Heartland Institute Learning To Troll On Billboards

Fluffeh writes "The Heartland Institute is a lovely group of folks who take issue with mainstream climate science. They organize an annual get-together of like minded folk and talk trash about environmental change. 'The people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society.' (That's from a press release!). Recently, when they were tricked by a researcher into sending him a lot of internal documents, they decided to go on the offensive and also get some more media attention. After all, any story is a good story, right? Launching a billboard with the Unabomber on it with the slogan 'I still believe in Global Warming. Do You?' was just the start, with the institute planning Fidel Castro, Charles Manson and possibly even Osama Bin Laden. That's when even their stout backers threatened to walk away, backing started to dry up — and it seems that common sense started to prevail — but only so far as to stop them from making their message too public."

Comments

crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Shills for the oil industry.

Re:crazy

[Chrisq]

crazy

Shills for the oil industry.

Strictly speaking shills for the oil industry are not crazy, just immoral and money-grabbing.

Re:crazy

[Miseph]

AGW proponents don't need to prove deniers are crazy to prove their point... that's what science is for.

One side sees this primarily as a scientific question to be resolved through inquiry and research... the other views it primarily as a political problem to be resolved through rhetoric and propaganda. To be sure, both sides are engaged in some degree of each, but at the end of the day it does make a difference whether the scientists seek out the politicians or the politicians seek out the scientists.

Re:crazy

[squiggleslash]

Curious to know what well funded entities are paying money to people to have them make up stuff that would encourage people to want "Big Government".

One thing I'd like to know is this: for the last few decades there's been a concerted campaign to make conservatives distrustful of science. I don't mean conservatives are (although the fact most of the ones I know insist that AGW is a hoax is a problem), I mean that there are hundreds of millions of dollars being funneled into groups like The Heartland Institute and Cato specifically because however non-partisan they claim to be, they do, ultimately, aim their messages at the Republican party and conservatives in general.

We've seen this on AGW, on tobacco's links to cancer, on asbestos, to a certain extent on evolution (though that's explainable from the conservative church groups), and I'm beginning to wonder if the minor flare up we've seen recently about vaccines isn't going to grow into another example, though there's no evidence they're targeting any political group yet.

So here's what I want to know:

1. Why? Why target conservatives specifically with anti-science propaganda? Why aren't liberals being targeted too? (Arguments like "Conservatives are more gullible" will be ignored for obvious reasons.)

2. Why is there no backlash from conservatives themselves? How many conservatives actually want to (a) be subject to anti-science propaganda that will, inevitably, result - thanks to the wonder of echo chambers - in believing something that's wrong and (b) want to be in a group that will inevitably be considered anti-science?

What gives?

Re:crazy

[I_am_Jack]

Really? So if I oppose the Heartland Institute for being primarily funded by the oil industry and its cohorts, then I must be supporting Big Government. Your new learning amazes me, Sir Bedevere. Explain again how sheep's bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes.

Re:crazy

[meerling]

It seems to me that science is not liberal or conservative, it's not a political construct though it may get caught up in politics. Instead, science is factual. It is based on observations, data, experiments, and facts. Gravity or superconductors don't change because of your party affiliation, nor does thermodynamics. Science has never been about belief, it's always been about proven predictability and repeatable results, something that politics have nothing to do with. I totally agree that the Faux slogan of 'Fair and Balanced' has nothing to do with science. That's because science was never unbalanced in the first place, it does what it was always meant to do and does it rather well with it's peer review system and it's logical and rational methods. As to fair, it's as 'fair' as anything that isn't a game or competition can be, even though some fools out there want to paint it as a circus.

By the way, the Heartland Institute is NOT scientific, it's a bunch of politically motivated crackpots that try to pretend they are. The sooner they drown in their own ignorance and lies, the better it will be for humanity.

Re:crazy

[drinkypoo]

Why aren't liberals being targeted too? (Arguments like "Conservatives are more gullible" will be ignored for obvious reasons.)

Denial is not a river in Egypt. So-called "conservatives" are more gullible. They're also not conservatives. They actually favor regulation of business, but they want it regulated how THEY want it regulated, not how the liberals want it. They ALSO want to tell you what you can do in your bedroom. They're fascists.

Why is there no backlash from conservatives themselves?

Because they're more gullible, and they think this shit is really clever.

A conservative is someone who wants government to regulate morality and to not regulate business. These people are vanishingly rare in the actual population. Most people are more centrist than they realize. But they are amazingly common in government. Moreover, they do not believe these regulations should apply to them. That means they're not really conservatives, either. They're what, oligarchists or something, I don't know what you'd really call it. But they don't believe what they're saying. The short form is "liars". Neither liberals nor conservatives are well-represented in government.

Re:crazy

[lexsird]

It's all one big pot of "Fascist Stew" that has been on the burner for quite a while. From your wording and "tone" I glean that you are a Con and are trying to put some reason to it all. You need far more objectivity.

Follow the money I say. This particular topic concerning this group interests me only in one aspect; who's funding them? My guess is, their backers wanted a low level background noise of decent, and instead got decent on "10" with an over the top message. This draws fire and attention, something they don't want.

One has to first free their own mind before they can have the objectivity to see how this fits into the big picture. I think you are starting to ask the right questions. But if you follow this down the rabbit hole, it gets really ugly. Be prepared to examine all of your instilled values as they are part of the issue of a deeply propagandized nation. Here is a barometer for you; The more sacred the cow, the more it should be tipped.

Follow the money for the answers you seek.

Re:crazy

[mcgrew]

If you are going to call someone a "shill" for the people paying the bills, then you have to be fair and apply the same standard for both side.

Yes, if both sides are shilling. A shill pretends to be an outside observer when he's actually being paid by the side he's representing. It's a traditional carnival/magic show trick where the magician reads the mind of a "stranger" from the audience.

If Bill Gates signs on to /. as an AC and says Windows is the best OS on earth, he's shilling. If he signs in as himself and says the same thing, he's not.

The oil companies have an agenda, and they pretend to not be behind the deniers. That makes them shills. If someone from the solar industry put up billboards warning about global warming without a "paid for by Solar Inc" they would also be shilling.

The climatologists who are warning about GW aren't shills. They're scientists.

Do you really believe that Climate Change is a hoax perpetrated by government to raise your taxes or something? You do realize that the AGW folks (Big Oil) benefit from big government, right?

Re:crazy

[khallow]

AGW proponents don't need to prove deniers are crazy to prove their point

Then why do they expend so much effort trying? For example, in the last link the author states:

Heartland's continued efforts in this area seem to risk turning it into a single-issue think tank. And that may actually make sense; the leaked financial documents indicate that some of its largest donations come from single individuals who are targeting money for climate efforts.

A scientist sacrificed his career to obtain this information fraudulently (as well as forging a memo to sex up the leak when the existing information wasn't good enough). Why wasn't the science good enough for him?

One side sees this primarily as a scientific question to be resolved through inquiry and research... the other views it primarily as a political problem to be resolved through rhetoric and propaganda.

Sure. So which "side" is which? The side that uses terms like "denier" (and equates them to crazy people) strikes me as the "rhetoric and propaganda" side.

Re:crazy

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Mod parent up! The sad truth is that if you teach fundamentalist [insert favorite religion here] to a person, you've automatically taught that person to think irrationally, opening them up to belief in anti-AGW, creationism, flat earth, a permanently growing economy and so on.

This is convenient for politicians and those who profit from the sale of religion or other belief systems. It is inconvenient, and may be fatal in the long term, for humanity.

Re:crazy

[i kan reed]

Except heartland shilling for the oil industry is a well documented fact, and you can check their funding sources and output very easily and see it.

You, on the other hand, are just blindly insulting a stranger on the internet. We're all impressed with your debate skills.

Re:crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

when you set your 'lambs' up to believe in bullshit and turn them against right-thinking and science, what DO you expect? you expect a lifetime of being shown non-intelletual ways is going to reverse itself suddenly? when you 'get' people very young and embed this emotional seed (religion), its nearly impossible to counteract later on in life. its often a life sentence of stupidity that they'll never get out from under.

what do they do, then? revel in it! rolling around like pigs in mud. 'look how stupid we are , WHEEEEE!'. seriously, its not far from that.

'god fearing people' also fear knowledge and reason. its a perfect marriage with the republicans. 100% perfect for the *modern* republicans, at least.

how could a group be so anti-science you ask? look around and see the new jesus-land (middle of US and almost all its south) that america has become. I'm amazed we get ANY science done in the US, anymore. all I see is christians forcing their views on people, in the laws and in cultures they don't understand and don't belong.

'liberal' is one who seeks higher understanding. we can see what the morons are doing and we're not joining in with their race-to-the-bottom.

Mods, how can this be anything but flamebait rated? There is no discourse here expanding the discussion in a meaningful way. This is nothing but pure hate bashing with strawmen arguments and stereotyping.

Re:crazy

[goldstein]

It might also be noted that some influential fundamentalist Christian churches believe that the world is coming to an end within a few decades and that there is also a belief that God will provide everything that man needs. It follows that long term thinking/planning is pointless and that any concern whatever about the environment betrays a mistrust in God. Just the perfect recipe for completely irresponsible behavior.

