P.S. - I must guiltily admit that unlike bluethree and ChefGuy, I actually found State of Fear to be a fun read. Sure, I was infuriated at the presentation of the science and at the simplistic character portrayals (environmentalists = either well-meaning but naive, or arrogant and evil; denialists = wise and heroic) but it still had an interesting enough plot and suspense to hold my interest.
jshore, you may not realize it, but “denialist” is a slimy term designed to associate people who might not agree with you with people who deny the Holocaust. I would appreciate it if you take the term somewhere else, it does not belong on this board. It poisons the validity of your arguments, and is subject to Godwin’s Law.
w.
Gird your grid for another long one, folks! In fact, I had to split it into two posts. But please consider this from the foreword of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisted:
So here we go!
Baloney. I quoted the entire paragraph! The whole point in doing so was to demonstrate wherein you took your own quote out of context to make it look “fair and balanced”, when in fact is was unreasonable in your actual context. You could have saved yourself this trouble if you’d instead simply re-stated your claims instead of selectively quoting yourself and claiming – without valid justification – that we’re “putting words in your mouth”.
First you say that I quoted you accurately and then you claim I didn’t. Which is it?
My very point in that aspect of our debate is that parts of your statement that I quoted verbatim in full context were ludicrous as written. Instead of standing by your non-obvious, unwritten intent, why didn’t you just re-phrase and disambiguate? Then we wouldn’t still be arguing about it.
It didn’t “infuriate” me, I merely pointed out how non-realistic it was. And before dissecting it yet again, allow me to re-familiarize the readers with what you actually wrote, and dissect why I criticized it right along with your own self-dissection:
I didn’t misunderstand or misinterpret the first two clauses of that sentence. I never challenged or doubted your or Crichton’s claim that the point of view with the most resources (read money/power) behind it will predominate. What’s there to doubt or challenge? In fact, it is the central fact behind my main argument! It’s your third clause that’s counter-factual and was the reason I objected (which we’ll get to presently).
Well, perhaps you should, because it seems to me that you don’t understand or are misusing the term! In the context of your whole original post we’re debating, “resources” can’t mean anything else but money/power, as I next explain. Here is what I contend is the default definition in this context:
The default meaning to draw from your full context is money/power. After all, you admitted it (next). Again, if that is not what you intended, then you should have realized your statement communicated your intent poorly and then re-phrased it instead of continuing to defend it as written.
What laughable rubbish! And laughable in so many ways! First, “best resources” DOES = money/power. Of course it does! In the context in which we are debating, it’s true by definition. And why on earth would this obvious and incontestable truth somehow make Crichton stop his contemptible anti-science, libertarian propaganda war against the truth of global warming and magically force him somehow to advance the exact opposite view? Is that private stock you’re inhaling, or what? Can I have some?
Too late. And if you were a clearer thinker, you would have written something along the lines of: “The obvious non-monopoly “monopoly” straw man being fabricated out of whole cloth for political reasons by the author…”
No, points all made here by Balthisar! Nowhere do you even hint that you were merely parroting the bogus myths of the book and that you, yourself, didn’t believe a word of them. You presented them as your own beliefs. Thus we were and remain free to criticize those specific remarks as transparently false, partisan pettifoggery. If you didn’t believe them, you did a piss poor job of demonstrating, or even hinting, otherwise. And the fact that you have decided to stand by them suggests you still believe them. Because it’s not the only side we hear by a long shot and at least 100 million Americans believe the so-called “dissenters”.
Sheesh! The whole friggin’ topic here is debating whether it’s right or wrong! We don’t need no stinkin’ book reports. Any rational observer encountering your words as written would come away believing you were arguing – or at least agreeing – that Crichton was right. And it seems to me you still are.
You really should have put a little more effort into that sentence. If you had instead said “all sides of the global warming debate” instead of “everything”, there’d be nothing wrong with it. But the vast majority of time spent questioning “everything” is time poorly spent. I mean, why not adopt solipsism? It’s utterly irrefutable, after all.
