Friday, August 23, 2013

Denier weirdness: The batty duke has gone to pot...


As if a potty peer isn't enough, now Anthony Watts of WUWT is giving space to a batty DuKE**.
Credit: Torben Hansen

Dr. Robert G. Brown, Duke University (elevated from a comment) AKA rgbatduke is today arguing that the greenhouse effect isn't real because marijuana is thought to have medicinal properties.  Or something like that.

If you can't follow his argument, then you're not inhaling deeply enough.  Pass the joint.



**DuKE - a collective noun eg A DuKE of deniers TM Lotharsson.




In the WUWT comments


Nylo says:
August 22, 2013 at 8:10 am  Stephen Abbott says: August 22, 2013 at 7:59 am Anyone who thinks pot was made illegal because two newspaper publishers didn’t want better that better paper from hemp to come onto the market is smoking something.
It’s not THE reason. It’s just how it all started, the original impulse. Similarly, IPCC started because of Margaret Thatcher’s desire to criminalise coal to deal with a domestic problem involving miners strikes. The reason why CO2 is now officially a Devil’s product is not because of the UK miners. That’s just how everything started rolling.

Rud Istvan says:
August 22, 2013 at 8:33 am   As fun as RGB’s post is to read, it is 1/3 truth and 2/3 urban legend living on the Internet on sites advocating legalization. That is the main way it resembles CAGW. A half hour of fact checking easily shows this assessment is directionally correct.

Personally, I think it detracts from the very important and sometimes personal points Dr. curry made about motived climate science reasoning, and the resulting ‘monopolization’ and then ‘corruption’ of some of the underlying essential data, as Anthony’s crowd sourced project has proven. Fighting bad science using bad analogies to motivated urban legends is bad technique.

curryja
says:
August 22, 2013 at 8:38 am  Robert, thank you for your hysterically clever post

6 comments:

  1. KR

    The basis of the WU post appears to be that doing science disagreeing with the consensus on AGW is suppressed, with an analogy to the difficulties of marijuana research on a banned plant.

    Absurd, really. There are no legal strictures on studying climate change, publications from people like Lindzen, Spencer, Houston and Dean, Gerlich and Tscheuschner, Akasofu, Humlum, etc., all show that it's quite possible to publish something that disagrees with the consensus on AGW.

    It's just that the vast majority of 'skeptic' publications turn out to be easily demonstrated nonsense with elementary errors.

    'Skeptic' research and publication problems aren't due to legal or societal suppression: they are due to bad science - contradicted by the harsh critic of reality. It's as simple as that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I just read the comments at WTFIU and I am sorry I ever learned to read.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The comment from r murthy about these families (sic) causing destruction of lives on the scale of world wars takes some swallowing since the two world wars together killed as many as 80 million people. I think someone might have noticed death on this scale.

      Delete
    2. > killed as many as 80 million people. I think someone might have noticed death on this scale

      Catmando, it is perfectly possible to hide the deaths of 80 million people. All is takes is to spread it thinly over space and time and make sure not to hit any rich white folks with CNN appeal

      Delete
  3. Watts seems to have a renewed interest in the Arctic, now that we won't be seeing back-to-back records after last year's insane record smashing melting season. I prefer to ignore his sh*t, but his timing was so impeccable this time that I had to react: Hole.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Has anyone asked why newspaper publishers (great consumers of paper) would want to keep better paper off the market? I'd have thought they'd want it available. Not that I'd expect logic, but this is new one on me and is a bit of a stand-out absurdity.

    WUWT is becoming quite the conspiracist's hangout in its End Days.
    That flash of fire Willard showed when he drew a line at denying the greenhouse effect and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Monckton was his last hurrah, and a pathetic one at that. Now he'll chum up with anyone who'll help keep his demons at bay. You'd need a heart of stone not to giggle.

    ReplyDelete

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