Conservatism, evolution, global warming, and the truth.

Great Debates
81

But we already understand right-wing thought, if we pretend the very term isn’t an oxymoron: fit the facts, true or not, to one’s agenda.

Another thread, discussing the “fact” that Stephen Hawking would be dead if he were British, gives a good insight into conservative “thinking”: facts are irrelevant. The Stephen Hawking comment came from a prestigious magazine, not just another Teabagging blogger.

Glaciers, polar ice, Mt. Kilamanjaro snow are all at historic lows, yet the attention span of “conservatives” seems to stop at last week’s snow.

GW skeptics in this thread punctuate their sentences properly, and know how to cut and paste URL’s but still manage to appear to be of the same intellectual ilk as Joe Sixpack.

82

Now that’s just silly. My attention span goes back to last year’s snow – and the snow the year before that, and the snow the year before that, and the snow the year before that, and the snow the year before that, and the snow the year before that, and the snow the year before that, and the snow the year before that, and the snow the year before that, and the snow the year before that.

Man, talk about a “facts are irrelevant” mindset; my entire point is that (a) it’s been going on for well over a decade, and that (b) I want to know just how many more years of the same I should satisfiedly chart before folks on both sides can agree that falsifiability is in play.

83

Perhaps so, though I doubt it would have made any difference.

Then perhaps you could tell me why the OP is phrased as it is?

So in other words they give the appearance of being intelligent, but the fact they disagree with you belies that impression.

84

Have you noticed that everything you posted earlier in the thread was incorrect? How does that make you feel?

85
  1. No, I haven’t, for the simple reason that I wasn’t. Many of the country’s conservatives view things exactly like I described.

Not much different than if I’d said 2 + 2 = 4.

86

Why do you insist on trying to delineate temperature trends solely by comparison with the record high temperatures of 1998?

As you can see from, for example, this graph, the 1998 high was an extreme spike in an overall rising trend.

Just because we haven’t yet equalled that extreme spike value in any subsequent year doesn’t mean that we’re in any kind of “cooling trend”.

All of the years in 2001-2007 had warmer average annual temperatures than all the 1990s years except for 1998. If we were really in some kind of cooling-off trend, we’d expect to see average 2000s temperatures dropping compared to other previous temperatures. But they aren’t.

Fixing the 1998 spike as the only temperature benchmark you’re willing to consider seems like wilfully ignoring the rest of the evidence.

87

I sincerely believe the following:
(1) many American opinion makers preach nonsense at odds with science, facts or logic.
(2) such nonsense is far more common from the “right” than from the “left”.
(3) many in the “middle” assume, based on “common sense” that, instead, nonsense is roughly equally common from the left as from the right.
(4) this misconception of the “middle” (3) leads to confused and erroneous thinking.

Someone at MoveOn.org described part of the dilemma of modern American debate: “When mainstream media gives an hour of time to someone telling the truth, they feel an obligation to give equal time to the liars.”

These facts do not seem generally recognized. When I see a question like “Why do right-wingers believe [some nonsense]” it seems more responsive to point out the general failure of right-wing “thought” to be fact-based than to focus on the details of any supposed science debate.

Despite what some may assume, I don’t consider myself particularly partisan; some of my views would strike left-wingers as right-wing. (Another fallacy of current American political thought is the idea that the Democrat and Republican Parties represent the Left and the Right. It would be more accurate to describe Democrats as right-of-center and much of the Republican mainstream as lunatic.)

I’m sure it may seem that way! :cool:

88

I apologize for “painting with a broad brush”. It is an emotional topic.

I’m pretty sure you’d agree with the following:

  1. Anecdotes about specific snow memories are irrelevant; one would instead seek best scientific data of overall temperature change.
  2. Given the enormous variabilities and uncertainties, there can be no “magic” threshold of certitude. Twenty years of cooling might give much more doubt than ten years, but you seemed to be asking for a specific number.

Some trends are influenced by “low-pass” filters; e.g. glacier instability can persist in a short-term cooling trend.

Can you offer specific URL’s showing conflicting temperature estimates for recent years? And, out of curiosity, do you disagree with Joseph Fourier that greenhouse gases cause warming?

