100 Reasons Analyzed
Dec. 16th, 2009 11:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andygatesThe breadth and sheer cheek of the bogosity in that 100 Reasons article took my breath away. After tearing it apart yesterday, I thought I'd do a bit of analysis:
Fully a quarter of the arguments are ideological, completely unrelated to the natural world or to science; they're "kyoto sucks" or "obama sucks" or "windmills suck".
Next largest are the lies. Straight-out deception. A fifth of the document is just plain lies.
What next? Attacks on the credibility of the IPCC, and 'climategate' smears: these aren't challenges to the science, but snarks at the people. This is what happens when ideologues go after scientists, and it's ugly.
Next is crank references. I'm including some fringey references that may pan out in that, because they're being spun as cranks who will tear down the lie - some honest work may be misquoted by the authors, and I apologise if that's the case.
And then we're down into the usual denier crap: cherry-picking (you can prove anything that way; one node is not a keystone, it is an outlier); it's the sun; the CO2 lag canard; baffling people with numbers (mixing up rates and values is a classic obfuscation trick); obsolete science and finally crumbs of logical fallacies, stuff that just doesn't make sense.
How did this rubbish get past the fact-checking apparatus of the national press? This has all the credibility of "Elvis Sighted on Moon".
Fully a quarter of the arguments are ideological, completely unrelated to the natural world or to science; they're "kyoto sucks" or "obama sucks" or "windmills suck".
Next largest are the lies. Straight-out deception. A fifth of the document is just plain lies.
What next? Attacks on the credibility of the IPCC, and 'climategate' smears: these aren't challenges to the science, but snarks at the people. This is what happens when ideologues go after scientists, and it's ugly.
Next is crank references. I'm including some fringey references that may pan out in that, because they're being spun as cranks who will tear down the lie - some honest work may be misquoted by the authors, and I apologise if that's the case.
And then we're down into the usual denier crap: cherry-picking (you can prove anything that way; one node is not a keystone, it is an outlier); it's the sun; the CO2 lag canard; baffling people with numbers (mixing up rates and values is a classic obfuscation trick); obsolete science and finally crumbs of logical fallacies, stuff that just doesn't make sense.
How did this rubbish get past the fact-checking apparatus of the national press? This has all the credibility of "Elvis Sighted on Moon".
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Like hens' teeth, but less common.
Date: 2009-12-16 04:24 pm (UTC)That what of the national press, now?
Re: Like hens' teeth, but less common.
Date: 2009-12-16 06:50 pm (UTC)So here's the question: the boffins find the problem. The political response varies -- the response of the Left is to tax bad behaviour and use the income to fund corrective projects; what is the Right's response?
I think that part of the reason the Right are so vehement about denying climate change is that they can't think what to do about it. Market forces don't work because climate is an externality. Deregulation leads to exploitation of the commons. Are there any interesting right-wing approaches to the problem?
no subject
Date: 2009-12-19 07:23 am (UTC)We got so many suits playing Deep Thought's philosophers over here that the only practical way to deal with the issue is to ignore the boffins and the suits and go ahead with business as usual (which generally means cleaner systems, at commercial replacement rates but much less speed than what the idealist want us to).
One of the latest results was finding the "facts" being quoted for dairy production for a year including a per hectare rate that related to forestry clearance as the figures were from some South American study. But the rate was being applied every year (as if it was being cleared each time) and still no pasture or microbiological sequestation info. Meaning farming, especially pastural systems are still only valued at a fraction of the recovery; while denser areas and occupations which only service a small area but have huge indirect consumption are practically ignored!