With a sea of information coming at us from all directions, how do we sift out the misinformation and bogus claims, and get to the truth? Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine lays out a "Baloney Detection Kit," ten questions we should ask when encountering a claim.
from Richard Dawkins' website
Friday, 26 June 2009
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31 comments:
E, those cold logical scientists!, spoiling all our fun by pointing out the obvious BS we invent to make ourselves "feel" better.
Delusion is so much more "warm and fuzzy", a lot less effort too!
;-)
This little video rates high in baloney indicators as defined by the speaker. In the beginning he refers to global warming with the certainty that it is happening independent of any political forces for or against the idea.
Yet there is a problem with the reliability of the data being used. This film is funded by the Pew Research people, who have a leftist political view, who also feel that global temperatures have increased over the last century by 1.4 degrees.
Methods used to measure temperature now are vastly different than methods used a century ago. On that basis alone global warming assertions should be suspect.
In addition, the primary sources used for measuring global temperatures differ significantly in the amount of temperature change, with the most alarming (and recently corrected) NASA data being used by Pew. http://icantseeyou.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/05/is-the-earth-ge.html
It was Pew scholar Dana Meadows who produced the book "Limits to Growth" for the Club of Rome; the Club of Rome proposed to use the phantom of environmental catastrophe to unite the world under an authoritarian agenda, proclaiming "The common enemy of humanity is man....Democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead" and "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine etc., would fit the bill."
There is more than a little baloney involved here. The speaker begins with an assertion about global warming, then does not mention it again. His other anecdotal evidence is all centered around ideas so far fetched as to be laughable, but in including them he associates global warming sceptics with people who believe they can bend spoons with their mind or that little gray aliens are abducting people.
It's clever, and slick, but still baloney. His support of global warming cannot stand up to his 10 principals of detecting baloney.
I agree that the ten rules should be applied to the sceptics too, and since Michael Schermer does admit all that people are susceptible to biases of their own it is unlikely that he (or any of us for that matter) is completely free of them too.
However, GW, regarding the temperature of the climte, according to the rules of the baloney detection kit, you also need to provide more than just negative evidence against the other guy to provide proof that your theory is true.
I also think you should be aware of what the Club of Rome is and does, otherwise you should save your breath. CoR is a political think tank, not a scientific institution. Any research it undertakes is done in order to develop contingencies against potential risk factors of the future. Whether or not the climate is changing in any particular direction, I gurantee you'll be very angry if political leaders failed to plan adequately for the future and weren't able to avert a looming disaster where it was later shown to be possible.
BTW I should declare some knowledge of the issues involved in weather as both my parents were climatologists who met at the Met Office in Bracknell (before it moved to Exeter) and it was a perpetual topic of conversation at the dining table. In fact my dad was one of the people who wrote the computer programmes for satellites measuring climate fluctuations and was one of the first people to use the data he collected to argue against the theory of global cooling which gained significant credence during the 1970s. That doesn't make me an expert of course, but it did provide me with a good grounding in the debate.
This insistence that "think tanks" are not important because they don't actually have authority is to deny just how many of the recommended policies have become law in nations around the world, especially with regard to the CoR who has several members holding public office, high positions in academia, and positions with central banks.
Obama, on an energy bill passed by the House today:
"At the White House, Obama said the bill would create jobs, and added that with its vote, the House had put America on a path toward leading the way toward "creating a 21st century global economy"
What kind of jobs are these going to be? Environmental police jobs, mostly, like Scotland now has. Squads of low paid enviro-cops invading people's houses and fining them for enviro-crimes, issuing orders to change this or that at great expanse. As one who is under the thumb of the IMO I know what this is going to be like; as of one month ago we have yet another document that must be filled out weekly and retained for three years, produced at surprise audits. The document is a checklist the signer produces as evidence that the signer has followed "best practices" such as using bio-degradable cleaning products and packaging and inspecting items on the list for compliance, logging each non-compliance and corrective actions. Expect in the next decade to be visited at your home by someone with such a list.
