Denialism
pharyngula | June 26, 2014Chris Mooney is galloping around on his anti-science education hobby-horse again. That's a harsh way to put it, but that's what I see when he goes off on these crusades for changing everything by modifying the tone of the discussion. It's all ideology and politics, don't you know — if we could just frame our policy questions and decisions in a way that appealed to the conservative know-nothings, we'd be able to make progress and accomplish things. And, as usual, I expect he won't recognize the irony of the fact that the way he communicates his message alienates scientists and science…
gregladen | June 21, 2014In 2009 someone wrote a blog post about climate change that made all the usual science denialist claims. Hurricanes have reduced therefore global warming is not real. In this case, hurricanes are one of the main threats of climate change (a straw man) and since they are not as common these days in the Atlantic as alarmists claimed the would be (cherry picking) global warming is not a concern. There were stronger storms in the past. Katrina wasn't really all that bad. Etc. etc.
The Ice Caps (he called sea ice "Ice Caps") are not really melting that bad and besides we don't really know what…
pharyngula | June 21, 2014Credentialism always makes for convenient excuses. We love to construct simple shortcuts in our cognitive models: someone has a Ph.D., they must be smart (I can tell you that one is wrong). Someone is a scientist, they must have all the right facts. And of course, the converse: we can use the absence of a Ph.D. or professional standing, to dismiss someone.
Creationists are very concerned about this, and you see it over and over again: the desperate need to acquire a degree or title, even if it is from some unaccredited diploma mill or a correspondence school, in order to justify their wacky…
gregladen | June 7, 2014Given recent attention to the issue of consensus in climate change research, this is a good time to mention a paper that came out recently by John Abraham, John Cook, John Fasullo, Peter Jacobs, Scott Mandia and Dana Nuccitelli called "Review of the consensus and asymmetric quality of research on human-induced climate change."
I'll paste the abstract below but first I'll summarize it in a sentence. The few papers that explicitly deny the basic science of climate change are rightfully rejected by the peer review process because they are crap. Bit they do find more attention by main stream…
gregladen | May 28, 2014Yes, folks, global warming denialism is going away. Here's one more example:
I'd like to know more specifically what Joe himself thinks about all this. This segment looks like a segue, and not the kind you drive around on.
gregladen | May 15, 2014The Global Warming Policy Foundation is an organization of mainly economists dedicated to mucking up the development and advancement of good science-based policy related to climate change. It is a denialist "think" tank.
A couple of weeks ago, Swedish meteorologist Lennart Bengtsson joined the GWPF. This was a little surprising, but not totally surprising. It was surprising because Bengtsson is scientist and the foundation is anti-science and, as I noted, mostly economists. (Well, they are sort of like scientists too, but a different kind of science.) It was not surprising because…
gregladen | April 9, 2014Yesterday, Ugo Bardi resigned his editorship at Frontiers Journal over the Recursive Fury Fiasco. Today, a second editor has done so as well.
You should go read the original post, but here's a key part of it:
Frontiers retracted a perfectly fine (according to their own investigation) psychology paper due to financial risks for themselves. It can only be seen as at best a rather lame excuse or at worst rather patronizing, if Frontiers were to claim to be protecting their authors from lawsuits by removing the ‘offending’ article. This is absolutely no way to “empower researchers in their daily…
gregladen | April 8, 2014Ugo Bardi is a scientist who until a few moments ago served as Chief Specialty Editor at the journal Frontiers. As you know, Frontiers has recently retracted a perfectly good paper, initially indicating that the retraction was due to pressure from the climate science denialist community, who did not like the paper because it was about them. Later, Frontiers changed its tune and claimed that the paper was retracted because of ethical violations of the authors, even though the journal had earlier clearly stated that there were no issues, ethical or otherwise, with the paper. I talk about…
gregladen | April 6, 2014Recently, the OpenAccess journal Frontiers retracted a paper written by Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer, and Michael Marriot Hubble called “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation.” The paper discussed conspiracist ideation as implicated in the rejection of scientific work …
A recent study involving visitors to climate blogs found that conspiracist ideation was associated with the rejection of climate science and the rejection of other scientic propositions such as the link between lung cancer and smoking, and…
gregladen | April 6, 2014I just watched a report on ABC news about anti-vaxers causing the current and alarming measles outbreak. It was a reasonable report for MSM though I missed large parts of it because I was multitasking ineffectively. But an idea came to me that would go a long way to manage this problem of anti-vaxers threatening everyone else's health and well being. Lives, even. They are threatening our lives.
