On 4/6/2014 4:08 PM, chris peck wrote:
The real story here is that a peer reviewed journal was intimidated into withdrawing a
paper that had passed through the proper review channels.
That the internet is full of conspiracy theory isn't news. And to the extent that
climate science denial is correlated with beliefs in conspiracy theories, so is climate
science acceptance. You don't have to read blog rows for long to see that climate
science acceptors are the lackeys of communist Illuminati hell bent on denying the world
freedom and that climate science deniers are in bed with the oil barons attempting in a
capitalist frenzy to do pretty much the same thing. What gets lost on both sides is the
actual science. A fact that I think is illustrated perfectly when climate science
acceptors demand capitulation on the basis that 97% of climate scientists agree there is
human caused problem. That 97% of scientists agree is an empirical fact, presumably, but
it is also an irrelevant one. Not a single fact about the climate is true on the basis
of a 97% agreement between scientists. Its an argument from authority writ large. its
the kind of fact which if persuasive would have kept us believing the earth was flat.
Yet every time I see blog rows on climate change it gets trotted out as if it is
informative.
But it is informative. It means that if you disagree, you need to show why the published
papers of these people who have spent a lot of time and energy studying and measuring are
wrong.
After all you probably never did an experiment to prove the Earth is spherical. You
accepted it because you were told it (If you dont' already know it, you might find it
instructive to read the story of Alfred Wallace and John Hampden's bet
http://drvitelli.typepad.com/providentia/2010/08/the-flat-earth-fiasco.html ). You
probably didn't test the germ theory of disease or conservation of energy either.
Brent
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