Beam me to Planet Gore !
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Stefan Lewandowsky’s ABC article on climate change is headlined “Opinion Versus Evidence”. Then with dead-pan delivery, he lists the “evidence”, but it’s all…opinions.
The question of delusion is looming. I mean really, is this a cry for help? There are not many laws of reason that Stefan leaves unbroken. He appeals to authority, attacks the “man”, and talks about everything bar the evidence on climate change. Is he serious? “Trust me”, he says, the world is warming because AIDS is real, mass-murderer Ivan Milat was guilty, Lord Monckton is only a non-voting member of the House of Lords, a few skeptics are burko, 97% of paid climate scientists agree that we ought to be worried and keep paying them, someone has discussed the actual money that climate scientists earn (How could they!), and to top it off, the IPCC report is 3,000 pages long !
Not to mention that Google Scholar (“I’m so technical”) finds lots of hits (thanks to Vice President Al Gore, who arranged for the US Government to pay billions of dollars to his favorite researchers, and who also is on the Google advisory team), plus the world has got warmer in the last 150 years. So carbon must have done it, eh?
Shock me. This is science by smear, confusion, obtuse topic, and irrelevant points. Not that we haven’t seen it all before, but it’s coming from a professor. He’s really going a long long way out on a limb with baseless, unsubstantiated bluster, and lighting up in a neon sign that says: “Reason-Free Zone”.
Apparently, all the skeptics’ arguments have been falsified multiple times:
“Instead, the very fact that many of the roughly 100 falsified “sceptic” talking points are continually reiterated in public draws a clear dividing line between healthy scepticism and arrogant denialism”.
Lewandowsky lists exactly no specific examples (Who needs examples when you just know?). Oh, but he must be right, because an editor at what was once a notable journal has been channelling the giant Rotarex in the sky, and has “seen” the true label on the foreheads of the critics, and they are not people:
The world’s pre-eminent scientific journal, Nature, therefore refers to those who cling to long-debunked pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories while dismissing the findings of thousands of peer-reviewed studies by their true label — denialists.
The Picasso Brain Syndrome is when a cortex has all the semblance of “normal” in that especially-Picasso style: two eyes, two ears, four higher degrees, and no continuity. Massive one-sided funding has created an entirely predictable consensus, and it’s creating a mental implosion in some cerebellums: People are simply unable to cope with following the evidence against the opinion. Some people are born to follow authority. It’s a shame when this happens to professors.
Make no mistake, Lewandowsky thinks he’s writing science, and he thinks he knows what evidence is: It’s headlined. So what is the evidence to convince the 40% of the nation’s unconvinced souls? It’s not thermometers, ocean sediments, ice cores, boreholes, or even crop migration of bananas. It’s a pile of brains (or rather emissions from those brains).
Stefan Lewandowsky thinks that opinion IS evidence. We want to know if the climate is going to warm due to anthropogenic emission of a trace gas. Lewandowsky thinks that if he piles up enough brain-discharges in one spot, this tells us something about the climate. His graphs, if he had any, would record a rise in brains aligned with the hypothesis of man-made global warming.
But, those graphs would be eerily reminiscent of all the other times similar graphs appeared. Not so long ago, many rich, smart people thought DOW 14,000 was an accurate portrayal of reality.
He’s not just going down in flames, but he’s advertised; invited a crowd. The tenets of science are being publicly carbonised (pardon the pun) in supposedly professorial “informed” writing that embarrasses both our taxpayer-funded mass media and our taxpayer-funded universities. This is my former faculty of science. I cringe. The whole crowd winces. The taxi drivers are laughing. Then they realize they pay for this man, this on-line “forum”, and they cry like the rest of us. Blind children in Eritrea could have been cured….
Lewandowsky almost discusses some evidence in one paragraph, but gets confused.
fyi
Consensus = (1) Self-censorship of deviations from the apparent group consensus, reflecting each member’s inclination to minimize to himself the importance of his doubts and counterarguments. (2) A shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view (partly resulting from self-censorship of deviations, augmented by the false assumption that silence means consent). (3) Direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes, illusions, or commitments, making clear that this type of dissent is contrary to what is expected of all loyal members. (4) The emergence of self-appointed mindguards—members who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.