One has to be aware about who are the politicians that decided to change the agreement that was there before.
( Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich Commercial on Climate Change ad from 2008)
It was not because of science that Newt and others decided now to toss the evidence and research under the bus.
Martial law
You point at the articles they authored where he reports on the science articles he cites wrong, and then you may have a point, as it is, this is just the killing the messenger fallacy.
The fact that they have been dealt with, many times over, makes it so. If one wants to ask questions, one should listen to the answers and not just hold out for “answers” one is wanting to hear.
How does the reader know if the backpack manufacturer is qualified to evaluate the science about which he is posting? Or is he just putting up links that support the narrative?
With the kind of people who use their last dying breath to deny Covid exists, there is no way to prevent denial. All those school boards that deny teaching of real science are getting exactly what they wanted.
By the quality of the cited research and science. Really, you are demanding that all information should be considered as being of the same quality. As was noted before, in a previous discussion, others have checked on the way Skeptical Science checks and looks for information and scientific groups can be critical, but overall they do agree that what they do is good work.
BTW, while not finding a problem with how they report the evidence and the science, Scientific American was pessimistic about convincing the public back in 2014 with what a group like that is doing. Well, what Skeptical Science is doing is not causing a backfire as they also feared.
Modnote:
A reminder to all from the Great Debates Rule:
I think our only “hope” at this point, considering the evidence of covid denialism is that some big disaster happens early on, that said disaster afects a sufficient cross section of the human population and the interests of the decision makers for those human populations and that said disaster is unequivocallly attributed to global warming. Thus forcing the decision makers to finally get of their arses and take the problem seriously.
Otherwise we are probably fucked.
I disagree with the idea that the quality information win out in the long run – I mean, I suppose it can, but not until misinformation has inflicted an awful lot of damage. It doesn’t matter if a majority or even a supermajority of people are persuaded by good information. We’ve seen throughout this entire pandemic that if 1/3 of the population is influenced by misinformation and lies the consequences can be disastrous.
And I’ve said it before and will do so again: this pandemic is absolutely nothing compared to the hell that awaits us when climate change’s impact really gets felt by enough of the population in the world’s more powerful countries.
One of the biggest issues with climate change is rising sea levels. If I look up volume of ice in the arctic and surface area of the ocean about a 3 meter rise is the worst case scenario I can come up with but I could be missing something. They are telling us it is a 20 meter rise.
That’s because it’s not just the ice melting that will cause a sea level rise.
There is also the fact that water expands when it warms up.
Glad that I was able to solve one of the biggest problems you had with climate change.
There comes a point when we ought to accept that maybe some people understand the science better than we laypeople do maybe? That doesn’t mean we can’t ask questions or that we should stop being curious - we should be more curious if anything.
If we weren’t already seeing warming trends happening right now in real time, perhaps we could be forgiven for being skeptical of climate change. But record warmth year over year, again and again over the course of the past 10-20 years isn’t ‘normal’. There has to be an explanation for it, and sunspot activity ain’t it.
If you are correct and it does sound logical I am very happy you solved that. I am not so sure you are correct but I will take that seriously and research it.
There is no strategy. A climate change denial market exists and it will be served by the media. Denial is a product some people want to buy.
Paging Sam Stone. Paging Dr. Stone.
I would suggest starting by policing the left from rolling their grab-bag of left-wing political ideas into the 'Green New Deal". The opposition from the right largely comes from the belief that the left is attempting to use Climate Change to pass left-wing policies that either don’t help with climate change, or actually make the problem worse.
For example, we now hear the term ‘climate justice’, which apparently wraps racial issues into the climate change debate. Biden wants hundreds of billions for new trains, which will make climate change worse, at least for the next 20 years and will soak up resources that could have been used in actually effective ways. The ‘Green New Deal’ has union-only and ‘buy American’ provisions which will make mitigation slower and more expensive.
And most of all, the continued refusal to consider nuclear power seriously calls the whole thing into question, as nuclear power is the only energy source we have today that could make a dent in CO2 emissions in a reasonable period of time. If it isn’t at the front and center of any climate change plan, the plan isn’t serious.
I actually read one article against nuclear power that said one of its major problems is that it rewards the ssme old big industrial companies, whereas wind and solar would create ‘good green jobs’ for everyone. If you are serious about global warming all you should care about is what reduces atmospheric CO2 fastest, rather than focusing on whether the right kind of people get the money.
That kind of talk is absolute poison when trying to get skeptics to join the cause.
Then there’s Biden’s inconsistencies which make one think that he doesn’t really believe in Climate Change either, other than as a useful tool for domestic politics. Because right after he shut down a whole bunch of U.S. exploration and pipelines, he bent over backwards to override sanctions and allow Russia to build its pipeline to Europe. Then he went and tried to browbeat OPEC into opening up more production to drive down the price of oil, stimulatng demand for it and makng alternative energy harder to fund.
Politicians and celebrity activists could also make themselves more believable by walking the walk they expect everyone else to take. John Kerry wrings his hands over Global Warming and tells everyone they have to sacrifice, then jets off in his Gulfstream. A common saying amongst denialists is, “I’ll believe climate change is real when the people telling me it’s real act like it’s real.” Don’t go out and claim that sea level rise will devastate us in 20 years, then buy an ocean-front mansion.
Let’s see a real plan for controlling China’s emissions. Because if China is allowed to keep building out cheap coal power, they will simply capture the west’s heavy industry and nothing will change except for a massive wealth transfer. That’s already happening, and China is by far the largest emitter of CO2.
So if we broke our backs and our economy to transition to expensive, unreliable and intermittent power only to watch China generate 75-80% of the world’s CO2 and it’s higher than it ever was, what’s the point?
One reason we need nuclear is because we could actually transition away from carbon while improving the economy and retaining or improving our comparative advantage in energy - a promise the greens always make but is complete horseshit when you are transitioning from dense energy sources to diffuse energy. Cheap nuclear power would remove the incentive for heavy industry to simply move to China.
Finally, At a time of scarce resources Biden is about to spend America’s wad on a giant 3.5 trillion dollar ‘stimulus’ that has nothing to do with climate. The Green New Deal comes after that, but there will be no political capital (or any kind of capital) left for that. If he really cared about global warming, he woild have made sure that those bills passed first while Democrats have control of all three branches.
So before tackling the deniers, it might help to clean house on the left and get rid of the bullshit that makes the deniers suspect it’s all a stalking horse for ‘fundamentally remaking’ society and the economy. Because as long as they keep getting evidence that this is at least partially the case, you’ll never get them on board. Anyone who says stupid things like ‘Global Warming can’t be fixed while we still have Capitalism"’ should be run out of the debate on a rail. They are doing more harm to progress than a hundred deniers, because they’ll create a thousand with such crazy talk.
Excellent post.
Not sure about that when big industry and capitalists that are not involved usually with fossil fuels wonder what the heck was that post about.
What you see there is a straw man argument, because no serious proposals are about dismissing industry when looking at solutions.