Susan Crockford writes
…commenter Brad Keyes at The Conversation defends the use of the “Ursus bogus” image with this astonishing statement:
“The problem is, only sensational exaggeration makes the kind of story that will get politicians’—and readers’—attention. So, yes, climate scientists might exaggerate, but in today’s world, this is the only way to assure any political action and thus more federal financing to reduce the scientific uncertainty.”
More at her Polar Bear Blog
@ur momisugly The Pompous Git
You opine:
‘We “denialists” are a heterogeneous lot.’
[citation needed]
I’ve attended conferences about science denialism and its psychological and neurological etiology, and have read most mainstream books you’ve heard of on the problem of denialists, so (without being ungrateful that you shared your opinion!) I’m not entirely sure you’d be able to tell me more that I’m able to tell you. I think I’m obliged to be extra “skeptical” of your characterization of denialists in light of the fact that (no offense) you *are* one by your own admission—and this can’t help but color your testimony, no matter how honest you believe you’re being. I don’t mean to be dismissive of you, of course—just rigorous. It’s about conflict of interest. If you’re an intellectual you’ll be aware, for instance, that in a serious academic seminar one would never include a denialist on a panel about denialism; & you’d understand that a book about denialism would be considered less credible (and might not find as reputable a publisher) if the author were a denialist him/herself, &c. &c.
Back to your impression of “you” as a “heterogeneous lot,” you’re probably talking about a rather superfcial diversity. And that’d be correct: given that denialists make up ~50% of the population, they can obviously be found in all shapes and sizes (even if the majority do tend to be older [60+] white males).
But if you look beneath the surface, as I’ve been doing for many years in the climate debate, informed by a bit of pre-reading about how denialists think according to today’s best science, then you’ll be struck by a number of remarkable commonalities uniting the whole denialist half of the community, and having few exceptions. Here are the first few items:
Changed words in bold:
That’s nine changes AFAICT. Still plagiarism, though.
Pompous Git:
Yep, thanks. I should have done that more precisely, but I am time constrained.
0. Because denialists mostly identify with the far right in political/electoral terms, they tend to viscerally resent government in all its forms, and to believe that any new regulation is wrong, as a matter of principle.
(Miraculously, though, when it comes to the practice of science, these Sons of Anarcholiberty suddenly declare themselves in favor of principle, rules, protocols, and Method! Oh well… consistency is the last accusation I’d lay at the foot of the climate denialist movement.)
As a “logical” corollary of these unusual beliefs, therefore, denialists are none too thrilled to hear or read about problems (such as climate change) for which science tells us the only solution is to invest a single borderless, worldwide government with the power to recalibrate the industrial metabolisms of its various subject countries by legislating any necessary aspects of public and private life, and to transfer wealth between them as and when necessary to justly reflect the respective historical culpabilities of developed versus developing countries.
The denialist’s worried reaction to any and all scientific news that necessitates a centralised, supreme temporal and conscientious authority over humankind is one of the first oddities most people notice when trying to engage them; yet, as unnatural as their reaction may appear at first, it almost makes sense when one understands the political filters through which a denialist/rightist sees and parses every single thing in his/her world.
1. For some reason, which I won’t speculate on because I’ve got a couple of papers in the works, denialists seem to become impolite and pejorative the moment a science-supporter tries to engage them on the climate issue. Of course, it’s only a minority who crescendo to outright abuse as one pursues a scientific discussion with them. But even the best-mannered denier can’t help using pejorative terms like ‘warmist’, ‘Climatism’, ‘believer,’ ‘catastrophist/alarmist,’ ‘CAGW,’ in a (subconscious?) bid to irrationalize, emotionalize and delegitimize the advocate and thus the advocacy of science. The sentence-by-sentence lexical bullying is rounded off by the denier’s hijacking of the word ‘skeptic’ for him- or herself, further insinuating that pro-science people are somehow incapable of critical thought.
At this point, many well-meaning ambassadors of science will and do simply give up, sapped and demoralized by the slow but steady verbal attrition of their dignity—which is usually the point. Another victory for the science-undermining industry.
Where does my high threshold for denier rhetoric come from? Simple. I go in with low expectations. I don’t expect the denier to accede to the kind of neutral, accurate and objective language we intellectuals would prefer (“science advocacy / pro-science / science-acceptance / science belief” vs “science rejection / science denial / science dismissal”)—I expect that my attempt to convey science will be met with knives. That way, if it just turns into a fist-fight and not a knife-fight, it’s a nice surprise and a good day for science evangelism!
