition has extended itself through all nations, and has oppressed the intellectual energies of all men, and has betrayed them into endless imbecilities. –Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC)
Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning is dangerous. –Confucius
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite. – Bertrand Russell
Broad-minded is just another way of saying a fellow’s too lazy to form an opinion. –Will Rogers
Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality. – Bertrand Russell
For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true;it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. –H. L. Mencken
Evidence
A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and giving to them only that degree of credibility which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure the world from most of the ills from which it is suffering. –Bertrand Russell
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. – Carl Sagan
In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. –Stephen Jay Gould
That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence . –Christopher Hitchens
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. –Aldous Huxley
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? – John Maynard Keynes
It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong. –John Maynard Keynes
The correct scientific response to something that is not understood must always be to look harder for the explanation, not give up and assume a supernatural cause. – David Attenborough
It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. –W.K. Clifford
It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true. –Bertrand Russell
Not until the empirical results are exhausted need we pass on to the dreamy realms of speculation . –Edwin Hubble
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. – David Hume
A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. – David Hume
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish. –David Hume
Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all. – Charles Babbage
The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other. –Francis Bacon
The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion. – Stephen Jay Gould
To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, but to imagine your facts is another. – John Burroughs
When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. –James Whitcomb Riley
The better a man knows the truth, the less he is likely to condemn. – Sebastian Castellio
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work. –John von Neumann
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. – Bertrand Russell
On Sciences
Science is organized knowledge. – Herbert Spencer
I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true. – Carl Sagan
Truth in science can best be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one. – Konrad Lorenz
[Science is] a series of judgements, revised without ceasing. –Pierre Emile Duclaux
Science is nothing but trained and organised common sense differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit; and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman’s cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club. –Thomas Henry Huxley
True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant. –Miguel de Unamuno
[Science is] the desire to know causes. –William Hazlitt
[Science is] the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another. –Thomas Hobbes
It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young. –Konrad Lorenz
There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance. – Hippocrates
The great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. –Thomas Henry Huxley
Science is the disinterested search for the objective truth about the material world. – Richard Dawkins
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions. –Claude Levi-Strauss
Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don’t. – Pete Seeger
Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary. –Albert Einstein
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. –Albert Einstein
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. –Adam Smith
The compass that today guides this timeless endeavor is scientific inquiry. It is science that gazes outward, providing the grand questions that challenge us to journey farther and farther from home. But it is also science that peers inward, exploring previously inaccessible areas of the Earth, and asking the practical questions that help us to make Earth safer, protect our citizens, and expand our economy. –NASA Roadmap “Exploring our Planet for the Benefit of Society”, 2005
Science is the only way of knowing – everything else is superstition. –Robert Park
Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them a man of science can never rise. –Ivan Pavlov
Thought-provocation
So you’re offended. So fucking what? – Stephen Fry (talking about religious objections to free speech)
Never argue with an idiot. The best outcome you can hope for is that you won an argument with an idiot. –Anonymous
I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief . –Gerry Spence
In the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more comforting than the fantasy. – Carl Sagan
Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do. – Voltaire
Give to us clear vision that we may know where to stand and what to stand for – because unless we stand for something, we shall fall for anything. – Peter Marshall
Whoever is still seeking for miracles so that he may believe is himself a wonder, who does not believe while the world around him does . –Saint Augustine
If you don’t think too good, don’t think too much. –Yogi Berra
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing. –Thomas Henry Huxley
Faith is believing what you know ain’t so. – Mark Twain
The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of “Spiritualism” is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a “medium” hired at a guinea a séance. – Aldous Huxley
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. – Oscar Wilde
When you have no basis of argument, abuse the plaintiff . –Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC)
The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not. – Eric Hoffer
There’s a sucker born every minute. – Joseph Bessimer (not Phineas T. Barnum)
Heathen, n: A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel. –Ambrose Bierce
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought. –John Kenneth Galbraith
It is harder to conceal ignorance than to acquire knowledge. – Arnold Glasgow
Never give in – never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. –Winston Churchill
Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. –Thomas Carlyle