I had incredulously asked: So you’re telling us that just about every newspaper and magazine article on the subject doesn’t include the anti-global warming viewpoint? To which you then replied:
There you go again into book report mode. The question I asked was addressed at you, not Crichton’s book. But you seem to agree with his stupid, intellectually dishonest mythology. Probably every single newspaper and magazine article I’ve ever read on the subject has included the dissenting point of view. And not merely to mock it, as you falsely claim. In fact, that insistence on presenting opposing points of view on such a solidly established fact is worthy of some criticism, in my view. They do the exact same thing in pretty much all newspaper and magazine articles about evolution (where they waste time and space presenting the Creationist/ID point of view as well). As I wrote previously, I’m a bit surprised they don’t present the flat earth view whenever they write articles about space and heliocentric and such. That’s how strong the case is that global warming is real and dangerous, and how weak the dissenting claims are: their proponents are global warming flat-earthers.
The first part, suggesting that “few” such articles present both sides, is counter-factual. The second is simply inevitable, as there are no substantive, valid, well-justified foundations for the dissenter’s viewpoint. You can’t provide what doesn’t exist. But they try, anyway.
As well there should be, but, alas, if it’s there at all (which doubt generally), it’s not nearly strong enough. Your side’s “Scholars for Truth” clones already get far too much public credence as it is! Like I said, at least 100 million Americans buy their deeply flawed “arguments”.
No, I’m not. That never even crossed my mind. My use of the term in this context is more in the line of employing social and psychological strategy and tactics to advance the agenda of those with the power to hold the leash. While a certain unavoidable amount of that goes on in academia, it is like a firecracker compared to the hydrogen bombs of corporations, especially those in the energy extraction and/or carbon-producing industries (and those in any government which supports them).
But they are winning! At the very least in the sense that your side dominates the views of American conservatives and libertarians, who represent a huge segment of the populace and the vast, overwhelming majority of executives and corporations and money and power in this country. Hell, your side has substantially “won” in the domains outside legitimate science. And if you don’t know by now that in the U.S., scientists are near the bottom of the power, money, status, and public authority totem pole, you must not live here.
First, I simply don’t accept your unjustifiable premise that the anti-science, anti-global warming agenda “doesn’t get out to the broad public”. My parents and siblings, bless their hearts, and all their friends (with very few exceptions) are totally and completely sold on the lie that global warming is a myth, no matter what I send them to read and no matter what I or anyone else says. And few of them watch Fox News (bless their hearts again). No, they’re getting their anti-global warming bullshit from a wide variety of sources, such as newspapers and magazines and online, particularly including Crichton’s blatant political sales and propaganda piece under discussion. In any case, the very question of whether your side has any legitimate “hard science” behind it forms the center of the debate! Not only do the overwhelming majority of scientific experts deny your side has any claims to legitimate scientific credibility, much, much more to the point for me is that the scientists I’ve long respected and admired for their critical, skeptical analyses long before the global warming issue became such a hot topic, have analyzed the claims and evidence against GW and came to the conclusion it lacks legitimacy and credibility. I can’t think of one who believes otherwise.
Moving on, you had quoted this part of what I had written previously:
What has anything I wrote (not just the part you quoted) to do with collusion or any claims of such? There’s no collusion involved! No conspiracy at all, which is precisely my point. It’s the law! Corporate executives are openly required by law to maximize their stockholders’ profits in any way that doesn’t violate the law. Otherwise, they’re not fulfilling they’re fiduciary responsibilities, which is my very point. They’re not some secret cabal engaging in illegal activities, they’re doing what they’re educated and hired to do, and they’re doing it in a perfectly legal way.