What sort of global economy is Obama talking about? Well, how do national economies operate today? They operate through borrowing money from central banks the citizens must repay at interest, the central banks having the power to create money out of thin air. Who profits from this scheme? Large bondholders of the banks who just happen to be the same families who've profited from every other system of government since 1692. Brown and Obama's "global regulatory system" is undoubtedly a plan to institute this system on a global scale under a world central bank, with taxes paid to support that bank as national taxes are now paid to support national banks. In short, a global command and control economy, exactly what the CoR has been wanting since inception.
All these various impotent "think tanks" work together for a common cause. Look at who constitutes your Sustainable Development Commission and who the SDC claims as its inspirations and what documents it says have most influenced its philosophy- same old bs!
If you folks are enjoying the recession and the economic loss you have suffered, you are well placed for the coming changes because you are now getting a glimpse of what life is going to be like under the new global economy. It will be a state of permanent recession, a sustained un-growth; less for everybody at the bottom and more for everybody at the top.
I expect the third world to become the new centers of liberal thought that grew out of enlightenment as the west abandons these principles, and I would not be at all surprised if this current push for a global financial system under western domination is the cause for the next world war. Who will win this one?
OJ, my theory is that this data being used to promote global warming is baloney based on highly contradictory positions.
NASA's use of climate models in these predictions is refuted...by who?....NASA! http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/essd5feb97_1.htm
NASA's conclusion is that the earth is both warming and cooling and that the climate models it uses are fatally flawed due to complexity of factors interacting to create "climate"; NASA notes most significantly the lack of inclusion in climate models of the role water vapor (the major greenhouse gas) plays.
NASA says satellite measurments show the troposphere to be cooling from 1979 to 1989, not warming as the climate models supporting global warming say it should. Yet, NASA's director continues to lobby for global warming and to serve as Al Gore's science advisor.
My theory is that applying all 10 principles to global warming will give the idea a high baloney rating as defined by Schermer.
Just coincidentally global warming supports the need for World Population Policy first formulated in 1974 just after the publication of "Limits to Growth". http://www.population-security.org/27-APP1.html#Adoption
So do I think I would be frustrated if the government fails to take some new initiative to take more of my property to support a very dubious claim? Hell no! I am willing to take a chance because there seems to be far more politics than science in this global warming baloney.
That House bill I referred to is over 1200 pages- no representative was allowed to read it before voting on it, and more pages are being added to it, it will be a few days before the people even know what we've been committed to. This is perfectly in line with CoR's statement that democracy would not be adequate to meet the coming need for change.
GW,
what you're saying is that you are concerned about any loss of your property and that you get more worked up by the prospect of some your property being taken in taxes to prevent it's destruction than you would for it's complete destruction. I guess you don't much like insurance then.
I agree with you that there are some contradictory noises within the scientific data placing a question mark over precisely how the climate is changing, but that is to be expected, yet despite the overwhelming preponderance of evidence in favour of a general rise in temperature (small enough to have a major impact) that is not a good enough excuse to say it can never happen and we can get away with doing nothing.
To give an analogy it's like the farmer who refuses to set aside grain in the winter for planting in the spring. Would you risk starvation next year because of a little hunger this?
In a more general sense, who are the barbarians at the gate threatening your existence if among their number they don't count environmental change?
Isn't your resistance to making contingency plans turning you complacent and foolhardy?
The preponderance of evidence for warming you claim is really a preponderance of hype.
It is just silly to say that one can determine an average temperature for the globe and detect a difference of 1 degree. An accurate determination would require a veritable net of thermometers spread over the earth and suspended in the air for accuracy of that degree.
The climate models are what is being used as this "evidence" you speak of, yet the prediction of the model that the atmosphere should warm up to 8 miles has been shown to be so false that the atmosphere at those levels has actually cooled. So where does this leave the evidence? It leaves it in the shitpile where it belongs. The model doesn't work.
How stupid can people be OJ? This carbon taxing scheme was created by Enron, former Enron traders have been employed to set up the exchanges. What is the learning curve here? When Gore was questioned about Lay's involvement in cap and trade last fall in senate hearings his response was "I didn't know him well enough to call him Kenny Boy".