89

Actually, that’s exactly what it means. Even GIGOBuster grants that the hypothesis would be falsified if we simply continue to fall short of that mark for some time longer; the only question is how much longer it needs to persist.

I’m saying we’re cooling since '98. Yes, as per the chart you’ve linked, temperatures rose tenths of a degree from the late 1850s to the late 1990s, and then dropped tenths of a degree after that, having previously dropped tenths of a degree from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, and et cetera. So what? I’m merely claiming that we’re cooling off from '98.

Well, look, imagine it’s 1998 and you know a guy who gets a raise and a promotion and – unexpectedly quits his job to start work at another company. “Kimstu,” he says, “I see great potential here; this business is going to be huge. My income will rise. It will rise, I tell you!”

And now it’s 1999. He’s still driving the same car and living in the same house; what’s more, he’s actually making less money. “Ah, it’s just the first year, settling in and finding my feet” he says; “I’ll be pulling in the big bucks before long.”

And now it’s 2000. The car looks a little dinged. The house needs repainting. He’s still not earning what he did before. “Two years? Two years is nothing. Trust me; I know what I’m doing.”

And now it’s '01. And then '02. And '03. “I know, I know; I’ve never yet made as much as I did back when. But give it time, give it time; I’m building a career, here.”

And now it’s '04. And then '05. “There, you see? I-I almost made as much money this year as I did at my old job.” And now it’s '06. “Had a bad year. It happens, you know?”

And now it’s '07. Or maybe '08. No, wait; '09. “I’m telling you, it’ll happen any day now. I’ll go back and rub it in everyone’s face, back where I used to work. It’s been a long hard slog this past decade, but it’ll pay off someday.”

There will come a point when even ardent supporters of Emperor’s New Clothes LLC will admit there’s nothing actually there; we haven’t hit it yet, but more of the same will, eventually, suffice.

Yes to #1. And yes to #2, so long as you’re including that stipulation about how twenty years of cooling might give much more doubt than ten years; I’d still like specifics on falsifiability, buy I can settle.

I’m not concerned with estimates for recent years; I want to know what will falsify the hypothesis. As for whether greenhouse gases cause warming, sure, all else being equal; I just don’t happen to think all else is necessarily equal. I’m content to chart the temperature, year after year, decade after decade – and if it keeps cooling after '98 for a second decade, then conflicting estimates or agreement with Fourier will be irrelevant.

90

As SA pointed out, we’ve left a rather interesting question behind.

Why is the rejection of basic scientific principles, logic and analysis in this context so tied to the right wing?

I don’t think that, say, in the 1940s or 50s there would be such a stunted and virtually nonsensical rejection of quantum theory or relativity. The science was clearly evolving the mathematical and practical tools to hone, understand, and test various hypothesis. There was clearly contention between schools of thought as to how the math and whatnot should or could work out, as well as competing interpretations of what the data could mean. And there were myriad experiments testing different aspects of the theories – experiments subject to scrutiny and review.

But there was no widespread hew and cry for NASA to build a faster-than-light vehicle. No call for teleportation devices (OK, maybe a jetpack or two).

Why is so much distortion, malfeasance, and ignorance largely supported by one political party? I don’t think the Democrats are inherently goody-goodies, immune from corporate largess. Is it an accident of leadership and timing? That the EPA was a Nixon thing because that’s what was going on at the time, but climate change is associated with the democrats because of Clinton?

Is it a byproduct of the partisanship paradigm shift that started with Newt and Rush in the early nineties? That is, though there has always been rancor and disgusting campaigns, the corporate sponsorship and entrenchment makes for a much more unified driving force. Sure there were Sears and Robucks inthe 1800s, but they are a pale comparison to Wal-Mart. Sure there were bitter campaigns from Jefferson on, but the triumvirate of Fox News, talk radio, and the introduction of the British tabloid model is in a wholly different tier.

So Rush, Bob Grant, Newt, etc. are coming into media and political power. Strongly tied to that power – especially in the media realm – is a rejection of compromise and a knee-jerk negation of anything said or claimed by the opposition. While partisanship isn’t unique to the right, the forces aligned such that unity and solidarity were/are much easier to enforce when there are multiple levels of self-supporting and sustaining marketing bodies. Add back in the Right’s slight tendency to be more pro-big business and their rejection of the science and solutions becomes that much more likely.

