Conservatives and climate change

[Kestrel]

I think their next step, after breaking and entering to steal email didn't work, is executions and torture. Religions all revert to that when pressed.

Denying climate change isn't part of anyone's religion. The problem is that the denial of other kinds of science in the name of religion makes conservative religious people easy fodder for climate change denial propaganda.

The Biblical literalists are easiest. Many of them have been trained from childhood to distrust scientists and most other academics.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Most people on this planet know AGW to be true¹. what is your chruch planning to do against this blasphemy? more bible quoting or more pseudoscienceblogs?²

1. a) Who has polled a representative sample of the Earth's population?
b) Scientifically literate people believe in glacial cycles.
2. The problem is, most people, in fact ALL people, lack the first-hand knowledge of facts and the ability to systematically deduce from these facts and the relevant theoretical constructions the outcomes of changes such as the predicted increase in fossil fuel consumption. Science is a collaborative enterprise which depends on trust (~reputation~status~authority). Experts in geochemistry have to trust experts in astrophysics for the astrophysicists' contribution to the discussion. Field paleobotanists have to trust field meterologists for the meterologists' contribution. Experts in some disciplines even have to trust other experts in their own discipline, since no one has the time to dig into sandbanks on all continents for fossil trees and then to prepare slides and measure tree rings.
The social network analysis that Wikipedia claimed was plagarized is not the first critique of incestuous academic culture. See Wade and Broad, Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science, Martin Anderson, Imposters in the Temple, and Charles Sykes, Profscam. One of these (I don't remember which) reported the result of an experiment which a couple of professors of Sociology conducted. They copied published papers in social science, changed the authors' names and institutional affiliations from Mr. Big at Prestige Ivy U to Mr. Nobody at Alfalfa Community College, and resubmitted them. "Peer" reviewers shredded the papers. Sometimes, even journals that had originally published the work later rejected the same paper (without noticing the copywork).
According to one Math professor friend of mine, the American Mathematical Society tried blind peer review, where editors stripped names and institutional affiliations from papers that they sent to reviewers. It did not last. The problem was not that reviewers passes shoddy worked but that the reviewers did not appropriately revere the submitted fingernail clippings from Mr. Big at Prestige Ivy U.
I don't see a way around this, aside from the occasional outside challenge and periodic rebellion against the manipulation of peer review.

 

[mhaze]

Denying climate change isn't part of anyone's religion.....

....while climate change and apocalyptic prophesies are part of the Global Warming religion.

Traditional religions not only tolerated contradiction and irrationality, they embrace them as part of the mystique. Words and phrases are repeated ad nauseam and in strange contexts, until they lose all meaning and become self-preserving mantras.

Contradictions and irrationality also abound in the modern theocratic world. The EU, for example, gratuitously destroys a tiny industry making traditional barometers, on the grounds of an irrational fear of mercury, then imposes the use of fluorescent light bulbs that distribute that same dreaded substance in huge quantities across the continent, all on the basis of the threat of global warming.

People who have never heard of Wien or Planck confidently assert that it is “obvious” that man-made CO2 will cause runaway warming of the planet, when it is not at all obvious to many who are familiar with the works of those gentlemen. It is obvious in the sense that it is obvious that believers will have everlasting life or that a senseless act of self-immolation will earn the eternal attentions of 72 virgins in Paradise. The capacity to believe six impossible things before breakfast has been restored from fantasy to accepted normality.​

http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/religion.htm

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

yeah good old uncertainty.

You mean, predictions of future climate are certain?

 

[bit_pattern]

You mean, predictions of future climate are certain?

Yes. Quantifiably so. No, but the degree of uncertainty can be quantified. Some climate predictions can fairly be described as very likely or, in a few cases, virtually certain.

 

[DC]

So you don't understand the scientific method?

I gather that from your buzzword-level use of the phrases phenomena, theory, hypothesis, as well as misunderstanding the needs and purpose or lack of of "alternative hypothesis".

well i do. im not the one that is in denials here.
but pls, explain if you think i am wrong., that will be extremely funny.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

(Malcolm): "You mean, predictions of future climate are certain?

Yes. Quantifiably so.

Climate predictions are rife with uncertainty.

 

[uke2se]

Malcolm, how do you feel about using the Wegman report as evidence knowing that the "report" has been retracted and its authors are under investigation for academic malfeasance?

 

[uke2se]

(Malcolm): "You mean, predictions of future climate are certain?
Climate predictions are rife with uncertainty.

So you didn't read the link then? How predictable.

 

[bit_pattern]

(Malcolm): "You mean, predictions of future climate are certain?
Climate predictions are rife with uncertainty.

