Monday, March 20, 2017

"Confessions of a climate denier"

Via Instapundit:  A few days ago I had a conversation with a very smart university professor of history and somehow the climate change subject came up. Almost instantly he responded to my thoughts by saying: “You must be one of those deniers who rejects the science consensus.”

This is the new form of intellectual bullying and it’s intentionally designed is to stop the conversation not advance it. In the academies it is a technique to close off scientific inquiry.

When the liberals talk of ‎consensus, what consensus are they talking about? Of whom? About what? Here is John Kay of the‎ Financial Times on the so-called consensus:
Science is a matter of evidence, not what a majority of scientists think…. The notion of a monolithic “science,” meaning what scientists say, is pernicious and the notion of “scientific consensus” actively so. The route to knowledge is transparency in disagreement and openness in debate. The route to truth is the pluralist expression of conflicting views in which, often not as quickly as we might like, good ideas drive out bad. There is no room in this process for any notion of “scientific consensus.”
Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, has noted that too many environmentalists “ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse.”

Then he adds: “… there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition.… The consensus was reached before the research was even begun…”

Kay and Lindzen are not alone.

Link to the whole thing

7 comments:

edutcher said...

Classic Uncle Saul - we are not wrong, you are against science.

If this reminds you of James Carville, you know how this goes.

Not unlike Comey and his bald-faced lies to Congress today. The truth does not matter, only our version of the truth matters.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Excellent Lem - thanks.

Leland said...

There was consensus once that the universe revolved around the Earth, because man was the center of everything. I see much of that old consensus in the argument that man has so much influence over the Earth's climate. The notion that the sun is someone insignificant seems antiquated.

chickelit said...

Water and water vapor are a wet blanket for CO2 naggers.Throw a bucket of it on them and they melt.

AllenS said...

Car exhaust didn't kill off the dinosaurs. Burning coal didn't melt the glaciers.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

This is the new form of intellectual bullying?

I thought only leftists talked like that.

Methadras said...

chickelit said...
Water and water vapor are a wet blanket for CO2 naggers.Throw a bucket of it on them and they melt.


Wait until they classify water/water vapor as a pollutant and then that wet blanket goes away. The EPA almost did it you know.