There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity . –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Bigotry dwarfs the soul by shutting out the truth. –Edwin Hubbell Chapin
You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life. –Winston Churchill
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Faith” is a fine invention When Gentlemen can see - But Microscopes are prudent In an Emergency. –Emily Dickinson
I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures but with experiments and demonstrations. –Galileo Galilei
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness. –Dalai Lama
A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a beginner all his life. – Robin G. Collingwood
Other
Heaven wheels above you displaying to you her eternal glories and still your eyes are on the ground. – Dante Alighieri
We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity. –Marie Curie
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religions. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough. –Aldous Huxley
Some people are like Slinkies. Not really good for anything but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs. –Anonymous
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature. –Jacob Bronowski
Truth exists. Only lies are invented. –Georges Braque
I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. Marie Curie
Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. No, not Thomas Jefferson – it was John Philpot Curran
The mob has no ruler more potent than superstition . –Quintus Curtius Rufus
There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity. – Robertson Davies
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. –John Dewey
Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it. –Emily Dickinson
Men talk of heaven, – there is no heaven but here; Men talk of hell, – there is no hell but here; Men of hereafters talk, and future lives, - O love, there is no other life – but here. – Omar Khayyám
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. –Denis Diderot
I would like to be remembered as a person who made trouble where trouble was needed. – Studs Terkel
I have always observed that when people are interrupted in the performance of some egregious stupidity their feelings are hurt. – Anthony Trollope
We are all born ignorant, but we must work hard to remain stupid. – Benjamin Franklin
Four stages of acceptance: i) this is worthless nonsense, ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view, iii) this is true, but quite unimportant, iv) I always said so. –J.B.S. Haldane
A man should never put on his best trousers when he goes out to battle for freedom and truth. – Henrik Ibsen
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. –Thomas Jefferson
The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract. –Oliver Wendell Holmes
Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible positions. – Thomas Jefferson
Morality & Ethics
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant. –H. L. Mencken
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life, so aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something. –Henry David Thoreau
The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis. – Dante Alighieri
There are causes worth dying for but none worth killing for. – Albert Camus
The time is always right to do what is right. – Martin Luther King Jr
In the name of noble purposes men have committed unspeakable acts of cruelty against one another. – J. William Fullbright
Prejudice is opinion without judgment . –Voltaire
You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists. –Abbie Hoffman
Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself. – Robert Ingersoll
There is nothing more unequal, than the equal treatment of unequal people. –Thomas Jefferson
Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof. – Ashley Montague
In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock. –Thomas Jefferson
Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too . –Voltaire
All it takes for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing. – Edmund Burke
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. – Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing in a biography of Voltaire
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities . –Voltaire
Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society. –Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
Prejudices are what fools use for reason . –Voltaire
We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. –Karl Popper
Alternative Medicine
Penicillin cures pneumonia even if you’re in a coma, but alternative medicine only seems to work when you are awake. – R. Barker Bausell
I suffered from chronic hypochondria for years. Eventually I went to a naturopath and was cured with a course of broad-spectrum placebos . –M. Cullen
There must be some limit to the thing. It cannot go on to infinity. (Es muss ein Ende geben, es kann nicht bis ins Unendliche weitergehen). – Samuel Hahnemann (to Dr Schreter, Sept 13th 1829, Writing about Homeopathic Dilutions)
The orthodox doctor treats what you have, and the alternative practitioner says you have what she treats. – Rose Shapiro
Rather than questioning the sincerity of the question, I’ll just repeat that this question has been asked and answered dozens of times over and over, on this site and others. The answers are always ignored, or rebutted with false ‘debunking’ statements.
So let me turn around and ask the question you should be asking: What evidence makes you non-skeptical?
Dodgy Geezer says:
February 25, 2012 at 7:34 am
“Science works by making conjectures and then proving them. It does NOT work by making conjectures and then asking people to DISPROVE them. ”
About the proving bit; that’s often difficult to do when you’re outside mathematics.
So I would say: You formulate a theory that is capable of making a prediction. Only when predictions of the theory come to pass, the theory can have a chance of counting as accepted, and only in this stage does it become a task of the opponents to disprove it.
But it looks like we don’t have to in the case of CO2AGW.
The next question is, which theory explains the LACK of warming, and my favourite candidate would be Miskolczi’s theory. I’ve already outruled the simple CO2AGW theory as insufficient.
In the case of climate science it’s of course all very fuzzy as no IPCC consensus climate scientists ever writes down the theory in a complete form together with its predictions, but we could argue that implementations of GCM’s constitute the most definitive form of a variant of the theory. Now, these are ruled out. They are disproven.
Exp said that at one point Anthony said he would accept the results of the BEST study but then backed away from this.
