heywood on 7/4/2015 at 15:05
You're being generous by calling Armstrong's post sciencey.
At least Anthony Watts produces counter-arguments and analysis. Despite his cherry picking and bias paid for by the right wing political networks who fund him, he does occasionally produce something that could be worth debating. IMO.
But I'm not debating a bloody hand drawing by Martin Armstrong.
Quote:
It's stupidity at its most basic level to think that when a field is more than 90% agreed on the basic premise of something, then this implies dogma and the <10% are the ones who must be on to something. Too many movies, too few books.
I still think that debating the science is a proxy for debating the public policy. Even the president of the Heartland Institute, (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bast) Joe Bast, acknowledges global warming is occurring at the same time he funds research that denies it. I think that the people who are backing and funding the anti-AGW side behind the scenes are not so stupid that they reject all the science that points to warming. Instead, I think they reject the doomsday predictions, and are more afraid that AGW will become a vehicle for driving anti-capitalist policies just as Naomi Klein pitched in the book I referenced above. In other words, I think they believe that the cure might be worse than the disease. I think spreading FUD about the science is their first line of defense in opposing policy change, which is their real agenda.
But perhaps I'm being naive.
Another way to look at it is AGW might be considered a false threat manufactured by the global elite to justify new measures of control & taxation to help further concentrate power & wealth. But then we're not talking about dilettantes anymore.
faetal on 7/4/2015 at 16:06
I meant it sounds sciencey enough for the dilettantes :) The point being that those without the right education & experience can't see the difference. Or just don't want to / can't be bothered to try.
Depends what is meant by "doomsday". I think that argument itself is tilting at windmills a bit because we're not necessarily talking doomsday other than as a worst case scenario, we're talking high chance of down the line food chain disruption leading to resource conflicts, moderate chance of catastrophic sea level changes even further down the line and some chance that complete loss of biodiversity equilibrium will decimate life on earth or at best, drastically reduce earth's carrying capacity for all but the most ecologically robust species (the latter being the legit doomsday outcome).
Versus the inconvenience of changing our lifestyles in the hope that it might not be too late to kick off the various positive feedback mechanisms.
I get why this will put the dissonance strain on the very religious:
1) We're a god's special creation and therefore can't be bad for the planet or doomed to fail
2) This mounting threat is just a prelude to the second coming of a messiah who will save the faithful
3) Equally batshit insane interpretations of bronze age scribblings
Or with neo-libertarians:
1) Fuck YEAH I should be able to drive a car with a huge engine, fuck you because AMERICA
2) What matters is the freedom to make our own money from whatever the fuck we like
3) India / China / [other country] aren't going to slow down, so why should I? (analogous to, other people are bad, so why should I behave well - i.e. a stupid argument).
Hence why I have limited patience with debate with them, since you can spend a while constructing a layered and reasoned approach, only to get a fresh wave of confirmation bias bullshit which ignores everything which has already been said.
Anyway, back to the doomsday thing - there is very little doubt in the relevant fields of science that anthropogenic climate change is happening and that the rate of warming is unprecedented and that the rate itself is increasing (for those who don't understand basic calculus, this is bad). The main arena of disagreement or "controversy" (though I hesitate to use such a loaded term as the dilettantes will extract that and interpret it as controversy of the entire topic) is how we predict the rate, extent and knock-on effects of the warming. This is improving over time though.
We have a choice really, we can either exact some policy to try to slow and perhaps halt the process, to either avoid further disastrous outcomes or give us extra time to keep devising better ways to adapt to and / or abrogate the warming; or we can collectively dismiss it and shoe-gaze until it is potentially too late to do anything. The former seems like the more wise option - it's like Pascal's wager but with data instead of myth.
FWIW, I think a great deal of the climate policies being introduced are little more than lip service, driven by two main things:
1) The sheer degree of regulatory capture that has occurred with most Western governments, meaning that there is simply too much vested interest woven into the executive to be able to move proper policy through.
