Conservative Group Plans Anti-Climate Education Program

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Ivan Seeking, Feb 18, 2012.

  1. Ivan Seeking Registered Senior Member

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    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=leaked-conservative-group
     
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  3. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    Yay FIRST AMENDMENT! (That was your point, right? It's hard to say since you only poses a quote and a link.)

    It could be a good thing. Scientists either have done a piss poor job at explaining climate change, or there must actually be room to debate the issue. As a non-expert myself, I have a suspicion about which is true, but lack the expertise to determine if my suspicion is true.

    So long as there is what appears to be passable science on both sides, we can't really object to a plan to teach their side's science. Now if they make a specific proposal and it includes provably incorrect information, that would be a time to condemn that specific misinformation (though not that they made an effort, as they are well within their rights to spread their message).
     
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  5. Rhaedas Valued Senior Member

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    The climate always changes. We call it weather. The argument is to what degree is changes.

    Which schools are they planning to stick this in? Public? I have no problem with textbooks saying that there's still disagreement on how much the climate is shifting and how it will affect us. I do have a problem with the schools being used as a tool to try and push an agenda. Practice good science, don't try and manipulate kids into thinking your way because you had more money to insert your hypothesis into a book.

    Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but this sounds an awful lot like the intelligent design plot to get into science rooms. Public schools are for validated science...universities are for debating theories. Take it there.
     
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  7. Balerion Banned Banned

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    There is no debate. Climate change is occurring, and no one who says it isn't can provide a shred of scientific evidence to support their claim. Of course, there are disagreements over details within the scientific community, but those disagreements are reflected in any and all literature on the subject.

    As Rhaedas said, this is quite like Intelligent Design kooks getting their materials in public schools. In this case, their motivation is not religious, but likely financial; the industries contributing the greatest to global climate change (read: the ones with the most to lose in this whole Green initiative) are likely pouring money into these efforts. But in the form of bribes, not research grants.
     
  8. Ivan Seeking Registered Senior Member

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    I didn't realize that posting a link means that I have a point.

    As a non-expert, your opinion doesn't matter. You can choose to vote as if it does but, as a objective voter, why would you care what you think? You're not qualified to have an opinion.

    What the lead statement says is: "The Heartland Institute reveal a plan to create school educational materials that contradict the established science on climate change"

    Perhaps we should let Fox News dictate what children are taught in science books? Or we could just have all non-experts vote on global warming to determine truth or not. That would really be free speech - science by democratic delusion.
     
  9. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    The forums would be very cluttered indeed if everyone posted everything they DON'T have an opinion on. You clearly selected this because you do have some opinion, but you wanted to play it cute and not spring the opinion on us until after a few other people had chimed in.

    In a sense I agree, My opinion on the particular scientific topic of whether anthropogenic climate change is occurring shouldn't be given weight. Neither should yours unless you are an expert and are willing to give us a run down of your credentials (in a verifiable way) and the work you have have reviewed (or, better, conducted yourself) in establishing your own position.

    That's why I hate these threads though, is that 99.999% of the people who chime in (both those saying the science is bunk and those saying there is no scientific debate over the reality of AGW) are not experts and their opinions are merely noise that distort the debate without adding anything of value.

    Yet you posted the link and started the thread, so either you are an expert with secret credentials (in which case your opinion can be disregarded because your expertise is unconfirmed) or you are a non-expert who posted the link in a way likely to add more useless noise to the debate.

    The Heartland Institute is not "Fox News", but no we don't let them decide what is science...we don't let any one source decide that (not even the authors the article itself, which is clearly not "neutral" on the subject they are reporting.

    You seem to be confused into thinging that all the experts back AGW, they don't. It may be that the dissenting experts are all wrong, but then again it's possible that all the pro-AGW experts are wrong. It's possible. So what we have here is a plan (as in "something they are considering doing in the future) for one set of citizens to have a point of view taught that you disagree with, and you are outraged because it's not "science." Fair enough, but the debate to have is not to mock them for being non-experts (unlike you with your years of study and, no doubt, many post graduate degrees in climatology that you'll demonstrate when you post your CV for people here to peruse). Rather, the way to attack their exercise of their well understood right to free speech and to petition the government (public schools being a governmental body), is to wait and see their specific proposals and explain why those are not scientific fact. And if you can't demonstrate that, too bad.

