The Limits To Skepticism

jamie found a long and painstaking piece up at The Economist asking and provisionally answering the question: "Does the spirit of scientific scepticism really require that I remain forever open-minded to denialist humbug until it's shown to be wrong?" The author, who is not named, spent several hours picking apart the arguments of one Willis Eschenbach, AGW denialist, who on Dec. 8 published what he called the "smoking gun" — it was supposed to prove that the adjustments climate scientists make to historical temperature records are arbitrary to the point of intentional manipulation. The conclusion: "[H]ere's my solution to this problem: this is why we have peer review. Average guys with websites can do a lot of amazing things. One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand. So for the time being, my response to any and all further 'smoking gun' claims begins with: show me the peer-reviewed journal article demonstrating the error here. Otherwise, you're a crank and this is not a story. And then I'll probably go ahead and try to investigate the claim and write a blog post about it, because that's my job. Oh, and by the way: October was the hottest month on record in Darwin, Australia."

Comments

You Don't Need a PhD to Know When a Chart's Bogus

[thepainguy]

In my Inconvenient Truth Analysis, I point out how Al Gore and/or his graphic designers use a set of information design tricks to try to increase the visual impact of their money slide. For instance, on the right side of the chart you can see where they overlaid one set of data (the red peaks) over another (the blue peaks).

Sadly, this explored the limits of credulity

[crmartin]

... and demonstrated the anonymous Economist author was a little short of the facts.

Re:re Time for open discussion

[jelizondo]

Please, please. See a great talk from David Deutsch at TED towards the end he talks about global warming, very interesting point of view.

And no, I'm not a climatologist, but neither I'm uneducated and will not bow before ANY priest of ANY religion.

Show me hard data; show me the experiments that prove your theory and I will certainly and humbly accept whatever it is you are saying.

Now, if you want me to just take you word for it, sorry. No can do.

In the 1970's the then current and accepted theory by the high priests was that pollution (i.e industrial waste gases) was going to freeze the Earth. Now it is going to burn it.

Re:I am very sceptical...

[Entropy2016]

Of course, you should also point out that scientists at universities are funded by government grants. It's hard to get those grants if you say something that the politicians don't want you to say.

I'm willing to bet that you've never been to grants.gov in your entire life. I'm also willing to bet you didn't know the application proposals are reviewed and approved by scientists (not politicians). You're probably a non-scientist / non-researcher who's attacking a system you clearly don't know jack about, so you've attempted to compensate for your ignorance by filling in the gaps with your (incorrect) assumptions.

YouTube.com vs peer-reviewed journals

[ReedYoung]

Pretty much fucking sums up the "debate": climate science vs. propaganda, hosted on zero-standards websites. Seriously, check the publication standards on the places that host denier material, versus the original sources of legitimate climatology information. Scientific legitimacy, publication in Science or Nature is significantly more challenging than submitting an e-mail address and creating a unique user ID.