1a) The realisation from prominent multi-nationals that appearing to be dealing with "green" issues (astro-turfing as I think it's known) is a good way to improve their standing with the general public without actually hurting their operations.
Chade on 7/4/2015 at 21:52
*reviews thread*
Goodness me, if you have "limited patience" for this, then what the hell do the rest of us have? :erg:
Pyrian on 7/4/2015 at 22:24
Quote Posted by Chade
Goodness me, if you have "limited patience" for this, then what the hell do the rest of us have? :erg:
:laff: Lives? :cheeky: I guess by limited, he means finite. Finite like an unsigned 64-bit integer. :p (Okay, maybe that joke only works for me. I recently used an incrementing ulong with - gasp - no check for overflow! Because it just won't.)
Chade on 8/4/2015 at 03:59
See, that's exactly the problem! If you were a climate scientist, you'd take the proper long-term view of this.
faetal on 8/4/2015 at 08:35
I expend the time for a few reasons:
1) I'm fairly well read on the topic and have a decent memory, so I can reel off the majority of it without too much effort
2) I think it's important to counter publicly made statements which conflict with the balance of rigorously examined information when it pertains to issues which affect the lives of a large number of people (environment, medicine, politics, economics - though my education and training favours the former over the latter). Especially as one of the problems I mentioned above is that the frequency of well-informed discourse is greatly outweighed by its ignorant equivalent, because the latter requires less skill, effort and care. For every one person who understands how to interpret research, there are at least 100 more who think that googling things which back up your beliefs is the same thing, so long as the results of the search are above whatever the threshold of perceived credibility is for the person searching. Worth noting that any subsequent identification of said results being below the perceived credibility threshold of the person who has research experience, is misidentified as bias, dogma or whatever else the dilettante feels they can use to compensate for difference of ability.
3) I do genuinely enjoy debate, when there are actually ideas being exchanged, modified and countered in a way which meet the standards of good debate, i.e. not waiting a while for the debate to cool off and then posting a fresh batch of bullshit - it's like when Zoolander says "but why male models?" after David Duchovny has just finished explaining why.
4) I often learn new things and sometimes even change my entire stance on a topic if there is actual debate going on, so it's valuable (to me) not to walk away every time something gets heated.
5) I work in research, I spend long hours at a desk reading and writing. Oddly, for whatever reason, during breaks from this, I find myself drawn to a bit of debate - kind of like stretching after exercise. I don't know, maybe I'm just weird.
Tony_Tarantula on 8/4/2015 at 16:10
Maybe a bit blackjack, but that isn't where my criticism of the "climate change" issues comes from. It distracts from very real, very immediate, and extremely troubling trends like deforestation, toxic chemical use from fracking, and garbage from the big-box business model, and so on.
It also is a case where the proposed cure is a lot of what's causing the problem in the first place. The extreme over-regulation has led to people with a vested interest in the current energy business model being able to shut down new technologies that would have been radically disruptive to the industry and would have enabled the production of large quantities of energy with no CO2 footprint. I had an acquaintance who is the Managing Director of a venture capital firm who was involved in such a project, and they even had a working prototype. What shut the project down before it even started was a hostile stance from government regulators.......wonder why when there's a revolving door between the agencies involved and the energy industry.
bjack on 8/4/2015 at 22:15
Politicians lie to us every day. Corporations lie about the safety and efficacy of their products. The current President of the USA has been caught in a number of significant lies. Foods that were terrible for us yesterday are just fine today. Drugs that were OK are now evil. Evil drugs are now just fun.
Why then should we trust the "experts"? Cholesterol is no longer the boogie man it used to be? What about the millions on liver damaging statins people took to lower that nasty, but now good cholesterol? What do we tell them now? "Oh, the experts were wrong?" Will the experts pay for new livers?
The operative word here is credibility. When there is constant conflict of conclusions (real or manufactured), there will be a credibility gap.