    Then there's the harder rub, suppose it can be shown that AGW is a hard scientific fact, as I strongly suspect it is. That does not mean that the government or anyone else should change anything about the way we live. You see that is a separate debate where the climatologists stop being experts, because they are not experts in matters of what are acceptable (let alone optimal) tradeoffs between current practices and future hardship.

    What are we going to do about that? Let "non-experts" vote on what the tradeoffs should be and what remedial action to save the environment is worth it? Yes. You see not one on Earth will be a expert on all aspects of that question, so the best we can do in a democracy is try to educate people as best we can, and then let all those idiot non-expert voters whom you so disdain vote on their own interests.

    This is where the climatologists will really need to improve their game. Right now they can't even make a convincing case that the scientific consensus is that AGW is real. I am not sure what advice to give them to help them out, but if they can't even convince people that the threat is real, good luck convincing them to make major changes to the economies of the world needed to resolve it.

    If what the Heartland Institute is doing bothers anyone, we're free to come up with plans to improve the scientific education on the subject. I guarantee you that that is what the Heartland Institute thinks it is doing, and the reason why you'd never convince them otherwise is that there too many "non-experts" on the left and right who treat science like it's another game in the series of political entertainments we've become accustomed to, where our teams (err I mean political parties) are cheered and supported not because they are right, but because they are "our team."

    The really sad thing is that people don't see it that way. We see plenty of bias on the other side, but you almost never see our own. That's human, we're awful at seeing our own bias, but I am telling you now: this thread adds as much to the AGW debate as Sean Hannity's typical rants do.

    All these things do is lead people to the conclusion that science can be debated by non-experts on both sides. The best we circumspect non-experts can do is to signal our potential lack of understanding (so that our opinions are considered in the appropriate context), and try to tell the other non-experts (and here I mean you), to pipe down because collectively we add more heat than light to problem.
     
  10. Balerion Banned Banned

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    What a load of soft-headed nonsense. The information is readily available to anyone who wishes to view it. People who oppose global climate change do so for political reasons, not scientific reasons. Don't come in here acting like they should be given any credence, or that "perhaps the other side is wrong," because you're asking us to dignify the wrong side of an argument that does not even exist in the scientific community.

    Do you not see the irony in complaining about a thread in which you are so far the chief contributor? And how about telling another poster to "pipe down" because he's a "non-expert" because they "add more heat than light to the problem" when you're the one adding the most amount of heat and the least amount of light?
     
  11. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Calling the Heartland Institute - a part of the propaganda operations of the fascist political movement in the US - "conservative", is a capitulation to that propaganda.
     
  12. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    And many people who are passionate about AGW being real do so for political reasons with no expertise in the science.

    More to the point, I did NOT say their views were correct and should be given credence. What I do submit, however, is that the arguments:

    (A) I have legitimate and logically valid reasons to oppose what the Heartland Institute has planned; and

    (B) I read online that others have legitimate and logically valid reasons to oppose what the Heartland Institute has planned,

    are not equivalent in the case where the person adopting B lacks the expertise to evaluate (or for that matter actual knowledge of the details of) the criticisms of those others. All it does in this case is add to the echochamber effect of millions of non-experts with Strong Opinions™ but utterly no knowledge that backs up their positions.

    I can see that you passionately oppose the AGW-deniers, but passion is not a virtue in a scientific debate. It simply makes one likely to chime in even when one lacks a proper basis for one's opinion. Passion makes you biased, and bias is simply not a good thing.

    It may be (and I rather assume it is the case) that the Heartland Institute put together its plan based a similar passion but also without a proper basis in the science. In that case, I'm happy to say the same thing of their efforts, and that they should pipe down and let the true experts has out the issue. Al Gore too. It's also perfectly fine for experts to discuss where their effort deviates from the known science, but that may not lead to our condemnation of the whole package, as there are also non-scientific questions that make up part of the debate.

    Simply asserting, "There is no debate" is childish and absurd when people are in fact debating the issue. For most people by the way the issue is not "is the climate changing" but a combination of "are the actions of mankind the principle cause of that change" and "what will the effect of the changes be in the future." Neither is a question where an argument from passionate is welcome , on EITHER side, since they are both going to be fact intensive.
     
