We Shouldn't Dismiss People Who Deny Facts? Why The Hell NOT?

                                                         "I duz  not like facks! DOH!"

A recent irritating, short essay in TIME (Sept. 12-19, p. 26) insisted rational and fact-based people need to give all the zombies,  knuckle draggers, and ignorant buffoons among us a 'break' and not dismiss them.  So, for example, we must give a pass to those who "believe things that are factually incorrect". Say like those who believe that vaccines cause autism, or to one innominate,  self-proclaimed genius of Intertel who is 100 percent convinced that "scientific conspirators falsified their data on which they based their alarming findings."  Or -from the same genius: "these scientists manipulated the peer review process to keep valid research against global warming from being published."

But anyone who's  been involved in serious climate science research would know the latter two beliefs are pure balderdash and definitely merit no respect. Especially if they issue from people who are members of a high IQ group.  They ought to have known or found out that denier papers are rejected because they don't meet minimum publication standards, including: use of proper mathematical or statistical techniques to assess data, use of coherent and testable physical models and/or simulations and assessment of errors in each of the preceding. But it's easier for deniers simply to believe denier research papers are left out because the review process is "manipulated."

While ordinary people may be partly excused for their beliefs, a high IQ person cannot be similarly excused, and he or she merits the full hammer of criticism and opprobrium. He has effectively misused his high intelligence to 'go off the rails'  and not conducted sufficient self-checks on his claims. Nor used his intelligence - with sufficient energy - to do his own research to first seek to disprove his many superficially -based beliefs.

Why? Because by virtue of their very intelligence they ought to fucking know better!  They actually possess the necessary intellect to ferret out the truth and DO the research but are too god damned lazy to do it. They don't want to read 15 or 20 papers that thoroughly debunk their idiotic beliefs, they'd rather just go to climate denier websites, imbibe the misinformation and repeat it. Especially with the conspiracy aspect.

The authors of the TIME essay ('We Shouldn't Dismiss People Who Deny Facts') claim:

"If we really want to change how they think, we need to take an honest look at what's driving those beliefs. Because it's not ignorance, it's psychology."

Actually, in the case of the genius climate deniers (or their  soft soaping allies who aren't as denial -based but still think "the jury is out")  it's politics that's to blame. Specifically Libertarianism,  which most of them espouse, whether in Mensa or Intertel.  This leads them to collect — even invent — bad information to flesh out what they already believe to justify their economics theories.  Their aim isn't scientific pursuit but rather defending an economic system they believe will unravel if practical solutions to global warming became law.

My point? Their  interjection and invocation of politics means they can no longer be afforded special consideration, and this distinguishes them from say, the vaccine skeptics. The TIME authors, Sara and Jack Gorman, claim we are all subject to the same principles that "cause scientific denial".  They add:

"Research has shown that humans are distinctly uncomfortable with events or phenomena without clear causes - and when we don't  know something we tend to fill in the gaps ourselves. Take autism. Since we don't know why it occurs it becomes easy to misplace blame."

Fair enough, but autism is not global warming, for which we KNOW the cause is ever increasing CO2 concentrations that cause the atmosphere to retain more moisture and heat creating a thermal blanket that heats the Earth like a mammoth greenhouse. Indeed, the source of the greenhouse effect has been known for nearly 120 years, from the time of chemist Svante Arrhenius, e.g.

http://warming.sdsu.edu/

This issue also transpired in the debate Monday night when Trump tried to deny he had earlier called global warming a "hoax".  This, despite the fact an old tweet of his was dug up where in he babbled:
"the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese."

Why recite such crap? Because it served a political advantage. But sorry, you don't get any breaks nor are you spared criticism when you go that route. The same applies to Libertarians in Mensa and Intertel who have banged the denier drum until they're blue in the face. They do it precisely because they don't wish to acknowledge that - if true (which it is) - economic sacrifices will have to be made in the short and long term interest of future generations.  The upshot of their unquestioning belief in market economics leads them to craft a pseudo-scientific narrative ( in the guise of real science) to attack genuine climate science. To accomplish this trick they make use of  the data, papers of proven scientific whores and hacks, willing to sell their dubious skills for a few shekels to the highest capitalist bidders or think tanks e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/02/another-climate-scientist-fake-exposed.html

One of the best exposes of their methods and dynamics has come from Yale Law school prof and science communication researcher Dan Kahan.  He has concluded that their information processing is almost entirely determined by their deep-seated political values and cultural identities. Thus, a white libertarian member of  Intertel, for example, will see global warming science as just one more vehicle of  subversive force backed  by the "untermenschen"  to be used against his precious economic values and Eurocentric ideals. All of this is then attributed to "global warming alarmism", as an expeditious cover for his own abysmal laziness, ignorance and cynicism. At this point, his thinking is already so corrupted and contaminated it's almost impossible to break through on any rational or critical thinking level.

