Monday, October 26, 2015

From the twilight zone of WUWT

Have you ever wondered about the delusions of deniers? Are they all crazy, or are some of them feeders of (or off) the deluded? Anthony's got an article from the twilight zone today (archived here). It's written by someone called Walter Starck.

Walter is one of those lazy people who doesn't bother with evidence. Bold declarations are enough for him. He wrote:
In terms of scientific rationale and supporting evidence, climate alarmism  involves far more denial than does skepticism. The only way one could honestly conclude differently would be to be blissfully unaware of the hundreds of robust peer reviewed studies which refute or bring into serious doubt virtually every important claim by the proponents of DAGW.
Why do disinformers assume that climate deniers are such fake sceptics that they won't check fake claims? It's probably based on experience.

Why doesn't he or anyone else at WUWT produce or even name any of these supposed "hundreds of robust peer reviewed studies"?

Wait a minute. Most of the time deniers are claiming they can't get any of their mysterious studies published. They claim that scientists hold the keys to the gate and deniers can't get a look in. Anthony Watts even set up a secretive open society just to publish all these studies that couldn't get published. Even he's not been able to find any pseudo-science studies to publish yet. (It looks as if he can't get any board members, either.)

So deniers should be demanding a list of these newly discovered hundreds of studies. They aren't, of course. Why spoil a good yarn with facts.


From the WUWT comments


Hivemind
October 26, 2015 at 3:50 am
This is the first time I have seen DAGW. Does it stand for Dumb Ass Global Warming?

Hivemind  
October 26, 2015 at 3:52 am
Or perhaps it’s just a letter thing… They got tired of creating real names so now we have CAGW, DAGW, EAGW… Wake me when we get to ZAGW.

Me too.

34 comments:

  1. Perhaps "hundreds of studies" refers to Tol's 300 which have been statistically proven to exist. Or proven to statistically exist. Or something like that. Anyway, they can't be pointed to because they haven't been found yet but that doesn't make them any less valid, does it?

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    1. Their possible existence has not been disproven and their definitive non-existence has not been proven. They may exist in a state of quantum indeterminacy until observed.

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    2. Indeed, if you will recall that famous though experiment: "Tol's cat" :-)

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    3. *thought* experiment. Doh.

      OT, but this is really strange. Over the past few months I've noticed that if I try to comment using Chrome, about 70% of the time I don't get the "I'm not a robot" checkbox, and so can't post my comment. Very frustrating. But with Firefox, it appears to work 100% of the time.

      Seeing as Blogger is Google's own software and so is Chrome, you'd think that they would at least notice something fundamental like that during testing, doncha' think? The mind boggles. I can never understand why people who should know better can build forms that don't work in all browsers. Maybe we need to get David Evans on it :-)

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    4. My comments wouldn't appear even when I did the robot checkbox with Chrome. When I finally noticed that---I tend to post then move on without checking---I used Firefox and had no problem. My last comment posted from Chomre though so this one might as well.

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    5. Sorry about this and thanks for letting me know. I wasn't aware. I've just reported it to Google and will add the tip to the comment guide.

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    6. The supposed "hundreds of robust peer reviewed studies" do exist! They're somewhere in the collective consciousness of skeptics. They are best described by Heisenberg (the scientist not the alter ego of the TV character).
      When the positions of the "hundreds of robust peer reviewed studies" are found, they can't be seen and when they can be seen, they can't be located - or something like that.

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    7. So if you know where it is you can't know what it is, and if you know what it is you can't know where it is? Or is that too simplistic?

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    8. At any one instant, you can precisely find either the quantum-sized, "hundreds of robust peer reviewed studies" travelling library's location or its velocity (momentum). But, you can't find/know precisely both its location and velocity at the one instant; it's one precise property or the other of complementary variables when wave-like systems are involved. A bit, actually a very small bit, like skeptics and their "hundreds of robust peer reviewed studies" that they keep referring to without ever saying where they are. Which might be better explained as the Skeptics Uncertainty Principle that is inherent in the properties of all arm-waving-like systems of denial.

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  2. See James Powell's separate approach to the AGW consensus issue, namely counting the number of published papers that explicitly reject it. (Spoilers: the number is very small and the "97% consensus" an underestimate.)

    http://www.jamespowell.org

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    1. He writes, See my article, "The Consensus on Human-Caused Global Warming," in the November-December issue of Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 39, 42. That goes into greater detail than the webpage.

      I suspect that the actual consensus is somewhat lower than his 99.99% figure, if you count stealth denalist papers. I recall reading of a paper in a non-climatological (oceanographic?) journal that supposedly had some useful information about the PDO and in passing argued that natural cycles could explain all the warming. This was because the analysis filtered out all non-cyclic effects, so it could have reached the same conclusion if the world was heating up by ten degrees per year. Anyone recall the details?

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    2. That sounds rather like the Mclean, deFreitas and Carterpaper that effectively detrended then blamed warming on ENSO. Tamino took it apart.
      http://www.skepticalscience.com/peer-reviewed-response-to-McLean-El-Nino-paper.html

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  3. How many AGW-sceptic papers are there written by scientists who can differentiate between short term 'pauses' and meaningful trends?

