Slashdot Mirror
When Beliefs and Facts Collide
schnell writes A New York Times article discusses a recent Yale study that shows that contrary to popular belief, increased scientific literacy does not correspond to increased belief in accepted scientific findings when it contradicts their religious or political views. The article notes that this is true across the political/religious spectrum and "factual and scientific evidence is often ineffective at reducing misperceptions and can even backfire on issues like weapons of mass destruction, health care reform and vaccines." So what is to be done? The article suggests that "we need to try to break the association between identity and factual beliefs on high-profile issues – for instance, by making clear that you can believe in human-induced climate change and still be a conservative Republican."
I'll believe in CAGW when the scientists quit fudging the numbers and it still shows it...when they can explain historical data that contradicts the theory...and when they can explain why the warming has stopped for the last couple of decades.
As it is, he fudging is so blatant that "climate science" is nothing of the sort...it's a Trojan horse for the same lod tired leftist government takeoff of economies. That trick never works.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
I didnt get the impression he was a liberal, that cant distinguish their socialist agenda from reality.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Are you Atheist? If so, you still have a religious belief. You believe that the supernatural does not exist. Many atheist form rather dogmatic beliefs around science, believing that science is infallible (which is rather harmful to science, since the scientific method relies on the assumption of fallibility.)
Anyone who says that climate isn't changing has their head in the dry dirt of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. Recorded history shows clearly that there is climate changes over time. Indeed, climate shifts have influenced man's history more than any other single event source. Scientific evidence shows that climate changes constantly. The problem I have is the intensity which climate cultists point to humans as the cause.
Given that the magnetic poles have been shifting regularly, if slowly, means that the solar wind's interaction with the Earth will change as the magnetic field moves. ("Settled science"? I haven't heard any nay-sayers.) How about the argument that carbon dioxide has been "building up"? Yet one study I finally found, that looks at wider time periods than a century (http://www.biocab.org/carbon_dioxide_geological_timescale.html) suggests that (1) temperature has no significant correlation with CO-2 content, and that we are coming out of a period of low CO-2 concentrations.
Does this mean that man is completely blameless? No. Temperature is a function of released energy, and the Earth had stored sunlight for millions of years. We are releasing that stored sunlight at an increasing pace, which eventually ends up in the atmosphere, one way or another, as heat. How much is due to technology, and how much is a by-product of man's actions such as the clear-cutting of Amazon rain forests and covering the land masses with asphalt and concrete, and how much is caused by other, non-man-made changes? So the question is whether the existing natural system for expelling heat are up to the task. More importantly, details are important. How much heat does technology dump into the atmosphere? Clear-cutting (and clear-burning) of land? Other sources? Without numbers, everything is just opinion. And when it comes to such "science", one option is equally as good as another, absent accurate and provable forecasts -- I believe that is why the climage deniers hold to their beliefs. Cultists haven't proven their case, or even shown their case has merit.
Are there other solutions than those proposed by the client cultists? One way to keep heat out of the atmosphere, if that is the goal, is to keep sunlight reaching ground level from being converted to heat in the atmosphere. Photovoltaics can help, although the energy would be released -- just perhaps in a different spot or a different time; the benefit would that such energy would displace energy released from fossil fuels -- current sunlight instead of ancient sunlight. Ditto solar thermal power plants -- using today's energy instead of million-year-old energy.
Sunlight that never reaches the ground can't contribute much to the heat load. How about reflection and dispersion? Some of the energy would be converted to heat by the air itself, but the rest would escape into space in the form of radiation (light, infrared). Another way to trap sunlight so it doesn't contribute heat is to increase the surface area of leaves, to increase photosynthesis -- and that has the benefit of eating up CO-2 as well as keeping heat out of the air. (Cultists: when did you re-roof your homes with grass? It would lower your air-conditioning bills, too, by keeping the heat out of your attic.)
But is that all there is? There is considerable heat trapped in the core of our planet. Further, there are energy sources in the ground that contribute to the atmospheric heat load...but I never see that heat source mentioned in the Climate Cultist literature. What is the effect of volcanos on the solar balance sheet? We know that ash can bring down airplanes, but what is the effect of that ash in the air? It could well be that geothermal power generation, replacing fossil-fuel generation, would be an excellent way to keep the atmosphere in thermal balance. Don't hear much about geothermal from climage cultists, do you...