However, just because something’s legal – or even required by law – does not mean it has to be moral or in the world’s or country’s best interests or even in their stockholders’ hypothetical long-term interests. And there’s no law against lying, certainly not in this context, as long as what they’re lying about does not betray any direct fiduciary responsibility (which another poster does not seem to understand, but I’ll get to that post later). So, as I said previously, they’re virtually required to plan and act and publicize as if global warming is a myth, whatever they may actually believe. (Unless the corporation’s stockholders will make more money the other way, which happens but is comparatively very rare).
Condescension accepted. Actually, you sound exactly like me. Those are much the very same words I use with people who talk about “The Government” as if it’s some kind of monolithic entity and not made up of individual people who care about what they’re doing. So I agree with you more than you may think. And of course I don’t hate capitalism; I deeply respect it (at least Adam Smith’s original compassionate capitalism). But I don’t always respect it’s modern methods and outcomes – do you? Really?
Huh? I don’t see the relevance of that to this discussion. No corporation is required to disclose or publish scientific views they don’t agree with, and they’re not required to disclose what they deem private or proprietary. I don’t see your point.
(Continued below in Part 2)
(Part 2)
Yet another straw man! How can you not know that “unalterable science” is oxymoronic? There is NO “unalterable science” anywhere! If it’s not tentative, it’s not science. I never claimed otherwise. Therefore, climate science is tentative, as is quantum chromodynamics, the branch of physics that consistently achieves staggeringly accurate predictions.
Your next response refers to the following interaction:
To which you now reply:
Sigh. As I thought I had made clear in earlier posts, interpretations in every science are entirely inescapable! There are no sciences free of interpretation; it’s just not humanly possible for it to be otherwise. So you’re erecting a false conceit when you repeatedly claim climate science is different from other science in this regard. To take the most well-known example, consider quantum mechanics. There are dozens of different, often contradictory interpretations of QM. Does this mean, as you keep implying or even stating outright, that climate science and QM aren’t science or that they’re not scientific because interpretation is utterly inescapable?
No. What’s going on in the GW “debate” is not related to different “interpretations”, it’s about different, and in the case of the “dissidents”, unjustifiable, conclusions. And the conclusion drawn by the legitimate, intellectually honest climate scientists is that global warming is real and dangerous, while the conclusion of the pseudo-scientists is that GW either doesn’t exist or isn’t a problem. Interpretations aren’t nearly as significant as you seem to believe. But in any case, they universally exist in all sciences.
And then some! The problem with corporate science is that conclusions reached by their scientific employees – who have signed non-disclosure agreements – can and often is suppressed (legally) if their work does not show what their employers want it to show. NDO’s are powerful things.
Perhaps, in that there’s never any escaping from all pressures or social forces, but I certainly won’t admit – because it’s false – that this exists in anything more than small proportions in academia while it’s usually a huge, crushing force in the corporate world. (And again, I’m not saying or implying that corporations are “evil” when they do this, I’m only saying that it’s an objective reality).
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. As I’ve explained previously, you do not have to be an expert in a particular domain to possess genuine knowledge of other areas outside your expertise. And certainly not merely to be able to justifiably endorse one side or another. If your premise were to be true, no one could justifiably claim any scientific knowledge outside their own tiny, extremely narrow area of expertise. And then the world would collapse.
Somehow, I’ve managed to grasp that. Please see my comments above in this post regarding the inescapable tentativeness of all science.
Next, we come to this quotation from your earlier post:
In response, I pointed out your straw man, i.e., that I think companies distort things “just because they’re a company”. I never argued any such thing. What I said was that energy-extracting and major carbon-emitting companies best serve their fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders by denying and combating the claims of global warming and the harm of global warming, regardless of what the individuals doing so actually believe in private. And further that this is a perfectly lawful practice that such companies refuse to follow, at least at their short-term (i.e., less than decades) financial peril, not to mention the individuals’ careers. To which you replied:
It can’t happen in any field. Inter-subjectivity is the best anyone can hope for.
