Well here is one sensible dude:
http://www.bigbutton.com.au/%7Efenwickelliott/diary.html
Best bits:-
"The point is not so much who is right and who is wrong; it is that we have moved into a
polarised state where, on the one side, people are saying that it is settled that man-made climate change is an imminent disaster, and on the other, people saying that it is a beat-up.
In the USA, there is now a relatively even split between those tho think it is a beat up, and those who don't, according to a recent Gallup Poll, with the skeptics at their highest level for 10 years. There is precious little real debate between the two sides, any more than there ever has been between religious dogmatists and skeptics. The IPCC crew have got hold of the notion that the science is settled, that anyone who contractdicts them is bad, mad and dangerous to know (Quicky would ban them perhaps?). It seems that the issue is not so much one of science these days, but more a question of where you stand, or as the Americans like to say "narrative". "
"
I picked up an old philosophy book the other day, on the subject of logic. It contains a detailed analysis of syllogisms. You know the sort of stuff:
- All men are mortal
- All Englishmen are men
- Therefore all Englishmen are mortal.
And so I started wondering about the syllogisms of climate change. They might be different for different viewpoints. Thus for the government of Margaret Thatcher (which was at least partly responsible, says Lord Lawson) for kicking the whole thing off, it might be:
- All Trades Unions are a bad thing, especially the National Union of Mineworkers
- We cannot break their stranglehold on the economy as long as they enjoy public support
- Therefore we should put it publicly about that burning coal is a bad thing.
All of that was coupled, of course, with the notion that we could and should be using more nuclear energy instead. Which is not the usual line of the socks and sandals brigade. Their syllogism is more like:
- All rich people use a lot of energy.
- Rich people are bad.
- Therefore using energy is a bad thing.
For climate change scientists, it might be different again:
- All scientists need research grants
- We only get research grants if people worry about climate change
- Therefore we should put it publicly about that climate change is a bad thing. In fact, very bad. Very bad indeed. Oh yes.
This last point might sound somewhat sceptical (or as Jeanie would say, being a New Zealander, sciptical). Let us look at the hypothesis that the climate change business might be heavily infected by woo-woo.
Woo-woo
This is a great term to describe nonsense of all kinds. It is used by skeptics, including the admirable James Randi, the professional conjurer who has performed a great public service by exposing people like Uri Geller and Peter Popoff (see below), to
mean irrational belief and quackery of all kinds.
Precisely what you categorise as woo-woo will depend, of course, on your own analysis. The list might include things like witch-doctory, creationism and other religious beliefs, mysticism, homoeopathy, reincarnation, spoon-bending, astrology, fung sui, talking to dead people, faith-healing,chiropractic and even wackier stuff than any of these.
Is the climate change package woo-woo?
The climate change thing is not a single proposition, but a series of propositions, something along the following lines:
- The world is getting much hotter;
- That change is caused by mankind releasing carbon into the atmosphere, by burning fossil fuels;
- The temperature change will cause sea levels to rise dramatically;
- These two changes will render the earth significantly less habitable;
- Mankind could and should fix all of this by releasing less carbon.
All of these propositions are said to be ?settled science?; they come as a package in support of a range of measures that have been advocated and, in some cases, implemented.
A typical feature of woo-woo (apart, of course from a fundamental implausibility) is that someone else stands to gain from it in some way. Faith-healers, chiropractors and the like make a living out of peddling their particular brands of nonsense. Some might say that this is OK; they are providing a service, and if people want to buy it, well, good for them. It is less attractive in the case of people like
Peter Popoff, a televangelist who got cash out of people by pretending to be getting supernatural messages, but who was actually getting short-wave radio messages through a concealed earpiece from his wife, who was rummaging through his audience's ?prayer cards?.
The fact that climate change scientists stand to gain from their beliefs does not make it all woo-woo, of course. But it is enough to make a sceptical nose start twitching.
The Denial Tag
It is also a feature of woo-woo for its proponents to discount opposition. There are many examples; I like this one. James Randi
quotes Yuri Geller as saying
"Is he [Randi] still alive? If so, he does not interest me, because I disconnect from negative people?
Brilliant! In the same way, we get the tag that anyone who doubts the climate change message is a ?denier?. This sounds fun ? lingerie seems pretty harmless ? but it just a breath away from ?holocaust denier? which is not fun at all.
Reliability of Expert Consensus
As it happens, there is no consensus among experts about climate change, although it is plain that there is an orthodoxy that runs heavily against denial. But how reliable would such a consensus be, even if there were one?
Not very. Our history is littered with examples of experts getting things wrong. Ask an International Panel on Catholicism if the Pope is infallible, and they will probably tell you that he is. Ask an International Panel on Chiropractic if you can fix 101 ailments by ?spinal manipulation? and it will say, ?Oh yes? (they are not negative people at all).
The Light in Their Eyes
No, what really makes me so suspicious about the climate change lobby is that light in their eyes, so similar to what one sees in evangelicals when they start talking about their religious obsessions. There is no point talking to them about the evidence that the world was not actually created in just one week a few thousand years ago ? there are not interested. In the same way, the climate change people are just not interested in contrary evidence. You show them the evidence that global warming may well have stopped about 10 years ago, that the Antarctic is getting colder, that none of their models have proved able to predict anything reliably, that carbon levels seem to follow climate change rather than lead it, that 100 years ago you could kayak 100 miles closer to the North Pole than you can today, that it is not just Earth, but other planets, including Mars Jupiter and Pluto, that have been warming. All of this suggests a complex and imperfectly understood picture, but for the guys with the light in their eyes, there is no doubting. They are just not interested in considering these issues."