2. Denialists don’t tend to be scientists. (At my most generous estimate, only 5% of denialists in the population are qualified, paid scientists.) And even when they do have a science PhD, their expertise usually turns out to be in a completely unrelated field. More often than not it’s one of those fields climate scientists think of as a bit undemanding, soft or relatively irrelevant to the problem science is trying to solve.
3. Denialists tend to subscribe to what we jocularly call in the common room ‘Methodism.’ (Yet they don’t so much as blush at their own hypocrisy when slandering the other side as ‘a religion’!! LOL).
That is, they insist on the reality of a naive, 7th-grade abstraction called “The [Modern] Scientific Method,” which is purported to have or be defined by certain “rules” saying what you can/can’t do in science.
What’s rather suggestive is how, 9 times out of 10, these “rules” just happen to say you can’t do the thing Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Peter Gleick, David Karoly, an IPCC lead author or some other science-endorsing scientist did. Very rarely does a researcher who doesn’t believe in science, like Richard Lindzen, seem to fall afoul of these “rules of science.” I’m not suspicious by nature, but I’d find it easier to believe so-called rules existed in science if they didn’t seem to be so…. welll…. systematically biased against the conduct of science-believing scientists, and hardly ever in conflict with the conduct of the science-denying scientists!
I’ve discovered on Twitter that the Methodist faith is alive and well and persists no matter how many times I ask the denialist, and they fail, to tweet me a complete list of these alleged rules. Most denialists don’t even try to answer this challenge. The more creative excuses for running away from it include: “this is a subtle topic,” “this is a complex topic,” “the rules took millennia to develop & if u expect me2 impart them2u by twitter then u don’t know the 1st thing abt science,” “go read [such and such a philosopher of science]”, etc.
[Reply: Enough with the ‘denialists’. Read the site Policy. ~ mod.]
4. Almost no denialist is aware (from high school or any other source) that science is, and always has been, fundamentally about consensus: achieving it, measuring it, using it to write policy, etc.
5. Denialists have a fondness for making facile, broad-brush generalisations, and will blithely do so with or without a single scholarly reference to substantiate them.
6. Denialists aren’t very good at uncritical reasoning.
7. Denialists generally show a gift for easy hypocrisy. Despite their so-called “science denial,” they are exasperatingly sporadic in their rejection of science. In fact, just about the *only* science they can all be counted on to disbelieve is the existential threat of AGW. Having snubbed the science on climate change, the average denialist will then admit to *accepting* the science on most, virtually all, other questions! I’ve long ago given up trying to hold them to a minimum standard of intellectual consistency—even on evolution or vaccines, it’s rare to find a climate denier principled enough, when challenged, to follow through on rejectionism. I’m sorry to say this, but from frustrating experience I have to conclude that “science denial” is almost totally false advertising.
8. Denialists have an absolute, arrogant sense of entitlement to know stuff—even information that would mislead them, even maths they wouldn’t know what to do with if they tried, even data that could easily be misunderstood in such a way as to give false comfort to delayers.
[Warning: Read the site Policy page. Labeling othrs as “denialists” is a pejorative that is not allowed here. At the very least, it takes the place of thinking. ~ mod.]
@ur momisugly Brad Keyes
Brad, you give your game away when you use the term “denialist”. It is a clear attempt to impugn by association with holocaust deniers. As it happens, my father was a guest in one of the Fuehrer’s prison camps so I find it particularly offensive.
Yes, I am a sceptic. I am sceptical of many things; it was the way I was brought up. The antonym of sceptical is gullible. Here is a partial list of publications on matters climatic on my bookshelf:
Boundary Layer Climates, TR Oke, Routledge 1987
Climate, History and the Modern World, HH Lamb, Methuen 1982
The Changing Climate: Selected Papers, HH Lamb, Methuen1968
In my collection of climatological documents there is no mention of the kind of stuff that I found in the following:
Heat: How to stop the Planet Burning, George Monbiot, Allen Lane 2006
Global Warming: Can Civilization Survive?, Paul Brown, Blandford 1996
While you may prefer the narrative in the latter, I prefer to obtain my science from credible scientists.
You may not have noticed, but Dr Pat Frank a Ph.D. chemist with more than 50 peer-reviewed articles.has been posting on this very thread. Robert Brown who lectures in physics (thermodynamics) at Duke is also a regular contributor here as well as writing university level physics texts (and.an excellent novel).
Yes, the tinfoil hat brigade also post here, but that’s due to our wonderful host’s policy. I suggest you stop the thinly veiled insults and engage at a less superficial level.