Foolhardy and complacent? What a friggin laugh! If we stopped all use of fossil fuels instantly we could lower carbon levels only by .003 percent by 2050.
A meteor may smash into the earth. Should we institute a global tax and mount a global scientific mission to fight against this possibility as well? Isn't it foolhardy not to do it?
This is something that has actually happened before!
This argument is on the same line as "the allegation is so serious an investigation is demanded!"
The allegation is so serious action is demanded! What a load of horseshit.
To put it in other words, global warming is not practically falsibiable so it has no explanatory power.
Actually GW we have a network of weather satellites surrounding the globe which do measure the temperature of the environment at all levels and they are capable of measuring temperature (among other things) to high levels of accuracy.
There are significant problems with modelling techniques as with all forward projections, but I think you're a little premature to suggest something as false which wasn't predicted to happen yet. I also think you're more than a little confused about the difference between data and evidence.
Rather than projecting your prejudice why not read what has actually been written rather than what you think has been written (in these comments for starters).
Marty said:
'All these various impotent "think tanks" work together for a common cause.'
Really? What about the right wing think tanks? In the UK, the first PM to use a think tank was a certain Margaret Hilda Thatcher.
Anyway, the point about think tanks is that they produce ideas. And yes, of course some of these ideas become government policy, whether they are of the left or the right.
In this respect, they're not much different from advisors, who tend to be unelected. And government functions are carried out by civil servants, who are also unelected.
Marty, I don't understand what your point is. Is it that there's
some giant global conspiracy to invent an idea that temperatures are increasing? If so, it seems a pretty stupid conspiracy, as the proposition would be so easy to disprove, it were false.
I find this strange:
"That House bill I referred to is over 1200 pages- no representative was allowed to read it before voting on it."
So did they vote for it? I woldn't vote for something of which contents I was totally ignorant. If they did so, then why? Are they being subjected to mind control?
Yes, they passed it Mel. Just like with Patriot Act I, and they didn't read it.
Here's how the mind control works. When the banker bailout thing came up several dissenting congressmen were taken aside and told that if they didn't vote for it the market would fall 2000 points in one week and physical martial law would be declared.
I've heard two MEP's speaking in interviews who said they vote on numerous bills and they vote according to lists which are given to them saying vote yes on this or no on that. This happens in state and federal assemblies here as well, each party hands out these lists.
It probably wont matter much by the time alarmists are forced to admit that sea levels aren't rising, the earth isn't getting warmer, we all aren't going to die. By that time all this new social transformation machinery will be established in law. The alarmists will just switch their position, as they have in changing global warming to climate change.
OJ, the climate models did predict warming up to 8 miles. The idea of global warming is predicated on the position that reflected heat is trapped by gas in the lower atmosphere.
There is no global conspiracy to use global warming for rapid social transformation, there is a global plan being enacted around the world. It is about to speed up to, because next year there is going to be another Kyoto meeting, and this year CoR is going to issue another report.
Mel, here are two articles on the bill and its length. Be sure to watch the video in the second where Henry Waxman, co-sponsor of the bill says he didn't read it. He trusts the scientists who wrote it.
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/06/24/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry5110850.shtml
http://www.examiner.com/x-5709-Chicago-Nonpartisan-Examiner~y2009m6d26-House-passes-1200page-green-energy-bill-read-or-unread
Michael Shermer - I LOVE the guy! In his book Why People Believe Stupid Things he quoted extensively from a newspaper article I wrote. (Sorry for that shameless self promotion.)
Really, he's quite brilliant.
But it's not shameless self-promotion if you don't tell us who you are. We want to read the article. Otherwise, I will have to trawl around the Internet trying to figure this puzzle out. Come back in and tell us about your article and who you are. thanks
GW,
you say people who suggest sea levels are rising are alarmist, but aren't you also being alarmist about social engineering?
I think there is a strong case to be put that those on the extremes of the debate are exaggerating claims for effect and we should all be wary of doing the same, but expressing a concern isn't the same as sounding an alarm.