Re:crazy

[i kan reed]

How do you keep getting modded up? I really don't get it.

Not a thing you've said makes sense. Governments don't benefit from AGW or even belief in it. Here's a hint for you: governments rule by fiat, by and large, and if they have a thing they feel they need or want to control, they can. You simply allege a conspiracy and motives and move on. How, exactly does a government benefit from climate change research? Be specific. If you just say "it lets government get bigger" you're only buying further into your own delusions rather than actually answer the question. Tell me who benefits from "bigger government" as a completely abstract concept.

Should the underlying motive for proving AGW exist, you've still alleged a monstrous conspiracy including every scientist who's worked on the subject in any meaningful way. Does it not give you pause to say "Not one of these scientists has enough ethical principles to publish their actual findings instead of made-up ones"? Think about the scope and scale of what you're talking about. I honestly can't get into your head where it's easier for everyone disagreeing with you on every forum on the planet is part of a massive conspiracy being easier to accept than the possibility that atmospheric composition affects planetary cooling rates.

How do you come to the conclusion that the government is bribing scientists?
How do you arrive at the notion that scientists are complicit?
How do you decide people agreeing with them are shills?

Those are not easy conclusions to arrive at, but you jump straight to them without any of the in-between parts.

Re:crazy

[TapeCutter]

It's one thing to laugh at this group and their ineffective methods

Crazy yes, ineffective hardly! They've been selling the best anti-science propoganda money can buy for almost 2 decades and more than a few Americans have sucked it down like it was chicken gravy. Science cannot compete with cheap and nasty PR, especially when a large chunk of the population is scientifically illiterate.

Re:crazy

[Score Whore]

One thing I'd like to know is this: for the last few decades there's been a concerted campaign to make conservatives distrustful of science.

That's your problem right there. Assuming you're referencing the recent study, you've accepted statements of the media blindly without actually looking into background of their statements. The study says nothing about trust in science. It's about trust in scientific institutions, colleges and government agencies and the like. The question used for this analysis was:

The GSS asked respondents the following
question: “I am going to name some institutions in this country. As far as the people running these institutions are concerned, would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all in them [the Scientific Community]?”

The question has nothing to do with actual beliefs and trust in science. Hell, it'd be like saying prefer to have sex with teenagers because they answered "Selena Gomez" when asked "Of these three women which would you have sex with if you had to have sex with one of them: Rosanne Barr, Betty White, Selena Gomez?"

Re:crazy

[guises]

One side sees this primarily as a scientific question to be resolved through inquiry and research... the other views it primarily as a political problem to be resolved through rhetoric and propaganda.

The problem is that this isn't true anymore. The science is pretty much settled, so it's all political now and scientists generally suck at that.

And yes, they do need to prove deniers crazy. Or at least convince the majority of people that this is the case. It's the only way to get anything done when there's this much money working in opposition.

Re:crazy

[mcgrew]

One thing I'd like to know is this: for the last few decades there's been a concerted campaign to make conservatives distrustful of science.

Well, that's pretty simple, actually. If you're not in the 1% and you're conservative (in the modern sense, today's "conservatives" would call Eisenhower and Reagan liberals) you're fighting against your own interests. Notice that the conservatives were all for continuing the tax breaks for the rich that Bush pushed through, but against tax breaks for the middle class and fought those breaks tooth and nail? They're for flat taxes, which would only benefit the rich? They claim to be against deficits but are for war, the most expensive of government programs? They're against medicare, social security, spending on public education, and everything else that only benefits the poor and middle class?

Anyone earning less than a quarter million per year who votes Republican is voting against his own interests.

We've seen this on AGW, on tobacco's links to cancer, on asbestos,

Again, conservatives are for big business and only big business. They're funded by oil companies, tobacco companies, banks, etc. and they have lots of money to dupe foolish middle class people.

to a certain extent on evolution (though that's explainable from the conservative church groups)

What I don't understand is conservative church groups. Conservatives are for everything Jesus taught against. Taxes? Christ said "render unto Ceasar that which is Ceasar's and to God that which is God's". He taught against arrogance (the meek shall inherit the earth), pride, greed, the death penalty, etc. Conservatives want everyone to have a job, Christ preached about the lillies of the field. Conservatives are against the homeless, Jesus WAS homeless (remember that next time you curse a bum).

Jesus was a liberal. So why are there conservative churches?

Why is there no backlash from conservatives themselves?

Because if they're middle class they've already been duped, and if they're rich they're the ones doing the duping.

Re:crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

The moment you say "the science is settled", you set yourself up for disaster.

Many before you said the same things. People saying the world was flat, that heavier than air vehicles were impossible, etc.- all saying, "the science is settled".

Nothing in your statement is scientific.

Re:crazy

[goldstein]

There is a huge difference. Mainstream science involves publication in scientific journals with stringent peer review processes. There are quality control mechanisms in place, starting with the journal editor(s) and reviews by other experts in the field. Furthermore, if you publish a paper that is later shown to have contained deliberately falsified data, your reputation and career will be permanently destroyed. Furthermore, it is difficult to get a paper published if it doesn't contribute something new. Also, if you submit a paper which basically amounts to taking the same data that Dr. X analyzed to get more or less the same result, the likelihood that it will be accepted for publication in a reputable journal, or even a conference, is nil. There is really no advantage, and serious drawbacks, in attempting to achieve a conclusion that isn't supported by scientific evidence and analysis. The flip side is that most of whatever scientists that can be counted in the the anti-AGW community have minimal background in climate science or closely related areas. The remainder tend to be eccentric figures or those who directly receive money directly from from the fossil fuel industry or indirectly through an affiliated organization such as the Heartland Institute. Note that in such cases, you can be certain that the funding organizations are looking for certain results and anyone receiving money from them knows that. I find it really curious that many of those who see climate science as the harbinger of really big government seem to be perfectly accepting of new measures for reduced legal rights, internet surveillance , etc.

Re:crazy

[MightyMartian]

None of your examples are in fact true. Does it bother you that you cannot even come up with counterexamples that ever happened?

I know of no one who said air vehicles were impossible. Certainly the Greeks pondered it and da Vinci designed air vehicles. As to the world being flat, well yes, in Bronze Age and pre-Bronze Age epochs, many cosmographical myths stated a flat earth, but we've known for something like 2500 not only the shape of the Earth, but its circumference with reasonable accuracy.

For you to in fact provide examples, you should, well, you know bring up some examples from the era of science, and the example has to be something that the general scientific consensus pointed in one direction when ultimately it was determined that it was the other way around. Good luck with that, there aren't a lot of scientific theories that had gained general consensus that have been outright falsified. Big ones like the Steady State model of the universe presented enormous problems that even when there was some general acceptance, Einstein was still forced to insert a Cosmological Constant because his own theory actually demonstrated the steady state model to be false.

But by picking at low lying fruit, like what some Ancient Babylonian believed to be true, you rather prove the point that the pseudo-skeptics aren't terribly interested in a scientific argument at all, but rather in rhetorical games. As to your air vehicle thing, more pure bollocks.

Re:crazy

[sycodon]

slower political change that makes smaller, immediate changes with measurable expected outcomes so that we can, scientifically, evaluate our decisions and continue, advance, or eliminate programs based on their results.

That is pretty much right there is the essential essence of Conservatism.

Re:crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are interesting questions. I'll try to answer with a link and with a joke.

Link: I strongly recommend downloading and reading Bob Altemeyer's book "The Authoritarians". In this book (75% scientific footnotes you can skip, 25% mindblowing clearly written sociology research) he makes a clear distinction between "right-wing authoritarian followers" (the main topic of the book) on the one hand (because you can't have a right-wing movement, dictatorship etc. without all those people who just neatly obey what TPTB instruct them to do), and "right-wing authoritarian leaders", who are a rare breed of people who have no scruples at all and happen to have found they are really good at gaining power over the backs of the "right-wing authoritarian followers" which they manipulate and enthuse.


Joke: This is a lame joke, I'm not exactly sure why I'm telling it here on Slashdot, but it felt appropriate somehow so indulge me.

It is a stormy night. Two men are driving on a motorway through the storm, looking stressed-out, tired and wary of the road. The autoradio is on softly but suddenly it gets interrupted by a blaring emergency traffic report:
"Attention! A wrong-way driver(*) has been detected on the E0 road driving northward! Keep to the right and try to signal the driver with your lights!"
Says the driver to his passenger: "ONE wrong-way driver?!?! Hah! I've had to dodge at least TWENTY of those idiots already!"

(*) the joke is marginally more funny in Dutch where the word is "spookrijder" -- "ghost rider".

Re:crazy

[azalin]

Ether theory, Newtons Models (still working in most but not all scales), electrons are particles, origin of the species, miasma ...
There are probably a couple more, but these are the ones that came to mind first. Science is and has always been evolving.
I totally agree that we are f*cking up earth big time and that it would really be a good idea to conserve energy, and stop burning up resources like there is no tomorrow. The data shows that we changed the atmosphere and it shows things are changing, but acting would be inconvenient and expensive (somewhat) so we ignore the problem.
On the other hand , dismissing outright proof because it doesn't fit your world view isn't such a new idea either.