From Kahan's theory, these pseudo skeptics don't really have the time to evaluate every piece of evidence that comes before them (say ice cores containing CO2) so basically punt. Instead of rationally and objectively evaluating the evidence they side with the top bananas in their political group  - in this case folks like Charles Murray- and use their generic  economic arguments (i.e. against taxes as "theft" and "force")  to attack climate science or more precisely the climate science consensus that human induced warming is real, e.g.

http://sciencepolicy.agu.org/files/2013/07/AGU-Climate-Change-Position-Statement_August-2013.pdf

One of their most used shticks is to clump all federal science agencies (like NOAA, NASA, EPA  etc.) together and "in on the scam". This makes it easy so they don't have to use their brains or  time plowing through separate specialist climate papers. Why do that when you can kill five birds with one stone?

Driven by this short cut mental modality, they then seek out those oddball contrarians (like Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, Richard Lindzen) who do sound off against the climate consensus, even though they are dead wrong and have been proven so.  The stage then emerges for the next phase: cherry picking only the data which conforms to their economic or political values. By now we have  a self-reinforcing mechanism: the more the Libbie genius gets exposed to the faux science that  supports his economic and political stance the more he continues to adopt that position and related ones further out. These include such far out, paranoid ideations that one's opponents "demand that Western Industrial Civilization commit cultural suicide by adopting the crippling constraints sought by the global warming conspirators."  in the words of Kort Patterson.

Meanwhile, by extension, misinformation in public life isn’t the exception, it’s the rule, according to a study published in Social Science Quarterly  which employed a “knowledge distortion index” and looked at two competing explanations for why this is so — one top-down, the other bottom-up.  The researchers used three Washington state initiatives from the 2006 general election cycle to examine the dynamics of what is going on in this particular sort of political environment.  The study, “How Voters Become Misinformed: An Investigation of the Emergence and Consequences of False Factual Beliefs,” found that “voters’ values and partisanship had the strongest associations with distorted beliefs, which then influenced voting choices. Self-reported levels of exposure to media and campaign messages "played a surprisingly limited role,” despite the presence of significantly mistaken “facts,” which were used to help construct the knowledge distortion index.
 

Lead author, Justin Reedy in one interview stated “Both of these theories recognize that citizens can develop distorted factual beliefs because of their political views, but they disagree about how those distortions might happen. Heuristics researchers generally think that citizens have limited attention for politics and try to process information quickly and efficiently.”

Again, this reverts to Kahan's theory of why intelligent climate deniers give short shrift to deep research that might change their minds - if they only got off their butts and put their high IQs to use for an activity other than denial. But because simple denial consumes less time (one can get denier "misinformation" quickly and efficiently from numerous websites) then their denier behavior is more likely to be reinforced. That means they will be less likely to expend time or effort on difficult independent  research that might change their mind.
 
The Gormans assert Iibid.):

"Rather than chastising people for focusing so heavily on stories, we should figure out why we are all so drawn to stories in the first place. Changing minds requires compassion and understanding, not disdain."

A sentiment with which I wholeheartedly concur. And that's why I often make allowances for those like the anti-vaxxers because they aren't privy to detailed biological science nor are they likely to understand autism if they did access research. So they must confabulate "stories" and these often support their false beliefs. However, I am not about to extend the same generosity to a Mensan or Ilian - especially one who cynically uses his intelligence to spread misinformation and misbegotten conspiracy theories about "global warming alarmists".

Jonathan Gruber: One MIT Prof That Obama Didn't Need

MIT, let's make no mistake, has made some major technological contributions to this country, and continues to make educational ones with its open courseware program, e.g.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/audio-video-courses/

The profs giving those (video)courses, such as in math, chemistry and physics, deserve all the props for getting their lectures online so many around the world can benefit from them. (The ones on rocket propulsion engineering are especially good!)

