Thursday February 17th 2011
g cross's comments
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@ KSStein: "I'm sorry, I know this will tick you off, but how the earth's climate operates is so poorly understood, it almost is like making it up."
Sure, but there is a big difference between saying that scientists are just making up models that offer no real insights at all and disagreeing with the range of applicability of the models they are constructing. When you throw around accusations that make it sound like you think the scientists are just making up models as you did previously, and then in turn make it seem like it is the other side that is overreacting by responding poorly to these accusations, then you don't need to look any further than a mirror to see why people are labeling you a "denier".
@ KSStein: "Those models are a construction of thousands of assumptions, many of which are in fact pure guesses."
Sure, some of the assumptions are educated guesses. This is why part of what researchers try to do in the field is to get a sense of how robust the conclusions are to their assumptions. If the conclusions are robust to variations in the assumptions, then this means that uncertainty in the assumptions does not imply great uncertainty in the conclusion.
Do you really think that they wouldn't have validated their models extensively before drawing the conclusions that they have? This is a community of *scientists*, after all, and they have been researching the climate for a hundred years.
@ KSStein: "I'm not suggesting that the AGW researchers are maliciously lying, I am simply pointing out that their projections are not in any way certain."
Sure, but everything is uncertain. Just because their predictions are uncertain doesn't mean that they are completely uncertain, as you seem to be claiming they are.
@ KSStein: "It is their best guess based on what they know. But when little is known, how valuable is that best guess?"
I think that you greatly underestimate just how much has been learned after a century of research. Yes, there are still unknowns, but a great deal has been pinned down over that time, which is why the researchers have grown increasingly confident in their predictions.
@ KSStein: "Made up computer models do not constitute evidence of anything, except that AGW researchers know how to make computer models."
Yes, because I am sure that the AGW researchers didn't bother to put any actual physics into their models; instead, they just made stuff up!
And you wonder why people like you get lumped into the class of deniers?
@ Chestertonian: "The problem is that the existence of AGW and the policy implications that Al Gore thinks flow obviously from it are one in the same for lots of Americans."
I completely agree, though I would add that this trait is true of both pro- and anti-AGW people.
Also, to be clear KSStein: I am not claiming that you have done all or even some of the things that I have listed, I am just listing some traits that people might have (perhaps erroneously) read in your questioning that would have (perhaps unfairly) caused them to lump you in with deniers rather than genuine skeptics, and why they have the inclination to do such.
You might say that it is unfair for so many pro-AGW people to lump most anti-AGW people into the category of deniers simply because of the actions of a few noisy and unreasonable deniers, but then again is it really less unfair for you yourself to lump all pro-AGW people into being members of a "religion" based on your own experiences with a noisy and unreasonable proponents?
@ KSStein: "@G: sounds good, except that AGW proponents label anyone who questions a denier, regardless of what they are questioning."
You can find this characteristic in at least some proponents of any theory that exists. The serious proponents, however, will accept questions if they are meant seriously and with the intent of learning more rather than with the sole intent of proving that AGW is wrong.
It is true that even the serious proponents can be sensitive to being asked critical questions, but frankly a big part of the reason why they get so sensitive is that their general experience with such questions is that they are being asked ingenuously by people who aren't actually interested in hearing the answer but rather believe that they have seen the hole in the theory and will never be convinced otherwise.
Also, not everyone is an expert in the theories in which they believe. If you ask someone who is not an expert in a theory to answer a question about it and imply that if they can't answer the question then their belief is therefore unjustified then you are being unreasonable because non-experts cannot be expected to know off the top of their head the answer to every possible criticism.
Furthermore, often times people (as I have done) will research an issue, come to a reasonable conclusion about it, and then proceed to move on with life and to forget many of the points that lead them to this conclusion. So if you claim that someone who cannot answer your questions must not have though much about the issue, then you can often be completely wrong and come across as a jerk
As a corollary to this, if you insist on making people answer questions about AGW to justify their faith in it then you should not be so surprised when you are not invited back.
