Showing posts with label steven chen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label steven chen. Show all posts

14 December 2008

Sussing Climate Change Sceptics

I have a big problem with climate change sceptics: I just do no understand how they can maintain their position in the face of overwhelming evidence from overwhelming numbers of overwhleming well-qualified scientists.

It's as if several hundred doctors, all acknowledged experts in their field, tell you that you are seriously ill, and must do something or you will die, and you say: "Well, I'm sorry, I just happen to disagree. I think you're all telling me this just to provide work for yourselves. And besides, I've found three doctors who tell me I'm fine."

Now, would anyone seriously take that attitude when it came to their own health, or of their family? I think not; so why would anyone take this view when it comes to humanity - that is, *every* family on this planet?

Well, here's one stab at explaining this literally suicidal state of affairs:

I do think that lots of potentially reachable people like my lawyer friend genuinely don't understand the difference between what happens in a scientific debate and what happens in a political one. And especially when such people are on the political right, they tend to suspect that the climatologists' global-overwarming consensus is not really settled science, but is only a sort of fairly well reasoned technical conjecture.They tend to think it probably has some merit, but that it requires caution because it's distorted by a political desire to multiply the power of federal economic planners who'll limit the natural workings of free markets. They see scientists and government officials as an interrelated elite with a closed outlook and a definite agenda....

Interesting: politics as kind of conceptual poison that taints people's world-views. I hope the rest of the analysis quoted in the post above turns out to be just as perceptive.