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  4. Even "hundreds" would be vastly outnumbered by the tens of thousands of mainstream climate science papers.

    And as for "not being able to get papers published, or get grant money" has anyone seen a serious study that shows any evidence for any bias against "skeptics"? Many papers of all sorts never get published and many grant applications don't get through

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    1. There should be bias against denial papers -- the point of peer review is to help filter out the crap.

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  5. Another example of climate denialist's incoherence (Stephan Lewandowsky): scientists are preventing deniers publishing yet there are hundreds of robust peer-reviewed papers that refute AGW.

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  6. Starck: "That there is abundant evidence for skepticism while that for DAGW is far less and more uncertain is a verifiable fact which deserves more emphasis."

    That sentence doesn't even make sense. "Skepticism" isn't a theory or a hypothesis, so how can there be evidence for (or against) it? But the point is: Starck doesn't have any other word to put there. What would it be? There is no coherent alternative theory.

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    1. That sentence is an example of 'word salad'.

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  7. Why do disinformers assume that climate deniers are such fake sceptics that they won't check fake claims? It's probably based on experience.

    This seems reasonable to me. As a complement to this is a quote from a Canadian blogger Sixth Estate in the context of a scandal about Senators' expenses in Canada:

    I guess we now know why right-wingers are so paranoid that lazy, self-interested gits are ripping off the welfare system. That’s what they think is going on, because it’s exactly what they do when given the opportunity.

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    1. I've found that when I do verify claims and check sources the disinformer does one of several things:

      1) ignores it, and carries on
      2) simply contradicts the source, or 'refutes' it with a worthless one (for example, Tony Heller/Steve Goddard vs. NASA)
      3) introduces a new fake 'fact'
      4) replies with "who's paying for your time to do this?" or some variant thereof
      5) give up and replies with an insult

      Note that any and all scientific corrections are volatile and will not carry over to the next hour, day or week's comments. Therefore if you tell commenter CO2ISPLANTFOOD that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 dwarf that of all volcanoes on Earth today, you will also have to tell it to him again tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that.

      A tiring sport, this ClimateBall.

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  8. Zillions of articles probably mean co2science with "interesting" way of selective summarizing publications - and some list of poptech (?). And all those blogists who were unable to get their earth shattering science published in real journals..

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    1. The poptech list was the go-to resource for fake skeptics a while back, but I don't know if it's been superseded. It's certainly been discredited over and over, like every other denialist meme.

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    2. Aaaaaarrrrgh! Don't mention its name! It may show up!

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  9. "Are they all crazy, or are some of them feeders of (or off) the deluded?"

    Isn't it now completely obvious? Deniers continue to refute facts, research and evidence without any valid reason other then sheer "I refuse to accept this" and endless levels of conjecture, straw arguments and connedspiracy theory. These are all clear signs of delusional behavior.

    Most are feeders - refusing to do any real, significant research for themselves. They're all operating in a echo-chamber round table, chewing their cud and regurgitating long-discredited claims over and over again. None of them are willing to budge when clearly proven wrong. It's far more then stubbornness now, it's morphed into a faith-based doctrine.

    What you're really dealing with is religious fervor. Anti-science, anti-warming denialism has become a new religion for these deluded fools. Using nonsensical arguments, their common "text" has become the new holy book of moronic stupidity.

    Of course they're crazy - the evidence is clear to see. Anyone that refutes reality is disconnected from reality. It's a mental break that replaces the physical with the imagined, conjuring up an imaginary world that defies the real, physical world.

    They've even got their selected preachers and evangelists to quote from. It is not relevant for them that their speakers are provably wrong and oft-repeat the same tired claims. Religions do not require proof or evidence, they only require the rote adherence of the faithful. In fact, proof is often denied and refused for examination.

    It's deeper then this, something I've published before. Non-proof is actually considered "evidence" that something "must be true". In a bizarre twist of logic and reasoning, the lack of evidence clearly means that their claims must be the true claims.

    Science and reason of course do not work this way. Nor does anything within the real physical world. But that's not what you're dealing with here. It is an imagine world of make-believe and fairy tales, a return to the Dark Ages of ignorance and hatred if they get their wish. And yes - I'm talking about climate denialists here still.

    They embrace all of the behaviors, beliefs and attitudes of the religious. You're not dealing with scientists, or facts - you're dealing with faith and religious fervor. They've created for themselves a new religion and it's just as false as the old religions.

    Related - because these fools are in our government now - and they are deliberately trying to suppress knowledge:

    http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2015/10/the-house-science-committees-witch-hunt.html

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  10. I'm a bit puzzled by the title "From the twilight zone of WUWT".

    Does that mean there's a part of WUWT that *isn't* in the twilight zone? ;)

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    1. Indeed - it _all_ seems dark and dank over there.

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    2. This is the twilight of WUWT, no doubt about that.

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  11. I'm reading The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science by Will Storr (2014), including a meeting with the loathsome Lord Monckton in chapter 13. Good discussion of why beliefs are impervious to correction. Including mine and yours, alas.

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    1. I have no beliefs but I do have some convictions.

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