So in short, while asking questions is welcome, coming across as asking questions but not actually caring about whether there is an answer will justifiably get you labeled as a denier. If you believe that your intentions have been misinterpreted by even serious proponents then I apologize, but this did not happen because AGW is some kind of religion but rather because you came across as someone who had already made up their mind before asking the question and hence a denier rather than a skeptic.
@ KSStein: "The AGW movement very much resembles religious authorities with their pronouncements."
Yes, that is exactly how the creationalists label evolutionists. Thank you for proving my point.
@ KSStein: "There is frankly no evidence that global warming will be a net harm to earth."
Creationalists also say over and over again that there is no evidence, even when they are shown evidence. Thank you again for proving my point.
@ KSStein: "The predictions of harms are, as bamps notes, entirely theoretical and based on models which vary wildly depending on who sets the assumptions."
Ah, so you admit that there is evidence after all, you just don't like it.
The fallacy that you are committing here is that of assuming that because there is uncertainty therefore nothing can be known. It is true that there are places where the models disagree, but there are also places where they agree. To the extent that models have shown that some conclusions are fairly robust with respect to the starting assumptions, this provides at least some evidence that these conclusions are worth taking seriously.
@ KSStein: "And yet, to question any part of the AGW catechism is to be labelled a denier and not be invited to respectable dinner parties."
We have no problems with questions, we just don't like it when the people asking the questions don't make any effort to see if they have been answered before proclaiming they have found a fatal weakness in AGW, which is usually what ends up happening and why we get so annoyed at it.
Mr. Dean: "In my view, the uncertainty that comes from messing with a system as complex as the climate is grounds for a MORE aggressive approach, since it encompasses a lot of long tail risks that we should try to insure against."
And it is worth noting that the climatologists themselves are worried that if anything they have been too conservative in their forecasts since many of the disruptive changes they were expecting have turned out to be taking place faster than they were expecting and in some cases faster than their worse-case predictions.
To be clear, I am not saying that it is impossible to be a smart, thoughtful person who disagrees with the claims of AGW (though in my experience these disagreements seem to arise must more frequently out of ignorance and intellectual laziness than out of insight). However, calling AGW a religion is just like calling evolutionism a religion: it is stupid and should be eliminated from serious discourse.
@ bampbs: "It can be hard enough to criticize even when you are not dealing with *a secular substitute for religion* [emphasis mine]"
Okay, this claim that climate science is "a secular substitute for religion" is pure idiocy and anyone repeating it dismisses themselves from the conversation as having no idea of what they are talking about, despite any protests to the contrary.
Climatologists express strong opinions in favor of AGW for the same reason that biologists express strong opinions in favor of evolution: because they see mounting evidence that points to a particular conclusion and get frustrated when people deny this not because they have a useful new perspective to offer but by invoking arguments from ignorance, inconsequential nitpicking, outright distortions, and smear campaigns.
Your remark here is really just like saying that physicists worship at the alter of conservation of energy and therefore do what they can to shut down heretics because it has become for them a "a secular substitute for religion".
@ KSStein: "The AGW movement demands belief and obedience while offering little in the way of concrete present evidence or future effect."
Funny, that's just how creationalists like to characterize the "evolutionist" movement.
I really have a hard time seeing how one can read that law as saying anything *other* than that anyone can defend the enumerated persons from being the victims of a felony or of great personal injury.
@ RR: "The second applies only to preventing felonies or personal injury."
Yes, with one such possible instance of great personal injury being the death of the fetus, since it is explicitly listed as one of the entities that you are justified in killing to defend from a design to cause great personal injury.
@ RR: "It doesn't allow people to kill abortion providers."
"""
FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to expand the definition of justifiable homicide to provide for the protection of certain unborn children.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA:
Section 1. That § 22-16-34 be amended to read as follows:
22-16-34. Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person while resisting any attempt to murder such person, or to harm the unborn child of such person in a manner and to a degree likely to result in the death of the unborn child, or to commit any felony upon him or her, or upon or in any dwelling house in which such person is.