Yes. But later it was discovered that Muller had artificially “adjusted” the BEST data. The before and after results are here:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/article-2055191-0e974b4300000578-216_468x4731.jpg
Muller rigged the results to show a hockey stick. He was caught. Naturally, Anthony refused to accept the rigged results. Only a fool would accept the claims of a charlatan.
Great post. Excellent quotes all.
I read the post and the comments section and thought this one should be included. (My apologies if I missed it.)
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
—George Orwell
Exp says:
February 25, 2012 at 4:38 am
“So, the sincere question, in 2 parts, is: What is the evidence that most convinces you of your position and what is the evidence and what would you have to see from the science to accept that AGW is something we should mitigate against?”
That question sounds like you’re working at GISS and need to know what data you have to fabricate next.
Well, just start by showing more warming. Fudge it up, the more the better. That’ll do.
Exp says:
February 25, 2012 at 4:38 am
Everything that has been claimed over the past 15 years or so to be evidence supporting CAGW has failed. (sea levels, surface warming, stratospheric temperatures, droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, global sea ice, aerosols, mid trosphere temperatures and the hot spot, missing heat and cloud albedo etc) These have all been highlighted many times before and not just on WUWT. When one of these fails the next thing is cherry picked to try and explain the previous fail. Constant fails of scientific method are very convincing, but not suprising when only the influence with humans on climate is looked into by these, not the climate mechanisms themselves. If one thing doesn’t happen as planned it is always because of humans doing x,y,z never anything else. La Nina’s had even been blamed for non-warming, yet global warming was screamed to the hills when there was a sequence of El Ninos. It is up to these alarmist scientists to prove this evidence supoorting CAGW and they have failed.
The biggest thing I find funny most of all is your claim that you don’t support a non CAGW view unless there is 30 years of non warming. Yet your pro CAGW view has been determined on just 17 years of global temperatures at the most.
Since the 1930’s global temperatures have only warmed during a period of 17 years.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1998/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1998/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1998/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1980/to:1998/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1980/to:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1934/to:1980/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1934/to:1980/trend
Under the assumption that Exp is sincerely interested in the answer to this question, here goes.
Exp, my technical background is in control systems. Stable physical systems are dominated by negative feedback mechanisms — these are the things that make a system return to stability upon receiving some external perturbation. One of the things that is established science and a matter of absolute consensus in my discipline is that stable control systems *are never* dominated by positive feedback mechanisms. They can’t be. If they were, then they would not be stable, they would be unstable: they would be unable to return to a stable state when knocked off balance by small, commonly occurring external forces. So now we have a bunch of climate scientists with no expertise in control systems claiming that our multi-billion year old, stable atmosphere actually defies the established science of control systems. They claim that our atmosphere is dominated by a positive feedback from water vapor. Basically, they argue that the effects of a small change in CO2 concentration will be amplified by water vapor to produce a large change in surface temperature.
Now I will grant you that stable control system can be knocked out of a stable state when the external force is of sufficient magnitude — but that’s not what the CAGW theory is proposing. Its saying that small changes in CO2 concentration to levels commonly seen in prior geologic periods, will destabilize the atmosphere (or, if not destabilize it, produce a catastrophically large change in surface temperature). This is an *extraordinary* claim for which there is no support in the control systems literature. If it were true, then it would have already happened sometime previously in the geologic record.
So I’ve got a very simple answer to you question: I need to see *evidence* (not computer models) that the equilibrium climate sensitivity to CO2 is >3C and I need to see the scientists who make such claims willing to answer my questions about his/her methods and results.
There’s nothing quite as frightening as someone who knows they are right. – Michael Faraday
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. – Stephen Hawking
Smokey says:
February 25, 2012 at 9:03 am
“Yes. But later it was discovered that Muller had artificially “adjusted” the BEST data. The before and after results are here:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/article-2055191-0e974b4300000578-216_468x4731.jpg
Muller rigged the results to show a hockey stick.”
Ah well, different time scales. The problem with BEST’s hockey stick they prepared for the media was that they used data until 2005 or so and then ran a symmetric 10 year running mean on it, so the BEST hockey stick stops in 2000 and doesn’t show the last flat decade.
Which clearly showed Muller as the wannabe geo-engineering alarmist he is.