Sigh. Another straw man. I never said any such thing, and in fact, as you yourself quoted me as saying, I completely agree that no human activity can be totally free of all and every element of social and/or political pressure. But the hard, undeniable reality is that such pressures are vastly greater in the business world than in the academic world. “Publish or perish” is a reality in academia, but there is no genuine pressure there to publish falsehoods, while there is exactly that in certain private domains such as is found in some businesses. And particularly in this context within energy-extraction and high carbon-emitting businesses.
Then we come to this exchange regarding tenure. I had written:
To which your reply was irrelevant. You evaded my points by first talking about non-tenured academics – which is quite beside the point, as the overwhelming majority of the academic pro-global warming scientists already have tenure – and then by claiming, entirely without justification, that tenured academics face job-security pressures that can make them issue false statements. And further implying that this is as much or nearly as much a problem in academia as it is in industry – to which I reply: BULLSHIT! And then you further evaded my point regarding the undeniably real and very common fact that employees are routinely fired for voicing opinions contrary to their masters’ opinions.
Then we move on to the issue of reproducibility, in which you parrot the highly naive, Creationist view that reproducibility is the essence of science and that any science in which one does not have experimental reproducibility is not a “real” science:
To which you replied:
What a huge and odorous load of cow manure. Your position is depressingly naive and depressingly common. Your words indicate an inadequate grasp of the philosophy of science and it’s actual practice.
Science is NOT about results! Results are data, not science. Sure, your average neophyte wrongly thinks science is a collection of facts and data, since that’s what his/her sixth-grade “science” teacher probably taught them, but you seem far too intelligent to still hold on to that rubbish. Talk about facile arguments! Science is nothing more and nothing less than the careful application of intellectual honesty, employing applicable elements of an array of proven empirical methods to reduce the error in our knowledge of the world.
Reproducibility is just one of those non-universally-applicable elements that may be employed, but only in those areas in which it is feasible. Laboratory experiments – pretty much the only aspect of science in which reproducibility is an option – represent a small fraction of the scientific endeavor. Again, how can you not know that?
Consider the following excerpts from talk.origins. First, the question:
To which Wesley Elsberry of talk.orgins responded:
I hope that puts an end to your foolish equation of science = reproducibility!
I had written:
To which you replied, completely ignoring everything I had written:
What hopelessly naive nonsense! You have really got to read a modern book or two on the philosophy of science. You’re just flat wrong. The pomos were and are not entirely wrong (they’re just mostly wrong). Facts are NOT interpretation-less or theory-neutral! I used to believe they were, ad did many of the early logical positivists, but we were wrong. So your assertion that interpretations magically disappear after some unspecified “thing” becomes a “fact” is false and highly naive. Now, I may sound like a postmodernist, but that’s just because – as I said earlier – they were right in a tiny few limited areas, and this is one of them. Every fact is inevitably and inescapably theory- and interpretation-laden. So Galilean physics is full of interpretation, just as every other science is. There is zero credibility in distinguishing climate science and global warming from Galilean and every other physics on the basis that one is “interpretive” and the others aren’t.
As a case in point, let’s turn again to your example of quantum mechanics. Do you not understand that the orthodox, Borhian take on QM is purely intstrumentalist? That it implicitly denies there is any knowable, objective facts and reality, at least in the microscopic realm? And that Niels’ son, Aage (also a Nobel laureate) and his colleagues have taken orthodox QM to it’s absolutely inevitable conclusion that atoms and other microscopic particles simply do not exist at all?
