An a-scientific paper, poor contribution of NGS to the enlightenment of its members.
Story submitted by Michel de Rougemont
I just finished reading the article « The age of disbelief » in the March edition of the National Geographic.
It is one of the most a-scientific articles about science that I ever could read.
Joel Achenbach, the author, pretends that sceptics have no place in the scientific debates because of their incompetence, their prejudices, their doubts in science, and, last but not least, their alienation to powerful lobbies, as for example the fossil fuel industry in climate matters.
First he makes a nice amalgam between deniers, as for example opponents to vaccine or flat earth believers, and sceptics. He may not have ever tried to learn what a sceptic is looking for, what are the motives of not being satisfied with generally accepted beliefs.
Then he looks for an authority, which we should all obey, that settles the scientific truth, or at least the correct way toward this truth. Here he demonstrates his inability to conceive that such authority cannot exist. Scientific societies can laugh about such pretension, well knowing how chaotic their progresses are. Only IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, not a scientific but a governmental institution created in 1988) and its followers have that arrogance.
Amazingly he affirms: “In this bewildering world we have to decide on what to believe and how to act on that”. I agree with this statement. But for him a sceptic who forged his opinion on contradictory evidences is just making the wrong decision. And since he wants to believe in approximate theories such as the anthropogenic nature of climate change, this is a settled “consensus” that no one dares question.
When he will have looked at disturbing facts that IPCC never explains, as for example that the glaciers began to melt long before the industrial age, that the rate of rise of the seas was already quite spectacular at the end of the 18th century, that two periods of warm have alternated with two cold ones over the past two millennia without having anything to do with the burning of fossil fuels, and that the rates at which temperature or sea level are varying show no correlation with the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, then he may ask why anthropowarmism has installed itself as indisputable dogma within the past thirty years.
He would like science to stay in the realm of rationality, but he is advocating dogmatic views. This article was a poor contribution of the National Geographic Society to the enlightenment of its members.
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Gave up on NG 22 years ago, too many opinion pieces.
Want to see a smart man self-detonate his own argument?
Title of his article:
Three Paragraphs in:
So, in this man’s eyes… “war on a consensus of experts” is now “science”… And he didn’t see the problem in his reasoning before publishing that nonsense?
I’m sure he’s a smart man, unfortunately he’s knee-deep in the quicksand of his own dogma. He’s abdicated his own daily rigor in questioning what he sees in favor of being a “subject matter expert”. He’s a tool, not a scientist, and he doesn’t recognize it.
Consensus is such a political term, just shows they are more worried about their political view than actual science.
National Geographic has become nothing but a climate fear propaganda mill. This latest scientifically unsupported alarmist article brought the following reply:
The subject article alleges that it addresses the “war on science”.
While the article discusses many issues related to challenges to various fields of science it dwells a great deal on the science of “global warming” or as this issue was later called after the global warming temperature hiatus commenced in 1998 “climate change”. The article jumps back and forth between these two terms without ever explaining why and how these two different terms came into use with this change characterizing that political ideology is the driver of climate science.
The article starts by trying to suggest that the kooks who don’t believe in the NASA moon landings are at fault for the challenges to the validity of global warming science.
The article should have addressed the letter of protest to NASA’s Administrator by 49 former NASA astronauts, including a number who landed on the moon, scientists and engineers demanding that NASA look at empirical data which does not support climate alarmists claims instead of relying on highly questionable computer models.
Specifically these NASA astronauts, scientists and engineers leveled the following challenges to NASA’s climate alarmism efforts:
“The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.”
“We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not
substantiated.”
“We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject.”
“With hundreds of well known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from GISS leadership, it is clear the science is NOT settled”.
The Age of Disbelief article makes the well-worn and scientifically unsubstantiated claim that Hurricane Sandy’s impact on the east coast and New York city was made worse by man made CO2 driven sea level rise. This is simply alarmist hype as the NOAA tide gauge data along the New York and New Jersey coasts clearly demonstrates.
Shown below are NOAA long period duration mean sea level trend records for Kings Point and The Battery, New York and Atlantic City, New Jersey. The NOAA data shows clearly that sea level rise trends at these locations are linear and unchanging with no sea level rise acceleration occurring over the last 100 years. The New York locations have rates of sea level increase of about 11 inches per century. The higher rate of sea level rise at Atlantic City location versus New York is the result of land subsidence. NOAA data shows that man made CO2 emissions have not caused increases in the rate of sea level rise that allegedly made Hurricane Sandy’s flooding worse.