    Last edited: Feb 19, 2012
  13. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Missing from this analysis of the rationale is that the Creation Science aka Intelligent Design community aka Right Wing Fundamentalists feel their religious world view is on the line, since, in the Bible, God allegedly gives us dominion over the world. It was to be our playground, until Eve dragged us into the muck.

    The avoidance of this fact (not just by you, which may not have been deliberate) is the a lie, the kind we call misrepresentation by omission of a material fact.

    It is true that industry fears government regulations, especially those that reach across the oceans and involve puppet states that multi-nationals are able to exploit wherever workers can be shot for striking, or children are forced to work for their food, or there are no product safety laws. And let us not forget the ubiquitous foreign policy of greasing palms. ie bribery laws are avoidable in some countries. The multi-nationalization of any kind of industrialization practices that are currently unregulated poses as severe a threat to big game capitalists, as much as Science poses to Preacher Merle, and his dwindling congregation that are beginning to have the scales fall from their eyes.

    The glaciers are melting. Period. The CO[SUB]2[/SUB] levels are monotonically rising. Period. The data is everywhere. Period.

    Take religion out of the debate. Take multinationals out of the debate . You'll still have capitalists left in every industrial country who will be worried, but about what? Their own money.

    What other motivation does anyone have for arguing against Climate Science?

    Show me how we validate any opponent of Climate Science. (not just you, anyone).
     
  14. Balerion Banned Banned

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    8,596
    I feel like I should acknowledge Pandaemoni's reply, since I won't be answering it. It's not that I don't want to, but Aqueous answered it better than I ever could have.

    Will "ditto" suffice?
     
  15. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    I did? Only after I usurped your points about the state of science and abundance of evidence which collapse this down quite nicely, thank you.

    The last time I got involved in a thread like this I finally decided to figure out what all the whining is about the data. So I went to Mauna Loa and immediately got buried in the size and complexity of their online data, which is kind of cool, I was imagining I was reading though old handwritten notes. Of course they have a bulletproof open record online. Their data goes back as far as any, enough to get the idea that this trend in CO[SUB]2[/SUB] is not going away.

    So why are the fundies bitching about the data one might ask. Well I found out exactly why. Because you have to do work to load it into spreadsheets, calculate statistics, wrestle with units, understand all the sensors and filters they used and why, and their proprietary lingo, etc... So guess what? You basically have to be a scientist already. Or at least a bean counter, with ambition to learn the rest.

    They're big fat liars, to quote Al Frankin.

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    HERE ARE THE DATA FILES NO ONE SEEMS TO FIND

    Thank you for the compliment on the other thread. I only recently noticed your posts, but never felt the urge to comment since I find your remarks reasoned, to the point, accurate and concise. So back to you!

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  16. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    Jdawg wasted a ditto on this? Sigh.

    If they raise a religious reason to oppose AGW as a theory, that's a different matter...in fact, I myself have only heard that is a very few fringe cases, never in anything approaching a mainstream debate. Even Fox news doesn't seem to trot out that line of argument that I've ever seen, and they loves them some spurious arguments.

    That a few conservatives somewhere may on rare occasion raise a religious justification doesn't mean that that is the "secret" reason so many conservatives oppose AGW. Even if it were, so long as their actual voiced arguments remain secular, you can't ban them from the educational sphere.

    Actually you and JDawg should be thrilled if they raise a religious explanation for opposing AGW. Here's why: As long as they are arguing the science, the courts can't stop them from raising the debate in science class. Even if you happen to think—Hell, even if you could conclusively demonstrate—their science is wrong, the court can't stop them. The only check on their getting their message into the class room are the control of the local levers of power (and passionate conservatives seem to be pretty good at getting their hands on those).

    Once they make an overtly religious argument though, that can be blocked. A clever lawyer might even try to get their whole curriculum tossed on the grounds that it's all tied to the impermissible religious message.

    How did we get from, basically, everyone who lacks expertise should be cautious about spreading their opinion as if it were irrefutable truth to this topic?

    Non sequitur much?

    The U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act makes it a crime for any U.S. person (including a U.S.-based multinational) to pay bribes in foreign countries, even where it is legal in those foreign countries, even where it's customary to pay them, and even where your company will lose to a non-U.S. rival because it can legally pay bribes. It's a law people really do take very seriously.

    Multinationalization (whatever that is, see below) is bad for capitalism, and somehow that relates to science being bad for some religious people how?

    Again, non-sequitur much?