But, on the other hand, some MIT profs have been colossal clowns and goofballs, one of whom is Richard Lindzen, who I already took down in previous blog posts for his climate science stance, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/06/richard-lindzens-fantasies-1.html

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/06/richard-lindzens-fantasies-2.html

The latest goofball is Economic Prof. Jonathan Gruber, who has now become the Repukes' "star boy" since assorted videos have appeared where he basically disses the American voter for being "stupid" because of the lack of transparency he (and others) applied to the Affordable Care Act. The videos were excavated from online searches by some guy who became convinced that somewhere in the Youtube Archives one miscreant or other  must have discussed pulling the wool over the American people with "Obamacare".

In one video Gruber is seen saying:

"This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) did not score the mandate as taxes. If the CBO scored it as taxes, it dies."

He was referring here to the individual mandate which he also implemented as part of "Romney care" in Massachusetts, thereby mandating individuals pay in for private policies from insurance companies - or face tax penalties if they refused.

In another recovered video seen last night on CBS News we beheld Gruber bragging his sorry ass off how he got "the feds" to pour in money to support Romney's MA plan to the tune of $400 million. He fairly looked like a pig that had overeaten rotten squash and potatoes with his self-satisfied look - which is now playing nonstop on all the right wing channels- especially FOX. And we won't even go into how Limbaugh has bloviated that  "this proves Obamacare was a fraud".

But the worst "revelation" emerged from a particular video where Gruber appeared at some confab and blurted:

"Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. Basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass."

Well, I don't know what parallel universe Gruber inhabits, but it surely isn't the one I'm in. In fact, most voters -  left and right -  smelled a "rat" from the instant the Affordable Care Act was trotted out. On the Right, we beheld hundreds appearing at ACA informal events bearing their rifles - many loaded - along with degrading images of Obama (including with a bone through his nose in Witch doctor garb).

On the Left, while we didn't go off the deep end and bring loaded weapons to assorted ACA events, we were deeply suspicious. We simply didn't buy that the insurance companies that had swindled us over the years could possibly be legitimate partners in a health care rollout- whatever its name. And this is exactly why we fought for the public option - though our first choice was "Medicare for all". We felt at least a public option had a chance to pass, but the pussified Dems - though they held a 60-vote Senate majority -  were so desperate to get Reepo cooperation for political cover,  that they allowed 3 Reepos to be on the critical 7-member  finance committee headed by Max Baucus. The rest, as they say is history, and when Baucus aligned himself with the Reepo three we knew it was curtains for the option.

But don't  tell me that we the voters were "stupid", because that was a lie, and shows that Gruber is as dense or deluded as those who believed that the ACA would really cut long term costs without negatively impacting other programs, such as Medicare. (A $500b cut in that program was needed to help fund the ACA, along with reducing the frequency of many preventative tests- hence the new "formal guidelines" for fewer PSA test, mammograms, etc.)

At the end of the day, the wool wasn't pulled so much over the voters as the Congressional Budget Office which was charged with correctly assessing the impact on the long term budget while also discriminating between real taxation and non-taxation in the mandate.

By far the worst blunder of pandering the ACA to the masses was in telling them if they liked their plan they could keep it. This later turned into a fiasco as we saw after the rollout how the insurance companies "never heard of it" and kicked  tens of thousands off plans that were tailored to their needs to obtain general plans that were not (i.e. including pregnancy care, tests etc. even though a couple may be child free). Alternatively, the ones allowed to remain on their plans saw their premiums, their deductibles or both increase brutally.

But again most people were skeptical of the rosy promises from the get go. Most intelligent people also knew that any law requiring thousands of pages was likely laden with bullshit - as much or more so than Vince Buglisoi's 2,500 odd page tract on "Reclaiming History" (to try to show Oswald was the real JFK assassin after all).

Despite its flaws, and there are many (not the least of which is that the ACA was originally conceived by the Republicans in the Nixon era), bear in mind that given the political constraints and an administration not prepared to go full tilt on the public option - it was the only "game" in town.  It meant at least half of the population could finally secure health care as opposed to none, and as we know from provisional ethics, enabling half a loaf is to be preferred over none.