How much would sea levels have to change before you get concerned?
The millions of people who live in low lying areas (like Bangladesh, The Maldives or New Orleans for example) will obviously get more anxious about the risks than people in Nepal or Colorado, but the world is completely interlinked and problems on one side of the world have a knock-on effect in ways you may not consider.
Many major cities including New York and London are on the front line and I don't think any of the institutions based in them are as unconcerned as you. The experience of Venice is also worth considering - would you be prepared to completely abandon such sites overnight?
There are huge security implications which you simply haven't addressed - population displacement and changing rainfall patterns among them. What about increased competition for resources? Would you accept water rationing? How much do you think is an acceptable price for a loaf of bread?
These are questions which have been the causes of war and revolution throughout history, so do you think we are now so advanced that we have evolved immunity from these considerations?
Yes, I'm well aware that our "representatives" rarely read the legislation before they vote on it. And I'm also aware that often they are told by their party bosses which way they should vote.
But it was the "not allowed to read it" part that caught my eye. I see two problems with this:
1) It's almost guaranteed to make the representatives hostile to the idea.
2) If they're not going to read it anyway and will vote according to their instructions, why bother to prohibit reading it?
Are you sure they were actually not allowed to read it?
Marty said:
"He trusts the scientists who wrote it."
As I'm sure you know, legislators don't draft legislation themselves, they merely oversee the process.
Why do you find it remarkable that he trusts scientists? Do you think they're less trustworthy than lawyers, for example?
Mel, last week that bill had 200 pages. By the time it came up for debate an additional 1000 pages had been added, the last 300 presented one hour before debate began. During the debate it was being altered. It couldn't have been read because there was no completed version, in spite of Obama's promise that everyone would be given at least 48 hours to read any bill introduced during his administration.
A bill concerning the transfer of billions of dollars from one part of the economy to another deserves thorough reading and understanding.
The writing of this bill was not even overseen by committee.
You ought to be happy though, it should relieve England of some of the burden of caring for those parasites in Buckingham Palace. One thing in the bill is a provision to pay people who have forested land, and to allow them to sell carbon credits on those forests. As a major US landowner Her Majesty will be able to attach more of her suckers to the labor of Americans, increasing her wealth.
This isn't flowers-in-your-hair free love and peace legislation, it is money, land, and power grab legislation.
This was an interesting vid, Eliz. I've never heard of Skeptic magazine - I imagine it's US-based?
I especially enjoyed him pointing out how human minds seek out meaning where it doesn't necessarily exist, and also his recommendation to aim for having an open enough mind that you can accept radical new ideas but not so open that your brain falls out. :-)
He also spoke about overturning the mainstream and that's a fairly important point. The mainstream ends up being the mainstream for a reason: overall more of the evidence supports it. A lot of the time people will run to one or two small studies to try and argue that a mainstream position is incorrect (and then, as this guy says, that becomes evidence of cover-up or conspiracy), but science knows full well that it is far from foolproof.
The infinity of true propositions in the world is much smaller than the infinity of false propositions, and the way we use statistics (in medicine, for example, 5% of all theories shown in a study to be true should *actually* be false because of the p < 0.05 ceiling for statistical significance) means that we know we are sometimes wrong in science. Our hope is that continuing to practice science we will constantly be correcting errors, and we know that we don't have any more successful methodology to evaluate observations.
I also liked that he talked about the expectation that errors creep into science and data. In fact in the wake of talking about how science is our best way of knowing things, I wish he would have discussed its problems, because there seems to be this tendancy for people to shy away from the difficulties and pretend that science is perfect.
OJ, I am not being at all alarmist about global social engineering. It is real, is the result of a concerted effort that began in earnest about 1970, it is well documented.
If you visit the CoR site at http://www.clubofrome.org/eng/new_path/ and read all through it, and then visit the Agenda 21 site at the UN: http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
you will see that a global body, the UN, is enacting the principles of the CoR. Further reading will reveal that these are by and large the same principles first formed in 1968 and promoted through books like "The Population Bomb", "Limits to Growth", and "The First Global Revolution".