Here's the deal. Most public schools have a mealy-mouthed policy that allows people to send their kids to school unvaccinated because they are dumb asses. That's a problem and that should be…
gregladen | April 4, 2014April 27th, I'll be giving a talk hosted by Minnesota Atheists at the Maplewood Library, 3025 Southlawn Dr, Maplewood, Minnesota. Details are here.
Details:
You may attend any part of the meeting you wish, here's the schedule:
1:00-1:15 p.m. – Social Time
1:15-1:45 p.m. – Business Meeting
1:45-2:00 p.m. – Break
2:00-3:30 p.m. – Talk by Greg Laden
4:00-whenever – Dinner at Pizza Ranch (1845 County Road D East, Maplewood MN)
This will be a talk about climate change focusing on current and challenging research questions that everyone needs to know about, as well as the relationship between…
gregladen | March 31, 2014STFU.
Seriously. For your own good.
Every time you make a move you seem to create your own pile of dog do and step in it. The latest own-goal for those who deny climate science was scored after an unreasonable and obnoxious attack on Professor Lawrence Torcello, of RIT. Details here and here.
Those mentioned above, and others such as the Drudge and Infowars, lied. They lied knowingly, blatantly, obnoxiously. They willfully misconstrued Lawrence Torcello's word and his research in order to make climate scientists look like Hitler. This is not a new tactic and it didn't work before.
And…
gregladen | March 26, 2014This is a followup on Are the climate science deniers criminals?, which explored recent work by Lawrence Torcello, a philosopher at Rochester Institute of Technology. (See: Is Organised Climate Science Denial Criminally Negligent?)
Professor Torcello's point was made in part by reference to the tragic events at L'Aquila, Italy, where a screw up mainly by non-scientist government official seems to have resulted in unnecessary deaths due to an earthquake. Torcello notes:
If those with a financial or political interest in inaction had funded an organised campaign to discredit the consensus…
gregladen | March 25, 2014It is very hard for me to view the world without my Anthropological glasses, since I’ve been one kind of Anthropologist or another since I was 13 years old. Thinking about climate science deniers, I realized what makes them annoying to me. Let me tell you what I mean.
The ongoing conversation at an archaeological site.
When Archaeologists (a kind of Anthropologist, in the tradition I was trained in) dig a site, they are constantly learning about what is under ground at that location, and throughout the process develop a model of what it all means. As an aside I should mention that…
gregladen | March 16, 2014Our future is at risk. The science is settled, in the main, though there are many details to continue to work out and there are unknowns. But no one doubts that business as usual release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere mainly as the greenhouse gas Carbon Dioxide spells big trouble for humanity and the planet Earth, including eventual massive sea level rise and highly disruptive changes in the Earth’s climatology that will make a mess of many things including our food supply. Think failed state. Think Syria. Now, think failed planet, Syria over half the globe, the other half merely a mess…
gregladen | March 10, 2014Neil DeGrasse Tyson on CNN:
And while we are on the topic, Carl Sagan, of the original Cosmos, on climate change:
See also this from Chris Mooney at Mother Jones.
And just for the heck of it, here's my interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson from 2011.
milhayser | March 6, 2014It's been a frigid winter in much of the United States, but Greg Laden notes that the country covers only 1.5% of the Earth's surface, and overall the planet just experienced the fourth-warmest January on record. Meanwhile global warming denialists are resorting to every rhetorical trick in the book, such as comparing their increasingly outnumbered position to that of Galileo. While it's tempting to recount the history of science as that of a few brilliant mavericks overthrowing established consensus, Greg writes "Science hardly ever gets Galileoed, and even Galileo did not Galileo science…
gregladen | March 5, 2014I have four things for you, two of which you already know about and one that is brand new and very exciting.
You already know that Skeptical Science is a web site that addresses most, perhaps all, of the questions that people raise about climate science. These questions might come from your Uncle Jeb who just figures global warming is a fad and not very important, or they may be questions that come from trained trolls who travel the Intertubes attempting to systematically disrupt the most important conversation we can have in the early 21st century. Skeptical science is also like an intro…
gregladen | March 1, 2014Nice coverage of climate change that is NOT A "DEBATE" ASSUMING SOME KIND OF DUMB FALSE BALANCE. Way to go, MSNBC. Thank you.
Summer weather in Sochi, a record-drought in California and a polar vortex. The evidence for climate change is all around us. Bill Nye and Jeffrey Sachs talk about the climate debate and need for energy research.
See also this guy:
It is funny that this guy got two people who are also not climate change scientists, but whatever.