How about EPA fuel mileage estimates? Bullshit. We had an American car that said it would get 19 in town. It got about 15 MPG at best. We now have a German car that the EPA says only gets 19 in town. It gets 23 MPG. Yes, I know the EPA is not doing the testing directly, but the method is severely flawed, or why else the is there such as wide spread? It seems the Americans and Koreans are cheating and the Germans and Japanese are understating. EPA numbers mean nothing to me anymore. They are bullshit. They cannot be trusted.
We are told that beer and wine are good for you in moderation. Wait, NO! Beer and wine are again terrible! Chicken is good, then it is not. Eggs are the devil's food and will kill you, then they are fine. California EPA restricts selenium to immeasurable levels in drinking water because some politicians feel that it is a terrible heavy metal poison, but others promote selenium for prostate health at 50 to 60 ug per day. WebMD even suggests healthy supplement levels for pregnant women. Yet, water districts a fined for having tiny trace amounts.
Average people of all walks of life are barraged with conflicting information like this every day. Most people simply turn it all off. It seems to be all shite. Can you really fault them for not believing your little prize compartment of reality that you are so sure of? I am sure you can. :cheeky:
Just trying to give some of you egg heads some perspective on why many "dilettantes" question your absolute certainty on matters.
Science can be very messy and even conclusions with consensus are not always right. Try talking about germ theory 300 years ago. New information comes along and refutes what was considered correct before. Again, try talking about string theory 40 years ago and not be laughed at. Sorry, but I am not up on that now, but isn't string theory the flavor the month? What's next? Tonal vibration of dimensional membranes in the key of D minor? (the saddest of all keys - an ode to Spinal Tap) :joke:
faetal on 8/4/2015 at 23:50
Yes, I get that science is confusing if you aren't trained in it and that the media does a horrible job of communicating it (hence the tired, oft-touted "one week wine is good for you, then it's not" thing), making it seem like the whole thing is terribly conflicted. Rather than take the time to learn the fine details, it's much easier to just lose interest - fine, it's not for me to tell people they need to understand science or they are a bad person or whatever. What irks me and (in the case of e.g. vaccines and global warming) is harmful is when people take that lack of understanding and use it a basis for knowing better than the "experts" (yeah, your use of speech marks totally invalidates the concept of expertise - way to fight the man :rolleyes:). It's telling how this mistrust of expertise only extends to things which are hard to understand - I rarely see people doubting the expertise of master carpenters. I guess part of it stems from wanting to banish the feeling of being outclassed in a debate about something you want to press a point on. If you say that science is meaningless, then everyone gets a gold star for effort and that's all that matters.
Fortunately, rather than make a meal of arguing that point, I can just refer to two established concepts - the Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby people with lower ability tend to over-rate their prowess (you for example feel totally confident that you've "seen through" science or whatever) versus those with ability; and cognitive dissonance, whereby information which conflicts with an already held belief is dismissed or ignored in order to maintain said belief. You and Tony are all over those like white on rice, which makes it next to impossible to take you seriously.
bjack on 9/4/2015 at 01:01
Science is not meaningless. Never said it was. No, I have not "seen through the science", as you put it. I just find that some scientists say what you hold dear is not settled. I reserve judgment until it is. You say it is settled. OK, you have jumped on the band wagon. Good for you. Enjoy the tune.
Back to what the OP was wondering about... why so many people distrust "experts". I gave a small number of examples in my last post.
1. EPA miles per gallon estimates being absolute shit.
2. Food claims (this good/that bad) of all kinds being garbage.
3. Regulating metals in drinking water to extremely low levels, but allowing "health supplements" to be sold that are far more concentrated.
Tiny little list. I could go on, but I have dinner to make. It will be filled with BPA since I will be using canned tomatoes. I do notice my man boobs are getting bigger. :joke: I am not so worried about me, but the zygotes and early fetuses seem to be in trouble.
It is not just the media that does a poor job of communication (more like manipulation), every little thing is now a hot button for the politicians to enact "CHANGE!" Then again, it has always been that way to some extent. There is wisdom going back thousands of years telling us to beware of politicians.
Oh, I prefer brown rice, BTW...