Next sub-topic: Mathematics vs. Science. Here’s our original exchange:
To which you now reply:
From your last sentence backward, here are my replies: First, I’ve never employed any ad hominem remarks against you. You seem to be one of those who misunderstands the term and thinks it means something like “personal insult”. It doesn’t, but this is already too long to go into that, too. As for the answer to your question “Who the hell mentioned mathematics anyway?”, the answer is “you did”, by referring to string theory, which is in no way a science but is just pure mathematics. String theory is not scientific! It arose from no empirical data and relies on no empirical data and does not make empirical predictions; therefore, it is not science. In fact, it’s so unscientific that there are several books out there attacking the whole philosophical pseudo-science of string theory. For example: The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next and Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory And the Search for Unity in Physical Law. The whole point of these and similar books is superbly exemplified in the title of the latter: “Not Even Wrong”. Those words, famously uttered by Wolfgang Pauli in a different but related context, refer to the fact that string theory is completely unfalsifiable and makes no testable predictions and is therefore completely unscientific, even *anti-*scientific.
You conclude:
You’re quite right in that last point. We shouldn’t believe the global warming “dissidents” just because they’re the side with by far the best resources, which they are employing full bore in a bogus propaganda war against genuine science.
That last is the center of my point in this regard; particularly the word “materially”. Here is what I wrote to Balthisar in this regard:
Now, I’m not pretending to be a lawyer and I certainly can’t quote chapter and verse regarding the applicable law and the SEC’s requirements, but in a general way, isn’t what I’ve said essentially the case?
For example, executives can’t lie in such a way as to falsely inflate (or deflate) the real value of a company or investment, but they can sure as hell lie about global warming!
Well, I had certainly never thought of that association with that term. I don’t know if others who use it have but I have only seen that comparison made by those on your side of the argument. Do you have suggestions for a better term? I don’t like the term “skeptic” because I don’t think it accurately portrays the attitude I have usually seen, which is very selective skepticism…with a willingness to uncritically embrace almost any argument that argues against AGW.
Actually, I might go back to the term “contrarian”, which wasn’t too bad.
You mean, like the Harvard lawyer who, upon meeting me, said “ah, Spain! That’s right near Colombia, isn’t it?”
jshore, thank you for a most polite response to my post, which was more prickly than it should have been.
Me, I call myself a climate agnostic, because I don’t think that we understand the climate well enough to come to any firm conclusions.
Or to look at it another way, while some skeptics are selective in their skepticism, I’m an omnivorous skeptic … I’m skeptical about almost everything, including belief without facts to support it. My beloved granny used to say “You can believe about a half of what you see, a quarter of what you hear, and an eighth of what you say” …
I don’t understand the need for any of the terms, or the insistence on dividing the climate world into two camps. Most everyone believes that the world is warming, and has been for quite a while, there’s good consensus about that. And most everyone believes that humans have some effect on the climate. The question is, how much?
To put it another way, if you asked climate researchers to estimate what proportion of the warming from 1900-2006 was caused by humans, you would get answers ranging from 0% to 100%, with a whole range of answers in between. The IPCC says about 50%. So if someone says 40%, does that make them a “contrarian”? What about 30%? Almost no researchers will say zero, most won’t say much more than 60%. So everyone’s bunched up somewhere between say 10% and 60%, it’s not two camps, it is a continuum … which leaves me with two questions.
-
Given the range of answers, what makes anyone think there is a “consensus” which people are “denying” or “skeptical” or “contrarian” about? Climate is very poorly understood, and there are more theories and beliefs about it than just about anything except nutrition.
-
What conceivable purpose does dividing the climate world into two groups serve?
To me, the habit of calling those who would put a low figure on the question “denialists” or “skeptics” or “contrarians” just reveals the fact that those using the names don’t have much faith in their beliefs.
Otherwise, why would they bother trying to demonize the opposition? It’s gotten so bad recently that there have been calls to try the “denialists” in “Nuremburg style” trials … getting a leetle touch nervous about what the scientific method might reveal, are they?
So what should you call them? Don’t call them anything, there’s no need to support a wholly ficticious division, there’s no need to demonize those who might disagree with you. Me, I don’t spend any time talking about “warmers”, nor do I call them “sheep” or some other derogatory term, there’s no point. I talk about science.
w.