Re:crazy

[MightyMartian]

Yes ether might count, but Newton's models still work for non-relativistic speeds, so are just a special case of GR, electrons like all force mediators can be considered particles, origin of the species if it refers to Darwin is still generally accepted, with modification, wasn't aware miasma was ever a "scientific" theory.

Re:crazy

[Hillgiant]

That is pretty much right there is the essential essence of Conservatism.

To paraphrase Ghandi:
I like your Conservatism. Your Conservatives, on the other hand.

Since the mid-70's Conservatives have not been at all interested with efficiency in government programs. They have been focused on elimination of government programs. They do not want to do more with less, they want to do less with less (unless their district is involved, then they might be interested in doing less with more).

Re:crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Why wasn't the science good enough for him?

Because he realized that the majority of American voters are morons who can be easily persuaded by propaganda.

Re:crazy

[MightyMartian]

You will note that his expertise was not aeronautics. What you're doing is a sort of a reverse appeal to authority. This is no different than Fred Hoyle's anti-evolution claims. Just because someone is an expert in one field does not make them an expert in others.

Re:crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

When you can't face reality, you are a denier of reality. Period.

When Copernicus showed a much simpler model of planetary motion and later Galileo observed it, they were labeled heretics by the church. It wasn't until John Paul II that the wrong perpetuated by the church was righted and the Roman Catholic church basically said they were wrong and science was right. This is why Roman Catholic church does not challenge science anymore (like they should not), but reserve their business to the world of the paranormal. The pope even indicated that evolution is not incompatible with christian beliefs - they don't want to repeat the "Galileo incident".

Now, we have similar deniers about reality, this being AGW. Something that has been shown to be increasingly more likely for decades.

So yes, deniers can't show that earth is not warming. They can't show that man is not responsible. All they can do is put labels on reality and say it can't be happening if they believe it hard enough. HTFU and deal with it, deniers!

Re:crazy

[tbannist]

I think you're suffering from the "false consensus effect". I don't think your views are typical of actual conservative ideology. There are two types of conservatives (they are not mutually exclusive): fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. Fiscal conservatives want effective and efficient government, they want to pursue policies that reduce costs. They have also been largely chased out of the Republican party. Social conservatives want the government to enforce morality and social order. They don't like it when people don't conform to their moral and social codes. They are perfectly ok with a bigger government that benefits the "good" people and hurts the "bad" people.

You seem to be neither type of conservative. Of course, that was pretty obvious when you described yourself as practical libertarian. Own it, you're a libertarian and not a conservative. The difference is fiscal conservatives don't care about the size of the government, they care that tax money is spent efficiently and effectively. On the other hand libertarians care about liberty, freedom from taxes and freedom from rules. To libertarians there is no such thing as efficient or effective government spending (except to protect property rights).

Also, I don't think you understand what fascism is.

Re:crazy

[i kan reed]

I don't mean to speak for the parent poster, but here's my 2 cents:

Never hurts to hear another perspective.

"Tell me who benefits from "bigger government" as a completely abstract concept." - Government employees, government funded researchers, politicians, and the businesses they write earmarks for, etc. Pretty simple really...

Except they don't. Politicians benefit from being reelected, employees benefit from raises and promotions. Those don't mesh at all with the concept of bigger government. Not even a little, so I'll move on to...

Businesses that get earmarks, while the most plausible, don't do better from more regulation, they do better from more spending, and those are not the same. None of that fits the concept I was referring to. Furthermore we're getting even further separated from the people who are presenting the so-called false information, creating an even vaster conspiracy. The chain would be: businesses that get paid by the government have an unclear investment in the concept of a bigger government, so they buy law-makers, who instruct(by what means? laws? comitees? very public record here) the grant givers, who give grants to complicit scientists, who publish false information. Look at that chain of responsibility, and tell me it's robust and able to engage in both secrecy and efficacy all the way down.

"possibility that atmospheric composition affects planetary cooling rates." - We can acknowledge this without accepting with 100% certainty that current models that statistically fit old data can accurately predict future temperatures. We can also disagree about the potential effects, and politically what to do about it.

"How do you come to the conclusion that the government is bribing scientists?" - They're funding most of them. Not bribes per se, but grants flow to those the government approves of.

Yes, but you're missing an important characteristic here. The money comes first, the results second. What prevents the researcher from, you know, publishing their actual results? Many of them have tenure, therefore a well paying job-for-life, with benefits. There's just no liability there to make them dependent on creating favorable results. Besides that, most climatology research grants aren't even for global warming. There's no compelling reason to "play ball". Moreover, how do the researchers know that they're getting grants on the basis of positive results? Who would let them know?

Again, the only explanation is a conspiracy in which every researcher is a part. Which is crazy. Like, very crazy.

I believe most of the scientists (and most of the believers or "shills") are not part of a conspiracy, or getting paid by the government to create propaganda. But they are "jumping straight to" the "easy conclusion" that because the Earth has warmed for a couple decades, "it's all humans fault, and we need to tax somebody right now to avoid Armageddon".

Except it's 1.5 centuries of directly measured warming, with a clear trend towards acceleration. Not a couple decades. And the availability of ancillary data(thousand year old glaciers disappearing) is quite large. I think you'll find that taxes are not the only proposed plans for dealing with the problem, and there's a wealth of proposed actions, only a small subset of which are needed to be implemented to halt the problem within 50 years.

I again see nothing but broad-stroke conspiracy allegations, with nothing in the way of supporting evidence. As for me "jumping to the easy conclusion", I've studied meteorology, a dash of climatology, and the relevant data. No alternative hypothesis(I've looked at "Natural cycles", "stellar output", "bad measurements", and "alternate carbon sources") for current temperature trends has even a lick of correlation, nor do they have any substantial theoretical backing that could be called scientific in nature. The problem isn't that it's the easy conclusion, it's that it's the remaining one, ruling out the impossible.

Re:crazy

[geekoid]

Because the Heartland institute is lying, and using lies to change policy. They are backed by people who want to be able to dump what they want where every they want regardless of the effect. SO yes, people need to be aware that these people are lying to change policy.

One side has mountains of facts and data, has research every available hypothesis, and has came to a consensus based on all the current data. The other side has no facts, not supporting evidence and has resorted to comparing people who know the actual science to a mass murders.

his isn't a discussion where two side have pretty much equal wait in evidence, that would have been the 70's and 80s'.

That's why one group is deniers, and the other groups is actual science and fact based.

Re:crazy

[im_thatoneguy]

It comes down this. A technologically advanced society with a high population density *needs* regulation. The natural checks and balances in the world at this level of density start getting to the point of "just reduce the population back to equilibrium". So the only way to sustain a population such as ours is the introduction of technology.

We can't feed the world's population without industrial farming. We can't sustain population densities like we see without sewage and plumbing. We can't have a functioning economy without trade and massive transportation systems.

If you're walking you need no regulation. If you're driving you need a driver's license. If you're working by yourself you need no structure. If you're a part of a global supply chain with thousands of components you need schedules and order and precision.

If you live 30 miles from your neighbor you can fire your gun into the air and probably nothing bad will happen. Try that in Manhattan and you're bound to kill someone.

Density and industrialization necessitate collaboration and regulation. The problem is that the conservatives don't want it on ideological grounds. They physiologically don't want to be a social organism. Which is fine when you can live out in the woods by yourself or in a really small town. It doesn't work when you have a million people living in 3 square miles.

The reason Conservatives are targeting science is because science is the field of observation. The *reality* of the situation is that small government just empirically doesn't work. And when someone says that your belief empirically doesn't work you rightfully say that it is attacking your ideology. So if it's attacking your ideology it must be political. To quote Colbert "Reality has a well known liberal bias". The conservative war is a war on reality. Big government liberals just 'lucked out' and happened to be psychologically more in line with the direction society is leading.

Ironically conservatives are the hardest drivers of this change in reality. They don't believe in population regulation (Don't interfere with me), they are the largest proponents of industrialization (Don't interfere with my business) which is just accelerating our advancement to a world that needs regulation.

Re:crazy

[MightyMartian]

But blood letting dates back to a point before the scientific discipline of medicine came into being. This is my point. Trying to invoke the bafflegab of the pre-scientific era, or the clearly unsupported nonsense from the scientific era doesn't make the point. I'm talking about scientific theories here. Even ether wasn't really a scientific theory, it had no real supporting evidence for it, and was rather easily falsified.

And QM and GR didn't disprove Newtonian Mechanics at all. That there were problems with Newtonian Mechanics was known before General Relativity came along. The issues with the procession of Mercury were a problem that showed that Newtonian Mechanics had an issue. What you're claiming would be like saying 3.14 is useless because it's not a sufficiently accurate enough approximation of Pi. It's true that for very accurate measurements, 3.14 won't do, and engineers will have to use better approximations, but for the purposes of high school geometry it's fine. Much in the same way, Newtonian Mechanics is a good enough approximation for getting satellites into orbit or getting a probe to orbit Mars. It utterly fails at any kind of relativistic velocities, and for certain kinds of phenomena.