He’s a front for these guys:
http://jer-skepticscorner.blogspot.com/2011/04/best-novim-and-other-solution.html
And this is Muller’s own company:
http://www.mullerandassociates.com/index.php
One almost sensible go so far:
“So I’ve got a very simple answer to you question: I need to see *evidence* (not computer models) that the equilibrium climate sensitivity to CO2 is >3C and I need to see the scientists who make such claims willing to answer my questions about his/her methods and results.”
What experiment can be proposed and done to provide such evidence? Got another world that we can try it on?
Your proposal amounts to what I think the position of most “sceptics” really is: I’ll believe it when I see it: I need to see signs of catastrophic warming.
Pop off to the casino and ask if they’ll let you place your bets after the little ball has stopped rolling.
“We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make some sense of it; observing a ‘reality’ that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue – only we’ve all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we’re given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We’re given Time magazine and Reader’s Digest, daily papers, and the six o’clock news; we’re given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We’re attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe barroom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when was the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management?”
Tom Robbins – ‘Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
Keep on Bitchin on Anthony & Gang!
BTW… How come no one gets into the predicting polar ice cap extents anymore???? Too cyclical???? If I could put a big red S for sarcasm here, I Would!
peace
Marvelous— absolutely marvelous. As a lifelong devotee of the sainted Mencken, I am addicted to epigrams and this collection would warm his heart as well as that of Ambrose Beirce ( author of the indispensible “Devils Dictionary.”
Very good.
It reminds me of Magritte´s painting “The Treachery of Images”
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b9/MagrittePipe.jpg/800px-MagrittePipe.jpg
It reads “This is not a pipe” For those who cannot tell de difference between computer output and reality.
Phillip K. Dick’s quote also applies here.
Exp,
What would make me change my mind over climate skepticism ? Well, I would have to seriously reconsider my position if you could find the missing hotspot in the troposphere. Without it, there is no water vapour amplification of the warming effect of CO2 and hence no crisis.
Now, would you like to answer your own question and tell us what you would accept as falsifying the man-made global warming hypothesis. We’re all waiting.
I know I responded to your post already, but I can’t lead the above false and misleading statement go without calling you out on it.
For from it, AGW is not a well-established truth. It’s theory not supported by real-world observations. It’s based on spurious, adjusted data and ignores the facts of natural climate change, not the least of which are we are still recovering from the Little Ice Age and no one can show the warming has exceeded previous Holocene warm periods which must have been entirely natural in cause.
In short, nobody has shown the late 20th century warming to be either unnatural or unprecedented. Nobody has shown the climate models accurately reflect the processes that control the real climate and nobody has shown the climate to be as unstable as it must be for AGW to be true.
Just to be clear that you get it, climate models do not output data or facts. Climate models produce the results they are programmed to output.
The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret.
– Terry Pratchett, “The Truth”
dcfl51 says:
February 25, 2012 at 10:20 am
Missing heat in the troposphere? I thought it was lost in the deep ocean. Silly me!
Michael Palmer says:
February 25, 2012 at 7:40 am
Apart from many true but redundant ones, there are a few questionable quotes in this list. Examples:
1. “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence .” –Christopher Hitchens
The only statements that can rightfully “be asserted without evidence” are simply the rules of logic
——————
I think that rather than disproving Hitchens you are agreeing with him.
Dear Anthony Watts
In regard to the many admirable quotations in your recent WUWT essay “Relevant quotes on skepticism – and a motto for our times”, please let me advocate for this one: “Be First with the Truth.”
Two fundamental virtues of “Be First with the Truth” are:
• it is the simplest and shortest of maxims, and
• the other virtues in your WUWT essay all follow from it.
Uncompromising fidelity to this simplest-yet-toughest of principles — extending in a chain of integrity from the lowest lance corporal to the highest levels of command — has sustained America’s troops (and the families of those troops) through many years of a grinding tough war. Semper Fi!
We all appreciate that Peter Gleick gravely violated “Be First with the Truth” … indeed, I was myself among the first to break the story here on WUWT (before even you, Anthony!), and among severest to criticize Gleick’s actions (more severe even than you, Anthony!). So I hope you will not mind that I apply the principle “Be First with the Truth” with equal strictness to the Heartland Institute.
[snip – I do mind, and I’m not going to let you steer another thread into areas you want to discuss that are waayyy off-topic for a thread about quotes – Anthony]
And so, it is entirely appropriate that rationally skeptical forums (like WUWT) severely criticize Peter Gleick’s gross failure to “Be First with the Truth.” And similarly, it is entirely appropriate too — and absolutely essential to the integrity and effectiveness of rational skepticism — that the Heartland Institute’s failures to “Be First with the Truth” are criticized with similarly uncompromising severity.