Section 2. That § 22-16-35 be amended to read as follows:
22-16-35. Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person in the lawful defense of such person, or of his or her husband, wife, parent, child, master, mistress, or servant, or the unborn child of any such enumerated person, if there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design to commit a felony, or to do some great personal injury, and imminent danger of such design being accomplished.
"""
So, yes, if your child attempts to get an abortion then a strict reading of this law says that you are justified in killing the abortion provider.
@ SirWellington: "How can I possibly think there is only one interpretation of American expecptionalism if I just said that we can debate the meaning of American exceptionalism?"
Fair enough, I can see that I was wrong to have made that claim.
However, given that, I have to confess to being a bit confused by exactly what your criticism is, since within that context it is not clear what you find unreasonable about Dr. Soren making arguments about how we should *not* interpret American exceptionalism by using data to show that some interpretations are provably wrong.
From my perspective it seems that your point and his are actually complementary rather than contradictory. He has made an argument that some interpretations contain flaws, and you have responded by proposing an alternative (and perhaps more widely accepted) interpretation that does not suffer from these flaws.
SirWellington,
You assume that there is a single obvious sense in which people consider America to be exceptional, when in fact different people mean different things when they declare America to be exceptional --- if they have more than a vague idea of what they mean to begin with, of course.
Furthermore, American exceptionalism is often used to justify policy decisions because of the implications that our exceptionalism makes our way better than ways chosen by other nations, so to the extent this is the case it makes sense to consider how "exceptional" we actually are among nations and hence to what extent our feelings of superiority is justified.
@ RP: "But Mr Soren's analysis is presented as some sort of discovery made by a scientist – a professor – and as such claims to be somehow more weighty than our chat."
Yes, I would consider his analysis to carry more weight than a typical casual chat between blog commentors, but less weight than a peer-reviewed scientific journal article.
@ RP: "For my taste, radical left rhetoric centred around freedom is in stark contrast to the abysmal lack of freedom everywhere where the Left grab power."
So in other words, if one looks deeply into Amnesty International then one will find that it is actually an organization dedicated to promoting oppression despite its claims to the contrary, and therefore nothing that they have to say about freedom can be trusted. This of course is not only unsurprising but practically expected given that it is generally true of radical leftists.
@ RP: "Does my post to Sir Wellington, and first of all the quote from his post, answer your question to some extant?"
No, because he does not actually address the analysis itself but basically ignores it saying that Mr. Soren got his notion of what makes America "exceptional" wrong. The problem with Sir Wellington's argument is that there are many domains relative to which one can be "exceptional", so choosing some of these domains and showing that America is not in fact exceptional in those domains does not mean that one has argued that there is no sense at all in which America can be exceptional.
What really happened in this blog series was not that Mr. Soren claimed that there is absolutely no domain in which America is exceptional, but rather that Mr. Soren performed an analysis of many domains to get a better sense of exactly in what respects we are or are not exceptional.
@ RP: "And yes, I don't think that journalistic material and Amnesty International propaganda are proper sources for the conclusions the good professor does."
Sure, they might not be good sources for a scientific journal article but that doesn't mean that they therefore contain no useful information; keep in mind that these are blog postings we are talking about.
Furthermore, again, where exactly do you disagree with how Amnesty International made its rankings? Your only argument against its ranking is a vague ad hominem attack implying that somehow an organization whose goal is to promote freedom is obviously not interested in constructing an accurate ranking of freedom.
In fairness, laws allowing people to kill abortion providers are really just a step down the road of allowing ordinary people to have the same right to kill anyone perceived to be a bad guy that superheroes already enjoy.
Needless to say, this movement of our society towards a more egalitarian future is one that I enthusiastically welcome!
Reluctant Polluter, I look forward to your explanation about what exactly was wrong with the analysis --- that is, other than the fact that it was done by the wrong sort of people, of course.