You can visit your own SDC website and see that your SDC promotes sustainable development in exactly the way set up coming out of the Rio Accords, through the use of governmental agencies, legislation, and ngo's.
If you are really interested you can learn about the Decade for Sustainable Education, who its partners are, and learn that the protestant churches (at the national level and increasingly at the local level) are following right along.
You will find the language used in all these various document is remarkably similar, and if you keep reading you will find that the philosophers of this movement believe reality is created through language. They believe society can be transformed through transforming language- you have adopted many of their terms for yourself.
Agenda 21 is a global agreement. There has been some resistance to it here and there, but its promoters are relentless and better funded than the governments resisting- these are the people governments borrow money from to operate. Resistance has been primarily due to the high cost of implementing the recommended programs which requires more and more taxes, something politicians recognize harms their office holding ability.
I'm just saying, people really ought to investigate this for themselves instead of just buying into the propoganda supporting it. It doesn't bother you at all that Ted Turner, who provides major funding for United Nations Population Fund publically says we need to eliminate 350,000 people a day to save the earth, and that while this is a horrible thing to say it is more horrible not to do it?
Realizing how anxious you are about impending global doom due to high temperatures swamping England, here is some data (you don't have to accept this as evidence, you can accept the IPCC statement that reinforces your anxiety) http://www.agu.org/journals/gl/gl0723/2007GL031814/
You've probably never heard of this study and probably aren't aware that IPCC's predictions of sea level rise are based on one of six tide level guages in Hong Kong that shows an anamolous reading, but what the heck, don't let that get in the way of what you believe.
About temperature rise and determining an average global temperature that shows a 1.4 degree rise over the last century, I ask you to consider that the volume of the troposhpere is 8140000000000000000.0 cubic meters. A really accurate measurment would have to include a tracking of each of these cubic meters over time; the sky would have to be full of satellites to do this. And even if it could be done, how would the temperatures be measured, with what frequency, and how averaged?
Here is an excellent discussion on the idea of doing this http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/Temperatures.htm
I don't think you've ever done much measuring or been around much water either. I've done both, and humans are notoriously bad at measuring things. I've been working at the ocean's edge for 25 years. It's still right where it was 25 years ago. If IPCC models were correct the Maldives would already be under water.
People who live on the edge of water can expect periodic disaster, because water levels go up and down with the weather. And the primary driver of mass immigration over the last two centuries has been politics, not weather.
If I haven't convinced you, take a valium and a xanax and try to steady yourself; buy some floaties, an innertube, some pool toys and sun screen and make the best of it. That's what I intend to do.
'take a valium and a xanax and try to steady yourself'
I would take some if I could get a prescription for them. They are restricted here so even Michael Jackson would have trouble finding enough to OD on.
Now there GW, there's no need to start throwing insults around when somebody tries to caution you against making hasty judgements.
Politics is a fascinating subject and understanding the motivations behind decisions is incredibly complex, with different people reacting in different ways to similar stimuli.
I think you're failing to connect the primary motivations with the secondary motivations - people don't migrate across the world because of their voting preferences but because of real events affecting their lives. Weather is one of the basic realities which underpins all our lives and the tiniest of fluctuations have great consequences for huge numbers of people.
I find it extremely odd that you are trying to instigate a debate about the correct conclusions to be drawn from referenced evidence on political grounds when I'm saying it is important to be prepared for all eventualities so that it is possible to mitigate any unpleasant consequences - whatever your politics. Your fatalism is therefore foolhardy, selfish and irresponsible in the extreme.
May I ask: what do you think is the job of politics and politicians? To actively go forth in an attempt to discover practical solutions to the dilemmas which face us, or to go around making sure everyone is sitting politely on their hands and not creating new uncomfortable problems which might detract from the idealised life of riley we might prefer to live?