@ur momisugly Brad Keyes
I will repeat my earlier request. Stop the insults; it won’t wash. If you want to persuade us, you need to engage with us at a higher level. Like explaining where Kevin Trenberth’s missing heat is. Or credible evidence for the existence of the predicted tropospheric hot-spot. This is a very science-friendly place. When you characterise all who post here as anti-science, you merely show just how ignorant you are. It’s not a good image to convey.
Brad Keyes said @ur momisugly January 22, 2014 at 11:25 am
ROFLMAO!
Brad Keyes said January 22, 2014 at 11:25 am
Now I agree with that statement, though it’s a rather convoluted way of saying we are very good at critical reasoning. I rather thought your thesis was untrue statements were needed to persuade people. Perhaps I’m missing something…
Brad: hate to burst your stereotypical balloon, but I am a Canadian liberal. That would put me in left wing of the Democratic party, if not the socialist wing.
In Oz, I would be a labor party supporter, for the most part.
As for your contention that science is always about consensus? Einstein disagreed with you.
Your
But even the best-mannered denier can’t help using pejorative terms like ‘warmist’, ‘Climatism’, ‘believer,’ ‘catastrophist/alarmist,’
Do you see the hypocricy in this statement? I bolded it for you to make it easy to see.
BTW, what exactly are we in general, and myself in particular, denying?
Brad: Almost forgot. You are, demonstrably, an unrepentant plagiarizer.
Les Johnson said @ur momisugly January 22, 2014 at 12:59 pm
Not to mention Michael Crichton:
I am old fashioned. “1000 experients will not prove me right. 1 experiment can prove me wrong.”
But Chrichton says the sentiment well, too.
Actually there is a sense that consensus occurs in science and I have written here before about this. What we are taught at the undergraduate level is in a sense consensus or settled science; that is, after several decades certain scientific findings having been thoroughly tested become part of what is called The Received View.
To the best of my knowledge, the CAGW account is not yet part of The Received View. I recently undertook a first year Geology class at UTas and the text book made a passing reference to [paraphrase] some scientists believe in CAGW and then goes on to explain climate consistent with such accounts as imparted by Lamb, Manley and so forth.
If there’s an undergraduate text in the nature of Oke’s Boundary Layer Climates I am unaware of it and no amount of cajoling of warmists has resulted in the discovery of such. It would be I believe akin to what Steve MacIntyre has called for as long as I’ve been aware of Climate Audit.
I’m not holding my breath.
Les,
you write:
“As for your contention that science is always about consensus? Einstein disagreed with you.”
Einstein’s papers were never submitted for peer review (the system that sorts the credible wheat from the incredible chaff). So name-dropping such an “authority” is simply not going to work on me. Did he produce good or crap papers? Who knows. But if he’s the guy who best represents your “side’s” idea (or ideal) of a scientist, then… well, that’s perfect! LOL
Gail, I agree with you about Stanford. I get to live with that stuff.
But that doesn’t vitiate my point that if you wreck academic science to get even, you’re wrecking the source of our prosperity.
If you want to improve our universities, make them honor the tenure contract they have with their faculty. In return for tenure — they can’t be fired for telling the truth — faculty are supposed to be dispassionate in communicating their profession. But faculty now produce advocacy papers and teach advocacy classes. This is a direct violation of the tenure agreement. It seems to me that tax payers have standing to sue public universities about that. By permitting advocacy faculty, they’re failing in their duty to the public.
Universities that systematically fail their duty to the public don’t deserve public funding. Notice, I’m talking budgetary funding, not grant funding. Budgets involve local control, is much more susceptible to local efforts, and is much more likely to succeed than anything on a national scale. It’ll certainly get the university’s attention.
@ur momisugly Brad Keyes
Einstein’s 1905 papers in the Annalen der Physik were reviewed by one of the journal’s editors, Max Planck, and Wilhelm Wien. On what grounds do you assert that they were not peers of Einstein?
Certainly it was pal review. Nevertheless, they were in any sane estimation peers.
See: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v2/n9/full/nphys407.html
Also, on what grounds do you denigrate Einstein? He had his faults (he was after all a human being) but certainly made a major contribution to 20th C physics.
Brad Keyes says:
January 22, 2014 at 3:15 pm
Peer-review can be used to enforce a false consensus, when it becomes pal-review.
Einstein said never to stop questioning, & he didn´t, including his own conclusions. That attitude allowed him to overturn the consensus Newtonian view of gravitation. Another prominent physicist, Feynman, said, ¨Science is belief in the ignorance of experts”. Another great physicist still living, Dyson (a skeptic of CACA), says, “In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right.”