Fox, Rush and the Republican party have made an art form out of deceptively couching lies and distortions. This isn’t a matter of disagreeing with their politics – again consider the core question of how/why did science end up so politicized. It’s a matter of their pandering to the ignorant and somehow achieving their end goals without their base pausing to think. It is, at its root, opposition for opposition’s sake.

91

Of course it is more complicated than that, for example on a previous thread it was also mentioned that the temperature should also drop to the levels of previous decades, and IIRC even you were ok with that, bringing once again the point that you are only making an argument ad nauseam and others can see that I’m not wrong as much as you want to insist on that useless point.

92

I think your question can only be answered with pure guesswork. Someone might have a model in which they could simulate the chance of, say, 10 years of cooling in the present environment, but I doubt anyone seriously believes any such model captures the actual system’s complexity, especially since many mechanisms are uncertain.

Here’s a webpage (prepared by the cousin of the singer Joan Baez!) which may illustrate the complexity of temperature change over various time scales.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/temperature/
For our discussion, the graph “Greenland temperatures over the last 100 years” near the end of the page might be most relevant. To bypass the rest of the page just load:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/temperature/ObservedTemp.jpg
This graph shows a 30-year cooling trend from 1938 - 1968. (I know not what special meaning that trend has, just mention it to illustrate that temperatures do fluctuate. The data involve “conflicting” trends of various time spans.)

Many thought that Global Warming would be a blip that delayed the next glaciation by a few centuries; I think there may be a growing belief that it might end the Glaciation Age altogether. Lovelock’s books might be a start towards understanding why the Glaciation Age itself might be fragile.

I think you can see why temperature details of the last decade are of little interest to me. Nevertheless I Googled just now, in response to your query, to try to glimpse this controversy. The first and only page I examined was
Is the earth getting warmer, or cooler? • The Register
I was amused – and thought it typical of anti-science – to read that the author quoted trillion-to-one odds on a simple math problem and his readers corrected him to million-to-one.

I don’t know if the Earth has gotten warmer in the last few years, or stayed about the same, but Fourier’s Greenhouse Effect is not in doubt.

93

I am quoting this in its entirety as I think it bears repeating and sums up my views on the matter. In my opinion the Republican Party and their affiliates in the mainstream media do not have anything constructive to offer the United States or its people and haven’t for almost a decade. They have been warped by the success of pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter to where all they can do is use the worst kind of populism to stir up righteous indignation of the masses while not solving any problems or building anything of value. They had control of the house, senate and executive branch for a solid 4 years and what did they accomplish?

94

Riddle me this: your man Inhofe produced a document stating that a large number of internationally reknowned scientists didn’t belieive in global warming. But when this document is examined, we find his sources are creationist engineers who are not climatologists and have never published on the matter, or creationist tv weatherman - cue card readers, not even meteorologists - who have no scientific training whatsoever. Why do you think Inhofe would try to deceive you so? Do you think your man Inhofe is so scientifically illiterate that he can’t tell the difference between a weatherman and a climatologist? Or do you think he makes his claims knowing full well the facts don’t back him up, hoping to fool you? Is he dishonest or just ignorant?

95

May I point out that by and large, this is wholly distinct from conservative political philosophy. It’s pretty much what makes the OP’s question hard. Most basic conservative viewpoints – either fiscal or social – may be championed and held by the demagogue set, but the impugnation of them and their tactics bears little on the underlying philosophical debate. Questions such as whether or not UHC should be implemented or whether or not government programs can successfully achieve a particular goal are debatable and wholly distinct from opposition to/glee at hosting the Olympics in Chicago. (Not that there couldn’t be a debate about hosting the Olympics there or at all, I’m referring to the rather vulgar display of schadenfreude.)
The atmosphere’s been poisoned by the wholesale marketing and commoditization of a political viewpoint on unprecedented scales. It’s no longer just politically helpful to be contrary, it’s extraordinarily profitable. Whereas a politician must represent his or her entire district, and must work with the opposing party in order to achieve joint and individual goals, the targeted media finds more profit in abject opposition. Their dominance of the dialogue is unfortunate, because it tends to mask worthwhile conservative thought.