In other words, Newtonian Mechanics wasn't falsified. It was subsumed as an approximation of General Relativity for non-relativistic speeds. It was a part of the answer, not the whole, and you will find most theories sit in that vein. Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection lacked a good system of heredity. Does that mean Natural Selection is wrong? No, it means it was complete and required a marriage with genetics to give a fuller answer, but it was still useful to explain observations.

So let's bring this back to AGW. Is it a complete theory? No, it is not. But enough groundwork has been laid, there is enough data being gathered to suggest that in the larger picture, it is correct, that three centuries of puking millions of years worth of previously sequestered CO2 and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere through industrial activity is influencing climate. The theory will doubtless be refined, and is being refined, but nothing brought to bear so far has shown the theory outright false, or even in the important points, mistaken.

Re:crazy

[TheEyes]

They are precisely the people targeted by groups like Heartland. They're not idiots. They like to think of themselves as free thinkers. But, nonetheless, relentless anti-AGW propaganda has left them thinking AGW is a giant conspiracy, despite the utter obvious absurdity of such a position.

What gives?

It's about maintaining the status quo. As a rule, people don't like change: they don't like having to change their behavior; they don't like having to change their thinking; they don't like having to change their perceptions of the world. Science is a deeply troubling system for most people because it is constantly changing, evolving, coming up with new theories which force people to reevaluate their lifestyles. Given that, is it any wonder that anti-science propaganda finds a sympathetic ear amongst the intellectually lazy?

Take climate change as an example. Since Joseph Fourier first postulated the theory of global warming by way of the greenhouse effect nearly two hundred years ago, scientists have slowly but surely been coming to the inevitable conclusion that it is unsustainable to endlessly continue our current technological reliance on spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day. The obvious, inevitable conclusion is that we must transition away from carbon-based energy production soon, to prevent potentially catastrophic environmental consequences. But, people don't want to change. They want to drive their big cars, run the AC with the windows open. Damn it, they want to eat meat with every meal, not just a few times a week!

And then, here comes the Heartland Institute, backed by the Fox News tabloid conglomerate, saying that you can still have all those things, you don't have to change at all. All you have to do is ignore the scientists. After all, what do they know, those elitist snobs with their multi-year longitudinal studies and lifetimes spent studying the climate and basic science. You have people who can say stuff too, and, even if their degrees are in lying and stealing money (read: law and business) instead of science, they're saying stuff you'd rather believe in, because it means you can still drive your SUVs and eat all the meat you want! Everybody wins, well, except for your grandkids who'll have to live in a world with stronger hurricanes, massive flooding, and food riots thanks to most of our farmland no longer being able to support crops, but that's decades away and you'll be dead.

Re:crazy

[i kan reed]

bigger government --> bigger raises, promotions, staffs, budgets to play with for government workers. Again, not claiming conspiracy here, everyone's just working for their own self-interest, which coincides with bigger government.

I'm imagining myself in the role of a grant-awarding bureaucrat. I ask myself "would I get a raise from my boss if I chose to give funding to A or B". A is a grant proposal that describes building a long term climate model improvement based of temperature readings in the Atlantic, cross-referenced with atmospheric carbon levels. B is the same proposal, but is by a person who had previous published a paper proposing a stronger correlation to stellar output to global temperature. If I am looking to move up the ladder in DC, do I choose A or B?

The correct answer, as I see it, is choosing the one that will get the most useful results fastest and cheapest, regardless of anything else, because my promotion depends on doing my job well, not on the outcome of the paper. Choosing who to fund on any other criteria doesn't seem like it would influence my chances at all. Being a skilled employee(at least a masters in an appropriate field so I can understand the proposals I'm given) my workload is not necessarily lightened by more co-workers. Please correct my scenario so I can be in the mindset of a selfish auditor who can somehow benefit from the fraud you allege.

Do scientists live off one grant? Where does their next one come from? Same place? oh...

Tenure or not, they're getting cash from Uncle Sam to do research, so are inclined to support bigger government. No bribes or "directed" research (or conspiracy) needed.

And again, I repeat a challenge, now for the third time in the thread. By what mechanism does "uncle sam" communicate this dependency between research results and grants. Other than republicans telling them this is what they do, why would a climate scientist go "oh better agree with everyone else"? The point is, the way you put it, there must to be a conspiracy involving just about everyone in the field. There is no other way. And they literally have to repeatedly as a universal group decide over and over again that the next grant in a specific sub-field, from one particular source(believe it or not there are lots of private foundations that support general research too, not enough, but some), is worth more than their credibility, ethics, and legacy. Not only that but they have to fake data that looks realistic and is consistent with the other fakers out there. It's just not possible. Just from the government->scientists part. Then you require a beneficiaries->government grant givers path too.

The only demonstrated example of the government interfering with climate research I've ever heard of was when Bush administration specifically had NASA reports redacted by non-scientists to remove references to Global Warming research. That's a demonstrated example that was well documented, so the kind of meddling you mention does leak from time to time, but we've never heard in the other direction. I think you need to build yourself a flow-chart showing exactly who tells who what to do, and by what mechanism they convince the counter-party to do it, all the way from the beneficiaries(particular people in particular roles) to the scientists who publish particular papers on the subject. Draw it out, with lots of specifics on paper, and then tell me you think it's still credible.

If you do that, I'll help you track down evidence to support your claim. If you don't do that, you're afraid of (or too lazy to)critically analyzing your own beliefs and there's nothing I can do to change your mind.

Do we cheer on the Black Plague in the 1300s then because it had been warming for a couple centuries? "Must've been those pesky human's fault. That's gotta be why it cooled for a couple centuries afterwards. Wait, there were more people in 1700 than 130

Re:crazy

[khallow]

That's because you've made up your mind and won't be convinced by any amount of evidence, which is objectively crazy. It's not propaganda to call a crazy person crazy.

This is the sort of dribble that comes out of the "rhetoric and propaganda" side. You're telling me what I think rather than making even a half-assed attempt at a reasoned discussion. I hope you figure it out some day.

They Never Even Said Those Things

[eldavojohn]

Fidel Castro, Charles Manson and possibly even Osama Bin Laden

Wow, I never knew that Ted Kaczynski and the above crew were quoted on Global Warming. So, upon reading the article I found that:

How did Heartland justify the comparison between murderers and tyrants and anyone who believed in global warming? "Because what these murderers and madmen have said differs very little from what spokespersons for the United Nations, journalists for the 'mainstream' media, and liberal politicians say about global warming," according to the press release that announced the ads. It went on to claim that "[t]he people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society."

Wait, so you're telling me that you're putting pictures of some of recent history's most hated and feared men next to quotes about believing in Global Warming?

Congratulations, Heartland Institute, your argument is now so depraved that you've reduced yourselves to holding up pictures of Hitler in a public forum while pantomiming your opponents. Is that reductio ad ridiculum or is this so childish that people didn't even bother coming up with a Latin phrase for it?

So they won't mind if I put up a billboard that reads

"... and when this Earth is fucked
the free market will build us a better one."
(read more at www.heartland.org)

Re:They Never Even Said Those Things

[clickclickdrone]

"... and when this Earth is fucked the free market will build us a better one."

Thing is, I can genuinely imagine them thinking this is worth a try.

Re:They Never Even Said Those Things

[bjourne]

Wait, so you're telling me that you're putting pictures of some of recent history's most hated and feared men next to quotes about believing in Global Warming? Congratulations, Heartland Institute, your argument is now so depraved that you've reduced yourselves to holding up pictures of Hitler in a public forum while pantomiming your opponents. Is that reductio ad ridiculum or is this so childish that people didn't even bother coming up with a Latin phrase for it?

Actually it is called "guilt by association" also known as Reductio ad Hitlerum :). People come up with dog Latin phrases all the time.

Re:They Never Even Said Those Things

[GameboyRMH]

"Denier" has no more association with "holocaust denier" than "consumer" has with "consumer of human flesh." But don't tell that to your raging persecution complex.

Re:They Never Even Said Those Things

[Anonymous Coward]

"you've reduced yourselves to holding up pictures of Hitler in a public forum while pantomiming your opponents"

I seem to recall environmentalists doing the same to Bush.
And no, I don't support heartland. I just don't support hypocrisy.

Re:They Never Even Said Those Things

[MightyYar]

The only way to get the "denier" label is to oppose whatever socialist fascist corporate-kleptocracy solution that has been proposed as the only or final solution to the problem.

I disagree. I've been saying for the last few years now (even here on Slashdot) that while I completely agree with the science behind AGW, all of the solutions are naive and overly optimistic. It is really cute to think that you will get the entire world to agree to stop using the easiest resources available to them. We should be spending money on it, but it should be on predicting and mitigating the effects - trying to prevent it is foolishness. I want to know whether we should, in the next 50-100 years, be putting up seawalls and such or not. How high should this new levy be? Should we bother to rebuild this coastline after the next hurricane? This valley after the next flood?

That said, I hope someone proves me wrong. I've had people disagree with me - and I don't blame them, it's a pessimistic view of human nature. But I've never had the reaction you describe.

Re:They Never Even Said Those Things

[khallow]

"Denier" has no more association with "holocaust denier"

There are quite a few people who disagree (which in itself creates that association). And I suspect the people who started use of the term, "climate denier" were deliberately invoking that parallel.

