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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.
These scientists are wrong! Liars! They don't respect our religion!
Science is not immune to politics. It's really that simple.
The problem with climate science is that it's so difficult. The average person the street has little hope of understanding all the data and how it interacts. They can never, therefore, have confidence in the results being reported to them. I'm largely in the same boat, btw; despite on and off studying over the past several years, I still don't really have a grasp on how all the data ties together and consequently I don't have a high degree of confidence in the reported conclusions of others.
Given this, attacking on the basis of "CLIMATE CHANGE" is the absolutely worst approach. The ignorance of your target audience will prompt them to respond contrary to your goals. Instead focus should be placed on the specifics; clean air emissions, water discharge standards, ect... Why? Because these are things people can understand, and they are immediately relevant to them. I don't want to live next to a factory dumping shit into the air/water, and neither does anyone else. That should be how climate change is addressed; not on the large scale, but rather the personalized one.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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.
Claim from 2007 post multiple hurricanes: Global warming will only make hurricanes more frequent and more powerful.
Life: They haven't, they aren't.
Reaction:Just wait
Claim: Global warming will cause droughts.
Life: Flooding and heavy rains.
Global Warming Experts Reaction: Dry places will get drier, wet places will get wetter.
Claim: People who deny global warming should be discredited as scientists.
Life: Debate, discussion, new data and learning happen. Global Warming/Climate change has had its share of bad science and reckless predictions on both sides of the fence and it makes it easy for people to believe what they want OR what they SEE OR simply become resistant to the concept believing the issue to be more political than scientific.
Slashdot Reaction to this post: Predictable
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
Science news is largely presented by reporters with journalism educations who don't have any background in the science they're covering and as a result don't really understand the nature of what it is they're covering.
As a result, when they report an issue like climate change, they're completely unqualified to explain the actual science and instead of covering the work that scientists do, they cover the scientists instead. Instead of explaining the research that led Dr. Jones to conclude climate is changing, we get an appeal to authority.
So the reason non-scientists deny climate change is that the argument for climate change is largely being presented to them via non-scientific arguments.
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...
The problem here is that people are willing to utterly ignore what has already happened. The Northwest Passage is open. The polar ice caps have shrunk. Every year is warmer than the year before. Miami Beach is flooding on clear days, they're building the streets higher.
Will humanity adapt and survive? Sure. But there will be crop failures, there will be mass starvation events, coastal cities will be lost, it will cost untold trillions of dollars.
With what we know now, CO2 emissions are the single biggest pollution threat to our environment right now, because they cause damage globally, not locally. That's why the ignorant don't see it as a problem, garbage in the street is visible. Burning, stinking rivers are obvious problems. But global climate changes that occur gradually don't look like a problem in your day-to-day life.
How much is it going to cost to abandon Miami, New York City, Boston, New Orleans, London, Amsterdam, Rome, Bangkok, Taipei, and pretty much every other coastal city? How much is it going to cost to find and develop new crop land? How much is it going to cost to try to feed the people whose formerly arable land is now desert?
It's not going to happen tomorrow, it's not going to happen 10 or 20 years from now. But it's going to happen if we don't do something about the elevated concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Maybe it's not going to be a global disaster before I'm long dead, and I don't have any kids, so maybe I should stop bothering with caring.
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?
Not really it is simply people making dishonest arguments. The scientific evidence that the planet is warming is overwhelming the problem is that the proposed solution - reducing greenhouse gas emissions - carries with it a huge economic impact. Not surprisingly this means there are a large number of people who believe that the economic problems from reducing greenhouse gas emissions outweighs the problems of just warming the planet.
However they believe that this argument is not strong enough to prevent everyone deciding to cut greenhouse gas emissions so, although they really believe the science, their only option to prevent the economic problems they are worried about is to attack the science and try to pretend that it is wrong. So really this is simply a dishonest argument made be people who are so afraid of the impact of curbing greenhouse gases that they attack the arguments for this in the only way that has any chance of success even though they don't really believe the argument they are making themselves
When the chips are down so to speak it is amazing how overwhelmingly people will back science. One of the best examples of this which is often pointed out is despite all the arguments in US schools about whether to teach evolution vs. creationism (or whatever fancy name is the flavour of the day) everytime there is a concern about a new disease evolving an spreading e.g. SARS, bird flu, swine flu etc. no politician stands up and says that we should do nothing because viruses can't evolve. So when lives are on the line people really do believe in science to help and guide them but if they do not see an immediate threat to their well being then they'll happily undermine and ignore it to keep up their own standard of living.
