Climate Change Deniers; What more proof do you need?

[Kimstu]

@BeepKillBeep

But Sam doesn’t know that because he’s never actually honestly looked into it. His sources tell him the scientists are a bunch of left-wing nuts and so he believes it.

This sort of “ulterior-motive dowsing” has been a favorite strategy of “climate skeptics” for a very long time. It’s a way to justify treating climate science research with elevated levels of suspicion even if you don’t understand what it’s saying.

I pointed out over sixteen years ago (yikes) that this approach is rather reminiscent of a classic Peanuts cartoon. The one where Linus thinks he can bluff his way through a true-or-false test without knowing the material, just by being savvy about the meta-nature of such tests:

Let’s see now… In a True or False test, the first question is almost always ‘True’… That means the next one will be False to sort of balance the True one… The next one will also be False to break the pattern… Then another True and then two more False ones and then three Trues in a row… They always have three Trues in a row some place… Then another False and another True…

If you’re smart, you can pass a True or False test without being smart!

Compare to:

@Sam_Stone

Climate science is as political as it gets, and scientists who may have contrarian ideas either might not get them published or not even follow up on them for fear of damage to their career.

And it’s been a political issue for so long now that I assume that some of the new generations of climate scientists went into the field because they already had a conclusion and want to help further a ‘cause’.

It is hard to keep bias out of science at the best of times, but when your career can be destroyed for bucking the ‘consensus’, and selection effects create new scientists that hacpve already reached a conclusion before their first experiment, it’s hard not to conclude that climate science is undoubtedly biased to some degree in one direction. Hard to quantify, but we should be skeptical - especially of results that perfectly fit your priors.

So I assume that papers will tend to be biased in one direction more than others, which means we need even more people to be skeptical.

It’s so fun and easy, isn’t it, to figure out how to evaluate the False and the True based just on your ass-extracted hunches about how “the system” works, rather than on actually understanding the technical issues!