A quick Google produces several uses of Denialist–concerning AIDS, 9/11 & climate change. No immediate mention of Holocaust Denial, although I’m sure the word is used in that context, as well.
www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=denialist
Sounds as though you are attempting to censor the SDMB.
Makes me wonder how much they’re paying Stone & Parker. 
Nitpick: QCD has not yet produced anything “staggeringly accurate”, or anything more than “pretty decent” (an error of 10% in a QCD calculation is considered good). You’re probably thinking of quantum electrodynamics, which has been more precisely numerically tested than any other theory in physics (19 decimal places, if I recall correctly).
Say what?
A Google search on denialist Holocaust brings up 16,400 pages, so I’m not sure which Google you’re using … sounds like you’re attempting to censor Google …
w.
I think her point was that if you just google “denialist” and start looking down the first several pages, you don’t see it used in reference to the Holocaust. As she herself noted, this does not show that usage of the term in this context does not occur many times (and your search, of course, shows that it does); however, it does suggest that it does not seem to be the most common usage (to the extent that the ranking in a google search is a measure of this).
Ranking on a google search is not a measure of how common the usage is, which is why google works so well.
w.
You stated that “Denialist” applied only to Holocaust Deniers.
You were wrong.
Bridget, thank you for your interest, but I said no such thing. I did not use the word “only”, or any similar word in my post. I simply said it was a term “designed to associate people who might not agree with you with people who deny the Holocaust.”
In other words, you are wrong.
It has been used, with the same implication, to describe people who deny that AIDS was caused by a disease, or to deny that 9/11 was caused by Muslim radicals. However, the usage related to the Holocaust predates both AIDS and 9/11 by decades … which is why it has been used for climate change, AIDS and 9/11.
A google search on “Holocaust denial” brings up 1,120,000 results. A search on AIDS denial" brings up only 14,600 …
w.
Righto. I guess I misplaced a few decimals. Thanks for the correction.
So what? That in no way justifies your angry denial that “dissidents” who clamor about ostensible “censorship” are not employing a very typical canard. I never said I doubted that a great many alleged “dissidents” make a great deal of noise about being “censored”; in fact, that was my very point. All your examples demonstrate is something I never doubted or disputed, i.e., that a great many “dissidents” make a great deal of noise about being “censored” by scientists who don’t agree with them.
No, I said that it is a common and tiresome canard for “dissidents” to complain about being “censored” by scientists. When in reality the dissidents’ comments rarely deserve publication in the first place, especially not in every scientific journal or in every web site. And I stand by that assessment.
A difference that makes no difference…
Even in that “denial” you do just what Bridget claimed and just what you denied: by claiming that the word was “designed” to apply to that specific context, you are claiming that the word cannot escape that context; i.e., it always has that context.
In other words, you are wrong.
It is to laugh. Your spurious etymology is amusing. From: Reference.com
As you can see, holocaust denialism is but one type of denialism rather than the very origin and “design” of the term. And that the phrase “global warming denialists” is valid and accepted.
Furthermore, your reliance on dating is highly dubious: you seem to be implicitly claiming that the word was never used prior to the Holocaust.
Google searches for (HIV | AIDS) & (denialist | denialists | denialism) yields 133,900 hits (though doubtless with much overlap). While that’s an order or magnitude lower, it’s a very long way from insignificant and it in no way suggests that no one can use the term “denialist” without implicitly referring to Holocaust denial.
And “AIDS” denial wasn’t “used to describe people who deny that AIDS was caused by a disease”, but actually to describe people who deny that HIV causes AIDS. And it’s no surprise that some well-known HIV/AIDS denialists are also global warming denialists.
Oh, and intention, are you going to address the hypocrisy of your claims of “ruthless censorship” in response to jshore’s comments about censorship at CA? As revealed in js’s link to In denial about Climate Audit censorship ?