I was part of the generation that "grew up with the Bomb" -- and I remember all those discussions about "nuclear winter"
Well, over there you are all socialists so the political label doesn't matter much anyway.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Nobody but Americans talk about religion in science. The rest of the planet doesn't care about old men in the sky.
Whereas Alfred Russel Wallace, who I believe can rightly be regarded as far more legitimate than Darwin himself (after all, he had a working paper that was observational while Darwin was still putsing and had nothing written, read Wallace's work, and back-fit "his" ideas to the notes from his voyage) but who simply wasn't a famous noble (damn pleb, stay out of the spotlight!), elucidated a theory of theism and the impossibility of life without it.
The general trouble faced by all for, as Hayek put it (slightly differently), rejecting "old men in the sky", is the reduction of vocabulary and thousands of years' refined traditions for thought of every kind; it's not accident the scientific revolution was preceded by religions ones, which formed the vocabularies necessary and led to the careful parsing of matters to be able to make distinctions and think clearly; nor that wherever religious have retreated throughout the globe, tyranny and mass murder have followed on scales unprecedented in history.
But hell, reject "religion" and one rejects the theoretical fundamentals. I've seen university professors go ape-shit when saying this, then reply to them such that the historically liberally ones STFU, and it takes only one word: "Spinoza."
Interestingly, a Christian-just-God-deist-Spinozan coalition on theology produced a document that put rights of man above the reach of rulers, wrote a whole document imbued with that philosophy and said it was only a silver mirror to a declaration that was gold and annunciated it; they were promptly ignored by others who don't "care" about the God of Nature or Nature's God, and their legal theory is tiraded againts on my country's shores by the "originalists" who reduce themselves in these moments to children with minds intolerant of something that can't be defined or set around an equal sign mathematically, with statements like "organic law is a theology, and not a theory of law." No, for lawyers, anything but brute force to the heads of all is no law at all--cause God ain't there.
One thing folks beyond our watery borders never have gotten is that religion has pretty much been a benefit to keep those mofo's in check at home, voting the cynics out or constraining what they can do. (Why they tirade about their being "idiots!!!!") It's as religion has declined in America that largely things have gotten worse, not only on account of removing the traditions and particulars that prevent a larger portion of people from buying their bullshitting or accepting the kind of things which only add to their historical litany of gross harms to human rights (forcible sterilization by the "superior" class of "educated" professionals who graduated stupid-U with inculcation of Darwinism? Only a troglodyte would dissent!).
Of course, as the sophistication of religion is drowned, its adherents' own harmfulness rises: the whole point of religion is largely to "do no harm", at least in the Christian tradition ("harmless as doves...", "...children of the Father..."), which includes the "do to prevent harm", which a certain left here hates heatedly. People hate religion because it can be used to coerce, yet then impose their own flimsier, undeveloped, and evidently harmful (which from the consequences which keep recurring, is obvious) ethics and shame, silent, threaten...in a totalitarian streak instead of fearful of a God should they be wrong.
My point is, really, "old men in the sky" shows a level of theological understanding that predates the Empires of Egypt and Nubia, or the Logos of Egypt, probably comes from those who think everything "Jew" is just late-made-up writing anyway (even as among some of the most significant of Egyptologists continue to uncover long-lost and forgotten sites are found by using Jewish writings) and don't know that the oldest mentions of a theology that is truly Divine comes
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
Talk to me agitation when you've read the IPCC report. I won't debate with John Regurgibots.
In other words, fuck out you lying ignoramus
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Over here in the US, the fascist conservatives equate anything not as fascist as them to be socialists.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
You're another of the people TFA was written about.
The easiest way to get rich/powerful is to be the child of somebody rich/powerful.
Not just the easiest way, but the usual way. The American dream being the fantasy that this isn't true.
That's not a fact, that's an assertion.
Show me your necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement that excludes natural climate change at any rate over 50%.
Proved wrong by your blind faith assertions? :)
The fact of the matter is this - your motivated thinking on this topic has blinded you to the base requirement for science - the necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement. You can't quote one for AGW, and you can't make any reasoned argument that it doesn't need one to be science.
Q.E.D :)
So, according to you, unfalsifiable hypotheses, like astrology, or creationism, can be considered science the same way we consider astronomy and evolution? :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Your beliefs are colliding with facts again :)