Hit this link for PaAnnoyed's opinions on impartial scientists cloistering themselves away from political and economic pressures in an effort to determine objective truth about Anthropogenic Global Warming. Or Cooling. Or Change. Or Whatever We're Gonna Spend A Shitload Of Money To Prevent.
Cedric, you'll be glad you did.
The picture of the countable cats cards came from here.
7 comments:
Do you believe in the science museum?
Thus PAannoyed begins his article.
Apparently, his government has put up a museum exhibit on climate change. Oh, the horror! No doubt the communists that sekritly control NASA are to blame.
So in other words, the government had come along and told them to do an exhibit, pronto, in order to get the public stirred up prior to Copenhagen.
So next time you go into a science museum, remember that what you are seeing may be explicitly part of a government political propaganda campaign, produced to order. As a scientist, I find that more than a little disturbing.
Yes, political propoganda in the shape of science exhibits organised by the government to fool the common man. That happens a lot. Won't somebody please think of the children?
WS,
Thanks for the support!
Cedric,
Are you one of those people who believe communists control NASA? That's very... interesting. But no, I don't think our Department for Energy and Climate Change are controlled by NASA. And while we do have some ministers who used to be Communists and Trotskyites, that was all a long time ago, and in any case I hadn't heard it said of Mr Ed.
I was puzzled though by your link to the Fields museum exhibit. I couldn't see anywhere where it said this was at the instigation of the government, and that the museum hadn't initially planned to put it on, but that the government needed some public support for them negotiating some sort of international pro-Darwinist treaty?
Was it merely an amateurish fallacy of abusive analogy that attempted to connect climate scepticism to creationism? If so, I'm very pleased that you were unable to come up with anything better. Thanks for the support!
Are you one of those people who believe communists control NASA?
Well may you laugh, but it has recently been drawn to my attention that in order to get at the facts, one has to go for the best. Enter the investigative expertise of a Phoenix small business owner. Trust this man.
"To fully understand the passionate, almost dogmatic
dedication so many people have to AGW theory, it is a bit useful to look at a
little history. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, there were a
lot of Marxists, socialists, anti-corporatists and anti-capitalists who were
looking for a new way to package and reinvent themselves, given that the vast
majority of people (at least in the West) considered socialism failed and no
longer wanted to hear about it any more(...)
Then, along came anthropogenic global warming. Here
was a theory and movement that united many disparate interests..."
Ok, so perhaps it's a little light on details. Names, places, documentation, etc.
However the logic is all there. Open your mind.
One minute, you've got idle commies. The next minute they've taken over NASA and every single scientific community on the planet. The Fiends!
I was puzzled though by your link to the Fields museum exhibit.
I doubt it.
Was it merely an amateurish fallacy of abusive analogy that attempted to connect climate scepticism to creationism?
Not at all. The article shows how science deniers complain about museum exhibits that goes against their beliefs. The scientific community isn't the one doing the complaining. Just the deniers.
You are doing the same thing as the creationists. Creationists back global warming deniers to the hilt and mimic them exactly. Or is it the global warming deniers who are mimicing the creationists?
Hmm. Tough call.
Same tactics. Same media marketing strategy.
(Teach the controversy!) Same obsession with creating sciency-sounding conservative think-tanks.
Same targeted population demographic.
Same vapourware in the scientific arena of peer-review.
Denialism always follows similar patterns.
Global warming deniers fit in with the rest nicely.
Oh, I see. Regarding the Marxists or whatever, yes, there are a lot of Marxists in the AGW movement, but they are generally outside the academic/government bit. They're the ones who organise a lot of the silly protests.
But just because there are ex-Marxists in the AGW movement, doesn't imply that everyone in the AGW movement is an ex-Marxist (or that we believe they are). The Green movement is not monolithic.
In any case, it's a straw man. I wasn't saying that the science museum had put on the exhibit at the instigation of the government because I believed NASA was controlled by communists. I said it because the museum director had made a statement to the media to that effect. And we know why they did it, because the museum director told us.
You are trying to get round the fact that I had direct evidence for my claim by just ignoring it and bringing in this irrelevant communist theory, and then trying to suggest that this was my argument.
And presumably then the idea is that we argue back and forth about communists, and the inconvenient science museum gets forgotten.
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Now, there is a form of the fallacy of abusive analogy that uses the association fallacy - this argument goes something like: A makes claim C, B makes claim C, B are bad people, therefore A are bad people too. Your logic appears to be that I complained about a museum exhibit, creationists complained about a museum exhibit, therefore I am like a creationist.
You say "Not at all", but then you use the fallacy multiple times! At no point do you ever actually address the content of my argument, or indeed anything to do with AGW-sceptical arguments generally.
In any argument, each side denies the truth of the other's. You would deny that there is any problem with the AGW orthodoxy, and you would use many of the same tactics to defend it. It's not a useful analysis of the problem.
Has it ever occurred to you that it might mean something that your side's argument is so stuffed with fallacies and non sequiturs?
I complained about a museum exhibit, creationists complained about a museum exhibit, therefore I am like a creationist.
The fallacy of the "Extended Analogy"? No.
That would only be the case if I was refering to two different situations. (For example, comparing the idea of breaking the law with the civil disobedience of Martin Luther King.)
In this case, the situations are not different at all. They are not 'extended'.
Creationists (Evolution Deniers) will attack museum exhibits and mislabel them "Dogma".
This is bad.
You (an AGW Denier) are attacking a museum exhibit and mislabelling it as "Propoganda".