Re:They Never Even Said Those Things

[Gr8Apes]

False.

Write the word 'denier' at the top of a page. Get people to list their connotations. 'Holocaust denier' will be high up there.

You're smoking crack.

While what you say may be true for a tiny minority of people with vested interests, the vast majority of the population would never even think of "Holocaust denier" even should those two words appear on the same page on separate lines. Why? Because for most of us, a "Holocaust denier" is much like an "Earth is Round denier". If they ever run into one, they're considered a lunatic fringe and they move on.

Re:They Never Even Said Those Things

[GameboyRMH]

No, he's saying it's better to be right than to coddle the opposition. They do not have well reasoned differences of opinion. This makes skeptic wrong and disagreer dubious.

Re:They Never Even Said Those Things

[Gadget_Guy]

Every one of the people that do not buy all (or part of) the whole AGW religion have been labelled "deniers" for 10 years now.

It is interesting that you mention this in relation to a story about Heartland Institute. It was this exact argument that made it apparent to me that there was a hand on the tiller of the anti-global warming movement. I wish I could remember the /. story when this happened, but there was one particular discussion about climate change when I noticed that out of the blue lots of different people had suddenly found themselves being offended by the term "denier". It seemed so unlikely that so many people would simultaneously become offended that at the time I thought that they must have been parroting a recent show of one of the conservative radio commentators.

But it made me pay attention to how the debate progressed in the ranks of the anti-AGW supporters. I began to wonder whether there was some checklist in the boardroom of a think tank (like Heartland) where they had listed what the next bit of FUD they were going to print in their next newsletter for their eager followers to claim as their own.

The funny thing about the "don't call me a denier" argument is that it is often used by right wing pundits who make a living denigrating their opposing side using labels like lefties, greenies, pinkos, communists, intelligentsia, ivory-tower academics, latte-sippers, chatting classes, liberals, alarmists and (apparently the next new term) "green-shirts". Actually, the last one is not really new; a quick google search on "climate green shirts" shows that it has been used for a few years now.

Still, good luck with your denialist gambit. Now it is true that the literal definition of the term is a very apt fit to what you are (more so than skeptic), and nobody using it was doing so to affiliate you with any other denialists. In fact the only people that bring up the holocaust are people like you.

But now you mention it, the holocaust deniers do share some traits with the anti-AGW supports like being against the weight of overwhelming expert opinion and the uncanny ability to be looking elsewhere when being shown evidence that they don't like.

Re:They Never Even Said Those Things

[Gadget_Guy]

Is it really so difficult to imagine that people simply do not want to see an enormous government intrusion into literally every energy use decision they make, or are made on their behalves by others?

Implying that somehow this is all a conspiracy theory is unbelievably false.

That is really outside the scope of the topic that I was discussing. The original poster was simply complaining about the use of the term "denier" and not about the implications of the measures required to solve the problem.

Now you might take issue with big government, and that is quite a reasonable and valid stance to take. But the problem is that the deniers (who can be seen elsewhere on this page) are going further than debating our the response to the problem by claiming that global warming is all a big con by government to give themselves more power. As far as conspiracy theories go, that one is huge compared to anything that I have suggested.

My theory involved a small number of people feeding a script to a group of willing, like-minded pundits who in turn influence the more conservative part of the population who eagerly lap up the tales of the "guv'ment" against them. It works because it is managable and it suits the desires of every participant in the chain.

The other idea, that AGW is a giant hoax, would require the cooperation of virtually every government around the world of all persuasions to corrupt the vast majority of the scientific community to produce false results and theories. It would be a monumental task and a complete house of cards, because all it would take is a few emails to wikileaks to show the evidence to bring the whole crashing thing down.

Which one of these theories would you consider to be unbelievably false? You can say that both are unbelievable if you like, but then you probably would not be considered to be the denier that we were discussing in the first place!

Re:They Never Even Said Those Things

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>AGW religion

I can't think of any religion that drills holes in glaciers and launches satellites to test its ideas. But maybe I'm "to[sic] dumb".

Re:They Never Even Said Those Things

[MightyMartian]

When the overwhelming majority of researchers in a field of study say one thing, and you get at best a handful of researchers with anything like the credentials necessary to evaluate the evidence stating the opposite (the rest being a hodge-podge of scientists in unrelated fields, engineers and journalists), is your first assumption that the naysayers must be right? You do realize that in almost every field there is at least one or two people who make claims opposed to the accepted theories; biology (a few evolution deniers), Big Bang cosmology (probably one or two physicists who claim it's wrong), HIV causing AIDS (that's right, still one or two who claim it doesn't), and the list goes on.

Let's face it, the reason YOU accept the skeptics is because it feeds your ideological leanings. You have political motives to deny AGW, and basically are willing to claim that the overwhelming majority of climatologists are either fools or liars to keep believing it. It's anti-intellectualism at its worst, but it's all been seen before.

Here's a news flash. The Universe doesn't give a fuck about Libertarianism, Communism, Capitalism, Pol Pot or your political beliefs. Reality is not defined by politics.

Re:They Never Even Said Those Things

[GameboyRMH]

Every legitimate question raised so far has been answered. It's the re-raising of those old questions that separates a skeptic from a denier.

Re:They Never Even Said Those Things

[geekoid]

"Every one of the people that do not buy all (or part of) the whole AGW religion have been labelled "deniers" for 10 years now. "
that's because the continue to deny it even thought all the evidence points to AGW. They have no new hypothesis that fits the facts.

That's what makes them, or anyone, a denier. It's not because we don't iike what they are saying,l it's that they are saying nothing but lies.

Non sequitur

[mwvdlee]

I dare bet the unabomber, Castro, Manson and Bin Laden all believe(d) in breathing air as well.
Does that make breathing air wrong all of a sudden?

Re:Non sequitur

[geekoid]

A billboard with Bin Laden "That man believed in God, do you?"

And here you are...

[Anonymous Coward]

...giving them free publicity, meaning their "crazy pill" strategy to garner attention worked.

Well done, Slashdot!

Re:Last I knew

[Anonymous Coward]

Only people with a vested interest in selling fossil fuels argue that there is even a debate. Volcanoes emit 300 million tons of CO2 per year, whereas humans emit 30,000 million tons of CO2 per year. The arguers are very loud, so I don't expect most people to know about this urban legend.

Re:Last I knew

[dbIII]

Last I knew, it was still heavily debated

The debate was over by the time a report on global warming landed on President Johnson's desk. I'm not exagerating. There was a report on that subject that was submitted to the President some years after climate scientists observed a trend, had a pile of conferences on the subject and agreed that it was a problem.
For the last decade there have just been self serving idiots like Monckton (call those Jewish kids Nazis) and Plimer (pretend climate science is a religeon and mock religeon - thus including climate science) pretending there is a debate. It's been almost entirely noise for hire. Compare the amount Monckton makes on his travelling roadshow to the most highly paid Nobel prize winner in any science on the planet and you'll see why.

Wrong Questions

[georgenh16]

They're going about it the wrong way.
You don't want people asking themselves why they care whether the Unabomber believed in AGW.

You want them asking the right questions:
1. Is the planet warming?
2. If yes, by a significant amount?
3. If yes, is it human caused?
4. If yes, by a significant amount? (say >=30%)
5. If yes, can we reverse it?
6. If yes, should we reverse it?
7. If yes, do the risks of not reversing it outweigh:

- taxing your breath
- crippling the world economy
- billions of people poorer, governments richer
- any and all other power grabs and loss of freedom that result

8. If yes, what are the chances we'll make it worse by trying to fix it?

There is a lot of doubt added for each of 1-6 (especially if you're a good scientist/engineer with healthy skepticism), enough that there's not good reason for any politician to even look at #7.
Only 1-5 are actually science/engineering. The rest are political questions.
Anti-AGW people like myself just like to point out that there is uncertainty in 1-6, and even if there wasn't, the answer to #7 is most certainly "NO".
And for #8, here I cite the Aral Sea, the tire reef, solyndra, and the recent article about wind turbines causing warming as examples of wonderful government environmental "successes".

P.S. If you're taking 1-6 as truth with zero doubt, you've got a religion.

Re:Wrong Questions

[GameboyRMH]

LOL plenty of wrong assumptions under number 7. And you don't exhale fossil-sourced CO2. At least I don't.

And the warming around turbines is very localized. They stir up the air around them.

Re:Wrong Questions

[vlm]

And you don't exhale fossil-sourced CO2. At least I don't.

I find that incredibly unlikely. You can argue the numbers but very roughly speaking a pound of "food" requires a pound of crude oil. The range of rational argument for the ratio is from 1/10 to 10 depending on the food, fertilizer, herbicide/insecticide, watering technique and source, shipment of all component parts, energy costs of refrigerated storage, capital investments in the transportation infrastructure (think of the giant blacktop parking lot full of SUVs in front of my local organic store).

You can play enron accountant that if you exhale 1 gram CO2, that gram did technically come from atmospheric sources so it doesn't matter than 10 grams of CO2 was emitted to make it possible for you to eat the food. But thats enron accounting... 11 grams output into the air is 11 grams into the air no matter how you split it up.