You've lost count? That's funny because I've never heard a single climate scientist say the world's continents would be entirely submerged by 2016. Can you cite one example of that? Or of any climate scientist saying desertification would occur over a majority of the world by 2016? If that's what you think you heard, then no wonder those were particularly easy strawman to tear down.
Are the "scientists" conducting these "studies" psychologists or behavioral scientists? Because as far as I know, those are the only "scientists" who study why people would react one way or another to a situation. I mean marketing people do too, but that's hardly science. The cited article is unclear although what is clear, apart from the APA format of citation, is that it does not follow the standard format of SCIENTIFIC articles. Usually an article by SCIENTISTS doesn't go "1. Introduction 2. Conclusion". There's a whole lot missing on things like materials and methodology, discussion, etc.
So if you want an additional tip as to why people (including scientists, for I am one) reject climate change "science" - here's a big hint: follow the scientific method. Note that I am not even discussing the actual data evidence for or against climate change. I am discussing the lack of credibility of people who call themselves "scientists" but clearly are not. The scientific method and the way scientific articles are laid out is not new and does not need to be reinvented.
Perhaps the confusion arises because social sciences people are actually starting to believe that they are "scientists" because they took Poli Sci.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
It is a debate on how much data were fabricated to draw the conclusions on climate change in the first place
No, that is just people who've been duped by propaganda demanding that scientists pick sense out their nonsense.
If you've been following Earth science since the 70s (as I have), you'll realize that there was a decades-long, vigorous debate that has gone on that was largely decisively finished by the late 90s. That said indivividual results continue to be debated vigorously, simply because the nature of evidence in a complex system like climate is always contradictory. Some places will warm while others cool. Sometimes will be cooler in places that are generally warmer. Some consequences will not appear when expected and other, unexpected things will happen.
Some misunderstanding of this complexity of course was inevitable when this first became a public issue, but by now it's clear that misunderstanding is supported by a conscious program of propaganda. Like the claim that the world "hasn't warmed since 1998", which was later modified to "the world hasn't warmed *significantly* since 1998," and which will soon become "the world has actually cooled since 2016". The problem with those 1998 comparisons is that they picked the hottest year ever by far as their *baseline*. This doesn't happen by accident; it happens as a result of a conscious and sophisticated attempt to mislead.
So yeah, it's beyond the point where these kinds of objections are worth taking seriously. Science is hard, but you can manufacture bullshit out of thin air. If you don't like the fact that people are ignoring you, join the flat-Earthers and perpetual motionists.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So a leg of your argument is that "this is what Nazi Germany and Russia engaged in". You lost it right there. And starting your argument with "I am a thermal engineer" is the same as saying, "I have some facility with math based models [maybe], but I have no expertise at all in climate science, observations, modeling or predictions, however here is my uninformed opinion..." We might as well take Jill Stein's (Green party presidential candidate) opinion on global warming, she's an MD, you know, and must be smart.
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
XKCD produced this graph http://xkcd.com/1732/ to shows how temperature has changed over the last 22,000 years
One of the hallmarks of conspiracy theories is that they imagine huge numbers of people to act in ways that contradict their own interests, and for them to all do it with perfect (or near-perfect) levels of secrecy.
The idea that there's more money to be made shilling against burning petroleum than there is shilling for it is simply farfetched. And leaving that aspect out of it for the moment, what scientists want more than anything is to see the scientific consensus overturned. When that happens it's like a gold strike: everyone rushes to the new fields and tries to stake his claim.
Once upon a time there was something called the "Central Dogma of Molecular Biology" (it was actually called the "central dogma"): DNA makes RNA, and RNA makes proteins. Except then Howard Temin and David Baltimore discovered reverse transcriptase, which explained how RNA from retroviruses were able to alter host DNA. Their reward for finding an exception to the dogma? A Nobel Prize, and a brand new area for research and technological development. Reverse transcriptase made the highly sensitive and accurate PCR test possible.
Any scientist who can conclusively disprove AGW would be able to dine out on that for the rest of his life. He would go down in history as one of the greatest benefactors of the human race. Most importantly, everyone would think he was waaay smarter than the other scientists.
People don't understand the function of scientific consensus. It doesn't represent a final version of the Truth; it represents a division between things statements that can be stipulated for the time being without recapitulating the entire lie of evidence (e.g. that matter is made up of atoms) and things that require citation of specific evidence (e.g. that there are stable elements with atomic numbers > 118).
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
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.