    Since "multinational" usually related to a company with a significant presence in more than one country, hence the name, I assume "multinationalization" is the process by which things spread to multiple countries? If it's bad for capitalists, then good news (for the capitalists), it only spreads when capitalists *choose* to move into a new country (aka make a "foreign direct investment")...so they can avoid it by imply choosing never to do it. As a result, I think you simply chose the wrong word. You might have meant "globalization", but that is not bad for capitalists either.

    On the link between that and science, most religions have little direct conflict with science, even the various Christian denominations generally don't.

    I suspect you think the connection between AGW-deniers and religion is stronger than it is. There is doubtlessly a correlation between religiosity and AGW-denialism, but to assert that the former directly causes the latter is simply post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. In other words it confuses correlation and causation. You wish the connection existed, I suppose, as that makes their arguments easier to deal with, as you can dismiss them all as unscientific, but that is to ignore their actual arguments and merely attack the straw man you hope if at their core. Truth is, though, if a denialist offers up a facially valid argument, and your only comeback is "The only reason you say that is your religion", that's a logically fallacious counter-argument, and you lose the debate at that point. Your argument is fallacious even if it is *true* that your opponents faith underpins his position, because the "underpinning" of his belief system (or any implied reasons for his position he does not voice) is irrelevant so long as his express arguments are valid.

    Most AGW-denialists do not dispute that. The ones that do are wrong, but again I am no expert. (As an aside, it seems to be a slight abuse of the word "monotonically" though, as depending on the time scale and the source there month to moth drops in measured levels of atmospheric CO2. Take, for example the monthly readings by Take religion out of the debate. Take multinationals out of the debate . You'll still have capitalists left in every industrial country who will be worried, but about what? Their own money.[/quote]

    Back to this, are we? You know that if the worst predictions of those like Al Gore were true, those capitalists would lose money when the world economy collapses due to environmental devastation, right? So, if they were concerned about their money, and if they believed in AGW and those dire predictions, they'd likely side with you. Your argument must be that they are overly focused on short-tern returns and ignoring the long term...but it seems like the more likely explanation is that the average AGW-denialist capitalists haven't been convinced that the answers to the key questions above militate in favor of addressing the problem. You seem to think they are greedy to the point of ignoring their own imminent ruin. In fact I can plausibly think of a scenario where capitalists would drive AGW hysteria, because there is money to be made, and lots of it, in allaying people's fears.

    I am not the best person to answer that, as I tend to accept that it is real, but the answer is not "greed and religion" it is people who answer one or more of the key questions differently than you do.

    Since some of their arguments are "It is not worth changing our society to prevent climate change, even if we could" you can't validate or invalidate that. Yet it is a rational position to take assuming they have an accurate sense of the costs (monetary and non-monetary) of the various alternatives, including doing nothing. (That's hard to do in part because non-experts like Al Gore prefer to fear monger the issue and tell tall tales of 6 meter rises in sea level over the next century, whereas even the IPCC—not free from criticism itself—suggests 6 cm is more likely.)

    The way to address them, as I said earlier on , is to listen to their specific proposals ad arguments and refute them on their merits case by case. Where you can't refute them (as in the "what should we do about it" case) you offer your alternate preference and your best case for why that is a superior reaction.

    Sometimes it no doubt comes down to refuting specific facts, which should be easy. Sometimes you need to engage in more complex arguments (like the fight over the so-called "hockey stick graphs") to show that the purported facts on your side that are alleged to be untrue (or purposefully manipulated) are in fact accurate.

    The problem is we can't have the debate, because where fundamentally you'd want experts on both sides involved, not the hordes from the internet or talk radio. The latter is so much louder than the former, that it's good luck to anyone who wants to find a reasoned and unbiased analysis.

    Look no further than this thread. I agree with you in principle, and people attempt to scold me for not wanting others shouted down before they present their arguments. You even seem to suggest that they can't possibly make a good argument. That's just good Science™! (At least as practiced by non-scientists.)
     
  17. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    You are advocating in defense of the Religious Right, namely that they are not to blame for the controversy that broke out after Al Gore brought Global Warming to focus in the national and international discourse.

    I find this ludicrous. Here are a few reasons why:

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-stenger/the-folly-of-faith_b_863179.html

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-stenger/global-warming-and-religi_b_864014.html


    http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1194/global-warming-belief-by-religion


    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-stenger/global-warming-and-religi_b_864014.html

    http://www.sj-r.com/opinions/x180621374/Bernard-Schoenburg-Shimkus-food-for-thought-at-hearing-prompts-snickers#video2
     
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    I haven't seen any actual debate. Link?