Re:Wrong Questions

[artor3]

1. & 2. are settled science. There's always some "doubt" in science, but not in the way you use the term. People like you, or more accurately the people who tell you what to think, profit from muddying the waters. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt... it's not just for software anymore!

3. & 4. are irrelevant. Who cares whose fault it is? If it's going to disrupt our lifestyles, we should try to stop it. This is just some religious fundie bullshit. "Oh, there's no way humans could affect God's plan!"

5. That's what we're trying to do, but deniers are fighting tooth and nail to keep us from even trying.

6. Yes, if you believe the science, the consequences would be severe. Not the end of the world, but a drastic reduction in quality of life for billions of people. But instead you've chosen to believe that all the scientists are in a big globe spanning conspiracy.

7. Taxing breath Strawman! Crippling the world economy FUD! Billions poorer, governments richer Bullshit! Do you think the governments are going to make a massive money pit filled with gold coins or something? They're not going to be richer, they're going to immediately turn around and spend that money. So your statement should have been "oil execs poorer, working class richer". And yeah, I'd be fine with that as a pleasant little side effect.

8. "Wind turbines causing warming." That story was revealed to be bullshit in the comments of Slashdot. It was only warming the area immediately around the windmill, not contributing to global warming. But of course, you wouldn't pay attention, because you want to believe all those stupid leftie ideas are back firing. You'll just gleefully go on spreading that lie 'til the end of time.

Keep Spreading Your Lies and Uncertainty

[eldavojohn]

Last I knew, it was still heavily debated exactly how much of an effect humans have had on global warming compared to natural causes (IE: volcanic eruptions).

Well, according to the USGS man made CO2 levels for 2010 were 35 billion metric tons while all volcanic activity was estimated at 0.26 billion metric tons. So keep spreading your lies and uncertainty about climate science. Your cheap rhetoric designed to protect your lifestyle is surprisingly effective against individuals who spend their lives studying this stuff and publishing in peer reviewed journals, NASA, etc.

Does it have an effect? Sure. Does it have a noticeable effect? Probably. Does it have a significant effect? Maybe. There's way too many variables to really be sure if humans are speeding up natural global warming by a significant amount (IE: accelerating it from millennia to centuries or centuries to decades).

All that bullshit peppered with weasel words like "probably" and "maybe" without a single citation. Well done. The concensus from the scientific community has been made, the burden of proof is now on you to refute their findings. Not vice versa. Not "probably" or "maybe."

Re:Keep Spreading Your Lies and Uncertainty

[Vintermann]

Hey, didn't you notice his confident, no-nonsense, businesslike tone? "Does it have an effect? Sure. Does it have a noticeable effect? Probably. Does it have a significant effect? Maybe. There's way too many variables to really be sure" ... What's a paltry scientific consensus to first-class truthiness?

Re:Keep Spreading Your Lies and Uncertainty

[PopeRatzo]

Yes, all that is true, but the fact is, it doesn't matter. There's no point in reducing CO2 levels. Even if we stopped emitting CO2 completely, NOW, down to 0%, no combustion of fuel AT ALL, it would still be thousands of years before CO2 levels reached pre-industrial levels. We've made our bed, now we have to sleep in it.

Do you understand the concept that when you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, first stop digging (unless you plan to be buried down there)?

Just because we find ourselves in a bad situation does not mean we should do nothing and just make the problem worse.

Re:Keep Spreading Your Lies and Uncertainty

[khallow]

It's time to start thinking about how to deal with the global warming deniers.

Aren't there some empty FEMA camps somewhere where we can put them where they won't hurt anyone?

Why don't you self-report to one of these camps? This sort of psychopathic post is how comparisons to Nazis or murderers get inspired. If your reasoning was strong enough to withstand people who will disagree with you no matter what, then you wouldn't be publicly fantasizing about removing them from society. It's only because you are incompetent in this area, that you see a problem.

The simple solution is that you don't bother trying to persuade someone who will never agree with you. Instead, you use their unconditional disagreement with AGW (or whatever) against them to persuade those who aren't committed. For example, if they claim that global warming doesn't happen, then show that it does. It's not magic.

Instead, I see lots of AGW advocates wasting a great deal of time trying to frame the debate or villainize some opposition, for example, labeling the other side as "deniers" (and rationalizing that claim with some pretty stupid arguments) rather than attempting to persuade anyone.

I recognize that sometimes we have behaviors, such as obsessive hand-washing (or publicly fantasizing about sending people to FEMA camps) that we can't easily stop due to screwy mental machinery, but we do have some ability to mitigate behaviors that are harmful to us.

Re:Keep Spreading Your Lies and Uncertainty

[MightyMartian]

It was also once consensus that the Earth was the center of the universe. A consensus of people in some places think it's okay to stone adulterers.

Neither were scientific.

Just because a majority of people believe something is true doesn't mean that it is.Bringing that up also doesn't do anything to convince people otherwise anyway. Providing facts and exposing myths without being confrontational is what will do it. You can point out factual errors in another's post without going down the road of "cheap rhetoric" and "buillshit" in your own. Try it sometime.

None of this has anything to do with the science.

Fallacies are fun!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Incidentally, I've heard that the late Mr. Bin Laden was a big enthusiast of the right to keep and bear arms...

Re:Fallacies are fun!

[H0p313ss]

Incidentally, I've heard that the late Mr. Bin Laden was a big enthusiast of the right to keep and bear arms...

However I've heard he's secretly a Muslim and born outside the US, so your mileage may vary.

here we go again

[hxnwix]

Another opportunity for Slashdotters to pity themselves for their victimization at the hands of a global scientific conspiracy. "We've been labeled deniers," the Slashdotters will lament, "it's ad hominem!"

"In our view, these billboards just return the favor. It's how politics, I mean science and peer review, works! It's hard ball, and climate-change-anistas are big bully crybabies!"

Indeed, it's reminiscent of how Copernicus, in his deep resentment of the Catholic church, formed the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun and then set about finding evidence of his pre-determined conclusion, labeling those who disagreed "deniers," and proceeded to build "scientific consensus" by using his position to deny grant money and publication to sensible, honest researchers!

the beauty of free speech

[TheKnave]

is that it makes the lunatic fringe much easier to locate.

Re:Happens when you call people "deniers"

[slashbart]

No it's bullshit. There are many ways in which people might not believe all or some of the claims on AGW. Believe it or not, there are even climate scientists (Dr. Bas van Geel for instance) who think the current scientific majority belief (IPCC) is wrong. That does not make him a "denier", it makes him a scientist with a dissenting point of view.
Are you really so thick that you do not understand that labelling someone a 'denier' makes the angry !? Call me a skeptic, call me a maverick, call me an obstinate old fart, I don't care, but don't compare me with people that deliberately deny one of the most gruesome slaughters of all time.
So if you don't understand that using this specific label is offensive, then you are either very ignorant, or just an asshole.

Re:Don't feed the trolls / Koran burners

[qbast]

Who did he kill?

Hitler!

[wytcld]

As Jon Stewart pointed out last night: Hitler believed an international banking conspiracy threatened to destroy Europe. Today there's an internal banking conspiracy threatening to destroy Europe ... and it's led by the Germans!

Heartland believes there's a conspiracy to falsify science threatening to destroy civilisation as we know it. Today Heartland's conspiracy to falsify science is threatening to destroy civilisation as we know it.

Oh the irony?!

Re:Don't feed the trolls / Koran burners

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

Indeed. How many planes has he flown into buildings? How many schoolbuses full of kids has he bombed?

Trolls just want attention

[CuriousGeorge113]

The only reason they're trolling is to get some widespread attention. Regardless of the ethics, it works. People are going to see this story, go to their website, read some posts and be influenced by their message.

Usually, trolls get down-voted to (-1 Troll). In this case, however, they made the front page. Not sure how that one worked out.....

Re:Seriusly America

[AngryDeuce]

It seems that way because unlike the extreme left, the extreme right does not own the mass media.

I love how skewed the right has become that they actually still spout that bullshit about the "extreme left" owning the media.

If anything, the media is centrist (which explains why the idiocy of the tea party isn't immediately laughed off the air every time it comes up), it's just the extremely vocal minority of far-right whackjobs with a bullshit persecution complex keep screaming because the rest of the media doesn't echo their nonsense the way Limbaugh and Glenn Beck do. I mean, the very fact that Sarah Palin was treated as a serious candidate, despite what a complete and utter moron she is, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the media is mostly centrist. A "leftist" media would have laughed her stupid ass right off the airwaves after her first Katie Couric interview, when she asked hard-hitting questions like "What do you read?"

Re:Seriusly America

[Psion]

I'll just put this here. It was on the ThinkProgress site for months whereas the Heartland billboard ad was stopped within 24 hours. Heartland issued an apology. ThinkProgress dropped the post silently and pretended nothing had happened.

Re:Last I knew

[slashbart]

Ok here's some evidence: fresh of the press: Nature Geoscience One of the co-authors (Dr. Bas van Geel) is actually very skeptical of AGW, because all of the GCM's underestimate the effect of the sun on climate. I tend to agree with his ideas, based on measurements, seems to me more evidence based than the output of computer models.

