|
****************************************************************************************
September 07, 2012
Some cooked-up psychologizing about climate skepticism
The writer below is a psychologist, which makes it no surprise that he is a paid up member of the Green/Left. So it is also no surprise that he himself does exactly what he says not to do.
For starters, I was amused by this at the head of his article: "John Cook does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations." We also read: "John Cook, Climate Communication Fellow at University of Queensland". So he is paid to promote Warmism but that does not bias him? Let me guess that if he were to become a skeptic he would be out on his ear in no time flat.
The essence of his article however is that skeptics cherry pick the evidence whereas noble souls like him do not. Let me mention a couple of cherries that he seems to miss.
He regurgitates the totally hokey "97%" claim. See here for a dismantling of that. Just by repeating such a flawed claim he reveals himself as unconcerned with the facts.
He quotes all sorts of climate processes that are allegedly going on but fails to look at the bottom line as given in the graph above. And note that the header above is a copy of a mainstream Warmist graph. It shows a totally trivial warming. If the warming has been so slight over the last century or more what are we worried about? A temperature change of less than one degree Celsius contrasts vividly with the (say) 10 degrees warming we all experience during the course of a single day, to say nothing of seasonal variations. In the context of normal human experience, the warming observed so far over the last 100 years or is so slight as to be almost undetectable.
And the cook-up man fails to mention that to go from the negligible warming actually observed to something alarming, Warmists have to invent all sorts of unproven and dubious "tipping point" processes that are going to befall us in the vaguely specified future. So he misses the biggest "cherry" of all. He ignores the most crucial point in the whole story. Warmism is prophecy, not fact.
It would be great if he would take his own advice and consider ALL the data and leave the prophecies for those with a paranoid spark
In a previous article on The Conversation, Stephan Lewandowsky asked, why do people reject science? I’m going to take a slightly different angle and consider how people are able to reject climate science in the face of strong evidence.
A growing body of research has found that when a person’s worldview is threatened by scientific evidence, they interpret the science in a biased manner. One issue where this influence is strongest is climate change.
For supporters of an unregulated free market, regulating polluting industries to reduce global warming is so unpalatable that they are far more likely to reject that climate change is happening.
The mechanism by which ideology such as this influences our scientific views is confirmation bias. We place greater weight on evidence that confirms our beliefs, while ignoring or resisting conflicting evidence. This can be a challenge when confronted with a convergence of evidence and a scientific consensus, but confirmation bias is up to the task. Let’s look at some examples.
The most common manifestation of confirmation bias is cherry picking, where one carefully selects a small piece of data that paints a friendly picture and overlooks any inconvenient evidence.
How do we spot cherry picking? It’s important to remember that there is no “their evidence” versus “our evidence”. There is only the full body of evidence.
If someone arrives at a conclusion from carefully selected evidence that contradicts the conclusion drawn from the full body of evidence, that’s cherry picking.
Cherry pickers ignore the fact that our planet is currently building up heat at the stunning rate of around 3 Hiroshima bombs per second. Instead, they focus on short periods of the surface temperature record. This record bounces up and down from year to year as the ocean exchanges heat with the atmosphere, meaning that it’s possible to find any short period during a long-term warming trend where temperatures fall briefly. Meanwhile the planet continues to build up heat – around 250 Hiroshima bombs worth since you started reading this article.
Confirmation bias also influences which sources of information we put our trust in. People tend to attribute greater expertise to people who share their values and beliefs. We’re drawn to those who tell us what we want to hear.
So what happens when 97 out of 100 of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming?
Those who reject the scientific consensus lavish their attention on the 3% minority, magnifying their significance and turning a blind eye to the 97% of scientific experts.
More HERE
Index page for this site
DETAILS OF REGULARLY UPDATED BLOGS BY JOHN RAY:
"Tongue Tied"
"Dissecting Leftism" (Backup here)
"Australian Politics"
"Education Watch International"
"Political Correctness Watch"
"Greenie Watch"
"Food & Health Skeptic"
"Eye on Britain"
"Immigration Watch International" blog.
BLOGS OCCASIONALLY UPDATED:
"Marx & Engels in their own words"
"A scripture blog"
"Recipes"
"Some memoirs"
"Paralipomena"
To be continued ....
Queensland Police -- A barrel with lots of bad apples
Australian Police News
Of Interest
BLOGS NO LONGER BEING UPDATED
"Leftists as Elitists"
Socialized Medicine
Western Heart
OF INTEREST (2)
QANTAS -- A dying octopus
BRIAN LEITER (Ladderman)
Obama Watch
Obama Watch (2)
Dissecting Leftism -- Large font site
Michael Darby
The Kogarah Madhouse (St George Bank)
AGL -- A bumbling monster
Telstra/Bigpond follies
Optus bungling
Vodafrauds (vodafone)
Bank of Queensland blues
There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)
Main academic menu
Menu of recent writings
basic home page
Pictorial Home Page (Backup here).
Selected pictures from blogs (Backup here)
Another picture page (Best with broadband. Rarely updated)
Note: If the link to one of my articles is not working, the article concerned can generally be viewed by prefixing to the filename the following:
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20121106-1520/jonjayray.comuv.com/