The moral of this story, if there is one, is for future presidents to be very careful about exactly who they select as advisers or as architects of a particular program or  policy.

If they aren't it may come back to bite them.

Bill Nye Should Be Able to Wallop Marsha Blackburn in Climate Science Debate

Bill Nye on Real Time Friday Night, discussing climate change

This morning, incredibly (to many of us), Bill Nye squares off on 'Meet the Press' against Marsha Blackburn in a debate ('discussion') to do with climate change. While this encounter is fraught with peril (given likely 'sound bite' limits and that the moderator David Gregory is a Neolib tool) there is really no reason why Nye - if he commands the most basic facts - can't send Blackburn scurrying out the door - vanquished and yelping 'Vamanos!'  This is, of course, assuming the moderator sticks to the science!

For those who may not know,  Blackburn is a vocal skeptic and vice chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. which basically means she's a nobody. At least in the realm of genuine climate science. She has zero qualifications, likely not even a physics first degree, and merely being on some HOUSE energy committee means nada - given the House was taken over by the Tea Party in 2010. 

As a salon.com piece (by Alex Pareene) pointed out ,  Bill Nye in some ways also lacks creds in that his actual qualifications (before becoming the 'Science Guy') were in mechanical engineering. But let's bear in mind that the courses taken by a mechanical engineer are heavy in advanced math (differential equations, complex variables, etc.) as well as advanced physics (thermodynamics, mechanics, etc.) at least place him in league with climate scientists in being exposed to the scientific method, and being familiar with climate change.

Sadly, too many under-informed Americans (like Marsha Blackburn) aren't. One of the glaring deficiencies was revealed in a  2012 Washington Post-Stanford University poll, wherein Americans' average estimate of the share of scientists who believe global warming is happening due to human behavior was a measly "64 percent". (At least this was better than a  2009 Post-ABC poll  where only 36 percent said "most scientists agree with on another" that global warming is happening; and a majority sensed "a lot of disagreement."

Of course, this is nonsense. It also shows the stupidity of most polls on scientific issues, where the media source is basically asking the opinion of uninformed people - who likely have little or no scientific exposure. In the case of climate science consensus, for example, the uninformed public is way, way off.  An extensive review of nearly 12,000 published papers from 1991 to 2011 led by John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli found 97 percent of those taking a position on the issue endorsed the idea of human-caused global warming.

Meanwhile, in their analysis of the extent of scientific consensus on global warming (Eos Transactions, Vol. 90, No. 3, p. 22) , P. T. Doran and M. Kendall-Zimmerman found that (p. 24)

“the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely non-existent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.”

In their analytic survey for which 3146 climate and Earth scientists responded, a full 96.2% of specialists concurred temperatures have steadily risen and there is no evidence for cooling. Meanwhile, 97.4% concur there is a definite role of humans in global climate change.

In other words, the dissenters are mainly outliers, and often cranks. In many cases too, they have no formal climate science background.  This also feeds into a nonchalance to take serious action because of a cognitive disconnect. For example,  while Americans consistently support government regulation of greenhouse gases, Gallup polls since the late 1990s have found a clear majority of Americans doubting global warming will seriously threaten them during their lifetime, even as most perceive some effects today.

Of course, this is bollocks. Anyone who isn't at least 95 years old today, WILL see definite and severe effects of climate change, and it will turn over their lives and definitely threaten them.  These effects will also ramp up as more and more carbon is pumped into the atmosphere until we exceed the 551 gT limit noted by Bill McKibben, which will engender a 2C increase and catastrophic climate events. The existing polar vortex is only one of  those, which instability has given rise to the Arctic weather conditions recently and the immense amounts of snow. See e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/01/yes-global-warming-is-still-real-and.html

But this elicits the question of why have such an "exchange" at all if the conditions don't contribute to greater understanding or a clear winner.   First, the time allotment isn't sufficient. The 'Meet the Press' meet up is only now beginning at 9.20 a.m. so not even a full hour is allotted. This means there won't be ample time for Nye to knock down effluent such as recently spouted by a CATO drone, i.e. that "it's just that there's so many more people living in so many more places....so you hear about more disasters."