Indifferent to the politics

[Karmashock]

That is trolling. I hate the GW issue in general because it's so political.

But indifferent to that, the heatland institute shouldn't have done that.

I mean... I'm sure you can find a pedophile that likes kittens and then make a billboard that says "so and so likes kittens... do you?"...

There are perfectly reasonable ways to make these arguments without resorting to these tactics.

The pro GW factions have legitmately taken some body blows with the IPCC apparently not doing a very good job with the science, the universities and scientists apparently having some elitist ideas about what the public should and shouldn't know... and of course the "everything is caused by GW" meme being disproven abotu as often as it's claimed. The polar bear line was recently disproven in that the polar bears are apparently fine and the whole basis for claiming they were in trouble was specious. The scientist that proposed the notion is either under investigation or was disaplined in some fashion for creating the media circus.

And of course the anti GW groups likewise take a beating on a regular basis because the world does appear to have warmed about 1 degree over the last 100 years and that is very worrying trend. And of course the oil companies keep funding counter studies not unlike the pro smoking studies done in 50s and 60s. So it's very worrying that such biased groups might be influencing the science.

Long story short, it's impossible to trust anyone and it's a big political circus.

This sort of ad doesn't make it better. It makes it worse.

Re:Don't feed the trolls / Koran burners

[GameboyRMH]

He knew what would happen, it was culturally inevitable for the people of Afghanistan. That doesn't say anything good about them, but he knew what he was doing would likely cost lives and he did it anyway. He's at least as bad as those who physically did the killing, he lives in a first-world country, the FBI even came to him and described the implications, he wasn't some religiously brainwashed bronze-age illiterate goat farmer.

Yes, You Would Have to Go that Far Back

[eldavojohn]

It was also once consensus that the Earth was the center of the universe.

But it wasn't published in peer reviewed journals. I dare say at the time there was no "scientific community" and that nationality determined which intellectual circles you could run in. Although I do agree that, to compare the state of where we are today, you would need to go back to pre-Renaissance times.

A consensus of people in some places think it's okay to stone adulterers.

Yeah, a consensus of people who were not scientists. Who were not using statistics or science at all ... who were basically calling themselves judge, jury and executioner. Again, what these strange archaic Puritanical concepts have to do with modern scientific consensus is well beyond me. I link you 18 scientific associations' assertions on global warming and you refute it with some ancient lynching. Apples to oranges.

Just because a majority of people believe something is true doesn't mean that it is.

It's really weird that when the top minds of physics postulate that black holes exist, we're not adverse to it. But when the top minds of climate science agree on something, suddenly we are the armchair scientists who are better than those who have studied this most of their lives and have compiled samples from decades past from around the world. And the key difference seems to be that you don't want to face the consequences. You're okay with no longer using CFCs, you're okay with trying to wrap our minds around the existence of black holes and could you tell me why now you choose to shove your fingers in your ears and scream "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU."

You can point out factual errors in another's post without going down the road of "cheap rhetoric" and "buillshit" in your own.

This befuddles me the most. The original post I replied to said:

Last I knew, it was still heavily debated exactly how much of an effect humans have had on global warming compared to natural causes (IE: volcanic eruptions).

So I provide a citation and hard numbers on man-made CO2 versus volcanoes. And you label that "cheap rhetoric" and "buillshit"?

The Cherry Blossom festival happened sooner than ever in its history this year in DC and NASA says it's not just cherry blossoms but all plants (published in Nature's May 2nd issue, a peer-reviewed journal). Of course, this natural basic indicator of the state of the climate doesn't have an immediate perceived threat to mankind's existence so you're free to keep your fingers in your ears. At some point though, it's going to become annoying, then problematic for third world countries, then it will slowly climb the chain up to the protected Americans. And then, and only then, will we be willing to do something about it. When it's too late.

Re:NO Warming for last DECADE

[GameboyRMH]

Of course there's no atmospheric warming for the last decade (I never said otherwise, are you seeing things?). If you think that has any implications for global warming theory you're an idiot.

Re:Happens when you call people "deniers"

[tbannist]

There are many ways in which people might not believe all or some of the claims on AGW.

If you don't believe any of the evidence on AGW, you're either ignorant or a denier. The evidence is overwhelming.

Believe it or not, there are even climate scientists (Dr. Bas van Geel for instance) who think the current scientific majority belief (IPCC) is wrong.

Ironically, your post was the top result when I googled "Dr. Bas van Geel" and "denier". Maybe you're the only one who's calling him a denier?

Are you really so thick that you do not understand that labelling someone a 'denier' makes the angry !? Call me a skeptic, call me a maverick, call me an obstinate old fart, I don't care, but don't compare me with people that deliberately deny one of the most gruesome slaughters of all time.

You're called a denier because you deny the evidence. You're not a sceptic because you are only sceptical about one position. You're not a maverick, you're the status quo. You deny reality and evidence just like the people who deny that world is round, or deny that smoking causes cancer, or deny the Holocaust happened. If that makes you angry, too bad. Maybe you should stop acting like the people you abhor.

Just like a Holocaust denier, you seem to have a political reason to pretend the evidence doesn't exist or isn't conclusive. Maybe you should ask yourself why you deny something that every major scientific organisation in the world has accepted as fact? Climate change researchers are 97% in agreement that global warming is real and caused by human activity. That's an astoundingly high level of agreement among the experts. The level of agreement is somewhere around 80% when extended to active scientists in unrelated fields.

It seems to me that you're offended because you know the comparison is accurate and you're ashamed that you're stooping to the same level but you can't bring yourself to stop so you lash out at the people who call you on your irrational denial of the evidence. You know that you're engaging in the same reprehensible selective thinking for equally specious reasons. However, it's up to you to stop acting like the people you hate.

Re:Happens when you call people "deniers"

[drinkypoo]

don't compare me with people that deliberately deny one of the most gruesome slaughters of all time.

Just for a moment imagine that the people you call green-shirts to deliberately conflate them with people who spied and snitched on their neighbors for a paycheck are right, and AGW is about to roll around and fuck us all really hard. How gruesome do you think that would be? It'd make the holocaust look like funtime at Chuck E. Cheese. So if you don't understand that the comparison is consistent, then you are being disingenuous, or you're just an asshole.

Re:Happens when you call people "deniers"

[jo_ham]

Wait, you think this is directed at you? Or at scientists who have dissenting opinions?

Hold on here - I'm talking about the Heartland Institute. They are quite demonstrably *not* the same as a scientist or a member of the public, or you (well, unless you're a member too, in which case I'm so, so sorry that you're that deluded).

They are not scientists, and they have no legitimate arguments - as seen by their need to go for "scare" tactics by equating their opponents to the Unabomber, Castro and Bin Laden. It's the equivalent of saying "anyone who doesn't believe what I say is gay!". Interestingly enough, the boogeyman that they tend to go for is usually the thing that they fear to be called most, so it speaks more to their own psyche than anything else.

There is not more accurate description of the Heartland Institute than "AGW deniers" - it is their sole mission. They set up with that goal in mind (ie, predetermined outcome and agenda to push, regardless of the actual facts at hand).

There certainly are some scientists who believe that AGW has been overstated, but they usually come to that opinion via a scientific approach. I may not agree with them (I don't) but I can argue with them about their method and interpretation of the data. You can't argue with the Heartland Institute, since if you don't agree with what's written in their propaganda then they simply dismiss you or tell people you're the same as Osama Bin Laden. It's hard to really get a handle on how that debate is supposed to go, other than "your argument is silly".

I will argue with people who disagree with me - the science surrounding AGW is complex and extremely broad, and we're still learning as we go. What I won't do is argue with an institution who have been paid handsomely to attack the character of anyone who disagrees with their employers.

"Denier" here is not meant to be offensive, simply accurate. How else would you describe the Heartland Institute succinctly? It cannot be "skeptical" since that implies that they have the capability to look at the argument rationally and form an opinion based on evidence. It is clear they have no intention of doing that. They're not really mavericks either, and I'm sure they're not all old farts.

My aim is not to be offensive, (even in the face of being equated to Osama Bin Laden and the Unabomber), it is to point out that categorising them as "deniers" is not the same. Calling for their houses to be burned down or equating them with Nazis *is* the same as what they're doing and is absolutely wrong and offensive - as I pointed out initially.

Re:Don't feed the trolls / Koran burners

[GameboyRMH]

Another completely messed up analogy. It's more like saying "that bridge will collapse if you drive a truck over it. I'm going to drive a truck over it, watch what happens." Then an engineer says "we know, we're working on it, we have signs up to not drive trucks over it, so please don't do it OK?" and then you drive a truck over it and lots of people die.

He didn't just say "Afghanis will riot and kill if I publicly burn a Koran." He then proceeded to do it, even after the consequences were spelled out, and surprise surprise, people died.

Re:Seriusly America

[pavon]

Heartland issued an apology.

No they didn't:

“This billboard was deliberately provocative, an attempt to turn the tables on the climate alarmists by using their own tactics but with the opposite message," the latest statement claims, going on to say, "We do not apologize for running the ad."

Heartland: a policy advocacy group, not science

[Geoffrey.landis]

Shills for the oil industry.