Consensus is what science exists to show false. That’s how science progresses. Sometimes the consensus is right and stays that way, but usually only after having overthrown a previous consensus. That the earth goes around the sun is one such present consensus.
Copernicus and Galileo were right that the earth is not motionless at the center of concentric spheres, as in the consensus geocentric system of Ptolemy, but moves, turning daily on its axis, while orbiting the sun annually & wobbling on its axis in a ~26,000 year cycle. Galileo was also right about the motion of falling objects, against the Aristotelian consensus, & that heavenly bodies aren’t perfect. Kepler was right that planetary orbits are elliptical, not circular as the consensus held.
Lavoisier showed the consensus phlogiston theory of combustion false.
Louis concluded against the medical consensus that bloodletting was of limited use in fighting pneumonia. Snow persuaded public health officials that cholera was spread by water, not miasmas in the air. The consensus was that malaria was also caused by bad air, not microbes transmitted by mosquitoes. Pasteur showed false the consensus view of the origin of disease, by supporting his germ theory. In the late 20th century, two Australian doctors showed the consensus about the cause of stomach ulcers wrong.
In the 18th century, the consensus was still that the earth is just 6000 years old, but geology showed that belief wrong. In the 19th century, the consensus was only tens of millions of years, then radioactivity was discovered.
In the 20th century, the consensus was that the continents don’t drift, until Wegener was vindicated by the discovery of seafloor spreading. The consensus was also that the channeled scablands of E. Washington State were not formed in a series of great floods, until the “settled science” advocates died off & Bretz outlived them to be recognized as right all along.
In the 20th century, the consensus was that the universe is stable, until Hubble showed that it is expanding & Penzias & Wilson found the CMBR, evidence for the Big Bang.
The crazy, cockamamie delusion of CACA will go the same way as phlogiston, once the grant money supporting the anti-human, corrupt cult dries up, its high druids retire & nature herself falsifies the absurd idea that man-made CO2 is the main driver of climate change.
Brad Keyes: your
Did he produce good or crap papers? Who knows. But if he’s the guy who best represents your “side’s” idea (or ideal) of a scientist, then… well, that’s perfect! LOL
History judges that he produced some very good papers. Which shows the veracity of his saying about only needing 1 paper to disprove him.
Your denigrating one history’s greatest theorists is interesting.
Still avoiding the plagiarism issue, I see.
John Tillman says:
January 22, 2014 at 3:51 pm
CACA perhaps most resembles the Ptolemaic system among past consensuses, since like geocentric models & even heliocentric systems with circular orbits, it must keep multiplying figurative epicycles to explain away the contrary observations owing to its fundamental falsehood. It’s also supported by the modern equivalent of a priesthood.
Les Johnson said @ur momisugly January 22, 2014 at 3:53 pm
Interesting too that he has yet to provide evidence of an undergraduate text of the calibre of Oke. Also interesting that while he claims we are anti-science, it is he who denigrates three excellent scientists in particular, all of whose theories are part of The Received View in physics.
Also I note that both Einstein and Wien were Jews. While not Jewish, Planck got himself into much bother for advocating what was called “Jewish Physics” and attempting to persuade the German Chancellor to stop the ejection of Jewish physicists from the universities. Of course the US was a great beneficiary of the introduction of Deutsche Physik. They eagerly embraced the likes of Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, Hans Bethe, and Max Born much to the regret of Japan.
The Pompous Git says:
January 22, 2014 at 4:20 pm
Max Born was Olivia Newton-John´s maternal grandfather.
Wonder if Brad denies the Holocaust along with physical reality.
@ur momisugly milodonharlani
I had no idea who Olivia Neutron Bomb’s relatives were, though she was a member of my community some time ago and for all I know, still is. Sadly, she is a member of one of the groups who have “saved” our forests. One of those forests is burning away merrily right now quite close to me. I can hear the helicopters as I type, especially when they take water from my dam.
I suspect that we will be subjected to some further evidence of Brad’s somewhat tenuous grasp of reality given he has already made several posts. I don’t believe that he will come up with any substantive responses to my questions.
The Pompous Git says:
January 22, 2014 at 4:53 pm
It was necessary to burn the forests in order to save them. Or save them in order to burn them. Same happens in Oregon, of course, & throughout the US West, on a colossal scale.
Yes, unfortunately, Miss N-J didn´t inherit analytical ability from her distinguished grandfather. She was born in Cambridge, so might also be related to Sir Isaac, although her dad IIRC is Welsh. Sir Isaac of course had no kids of his own & probably never even engaged in sex. Newton’s half-niece however was the mistress of a powerful nobleman until his death, followed by her marriage.