All complex system sciences are but climate science has very high rates of confidence, much higher than you will find in any other complex-system science. Take diagnostics for example, when was the last time you heard of a doctor giving a patient > 95% certainty in their diagnoses? What would you do if a doctor was 60% certain that a growth in an x-ray was going to be cancerous, would you pay for invasive surgery to have it removed, or would you wait until it visibly grows and take the chances it might metastasise before being certain its cancerous and having it removed? What about if the doctor was 40% certain? Or 20% certain? What would you do?

 

[DC]

1. a) Who has polled a representative sample of the Earth's population?
b) Scientifically literate people believe in glacial cycles.
2. The problem is, most people, in fact ALL people, lack the first-hand knowledge of facts and the ability to systematically deduce from these facts and the relevant theoretical constructions the outcomes of changes such as the predicted increase in fossil fuel consumption. Science is a collaborative enterprise which depends on trust (~reputation~status~authority). Experts in geochemistry have to trust experts in astrophysics for the astrophysicists' contribution to the discussion. Field paleobotanists have to trust field meterologists for the meterologists' contribution. Experts in some disciplines even have to trust other experts in their own discipline, since no one has the time to dig into sandbanks on all continents for fossil trees and then to prepare slides and measure tree rings.
The social network analysis that Wikipedia claimed was plagarized is not the first critique of incestuous academic culture. See Wade and Broad, Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science, Martin Anderson, Imposters in the Temple, and Charles Sykes, Profscam. One of these (I don't remember which) reported the result of an experiment which a couple of professors of Sociology conducted. They copied published papers in social science, changed the authors' names and institutional affiliations from Mr. Big at Prestige Ivy U to Mr. Nobody at Alfalfa Community College, and resubmitted them. "Peer" reviewers shredded the papers. Sometimes, even journals that had originally published the work later rejected the same paper (without noticing the copywork).
According to one Math professor friend of mine, the American Mathematical Society tried blind peer review, where editors stripped names and institutional affiliations from papers that they sent to reviewers. It did not last. The problem was not that reviewers passes shoddy worked but that the reviewers did not appropriately revere the submitted fingernail clippings from Mr. Big at Prestige Ivy U.
I don't see a way around this, aside from the occasional outside challenge and periodic rebellion against the manipulation of peer review.

1) there were several international polls on that topic.
b) and even know how they work.
and what do you want to say with those anecdotes?

 

[DC]

You mean, predictions of future climate are certain?

did you read that in my post?

 

[DC]

(Malcolm): "You mean, predictions of future climate are certain?
Climate predictions are rife with uncertainty.

how much uncertainty?

 

[W.D.Clinger]

You mean, predictions of future climate are certain?

Yes. Quantifiably so.

That's an excellent document.

Its Table 1, which "provides calibrated language for describing quantified uncertainty", recommends the most certain outcomes be described as "virtually certain", not as certain. With that in mind, I think a better answer to Malcolm Kirkpatrick's question would be

No, but the degree of uncertainty can be quantified. Some climate predictions can fairly be described as very likely or, in a few cases, virtually certain.​

 

[jj]

did you read that in my post?

DC, Malcolm is just another one of the people who equate measured uncertainty with "nothing at all". I think most of them know better, but it is possible that they just don't understand error bars.

 

[bit_pattern]

That's an excellent document.

Its Table 1, which "provides calibrated language for describing quantified uncertainty", recommends the most certain outcomes be described as "virtually certain", not as certain. With that in mind, I think a better answer to Malcolm Kirkpatrick's question would be

No, but the degree of uncertainty can be quantified. Some climate predictions can fairly be described as very likely or, in a few cases, virtually certain.​

I've taken your point on board and edited the post accordingly

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

how much uncertainty?

Enough that Steven Schneider recommended urgent action against an impending Ice Age a few years ago. Outside a dry statistical definition, certainty is an emotion that often has little to do with facts.

 

[DC]

DC, Malcolm is just another one of the people who equate measured uncertainty with "nothing at all". I think most of them know better, but it is possible that they just don't understand error bars.

yeah the poor guy has been misled.

 

[DC]

Enough that Steven Schneider recommended urgent action against an impending Ice Age a few years ago. Outside a dry statistical definition, certainty is an emotion that often has little to do with facts.

can you show us the studies he based that on?
and it is clear from your post that you do not actually know what uncertainty is in scinece. not suprising. how about you inform yourself about it first and then come back?

and how was the concencus on his predictions?
also was his predicitoin based on uncertainty of CO² levels or had it to do with Aerosol?

 

[bit_pattern]

Enough that Steven Schneider recommended urgent action against an impending Ice Age a few years ago. Outside a dry statistical definition, certainty is an emotion that often has little to do with facts.

Define "a few years" because I think you really mean "a few decades". This reminds me of the quote attributed to Milton Keynes; "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?" The science has changed quite a bit since 1972 and, despite what sensationalist titbits you might dig up from Time magazine or whatever the original source is, Schneider was no more alarmist than any other scientist and within a few years changed his opinion on according to the weight of evidence that CO2 warming was going to override SO2 cooling.