Kenny Quoted: Environmentalism is in part a real argument, in part a religion, in part an aesthetic; the second and third parts make people too willing to accept the first.
Arnies's response: So do we automatically discount any argument based on religion or aesthetic?
Kenny Quoted: Which gets me to Mike's various queries about why I choose to align myself with the forces of evil and ignorance by expressing skepticism about the horrors likely to arise from global warming. Simply put, I am skeptical of conclusions that appear to go well beyond the scientific evidence, pushed by people who have reasons to want other people to believe them.
Arnie's Response: So do we automatically be skeptical of arguments pushed by people who have reasons to want other people to believe them? Or just arguements based on science pushed by people who have reasons to want other people to believe them.
In either case, people should be automatically skeptical of religion, and anything tying religion and science. We should also be skeptical of anything anyone says in any argument because they have a reason to push it.
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2 comments:
I think we're more in agreement on this than in disagreement.
It's not that one disagrees with all arguments based on religion or aesthetic. But when the subject is, "What shall we use the government's capacity for violence to do?" then the answer had better not be, "Force everybody else to live by the rules of my religion," or, "Force everybody else to change their lifestyles in order to make the world more aesthetically pleasing to yours truly." I think that's Friedman's point.
Whoops, posted before I meant to.
At any rate, you don't have to be skeptical of genuine arguments pushed by people who clearly have a conflict of interest. If they have provided genuine arguments, why then you can simply test the argument on its merits and go from there.
But that's not what you normally get, and that's certainly not what you get much of in the global warming propaganda campaign. What you get is people wanting you to accept that global warming is Extinction Looming on their authority. In other words, not one person out of a hundred who is sure that global warming is a terrible crisis, could give you a coherent description of even a single experiment generating repeatable results, or could explain the process by which long-term warming of oceans causes the oceans themselves to generate more CO2, or could perform a regression analysis to show how much of the rise and fall of temperatures in this century is statistically explained by human industrial emissions and how much is statistically explained by sunspot activity. They don't believe in global warming because they've paid attention to the scientists' actual arguments. They believe in global warming on the scientists' authority, or, to be more precise, they believe that science has proved that humans are destroying the world with global warmings because the media and popular culture and the United Nations (that bastion of intellectual integrity) say that all the smart scientists say so.
And if you accept an opinion based just on the say-so of somebody who has a vested interest in your believing that opinion...that's not exactly the height of wisdom.
Not that that's the only test one applies to appeals to authority -- but the global warming people do abysmally badly on the other tests as well. Past record of accuracy, for example, is a standard test of the reliability of an authority; but it's hard to come up with something that has a worse track record that "what the media and popular culture say that science has proved." Or, again, you look at the methodology used by the person who's claiming authority...and yet again, you're not seeing reproducible results. You're seeing outputs of computer models driven by parameters that aren't known to be constant and that can't be measured in isolation from each other (which means they can't actually be determined); charts and graphs that create the appearance of massive gyrations but that upon closer inspection generate that appearance by the hoary old trick of making a variation from, say, 68.9 to 69.7 look huge by putting it on a scale that runs from 68.5 to 70; the infamous hockey-stick chart that was just out-and-out dishonest; the notorious attempts by these same practitioners of "scientific consensus" to pretent that the medieval warming period never happened because they couldn't fit it into their models; the ceaseless incantation of the dead-giveaway phrase "scientific consensus"... look, people who have a real case don't have to stoop to bullshit like that. So no matter which one of the tests on applies to people who claim to have an authoritative opinion and who demand that you accept that word that something is true even though their arguments seem awfully dubious, the global warming propaganda machine does very badly on the test.
See, I remember quite clearly that several years ago we were all being told that there was no question about the science, that global warming was well established (just like global cooling was in the '70's), etc. So,
um, the IPCC just produced another report saying again, "Okay, now we REALLY know for sure." And note how Martin Perry -- whose claim to authority is that he "conducted the gruelling negotiations" (yes, this "science" is conducted by "gruelling negotiations") gives the game away.
There was little doubt about the science, which was based on 29,000 sets of data, much of it collected in the last five years. "For the first time we are not just arm-waving with models," Martin Perry, who conducted the grueling negotiations, told reporters.
Now wait a second -- so, back five or six years ago when we were all being told that scientists KNEW that global warming was happening...back then we were "just arm-waving with models"? But NOW, even though we're saying exactly what we saying back then when we actually didn't know WTF we were talking about but swore we did...NOW you can trust us because this time we Really Truly Know.
Lie to me once and I believe you, that's your fault. Admit that you lied to me and then lie to me again and I still believe you -- I deserve what's comin' to me.
[The arm-waving point, by the way, is one that I've seen several other places, not one that I came up with my own brilliant self.]
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