Chris Mooney [author of "The Republican War on Science"] in Mother Jones: There's No Such Thing As the Liberal War on Science
In general, I'm no fan of intellectual whack-a-mole. Nevertheless, there's one bad idea that circulates and recirculates with such frequency that once in a while, you just have to dust off your mallet.
I'm talking about the idea that when it comes to misusing or abusing science, both sides do it-a pox on both their houses-and the left is really just as bad as the right.
This idea is currently being championed by the generally clear thinking (but also ideologically libertarian) Michael Shermer, who wrote in Scientific American recently about the "Liberal War on Science." I just appeared in an hour-long discussion of this subject on the Canadian public affairs program The Agenda With Steve Paikin, which also featured Shermer and Mark Lynas, the British environmentalist and author who recently gained great attention for his resounding defense of genetically modified foods:
Shermer begins his article by conceding that conservatives have a bad scientific track record, noting their global warming denial and evolution denial in particular. The latter, he writes, springs from the "erroneous belief that the theory of evolution leads to a breakdown of morality." But then he goes on to argue that since some Democrats also doubt these scientific verities-or more particularly, a recent Gallup poll found that 41 percent of Democrats are Young Earth Creationists, and 19 percent doubt the Earth is warming-science denial is a problem on the left too.
Yes, but considerably fewer Democrats than Republicans get the science wrong on these issues, as the very polls that Shermer cites demonstrate. Nobody ever said Democrats were perfect on science. But Republicans today are majority creationist (58 percent, according to Gallup) and majority climate denier.
And polls alone don't tell enough of the story. Evolution denial and climate denial on the right are much more politically problematic-because conservatives, not liberals, are going around trying to force these wrongheaded views on children in schools. Oh, and by the way: By denying global warming, they also jeopardize the planet and the well-being of humanity. In my view, not all wrong beliefs are equally harmful-rather, wrong beliefs are harmful in proportion to their bad consequences.."
when they changed the name to climate change they became global warming skeptics and deniers
There most certainly is and there is ample empirical data to support it: interglacial age, a warming period between ice ages. There are bigger forces controlling the earths climate than a bunch of bipeds burning fossil fuels emitting CO2. Man's contribution to the climate is so small as to be within the margin of error. Solar activity and precession of the equinoxes are the two biggest factors in global climate change but, politicians and snake oil salesmen can't make a nickel on these factors.
The CAGW Cult (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Cult) hides their experiments and results, even to the point of illegally refusing to honor FOIA requests for data from publically supported projects.
I am a "skeptic". I challenge Shermer and the rest of his cult: "The recent 18 year pause in global temperature increases, as perfectly demonstrated by the RSS satellite temperature, data PROVES the CAGW theory is WRONG." You defend your theory using REAL data and results. This psychobabble you wrote here doesn't demonstrate a thing other than that you are not a scientist.
The AMA says that AGW is real. Which is proof that the whole thing is just political.
Of COURSE not!
But there are FACTS in the geological record that PROVE these temperature swings are a CONSTANT throughout Earth's history BEFORE MAN appeared on the scene.
Trying to blame it on him now is just STUPID!!!
...or EVIL!
Here’s the alternative SET OF FACTS:
The Earth’s average surface temperature has fluctuated tremendously, from much warmer than it is now to much colder than it is now. It has been warm enough to grow palm trees above the Arctic Circle. It has been cold enough to bury 2/3 of the Northern Hemisphere under two miles of ice.
The reason for these enormous fluctuations is uncertain. One thing that IS certain is that the activities of the human population cannot possibly account for it.
I do not need an hypothesis, alternate or otherwise, to explain these FACTS.
What I would like to know is, how does the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis account for these KNOWN FACTS?
AGW? Yet another name for this stupidity.
That cook paper that keeps getting cited has been discredited...
The Michael Shermer’s of the world do not want the truth. They do not seek the truth.
They want to be right, justified, on the high ground of morality. It is Kool-Aid drinkers like him that usher in the bloody tyrants of the world. And when the idiots are clearly shown that they were lied to, they will slay the messenger.
They throw the term denier around, while the AGW crowd denies the pause and the Medieval warming period...
There is not enough science behind AGW to have a need for any theory, pro or con.
Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is based solely on software models, none of which have been validated against real-world observations. Instead, they massage the inputs until they get the desired outcome.
There is no rational reason to believe their is a “hockey stick” inflection point in the Earth’s temperature response graph.
So, for the author to use lack of a counter-theory as evidence of truth for their non-existent theory is a flat out lie.
MMGW is not a real theory until it has a negative case.
All scientific theories *must* have a negative case, that is, describing something, anything, that would show the theory is incorrect. But that is something the MMGW advocates *refuse* to present.
You want to test the theory of gravity, so you hold a ball a few feet above the floor and let it go. Typically it will fall, thus generally supporting the theory of gravity. However, you have a negative case, that if it does *not* fall, then the experiment, for some reason, is not working.
But as far as the MMGW advocates are concerned *everything* proves MMGW. Hot, cold, up, down, darkness, light, etc., etc. They will never say what would show that MMGW is *not* happening.
This has put them in the untenable position of not just modifying data to fit their theory, but modifying data so much that it has reached the “night is in fact day” point.
No credibility left, so like the Soviet science fraud Trofim Lysenko, all they can do is threaten and coerce the real scientists. Even kill them if you can. But there is no future in that, because there are far too many legitimate scientists for it to last very long, so unless they can get the law changed and quickly, the whole scam is likely to burn out.
Shermer does not know the basics of the scientific method. For a theory to be falsified there is no requirement at all for an alternative theory. And AGW models have been falsified repeatedly. Moreover there are numerous alternative theories, number one among them being the climate is sinusoidal and guys like Shermer should thank GAIA that they are living in an interglacial.
Climate alarmism is just bad science: there is no cohesive, consistent evidentiary support of the human-caused global warming hypothesis.
And I did not read beyond this sentence, since the author clearly understands so little about the subject he is writing about.
In science, you have a hypothesis and a null hypothesis. You cannot ever have a hypothesis without an opposing null hypothesis. Thus, if the hypothesis is that there is human-caused global warming due to carbon dioxide, you must be able to define a set of testable hypotheses and their corresponding null hypotheses. For example, you would hypothesize that global temperature is a direct function of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air. The null hypothesis would be that carbon dioxide has negligible, if any, effect on global temperature. As far as I can tell, no one has ever experimentally demonstrated either the hypothesis or its null.
I do believe that for thousands of years in many languages it has been known as “weather” ... Seasons have been documented for many thousands of years.
To call him "clear thinking" is itself a supreme act of Christian charity. The man is a second-rater, a "science writer" and "philosopher of science" who failed to become a scientist himself.
Humans are destroying the planet because, because, because how could it not be so!
The Sun is Hot. It’s not a theory.