Really? Then how account for the scores of receding, melting glaciers where NO people live? Images and videos not long ago made available in a PBS program, see:

http://video.pbs.org/video/1108763899

Even five minutes into this 'debate' Blackburn has tried to invoke the non sequitur that neither she nor Nye are "science experts" and there is still "disagreement" even amongst those in Obama's own WH.  Seconds later she resorted to the "only tiny difference" shtick, saying we "have only gone from 0.032% to 0.040% CO2 concentration"-  not realizing that even a 0.001 % increase in CO2 is critical, as Gunther Weller showed in his Arctic melting studies from the 1980s.

She's  also again introduced the  recycled idiocy that "there's no consensus" - mentioning losers and outliers like Richard Lindzen and Judith Curry - though here David Gregory did interrupt to correct her- pointing out that naming a couple skeptics doesn't equate to there being no consensus.  For my takedowns of Lindzen and his rubbish, see:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/06/richard-lindzens-fantasies-1.html

and:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/06/richard-lindzens-fantasies-2.html

Realizing she was busted there, Blackburn plied the usual ploy of: " Well, let's assume everything Bill says is right. Even director McCarthy from the EPA, in answering questions before our committee, said reaching all of the 26 U.S. goals is not going to have an impact globally"

Which is likely correct, given the U.S. is now outsourcing, exporting high polluting, cut-rate, climate damaging fuels to other nations! In other words, while we portray ourselves as the cleaner and cleaner nice guys, we are happy to foul up the rest of the planet as we embrace the error that "there's no fossil fuel we will leave in the ground" (See 'How the U.S. Exports Global Warming' in Rolling Stone, Feb. 13, p.32.)

As Nye's eyes rolled, she then added to that by averring "You don't make good policy based on unproven hypotheses". 

Nye did present a solid comeback, holding up a photo image of the melting Arctic (though I'd have preferred to see short video clips from the PBS documentary - as shown at the link above). He also noted that Blackburn's mention of a "slight change" is ludicrous, since it's actually a 30 percent increase and in the last few decades.

At this point, the discussion again veers to policy, and how costly implementing climate change responses will be.

The turf is mainly beneficial to Blackburn - harping endlessly on "cost benefit analysis" - but on the science Nye enjoys the edge.

However, David Gregory has brought up the sad polling stat (again) that global warming - climate change is only 19th on the list of Americans' concerns. (It ought to be first, or roughly equivalent to the Earth facing a planet killer asteroid.)

Nye's response is fair enough but not as hard hitting as it could be. In the end, this 'debate' wasn't nearly a patch on the one with Ken Ham -  because it wasn't a formal one with adequate time allotted and proper rules. However, it terms of the science and what needs to be done, Nye clearly got the better of Marsha Blackburn.

Partisanship and the Brain: Why We Can't Get the Righties to Accept Global Warming or Evolution

Yale professor Dan Kahan's research discloses that a graph of C-14 excess over C-12 over a 2,000 year period such as shown, would be next to useless - if shown to a political partisan. The quantitative basis would be obscured behind the need to preserve one's personal beliefs and biases.


For many years I've pondered why it's so difficult to get through the brains of hardliners on the Right, say to convince them of the validity of  global warming, Darwinian evolution or even the need for raising taxes in a low aggregate demand economic environment. Over years of honing the most comprehensive, fact-based arguments nothing seems to have sunken in, and the other side - for whatever reason- never appears to grasp or accept them.

Now, however, it appears an answer may be at hand. We may now finally know why it is that arguments, no matter how logically crafted or fact-based, are always doomed to fail if the brain of the other person is inherently biased and partisan.   One needs then to examine Yale law school professor Dan Kahan’s new research paper  “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government,”. (For those less inclined to technical takes Chris Mooney’s piece about it,  “Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math”, is perhaps a better option.)

What Kahan  did is to conduct ingenious experiments concerning the impact of political passion to affect people’s ability to think clearly.  His conclusion:  partisanship “can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills…. [People] who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs.”

Thus, when we provide evidence or the numbers, showing that the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is now at nearly 450 ppm and it's increasing at the rate of 2 ppm per year, and that the solar insolation is increasing at the rate of 2 watts per square meter per year, it means absolutely nothing to the politically- contaminated brain. The numbers won't be processed, the rate of increase - relative to the critical tipping point  (550 ppm) for the runaway greenhouse - won't be appreciated. The same applies to any quantitative data shown in graphical form, such as the one for the isotope C14 excess over C12 shown at the top of this post.