    Only because of the mockery "most people" earned by insisting for years that the climate wasn't changing - remember all those propaganda campaigns centered around supposed heat island effects on instrumentation? The repeated and regurgitated claims that the satellite data, or the ice core data, or the ecological data, or the oceanographic reports, or something, contradicted whatever the other ten categories of data indicated and should be considered more reliable? The repeated attempts to trash the Hockey Stick and - failing that - the personal reputations of its authors?

    Prediction: Give "most people" a couple of months, and they will be back with denials of climate change itself again. The ocean isn't expanding from the temps, say, while pointing to some recent data on Pacific Oscillation effects, showing that things aren't really getting warmer as "global warming says".
     
  19. Balerion Banned Banned

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    Well, thank you, kind sir!

    Very nicely done on the latest response, I might add.

    (and by the way, Franken is an old favorite of mine, all the way back to his SNL days--via Comedy Central reruns when I was a kid--and I even read his Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" a few years back. Great stuff.)
     
  20. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    Of course conservatives (though not exclusively the religious right) are to blame for enflaming the controversy. I never said otherwise...although they certainly had help from scientists like Marcel Leroux who believed climate change was a purely atural non-man-made phenomenon and Richard Lindzen who said we have no idea how to forecast what the climate will be in the future. And of course any right wing movement is very likely to disproportionately include members of the "religious right" proper.

    That is irrelevant though, it's just a variation of the guilt by association logical fallacy. Even if the original opponents of global warming were all certified religious twits, it doesn't matter. If that were true it would not, in and of itself, address the issues. You would still have to address their arguments at face value (if you were going to defeat them logically, at least).

    To suggest a concrete example of why...your argument would be akin to condemning rocketry because so much of what we know of rocketry was first developed by the Nazis. It turns out, however, that the fact that Nazis held other odious opinions on certain matters is not logically related in any way to the validity of the arguments they made in the context of the rocketry issue specifically. Simply saying, "the members of the group X are bad, and bad people are wrong," is not a valid refutation.

    So, even if the religious right was heavily involved early on in denying AGW's reality, that does not answer any of the key questions, nor does it suggest that others (including those in the religious right) who have different answers to those questions are wrong, nor does it lend credence to your apparently belief that non-experts are qualified to add to the debate in a material and beneficial way.

    Again, my point is and has been that non-experts are not very helpful in these debates, so should be more guarded in their participation. You appear to be trying to change the subject to something else. Unfortunately your something else seems to be a logically questionable belief that if the Religious Right ever had a hand in AGW denialism, then that proves AGW true, and allows one to ignore AGW's opponents...even those who are not members of the religious right. Not all of them are...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...tream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming
     
  21. Balerion Banned Banned

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    But that's a straw man. No one is discrediting any and all arguments against climate change simply because the Christian Right is associated with it; we know the science is good, and people who oppose it have been debunked. There is no argument about its existence within the scientific community. Sure, there are scientists who oppose it, but you'll notice that 1) they are often outside of their field, 2) they never publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals, and 3) to a startling degree, they are either being paid by or in charge of some fringe Christian institution.

    I will agree with you that "non-experts" do make this topic difficult to discuss. Your posts on this subject happen to stand as perhaps the best example of how someone who hasn't the first clue what they're talking about can cloud a very simple issue. But even then, I think if you were less interested in your own opinion being correct, and more interested in having an actual exchange of ideas, then your "non-expert" status would only mean that you learned something today.
     
  22. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    "You seem to be confused into thinging that all the experts back AGW, they don't."

    Maybe 2% don't. That doesn't warrant equal consideration.
     
  23. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The fact that you, as well as everyone else, clearly recognize that denial of the effects of anthropogenic CO2 accumulation is a "right wing movement", should immediately settle the thread issue.

    We don't want people teaching rightwing movement agitprop in science class, do we?

    Experts in what? Expertise in identifying authoritarian rightwing propaganda operations comes in handy much more often than expertise in atmospheric physics, for example. Experts in remembering that some goofy line of argument is coming around for the fourth time in ten years, from the same people, should be allowed an unguarded comment or two, one would think.
     

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