I get the impression you've made your mind up about me, so let me confound you - I don't think the two are incompatible and in fact I think the two are necessary and complementary parts to the greater whole. It takes all sorts, and it takes disagreement to filter out the inconsistencies on each side. So if you aren't prepared to accept the possibility that you don't have all the answers then I'm more inclined to doubt whether you have any.
Hi, okay, I'm Anonymous above (still, this feels a bit much).
One of Shermer's big causes (and I would like to point out that he's not Jewish [he was born Christian, but now is, of course, an atheist]) is tackling Holocaust deniers. So he quoted an article I wrote about one of those idiots.
Oh, it's you Michigan Mom! Well, can we have the article so I can post it? We would love to see it. Don't make me go searching all over cyberspace for it!
OJ, people don't migrate for voting preferences, they migrate because of politics that make them flee for their lives.
I didn't mean to insult you, I meant to tease you- sorry. This environmental agenda is driven by a desire to lower global population; the agenda part is presenting depopulation in other terms and creating the fearful conditions necessary for getting people to accept those terms.
There are 34 pages in this link that explain the perceived problem: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wpp2007/Publication_introduction.pdf
This is the sixth or seventh such document produced since 1974, depending on how you count them. This paper is a discussion of present population policies and if you keep track of the numbers of people eliminated through the various methods Malthus outlined in his essay you will see that at least 3 billion people have been removed from the planet by governments interested in population planning since 1970.
Here is the UN projection of world population to 2050 http://www.photius.com/rankings/world2050_rank.html
What this projection leaves out is that after 2050 the population is expected to slowly but steadily decline, leaving us with no overpopulation problem whatsoever.
If current population planning policies continue in effectiveness, we will never reach that 8-10 billion projection. Global birth rates are simply below replacement rates.
GW, you make a remarkable number of unwarranted assertions.
All agendas are moved by a combination of motivational factors and it's blatantly biased, blinkered and potentially disingenuous to state otherwise.
Equally there are a variety of reasons why people decide to change homes, including everything from from economic to security grounds.
So to be frank, your focus on specific concerns to the exclusion of others leaves me bemused about the content and reliabilty of anything you wish to say. Interesting references, yes, but so what?
The so what is that the mass refugee flows we've seen over the last three decades have been due to politics and not to weather. Another so what is that the environmental agenda is inextricably linked to the global drive to lower population. Another so what is that if you look at figure X of that publication you will see those mass refugee movements have all occured in countries the UN designates as nations where "major" population change is desired. Yet another so what is that politically motivated migration has actually happened and is happening, while global warming induced mass migration is "forecast" "if" certain things that "could" or "might" happen do happen.
Can you think of any mass migration in the last 50 years due to rising sea levels? Or to a .75 degree change in a global average temperature which is only a theoretical concept and not a practically obtainable measurement?
Give me two specific unwarranted assertions I have made so I can adress them- you may be right. But if you don't identify them I can never correct them can I?
Here's one unwarrranted assertion:
"Another so what is that the environmental agenda is inextricably linked to the global drive to lower population."
There would still be an environmental agenda whether or not the population continues to increase. I don't deny rising population makes environmental policy harder - that's simple commonsense. Also, the population control policies that have been implemented (China's one child policy springs to mind) are economic, not environmental. So to say they're *inextricably* linked, the implication that one would not exist without the other, well, I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that.
Here's another unwarranted assertion:
"...Gordon Brown, who wants to lower the population by 40 million by 2050"
I think we debunked the idea that Gordon has any policy to lower the population.
Mel, here is an article from the left explaining the interconnection between the environmental agenda and population control from their perspective. http://monthlyreview.org/mrzine/barker230708.html
There is plenty of evidence to support this view, but if you never read it you never know it.
As for the Gordon Brown thing, Brown certainly does support the depopulation policies of the UN. As to lowering the UK population by 40 million that was an offhand comment I made about an article I read three months ago. Consider it debunked. You can't however debunk Brown's support for sustainable development and the Millenium Development Goals which do, if you care to read, support depopulation of select areas. Nor can you deny that Sarah's hobby is preventing the birth of as many black and brown babies as she can- she may speak of it in loving terms but it is still racial genocide.
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