In other words, we can say 'goodnight'  to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, media literacy or reason can provide the tools and information that people need in order to make good decisions.  Not even graduate degrees, it appears, can make a difference in perception or insight if the person is a confirmed partisan. Global warming will remain a "hoax" even if he avails himself of the excellent Yale course on global atmospheric dynamics, e.g.
http://oyc.yale.edu/geology-and-geophysics/gg-140

The  lack of information then isn’t the real problem.  The impasse resides in how our brains work, no matter how smart we think we are.  Just like the OAA or orientation and activation area of the brain, pre-disposes it to God talk and special beliefs - i.e. that a person is one-on-one with the deity- other brain regions (e.g. temporal lobes, optical chasm) impede rational processing of data, information.

Sure, all humans want to believe they’re rational, but Kahan's work shows that in reality most people employ their reason  ex post facto to  rationalize what they already want to believe. Thus, if they already believe global warming is a "hoax" their brains won't work in order to process new information that invalidates that, but rather they will search for bogus information (say from a Terry Lovell, or Richard Lindzen, or Jason Lisle) that reinforces their misperceptions. So in fact, they are prepared to waste their brainpower to protect their political belief systems.

Do facts matter at all anymore, what with Neoliberal PR dominating and the artificial manufacturing of consent pushed by it all over the Zeitgeist? The answer, basically, is no.  When people are misinformed, giving them facts to correct those errors only makes them cling to their beliefs more tenaciously, because their engines of rejection will work ever harder by rationalization to protect them. This includes citing bogus sources - such as FAUX News- to assert their beliefs have merit.

Kahan, meanwhile, gives excellent examples in his work of how the brains of partisans set up barriers to correct their own beliefs:

- People who thought WMDs were found in Iraq believed that misinformation even more strongly when they were shown a news story correcting it. In most cases, they asserted the source (e.g. MSNBC) was wrong, and their source (FOX, Rush Limbaugh)  correct.

-People who said the economy was the most important issue to them, and who disapproved of Obama’s economic record, were shown a graph of nonfarm employment over the prior year – a rising line, adding about a million jobs.  They were asked whether the number of people with jobs had gone up, down .

-If, before they were shown the graph, they were asked to write a few sentences about an experience that made them feel good about themselves, a significant number of them changed their minds about the economy.

Kahan's bleakest finding was that the more advanced that people’s math skills, the more likely it was that their political views, whether liberal or conservative, made them less able to solve the math problem.  This is interesting in itself, and once again, shows me that without critical thinking skills both sides are liable to go astray. Thus, we see  liberals  more and more supporting Obama blindly,  asserting "Good American exceptionalism" and "Obama right or wrong" even as he was castigating Edward Snowden as "no patriot" or banging the drums for war with Syria. Meanwhile, we see many conservatives blindly following the Tea Party like lemmings, even as they may lead them (and all of us) over the cliff with the debt ceiling impasse.

If only our brains were more evolved these problems might be solved. But without serious external intervention, this is all but impossible. The alternative being having to wait another million years for the biological evolution of the brain to occur.

Why Do So Few Scientists Belong to the GOP? ANS: They HATE Dummies & Zealots!

As this WSJ  article from 2012 shows, the bulk of free market -brainwashed puppets are those that refuse to accept man-made climate change, global warming. This is driving real scientists away .


The issue has surfaced, in a recent report, that barely 6% of scientists belong to the GOOPr party. Some people want to know how this can be and others (critics) insist it's just that the terrible media (largely Neoliberal and free-market, war worshipping) paint the poor lil Goops as "more anti-science than they really are". Oh REALLY? I seem to recall during the Repuke debates last year, when the question was asked of the 'puke candidates if any accepted evolution, not one raised a hand! You call that painting them as more anti-science than they are!?

Another aspect that infuriates physical scientists (and which can be repeatedly seen in letters appearing in Physics Today) is the GOOPr questioning of  climate change. This alone has plausibly driven away thousands of climate scientists, as well as physicists and astronomers who essentially say they “just don’t get those people.”