96

Oh, so you don’t believe those things? So you are on record as thinking that “Many” of the countries conservatives believe facts about policy that simply aren’t true?

You didn’t present your post as “what many conservatives think” you presented it as what you think.

I’m glad you don’t buy into (at least a few) moronic conservative lies.

97

That’s incorrect. Possibly, as per the IIRC, you recall it that way; in fact, the exact opposite argument played out. You’re mistakenly paraphrasing the reverse of what happened in that other thread to accuse me of making an argument ad nauseam.

To refresh your memory: I wasn’t okay with requiring a drop to the levels of previous decades; you proposed such a requirement, and I rejected it, whereupon you agreed that “if in the next 10 years the temperatures remain constant or cooling that then the theory will suffer a huge blow.” When I refused to okay the comparison to previous decades, you agreed to jettison any such reference because “for the purpose of falsifying the theory I would not expect to see increases.” I rejected your proposal to look at previous decades, and you replied accordingly:

So don’t go the “IIRC” route: the exact opposite happened in that thread, thus undermining the point you’re trying to make in this thread. Before you accuse me of making a particular argument ad nauseam, look up the argument you’re paraphrasing and note whether you’ve got it exactly backwards.

98

Ok, so I was wrong on the way of **setting **a challenge. There is no need to go for more useless rhetoric from your part, however I have to then insist that rejecting it does not show anything.

As I said:

“A temperature decrease in the next decade should indeed count against the current theories regarding AGW IMHO.”

That still stands, it seems that for some reason you want to continue discussion on why that apparent falsification in 10 years would be unacceptable till the end of time, again, just ad nauseum. What it still clear: You want to continue discussing that instead of “What the science says” item quoted in the last post that shows that you are still wrong regarding your 1998 canard.

Others already can see that in this discussion we have a guy that “has” to feel bad when having his relatively useless challenge rejected and another guy that does not feel bad for getting the science wrong.

Well I prefer to “feel sorry” :slight_smile: for not getting the specifics of a challenge wrong, you… I will lets others figure out what you are doing with the science.

99

Well, that’s wrong for two reasons.

First off, you’re not the sole arbiter of what constitutes an acceptable timeframe. I want to hear from other warmists: possibly they’ll likewise sign on for another 10 years, but possibly they’ll require a longer amount of time.

Second, you’re mistaken as to whether I feel “that apparent falsification in 10 years would be unacceptable”. Given that I don’t find it unacceptable, it’s not about continuing such a discussion ad nauseam; since you’ve once again attributed the exact opposite of my position to me, I need to point out the reverse.

I want to make sure we’re actually in agreement about the stuff that’s 100% false before we move on to discussing stuff that’s actually up for debate. You’ve demonstrably gotten item after item after item after item after item wrong, and I want to address those before we move on to item after item after item that you’ve arguably got wrong.

I prefer to see whether the temperature decrease continues for another 10 years. You’ve already granted that, if it does so, it should indeed count against the current theories regarding AGW. You’ve already granted that the theory would “suffer a huge blow” if in the next 10 years the temperatures remain constant or cooling, even adding that it would suffice “for the purpose of falsifying the theory”.

You’ve gone on to reference a quote about ‘what the science says’ with regard to temperature – and that’s why I want to revisit the points you’ve granted. It’s not merely about me harping on a topic ad nauseam; it’s because I want to see whether, in light of your ‘what the science says’ quote, we’re still on the same page about whether 10 more years of surface temperature cooling from 1998 will indeed be a huge blow to the theory, counting against it for the purpose of falsifying it.

I want to address your ‘what the science says’ point by asking you to contextualize it with regard to falsification; that’s what science is.

100

Naomy Oreskes did investigate where that targeted media is coming from that is affecting the discussion:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/02/oreskes_on_the_american_denial.php

It includes a long video but it shows how conservative think tanks like the Marshall Institute switch from denying item after item though the years by using virtually the same tactics. It is the same history when dealing with Tobacco, CFC-ozone, Acid Rain… all the way to global warming.

The following are the times to go in the video to see the following items: