In article ,
"anorton" wrote:
"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"anorton" wrote:
"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
The "settled science" of Global Warming has become unsettled.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000...07774168722660
2.html
The Wall Street Journal, 22 February 2010.
Joe Gwinn
Think a bit about what this means. Everyone knows the UN is a political
not
a scientific organization. The compiled UN report of several thousand
pages
has been subjected to most intense scrutiny that could be bought by OPEC
and
the coal, oil, gas industries, yet they have found less than a handful of
errors or exaggerations. They have found nothing wrong with the hundreds
of
other remaining conclusions. The few errors have to do with specific
effects of climate change in certain areas. None have to do with the
fundamental conclusion that CO2 from fossil fuel is significantly warming
the Earth.
Of course their have been many thousands of invalid, easily-rebutted
criticisms spread by all sorts of bloggers and paid lobbyists. The lack
of
weight in these argurments becomes apparent by contrast when you see the
effect in the media of a single valid criticism. As I have mentioned
before, we are seeing the results of an organized F.U.D. marketing
campaign.
F.U.D. (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) is a well-worn negative marketing
technique used when your product is inferior in nearly every way to your
competitors. The idea is to spread so much negative innuendo, rumors,
half
truths and lies about the competing product along with the few true
weaknesses that your competitor has to spend all his energy and time
defending himself, but still it is impossible to remove doubt in the mind
of
the customer after such an onslaught. Of course the truth becomes
plainly
obvious eventually, but this strategy allows the perpetrators to extract
the
maximum profit from their current product. Most scientists (even the
technocrats at the UN) are not professional lobbyists and do not know how
to
respond to such an organized attack.
I would submit that you are misreading the politics. The issue is that
people were asked to trust the experts, to the tune of trillions of
dollars.
Then it was discovered that one group of experts (Climate Research Unit)
were withholding and manipulating evidence, and another made a howler of
a conclusion (that glaciers would soon melt away) by being careless of
validating sources (UN).
These are precisely the sort of myths that are being propagated by the FUD
attack. Only the UN report exagerrations are valid criticisms.
http://mediamatters.org/iphone/research/200912010030
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/sc...04climate.html
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...u-data-suspect
-an-objective-assessment/
These are the thirteenth strikes of the clock, which cast doubt not only
on themselves, but on all prior strikes. (Paraphrased from a famous
quotation, so famous that I don't recall the source.)
Exactly. This is the desired effect of a FUD attack. Make everything
uncertain even if there is no evidence against it. In front of a good
prosecutor on a witness stand, anyone, no matter how innocent, can be made
to look like an evil villian if they have no defense attorney. It
unfortunately plays well to the sensationalist media. Here are some
examples of what has been falsely spread in the press.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php.../daily-mangle/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php.../whatevergate/
Well, while I agree that people have seized upon these events to push
various agendas, I think that there is far more to it than that, given
for instance the reaction of the scientific community, which has started
various investigations, and forced the head of the Climate Research Unit
to step aside, and so on. The UN has had its share of egg-on-face as
well. This has all been detailed in a trail of WSJ articles I have
posted.
The good news is that now the evidence will get the wire-brush
treatment, and we will soon know what did and did not survive.
That is good, but you see from the above it does not much matter that
something is reviewed and found valid. If there is an eager machine to
recirculate the initial accusations, they tend to stick around.
All true, but one does not get to give policy advice with
trillion-dollar impact in the real world without a whole lot of "help".
Nor can it be avoided in a democracy. Nor can the process be sped up.
The wire-brush treatment *is* at the core of the scientific method, of
how science decides what is and is not truly known.
Give it a few years. Whatever survives will be effectively unassailable.
Joe Gwinn