Enter one Barry Bickmore, professor of geology at Brigham Young University and a  one-time Republican convention delegate for the state of Utah.. Bickmore told The Salt Lake Tribune that :

“my party is increasingly ruled by zealots and a demand for ‘ideological purity’ that turns off scientists.”

Duh! If it's one thing scientists detest it's zealots who appeal to either ideology or religion to attempt to insist their "models" of the cosmos or its origin are the only right ones.  Ok, so none of this is exactly news, but it is a major change from the past when the proportion of scientists was almost evenly split. The Tribune, for its part,  dedicates a lot of thought to what could be driving the rift, which is especially visible in red states. The discomfort, evidently, is mutual:

One theory goes that conservatives tend toward a single-minded, “authoritarian” world view, so they are less comfortable with the uncertainty that’s built into the practice of science.

The above is spot -on. Examine any born or bred authoritarian, of whatever stripe, and you will find someone who detests intellect, free inquiry and higher education or abstract research that exposes human beliefs as false. These authoritarian types, if they only had their way, would doubtless put all questioning scientists back on the rack or even burn them alive. They hate questioning, and they regard it as impudence or disrespect. Needless to say, none of them have any place in any scientific field. They are better suited to being military intelligence officers (note the oxymoron there), bible punchers, G-men or CIA water-boarders.

An even more interesting take (ibid.):

Another hypothesis holds that the stauncher someone is about free-market economics, the more likely they are to see conspiracies in science, such as NASA faked the moon landing, there’s no proof cigarette smoking causes cancer and climate change is a hoax.

This actually dovetails with a tendency I noted before, called agnotology - which free marketeers practice to a fault - in order to protect their free market idiom and economy!  Stanford historian of science Robert Proctor has correctly tied it to the trend of skeptic science sown deliberately and for political or economic ends . In other words, the supporters of agnotology - whoever they may be- are all committed to one end: destroying the science to enable economic profit and hence planetary ruin. Proctor also notes these special interests are often paid handsomely to sow immense confusion on the issue.

A perfect example of what I am writing about is depicted in the graphic shown, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal last January.  The piece claimed to be "signed by 16 scientists at the end of the article". Before getting to some of their bollocks, let us inquire into exactly WHO these people are. Do they have the gravitas or the disputative basis of real climate scientists? Going through the list, one found:

Jan Breslow: Head of Biogenetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University

Edward David: Member, National Academy of Engineering

Michael Kelly, Professor of Technology, Univ. of Cambridge

Richard Lindzen, prof. of atmospheric sciences, MIT

James McGrath, prof. of Chemistry, Virginia Technical University

Bert Rutan, aerospace engineer

Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut

Nir Shaviv, prof. of astrophysics, Hebrew University

The only marginal climate scientist in the lot is Lindzen,  and I already lambasted his drivel in earlier blogs:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/06/richard-lindzens-fantasies-1.html

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/06/richard-lindzens-fantasies-2.html

But this is the type of phony setup that free-market pandering media employ to try to make the unwary or gullible believe: i.e. that most of academic science is on the side of the doubters, deniers. This is exactly the worst aspect of agnotology.

In many of my past  blogs I've repeatedly cited the actual results from REAL climate scientists, as opposed to pretenders. Specifically, I've referenced the scientific consensus on global warming reported in Eos Transactions, Vol. 90, No. 3, p. 22, by P. T. Doran and M. Kendall-Zimmerman found that (p. 24) :

“the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely non-existent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.”

In their analytic survey for which 3146 climate and Earth scientists responded, a full 96.2% of specialists concurred temperatures have steadily risen and there is no evidence for cooling. Meanwhile, 97.4% concur there is a definite role of humans in global climate change.

The authors concluded (p. 24) :

“The challenge appears to be how to effectively communicate this fact (non-existent debate among real climate specialists) to policy makers and a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate exists among scientists”


The problem, of course, is that so long as a few pseudo-climate scientists are given large header displays and article space in the likes of The Wall Street Journal, this perception problem will continue and many people will mistake the views of these pretenders for those of actual climate scientists.

In the meantime, the reason so few scientists belong to the GOP ought to be obvious: they detest liars and zealots more invested in protecting a perverse economic system than in accepting scientific truths.