Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Study How Non-Scientists Deny Climate Change (theguardian.com)
A new research paper suggest climate change opponents are "simulating coherence by conspiracism".
Slashdot reader Layzej says the paper "examines this behavior at the aggregate level, but gives many examples where contradictory ideas are held by the same individual, and sometimes are presented within a single publication." From the paper:
Claims that the globe "is cooling" can coexist with claims that the "observed warming is natural" and that "the human influence does not matter because warming is good for us". Coherence between these mutually contradictory opinions can only be achieved at a highly abstract level, namely that "something must be wrong" with the scientific evidence in order to justify a political position against climate change mitigation...
In a nutshell, the opposition to greenhouse gas emission cuts is the unifying and coherent position underlying all manifestations of climate science denial... Climate science denial is therefore perhaps best understood as a rational activity that replaces a coherent body of science with an incoherent and conspiracist body of pseudo-science for political reasons and with considerable political coherence and effectiveness.
"I think that people who deny basic science will continue to do so, no matter how contradictory their arguments may be," says one of the paper's authors, who suggests that the media should be wary of self-contradicting positions.
In a nutshell, the opposition to greenhouse gas emission cuts is the unifying and coherent position underlying all manifestations of climate science denial... Climate science denial is therefore perhaps best understood as a rational activity that replaces a coherent body of science with an incoherent and conspiracist body of pseudo-science for political reasons and with considerable political coherence and effectiveness.
"I think that people who deny basic science will continue to do so, no matter how contradictory their arguments may be," says one of the paper's authors, who suggests that the media should be wary of self-contradicting positions.
Note that holding contradictory beliefs is fairly common of conspiracy theorists (link):
Another study titled Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories managed to show that, not only will cranks be attracted to and believe in numerous conspiracy theories all at once, but will continue to do so even if the theories in question are completely and utterly incompatible with one another. For instance, the study showed that: "... the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered [and that] ... the more participants believed that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when U.S. special forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive," and that "Hierarchical regression models showed that mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively associated because both are associated with the view that the authorities are engaged in a cover-up".
Citation: Wood, Michael J., Karen M. Douglas, and Robbie M. Sutton. "Dead and alive beliefs in contradictory conspiracy theories." Social Psychological and Personality Science 3.6 (2012): 767-773.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Bad Predictions: Claim from the late 20th to early 21st century: Global Warming means that the planet it getting hotter. Temperatures will rise. Life: Record lows in winter Reaction: Change the term from Global Warming to Climate Change.
Actually this prediction was right, the hottest years on record are all recent years. Temperatures did rise, on average. That doesn't mean that there isn't a town where it is colder in one month of the winter.
Physicist Hal Lewis; Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara: "It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist." http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/n...
I've also heard that many of the global warming studies don't include the solar cycles the sun goes through as well.
You mean these cycles?
The NIPCC spent the time and effort going through the IPCC reports section by section exposing their fraud. An appropriate response to the NIPCC would be to prove them wrong, but instead they focus on smearing the authors and their institution. To me that shows they have nothing left to stand on and hope that nobody will read the NIPCC reports.
Lewandowsky and Cook - back on track with another paper full of lies and bullshit.
Remember the '97%' lie? Where 72 out of 12,000 papers supported his position, 1 supported the opposition's most extreme position, so he eliminated the rest and called it "science"? The paper where he had his forum members performing analysis? The paper where dozens of other scientists pointed out he had failed to understand their papers? That one?
Or the 'Moon Landing Hoax' hoax of a paper? Where these two allowed their forum members to submit answers to their online survey of opposition beliefs? Where they claimed to have included hundreds of skeptics and skeptic websites, all of whom reported they had never participated?
Oh! What about the 'Recursive Fury' paper, where these two 'analyzed' responses from skeptics - most of which they made up themselves?
After they've had multiple papers withdrawn for ethical, legal, and methodology concerns, you'd think they'd have learned to stop publishing this type of BS, but here they are at it again.
This paper uses careful selected objections to modern climate science (such as, your model don't produce real world data) and then says that because the objector has not proposed an 100% accurate alternate model, the objector is insane.
No, that is actually what the paper claims. That skeptics are not sane, or rational, or capable of coherent thought. All because some of them admit they don't know what the correct answer is, when they point out that someone else's answer is wrong.
Trees and plants only grow faster if we aren't also cutting them down all over the globe (and in many cases they are just burning the wood, which creates even more CO2).
Nature's ability to rebound is severely limited when we are attacking it from every possible angle (air pollution, water pollution, deforestation, soil-exhaustion, pesticides, etc).
The earth may be a big place, with lots of hidden stabilizers, but humans are an even larger and more destabilizing force
Climate Change is not a religious issue for those who "deny" it.
Yes, it often is.
https://www.google.com/#q=reli...
To say there's no religious component denying climate change to it is simply incorrect.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
e.g. If the three months of winter on average way above normal, but I can find one day over the three month period that was unusually cold, I am going to pretend the entire winter was record cold.
Actually, it's more like "if it's cold outside my door, then the whole world must be cooler than normal".
It's worth noting that the "greenhouse effect" is much less pronounced in the winter than the summer, because in the winter there's less energy to be trapped. In fact in the polar regions there's practically none. So expect winters to still be cold, in fact you may get record cold as weather patterns are disrupted (e.g., 2014) by latitude gradients in energy trapped.
In fact models have predicted a pattern of both extreme highs and lows for twentyyears now. It's only when you integrate over the entire surface of the globe that you see "global warming". Consider this quote from a 1995 New York Times article:
A four-degree warming, some scientists say, could cause ice at the poles to melt, resulting in rising sea levels. It would also shift climatic zones and make floods, droughts, storms and cold and heat waves more extreme, violent and frequent
This idea that global warming is disproved by local cold snaps is just a straw man argument.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
XKCD produced this graph http://xkcd.com/1732/ to shows how temperature has changed over the last 22,000 years
Actually... you pretty much just proved that you have no idea what it means. Nowhere did I assume the conclusion of my argument true without providing evidence of it's truth. In fact I listed a whole lot of evidence.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
XKCD produced this graph http://xkcd.com/1732/ to shows how temperature has changed over the last 22,000 years
xkcd is great, but the data he referenced follows the infamous "hide the decline" trick. The 'trick' is nothing more than using the instrumental temperature record to fill in gaps or quality in data. For the proxy records cited going back 20k years, the accuracy and precision over the last 100 is poor and the authors themselves state as much. Thus, to complete the data set through to today the instrumental record is included from 1900 onwards.
Nothing really wrong with that. The only caveat is in how you interpret the graph. If you look at the graph and observe that there is an unprecedented trend set off at 1900, the beginning of the industrial era you have to be careful. The unprecedented trend ALSO coincides with a change in methodology and data source in the graph. Ruling out how sensitive the proxy data is to short term spikes like today is vitally important to interpreting that part of the graph well, and we're still working that.