The false claim of CO2 driven man made sea level rise acceleration relative to Hurricane Sandy is a classic example climate alarmist hype unsupported by scientifically measured empirical NOAA tide gauge data which alarmist simply ignore.
The subject article also alleges that the hundreds of scientists at most recent UN IPCC AR5 report gathering session couldn’t possibly be wrong about their man made CO2 alarmist claims even though these claims are derived from flawed climate models which grossly overstate the impact of atmospheric CO2 levels on global temperatures as shown in the UN IPCC AR5 WGI report Chapter 11 Figure 11.25a below.
Despite the fact that the observed and measured empirical global temperature data demonstrates that the models grossly exaggerate and overstate the impact of global temperatures as a function of atmospheric CO2 levels these same UN IPCC “scientists” use these models to justify their claims of climate impacts caused by rising CO2 levels.
Worse yet the UN IPCC AR5 WGI report specifically acknowledges that the climate models have no defined degree of certainty but are simply “plausible” and “illustrative” of possible outcomes with this lack of certainty being concealed from public view. The measured empirical data clearly says the climate models exaggerate and overstate global temperatures but this real data is simply ignored by climate alarmists scientists and media.
The scientifically legitimate challenge to the adequacy of climate science is not driven by the “moon landing never happened” kooks or the failure to communicate the issues to the public or any other made up excuse trying to hide the real truth behind the huge shortcomings of climate science.
This climate science challenge is driven by the failure of the alarmist climate science community and media to address the massive volume of measured empirical data which does not support the alarmist claims which are based on completely inadequate climate models. This National Geographic article completely misses this most important reason why the challenge to climate science has occurred and why it will continue to be pursued.
The dogmatic ideology of climate alarmism which is based on hype, exaggeration and deception cannot escape dealing with one of the most important elements of the scientific method which requires the use of measured empirical data to make a valid scientific case. Science is not decided by consensus, by authority or by computer models. In the final analysis science is decided by use of measured empirical data.
Until National Geographic begins to address this very real and massive shortcoming of climate alarmism it will remain just another media source which deals in the hype, exaggeration and deception of scientifically unsubstantiated climate alarmism.
The NGS intellectuals are mimicking mimics who are mimicking mimics. If they are aware then they don’t seem to care.
John
The basic thesis of the NatGeo article is “We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge – from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change – faces organized and often furious opposition”.
This is plainly incorrect: it confuses knowledge with theory. One can agree or disagree with theory all one likes – including experimentation to demonstrate that the theory has actually failed.
Scientific *knowledge* is a different matter entirely – while it proposes theory it also expressly states a nul hypothesis, accepting that if the nul hypothesis fails, the theory itself fails.
Climate change is is not “scientific knowledge” (where is the nul hypothesis? How long exactly must “the pause” last?). It is still just theory, where proper scientists not only have the right but the duty to keep it under watchful examination, whether or not that amounts to “organized and often furious opposition”. And I also think that any “fury” is most often seen directed from the true believers towards the doubters ….
NGS should go back to the glory days of it roots. In 1940 I was attending a very posh private boy’s boarding school; the library had all of the yearly bound editions of the magazine. It was to us 10/11 year old boys the “Playboy/Hustler type mag’s of that time, almost every issue had pages of bare breasted African natives, our teachers even encouraged us to look into the NG’s in our designated “Library Time”. I guess one could say it was the approved porn of the day. I don’t know when that school was founded but by the time I got there those NG pages were well worn, almost tattered. Today NG heart and soul remains in bare Africa, if you will note every NG world map has Africa in the center, what is on either side is marginalized.
The a-scientific article reviewed by Michel may not be the worst item that NG has served up this month. In the “NG News” sidebar immediately to the left of the “Why Do So Many People Doubt Science”, we have an outrageous example of outright lies and deception. It has a satellite image showing the Arctic ice cap with a yellow outline purporting to show how much the sea ice has shrunk. If you let your mouse hover over the picture, a caption pops up:
“Extent of the Arctic ice cap today versus three years ago.”
Three years ago was 2012. We presumably are being told that the yellow outline represented the ice cap in 2012, and that three years later it has shrunk significantly. Anybody who has been following Arctic ice knows this is a blatant lie.
We then click through to the article itself: “Earth’s Dashboard is Flashing Red–Are Enough People Listening?” by Dennis Dimick (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/02/150202-climate-science-public-opinion-evidence-global-warming/).
