An alien view?
Astrayalien promotes beliefs alien to science. He provides a link to John O'Sullivan (another denier crank) who believes that the atmosphere has a cooling effect and that without it, earth would be 121 degrees Celsius. (Yes, that's actually on his website!) O'Sullivan's ideas are so ridiculous that I doubt anyone has ever bothered to refute them. (I stopped reading once I got to the bit about the atmosphere having a 'cooling effect'.)And if you were in any doubt about the collective IQ on HotCopper, six more HotCopper-ites agree with astrayalien than disagree.
Not only that, but astrayalien also links to the website of a software developer, Christian evangelist, wedding photographer called Douglas Cotton, who he believes has overturned more than two hundred years of scientific research by 'proving' there is no such thing as a greenhouse effect. Doug doesn't publish in peer reviewed journals but that doesn't deter astrayalien.
Younglogga gallantly tried to restore credibility to HotCopper and bring the thread back to some semblance of scientific decency by referring people to skepticalscience.com and its links to peer-reviewed science, but to no avail. Astrayalien thinks such peer-reviewed science is "complete drivel". He only accepts 'science' from evangelical wedding photographers/software developers. Anyone who accepts peer-reviewed science suffers 'cognitive dissonance' according to astrayalien. (Does he know what cognitive dissonance is?)
Resident troll Hanrahan supports astrayalien, referring to skepticalbloodyscience.com. (Young Han cannot abide the site because it uses science to refute the 'arguments' of his mate Bob Carter.)
Genericmicrobe can't understand skepticalscience.com and wants HotCopperites to explain it!
Denmor says science is 'alarmist claptrap'.
Denial from HotCopper seems to be keeping pace with Earth's temperature. Correlation does not necessarily mean causation, but ...
Wow. That website of astrayalien is a bucket of crazy.
ReplyDeleteI did a year ago go to denier sites to ask if any denier would be willing to stand in front of a CO2 laser :) But this is a new set of crank that has popped up since then. I left an invite, lets see if it stays :)
Douglas Cotton - now there's a name I see too often. The Conversation, what looked to be a great new addition to new media has fallen to crank balance, ie false balance between a factual position and crank position
(Dara O'Briain always comes to mind here "There’s a kind of notion that everyone’s opinion is equally valid. My arse! A bloke who’s been a professor of dentistry for 40 years doesn’t have a debate with some idjit who removes his teeth with string and a door!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMvMb90hem8 )
Anyway, TheConversation.edu entertains denier comments flooding any climate science or policy article as well as the occasional denier article. Which gives me the irrits. I know they publish crank on material I know about, what about topics I'm not so informed on? Is it authoritative, expert derived or is it cranky arseplucks - I have to assume the latter unless I can check with other resources and then that raises the question of why read the stuff to begin with. And good articles raising excellent questions have 1 or 2 good comments sunk in a sea of denier spam.
On the topic of cranks, I came across this term today - crank magnetism.
ReplyDeletePerfect description of many deniers, because most of them by default are conspiracy theorists, thinking AGW is a scam, cult etc. So they are inclined to accept opposing and contradictory notions especially but not solely relating to climate. (Eg it's warming, we're heading for an ice age, H2O is a bigger greenhouse gas, there's no such thing as a greenhouse gas.)
(If crank magnetism is in play, a person will be attracted to off-the-planet ideas no matter how weird or how much it conflicts with other crank notions they support.)
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ReplyDeleteSorry Doug - not here. Your comment has been promoted to the HotWhoppery (with some minor modification). It didn't comply with the comment policy.
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