This is bad.
Further, in neither case, is the actual scientific community making any sort of complaint at all. None.
There are two venues.
One is the scientific arena.
The other is the court of public opinion.
Deniers are people who have completely failed to gain any traction in the venue of the scientific arena.
Rather than admit defeat, they are driven to take their case to the public directly, bypassing the scientific community and the process of peer-review.
This pisses scientists right off.
To be successful at this, they must sound sciency and take advantage of the general public's illiteracy in science. Some scientific communities do try and stop the fraud but usually deniers have the upper hand.
The well-documented tactics used by science deniers are almost always the same because their goal (to hoodwink the public) are the same.
The 'tobacco doesn't cause cancer deniers' transferred their skills and people to the global warming deniers and are gleefully copied by the evolution deniers. Their methods and language are indistinguishable from each other.
Politicians and members of the public who strongly support Creationism and deny good science are very comfortable with denying AGW because they reinforce each other.
"The same scientists that have lied to you about God and the Evilution Hoax are now trying to pick your pocket and lie about the global warming hoax, b'gosh!"
It's a very easy sell.
Tactics that are wildly successful in sowing doubt and manufacturing "controversy" where none existed are not abandoned. They are recycled...by the same people.
Creationists and AGW deniers (or any other deniers such as the anti-vacc crowd) cannot cut it in the scientific world of peer-review.
The excuses as to why this is so are interchangable between the two groups.
No scientific communities on the planet deny the science underpinning Evolution/AGW or declare them to be fatally flawed or to be a hoax.
Once again, the excuses from Deniers as to why this is so are interchangable between the two groups. Conspiracy theory is a friend to both camps.
You would deny that there is any problem with the AGW orthodoxy...
Ah, the whiff of desperation.
Another tactic used by the creationists is to label those that champion evolution is to sow their rhetoric with religious references.
Church of Darwin/Cathedral of AGW/Dogma of Evolution/Dogma of AGW/Darwin Orthodoxy/AGW Orthodoxy etc.
You know what impresses me?
Peer-review.
Not even just individual peer-reviewed papers.
I mean a mass of peer-review.
Enough peer-reviewed literature to convince all the scientific communities one way or the other.
If you were to sort all the current peer-reviewed papers supporting AGW and all those refuting or are ambivilant towards AGW into two groups...which group would be bigger?
Which one of them would be so big that the other group is effectively non-existent?
"If you were to sort all the current peer-reviewed papers supporting AGW and all those refuting or are ambivilant towards AGW into two groups...which group would be bigger?
Which one of them would be so big that the other group is effectively non-existent?"
Neither. They're roughly the same size. I think it's about 5% for, 5% against, 40% accept the AGW position as a consensus without contributing or discussing any evidential support, and 50% don't mention it. Not that it's relevant.
And now apply the same argument to published papers on the origin of species on the date Darwin published his first exposition of natural selection. Or Chandrasekhar's paper on black holes in the days when Eddington held sway.
Science does not operate by consensus. Politics does. Anyone who uses this paper-counting argument puts up a neon flashing sign above their head reading "THIS IS NOT SCIENCE!"
All these sources you are citing are not science. Science operates by testing and falsification - you put up a theory, you try your damnedest to knock it down, and if your best efforts fail (where you would have expected them to succeed against a false theory), then the theory gains credibility. Science is recognisable by its sincere and determined scepticism. (Thus, 'creationist science' would be trying to knock holes in the Biblical version. Because they don't, you know it's not science.)
Science rejects absolutely any form of argument from authority. Peer review and journal publication are a mechanism for finding interesting ideas more efficiently, nothing else. Ascribing any authority to them on the basis of where or by who they were published, independent of the technical contents, puts up that neon sign again.
Every time you make one of these errors, or trot out one of these fallacies, you are labelling your own position as being anti-science.
Which is fine by me. :-)
They're roughly the same size. I think it's about 5% for, 5% against, 40% accept the AGW position as a consensus without contributing or discussing any evidential support, and 50% don't mention it.
Excuse me?
You "think"?
I don't give a damn what you "think".
Try that again.
These numbers come from where?
Who vetted them?
How was the research for these statistics conducted?
Peer review and journal publication are a mechanism for finding interesting ideas more efficiently, nothing else.
Not true. There is more to it than that. The only reason why you are attempting to belittle the peer-review process is because global warming denialism has precious little to offer in that department.
That's why on denier blogs you endlessly here about "32,000 scientists doubt global warming" but you won't hear any bragging about how "AGW supporters don't have any peer-reviewed research 'cause we've got it all".
Science does not operate by consensus. Politics does.
That's something a denier (Creationist, Moon Hoaxer. 9/11'er etc.) would be comforable saying.
In fact, they do say that!
Frequently.
There is a scientific consensus on Evolution and the Periodic Table and Germ Theory and Helicentricism.
Perhaps it's all thoses durned scientists playing politics?
No, that won't do.
The global scientific consensus was arrived at the old-fashioned way.
Decades of hard work by teams of scientists all around the world following the scientific method.
Trusting the expertise of NASA and the NAS and all the others on the subject of climate change is no more unreasonable than trusting the entire medical profession on the subject of vaccines or HIV.
Yet we have the anti-vacc crowd and, yes, we have the HIV deniers too.
If you want to claim that it's all just politics, then that's something you are going to have to provide evidence for.
How exactly did "politics" created the global scientific consensus?
When did it start?
How did the vast international conspiracy to subvert the scientific method happen?
Was it...the Communists?
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