We now see that the picture has a date stamp of September 16, 2012, and the caption tells us that the yellow outline actually represents the sea ice extent back in 1979. At this point my internal deception alarms did indeed “flash red”. If you want to show how much the summer ice cap has shrunk since 1979, and you are writing an article in 2015, why would you choose a satellite image from 2012? Why not an image from 2013 or 2014? The answer is easy: September Arctic sea ice area has increased by almost 50% in the last 2 years. 2012’s picture is much more scary.
Why do so many people doubt science? Ummm….let me guess-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2995239/Why-Royal-Society-wrong-climate-change-devastating-critique-world-s-leading-scientific-organisation-one-Fellows.html
I gave up on the NGS long ago. They’re nothing more than a bunch of liberal hacks anymore.
Achenbach began his article with a synopsis of General Ripper’s worries about fluoridation inDr. Strangelove, then continued:
You’d never know from reading the above that European countries have stopped adopting it or have moved away from it, per Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_controversy :
Fluoridation’s effectiveness and safety appear to have been oversold, according to recent studies, which is one factor in the rollback above.
(It seems to me that fluoridators could get 90% of what they want by fluoridating the milk and other drinks in school lunches.)
Achenbach oversold the absoluteness of the consensus and the strength of the evidence of its correctness.
That’s what organized establishment “science” did about the issue back in the fifties and sixties.
That’s what he and it are doing now with regard to global warming.
That’s why we should be skeptical of them now.
They’ve oversold us before.
No pseudo science, skepticism or denial among Greens down under-
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/14/fluoride-inquiry-nsw-greens
Not when the science is settled, no siree sir!
Half of Achenbach’s NG article commits the “fallacy of division.” To quote from a text:
Achenbach lists six groups that are or were 1) against the scientific consensus and 2) wrong–or at least wrong in his opinion. These are anti-fluoridationists, anti-vaxers, moon-landing d*niers, anti-GMOers, anti-evolutionists, and flat-earthers.
He then includes climate contrarians in the anti-consensus group, hoping to rhetorically induce his readers to conclude that they also are wrong. But that’s a <non sequitur.
And it’s a one-sided presentation. There are a dozen cases where the consensus was wrong and the contrarians were right. The issue can’t be solved by smearing, as Achenbach has done. The issue is, Who is right this time?
Oops–on second thought, forget my “fallacy of division” accusation. That doesn’t really fit. Basically, the use of those six examples is a smear job: an attempt to insinuate guilt (wrongness) to an anti-consensus group by association (with anti-consensus groups that were wrong).
The old guilt by association trick, whereas fallacy of division and fallacy of composition are somewhat different but opposite sides of another coinage.
F of D- You insult our President you insult all of us
F of C- I take a box to stand on to the game and I can see better so if we all take a box we’ll all see better.
Probably dogma, but my gift subscription issue went to the trash with the plastic wrap still on. I’ll advise the gift giver to save money next time and go with socks or sweaters next time.
Cancelled National Geographic long ago (80’s) due to their political agenda. I miss the great photos and some of the space related items, but I cannot support their politics.
This would be a good time for a photojournalism story of radicalization of enviro groups. There is probably an evolutionary corollary in the fossil record of ever more outlandish natural designs leading up to absurdity and extinction.
I sent he following letter to National Geographic:
“I’m very happy to see you lumping “global warming” in with the flat Earth types, as it means you who are pushing that hoax are becoming desperate. A vast number of real scientists dispute it. Do you remember the old computer saying “garbage in, garbage out?” If you look at how most of the government thermometers have been mis-located next to heat sources by incompetent government workers, even sincere scientists operating with such faulty data will produce garbage results. Of course, we have a raft of public disclosures of out right data manipulation by the global warming pushers. Remember, always follow the money. In this case, we see many lining their pockets pushing the hoax.
In case you now think me a pickup-driving, beer infused hick, just a few facts: I’m a member of Mensa, the top 2% IQ society, owner of an environmental consulting corporation, and a self-made multi-millionaire.
I’m also Roman Catholic, and find it fascinating that some Christians in one breath claim that God made everything, then deny God the right to have created evolution. Clearly evolution is happening, but there are very serious gaps in the chain of data leading to modern humans. A major part of the problem is that far too many scientists deny the existence of God, despite clear proof that God does exist. Being an Atheist is such an outlandish thing that people rightly question the sanity and judgment of all Atheists, and anything they claim.”