Exp says:
February 25, 2012 at 9:53 am
“Pop off to the casino and ask if they’ll let you place your bets after the little ball has stopped rolling.”
We can to go to the casino and place our bets at out liesure if we so choose. As far as the ‘solutions’ to ‘Climate Change’ go, they will be forced upon us at gunpoint by government. Truth be told, sceptics are too stoopid for their own good and climate scientists are the true saviours of Mother Gaia, even thought they can’t presently locate the missing heat, are they not?
Exp says:
February 25, 2012 at 9:53 am
“Your proposal amounts to what I think the position of most “sceptics” really is: I’ll believe it when I see it: I need to see signs of catastrophic warming.
Pop off to the casino and ask if they’ll let you place your bets after the little ball has stopped rolling.”
So you are placing your trust in discredited GCM’s. Well, maybe they’ll fix them so they can explain the current lack of warming and then we’ll have another go at CO2AGW theory Vs. 2.0.
All the models are designed to hindcast correctly, or hindcast what James Hansen thinks the temperature history of the planet is, which is a bad reference to start with. You trust these models? Why do you trust them? Here’s why. Copy of a comment of mine from PG’s(*) notrickszone.com :
It occured to me in attempts at debate with William M. Connolley on the “Omitted Variable Fraud” thread on WUWT (he ignored me, BTW) that the modelers have a very simple means of achieving whatever future prediction they want.
a) Any model must maintain conservation of energy – in each time step, energy between cells can only be redistributed, not created or destroyed. This is something that goes easily wrong, so they really do test that that holds; an error here would be too blatant.
b) Energy comes in from the sun. This is modelled as largely constant; with which I agree. TSI won’t change much.
c) Energy leaves only to space.
By controlling c) they control the temperature of the model. That’s why they are so relaxed when one tells them, look, you try to model a chaotic system, your simulation MUST go off the rails in no time. They know it can’t happen – they simply control the energy that leaves to space.
And how do they do it? Simple.
The Aerosol fudge factor. Control the thermalization of photons by aerosols and you have a control knob for the energy content of the model. After decades of research, there are still large uncertainties about the forcing caused by aerosols, and even whether it’s net positive or negative.
They have no intention of changing that. If experiments would narrow down the range they would lose this very simple means of tuning the models to whatever warming they like. There is to my knowledge no research other than more modeling going on with regards to the aerosol forcing. That modeling will of course deliver exactly the right results to justify the model’s behaviour; a scientific shell game, a tautology; an obfuscation for the public.
(*) No, another PG.
Alexander Feht says: and many others
February 25, 2012 at 7:55 am
Exp says:
February 25, 2012 at 4:38 am
30 years of no significant warming as evident in the surface temp record would pretty much be enough to change my mind.
I hope you will live that long (another 15 years). Don’t forget then, what you’ve said today.
Are you folks not paying attention? Or maybe you don’t know how to subtract! Earth’s atmospheric temperature is (January 2012) nearly the same as, or slightly below, what it was 30 years ago. There has been 30+ years of “no significant warming” as requested by Exp.
Can y’all ignore the next comment by Exp, insofar as it will be an almost exact duplicate of the comment here, where it is off-topic (O/T or OT).
Babsy, I trust you are being humorous and have your ‘sarc’ on but there might be some trolls reading this and taking your comment literally. For their benefit, the hotspot is NOT an area of the atmosphere where missing heat resides. It is an area which, according to the computer climate models, is supposed to warm FASTER than anywhere else during periods of global warming. Unfortunately for CAGW believers, this hotspot is not present in data from the warming of 1975 to 1998. Furthermore, we cannot look for it in current data because, despite what the alarmists say, they know full well that there hasn’t been any global warming for about 15 years. They will have to wait until 2025 or thereabouts before they can start looking again because that is when the NATURAL !!!!!!!! cycles evident in the 1860-2011 temperature record are next due to switch to a warming phase.
Did you intend to let is slip you have no evidence of AGW, but you believe it’s a problem anyway? Where is the science in that?
Please see More Soylent Green! says: February 25, 2012 at 6:48 am)
Gleick didn’t break “Be first with the truth,” he broke several laws, published harmful data and distributed fake documents intended to discredit those whom he disagreed with.
I have another motto for you to try on: “Don’t lie, cheat or steal or tolerate those who do.”