Well, they are funded by the fossil fuel industry (not just oil; that includes coal), or by billionaires whose money comes from in the oil industry. (For this campaign, anyway; they also work on other issues.) Whether this makes them "shills" is a value judgement.

What we learn the billboard, however, is simply this: the Heartland Institute is a policy advocacy organization, not a science institute. They are no longer even pretending to have any interest in actual science. Their only interest in science is to attack it in order to make policy points.

They have stated this before-- Joseph Bast, the president of Heartland, stated that the Heartland Institute's focus is "commitment to a free market policy agenda," and that the main motivation for the Heartland Institute being involved in this debate is to "prevent the U.S. government from adopting policies that favor renewable energy," which he claims would cause an "economic disaster for the country."

But, despite clear statements that their agenda is related to policy, not science, people have been taking their attacks on science seriously.

Some links:
http://rockblogs.psu.edu/climate/2012/01/ethical-analysis-of-the-climate-change-disinformation-campaign-introduction-to-a-series.html
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201107070016

Re:Don't feed the trolls / Koran burners

[qbast]

If there is a crazy sniper, then rational response would be to deal with that sniper. Not leave him where he is and ban red shirts instead. You are treating Afghans as if they were children or mentally ill. They are neither - responsibility for their action is theirs, just like for any other adult. Killing UN personel also made them murderers and now it is up to court in Afghanistan to punish them. 'Poor goat herders', 'crappy childhood' or 'religiously brainwashed' is no excuse unless you are willing to use similar excuses in US courts.

What are the roots of anti-science politics?

[Geoffrey.landis]

One thing I'd like to know is this: for the last few decades there's been a concerted campaign to make conservatives distrustful of science....

So here's what I want to know:

1. Why? Why target conservatives specifically with anti-science propaganda? Why aren't liberals being targeted too? (Arguments like "Conservatives are more gullible" will be ignored for obvious reasons.)

This is an interesting thing that I've noticed. It's a very significant change from the world I grew up in, where liberals were classically distrustful of science, and conservatives very much pro-science. Through the Reagan era, being pro-science was associated with conservatism, but somehow after the end of the Reagan era, the conservative movement made a sharp turn away from science.

My hypothesis is that it comes from the conservative politicians discovering in the 90s that they can tap into the power of religious fundamentalists. The fundamentalists came with an anti-science agenda and distrust of science, preferring belief-based reasoning in the form of their advocacy of creationism, and have spent decades fine-tuning their anti-science arguments that they have been using in the war against evolution. The mainline conservatives seem to have picked up their specific arguments, without even explicitly recognizing the overall tenor of them as being anti-science.

Re:What are the roots of anti-science politics?

[Darinbob]

In the Reagan era, science meant high technology and the US was riding high on its scientific and technological superiority in many ways. Science supported many "conservative" views (these simplistic labels have changed meanings since then though), it was science that was going to help the Strategic Defense Initiative, it was science that put us ahead of the Soviet bloc countries. Science was a friend.

Over time though, science is no longer a friend. Science tells us to conserve and that worries economic free market "high growth" people, that oil is going to run out, that we might be in for some bad times if we don't change behavior, etc.

Basically when science has evidence to support one side then that side promotes it, when science has evidence that undermines one side then they oppose it. Science isn't political.

Re:Don't feed the trolls / Koran burners

[ArcherB]

Islam is a religion of peace in the same sense that Christianity is. Do Timothy McVeigh or Anders Behring Breivik make Christianity a religion of war? Would it be a religion of war if there was some middle-eastern country full of Christian fundamentalists?

Ah! There it is. The moral equivalency argument. First, McVeigh and Breivik were not "Christian fundamentalists", and did not do their crimes in the name of Jesus. Even if they had, it would obviously be against the teachings of Christ. Christ, for example, never waged war or led an army. Mohammed did. Also, you don't see Christians rioting and killing people in mass every time a Bible is burned or someone makes a cartoon of Jesus. Hell, Southpark has Jesus as a recurring cast member. He plays a talkshow host and super hero who looks at porn. And while I'm sure SouthPark's advertisers may have been threatened with a boycott or something similar, no one rioted and no one died.

In other words, your moral equivalency argument is bullshit.

Yes, an attack on civilization as we know it

[Geoffrey.landis]

Today Heartland's conspiracy to falsify science is threatening to destroy civilisation as we know it.

How? Even if you grant fully the research supporting AGW (Heartland's primary target), there's no civilization-threatening problem out there.

Heartland is making an argument against proposed policy responses to global warming by attacking the science. Their attack is to support and amplify the voices of critics who are shouting out assertions that scientists are liars, con men, hoaxers, crooks, and frauds.

If the "I-don't-believe-in the-greenhouse-effect" crowd were merely saying "climate scientists are well intentioned, but are misinterpreting key data that shows we should hesitate before drawing conclusions," that would be a different thing. But the attack is using phrases like "criminals" and "corrupt" and "conspiracy to defaud the public" and "should be put in jail."

Since our society is based on science, yes, I'd say that a campaign to instill the attitude that science is fraudulent and scientists are liars and should be put in jail is an attack on civilization as we know it.

Re:Read the article

[MightyMartian]

It's a variant the Gish Gallop, invented by (in)famous Creationist Duane Gish, whose chief means of winning debates was to throw so many things at an interlocutor that there was no way to deal with it in the time allotted. So many of the pseudo-skeptics tactics are pretty much based on the pioneering rhetorical games of the Creationists. In this case, you troll journals and repositories and look for anything that faintly looks like it might be anti-AGW and throw it out there, even when it turns out that the authors certainly do not make that case. You see, the amount of energy it takes to just throw articles out there is small compared to having to read through all the articles and references, thus it becomes a sort of rhetorical economics.

The other tactic that links in to this is to ignore when you've been shown the article in question doesn't falsify AGW, and then just keep throwing it out there anyways. This is pretty common, and why you will see some pseudo-skeptics throwing out long-debunked claims as if they were somehow still relevant.

Intellectual dishonesty

[TapeCutter]

Why wasn't the science good enough for him?

Institutionalised anti-science groups foisting policies the directly conflict with something as important and well researched as the pentagon's annual threat assesments upset most scientists and skeptics in the same way as shoplifting upsets shopkeepers. In my book deniers are intellectually dishonest people who cannot be swayed by reason and evidence, the exact opposite of what it means to be a skeptic or a scientist. Yes, it really is THAT simple, some people still live and die by their principles other's sell them for whatever they can get. No grand conspiracies, no scientists living the highlife on the taxpayer's dime, no NWO, no reputable journals playing the role of Pope Urban VIII. Just a loose group of 50-odd "think-tanks" all headquareted within a mile of K-street and all selling the same (surprisingly cheap) product - tailor made anti-science propoganda and face to face access to the likes of senator Inhofe.

I can understand why honest, descent people sacrafice things to try and shut these morally bankrupt institutions down, especially when 'the people' are supporting their FUD factories via a tax free charity status. What I can't understand is how easily their obvious propoganda convinces literally millions of otherwise intelligent people that someone like Lord Monckton is anything but batshit insane and/or a compulsive liar for hire.

They aren't real conservatives

[QuincyDurant]

People who support radical change have hijacked the word "conservative" just as those who support extremism in religion have hijacked the word "Christian."

  Many, perhaps most, of the engineers and scientists I know are instinctively conservative. They want to build on the past, not toss it out. As Edmund Burke wrote, they have the disposition to preserve but the ability to improve.

True conservatives also want to conserve the earth; it is no accident that the word is closely related to "conservation." And when science comes in conflict with religion or traditional belief, the first instinct of conservatives is to defend the old order, but after science prevails, as it did by 1926 in the matter of evolution, conservatives defend the new "old order." They do not seek to return the 21st century to the time of the robber barons of the 1800s.

The problem is that true conservatives--the ordinary people you live and work with--have allowed extremists like Limbaugh run the so-called conservative agenda because they see these loudmouthed firebrands as helping them hold back too-rapid change. In this, they resemble the Junker class in Germany that despised Hitler but supported him because they thought that he and his own brand of firebrands would hold back socialism.

If the stranglehold that extremists have on today's U.S. Republican Party is ever to be broken, it must be broken by true conservatives in the tradition of Burke, Churchill, Eisenhower, and the first President Bush. Until that is done, they have no real choice except to stay home or vote for the Democrats.

Unindicted Co-conspirators

[ThatsNotPudding]

Science cannot compete with cheap and nasty PR, especially when a large chunk of the population is scientifically illiterate.

The main selling point of HRI in particular and the Right Wing in general is this: You and your family don't have to ever change your lifestyle or even think about the devastating environmental, financial, or human rights effects of said lifestyle.

Even on a subconscious level, being absolved of ones' sins is very alluring. Praise Jesus and turn up the A/C!!

Re:Unindicted Co-conspirators

[Darinbob]

You don't even have to ask What Would Jesus Do. Those sorts of questions would just confuse the average voter. Just trust us when we say that Jesus would drive a Hummer and throw his McDonald's bag out the window when he's done with his supersize fries. Remember, when we win the election it is because it is God's Will, but when they other guys win the election it's because they're cheating crooks trying to steal your liberty.