Skeptics, sceptics and doubting Thomases
I am getting really concerned these days by a dangerous new trend that's catching on like a bad cliché among a lot of my friends & acquaintances who I thought were smarter & better-informed.
It's climate-change denialism.
I don't know quite what's causing it, but with my skeptical hat on, it's really worrying me. It's the new homeopathy/intelligent design/pendulum-dowsing; it's not based on reason or evidence, it's based, I think, on a distrust of authority, a resentfulness against the tide of eco-awareness, and the growing feeling that one has to Do One's Bit for the Environment. People seem to be reacting against it.
But there's more to it than that.
As I get more involved in the active skeptical movement, trying to find way to expose the legions of liars, scammers, frauds and charlatans who are making money and exploiting the gullible, it's tremendously vexing to see people swallowing this new brand of patent bullshit.
From where I stand, as a rational thinker with a materialist, monist, scientific worldview, there is an awful lot in the world that can, absolutely & unambiguously, be divided into fact & fiction. Not everything - one cannot prove which composer or poet is better; that is personal taste. But one can prove that homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, dowsing, crystal healing, laying on of hands, etc. etc. do not work, for instance.
It is possible to test the power of prayer, or the reality of reincarnation, or clairvoyance or ESP, and they do nothing at all. Zero. No "maybe", no "mostly", nothing at all.
In scientific research, it is a little different. Science rarely gives "yes" or "no" answers to complex, difficult questions, & those without any scientific training do not understand the qualified answers that it does give, those of balanced probabilities.
The evidence that people do not understand probability is that the National Lottery, for instance, still exists & is profitable.
But in science, it is often nonetheless possible to say "according to all the evidence, this is real but that is not." There often isn't "proof"; it's a question of balancing the evidence for and the evidence against, doing Hard Sums and statistics, and saying "according to the best current evidence, we think this is what's happening." It's expressed in terms of probabilities, in chances of things, in terms of ranges of expected outcomes.
But the punters want Crown Court or Judge Judy or something. They want simple clear answers and proof. Well, tough. Deal with it. There are no such "yes, definitely" answers. But on such things, such fuzzy uncertain results, is built the great edifice of science, that created the computers you're reading this on, the drugs that save millions of lives, the airplanes that carry us around the planet and the space vehicles that provide us with a world that contains GPS units that come free inside cellphones.
So, for instance, in the question of climate change. It is settled; it was settled a decade or more before I was born, settled way back inthe 1950s. It is not controversial, there is no real debate.
What there is, is bullshit. FUD, it's called in the IT industry: Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt. It's been methodically fostered by the oil & other fossil-fuels industries, by politics & by big money, spreading lies & bullshit because they fear for their bottom lines.
The trouble is, nowadays, this big-money BS campaign is a trendy bandwagon to jump on. More and more people I know are doing so. They don't really know about the subject and they're generally not interested in going and finding out, but they lap up any news story or bit of media bollocks that appears to suggest in any way that the world's climate is in fact changing.
This winter, in north-western Europe, it's been the snow, the "big freeze". So one area temporarily goes cold, OMG, global warming isn't happening.
It's drivel. Pure unadulterated balls. Disinformation spread by the malicious, swallowed and evangelised by the gullible.
There was no "big freeze". Go read about the Frost Fairs on the Thames just 200 or 300Y ago to see what the climate in northern Europe used to be like. This was a small temporary fluctuation of the Gulf Stream that chilled us by 5°C or so for a month. It's a glitch, not a big freeze, and it's evidence for climate change, not against it, because we are changing the thermohaline circulation of the oceans, something so huge that we cannot replace it with any technology we have. The Gulf Stream moves one hundred times as much energy as the total output of human civilisation; we can't replace it, but we can break it. Right now, it's faltering, at least in part because of the meltwater from Greenland diluting what should be the extra-salty surface waters. Saltier water is heavier than less-salty water, so it sinks. Water it down with freshwater from melting glaciers, it's not heavier & it doesn't sink. Result, northern Europe freezes.
It saddens & infuriates me to see smart people accepting drivel, nonsense, crap & lies, because they think they're rebelling against the establishment or the government, when all they're doing is buying the paid-for propaganda of the oil cartels.
The thing is, if you actually went and did some reading, educated themselves from the sources and not from the propaganda, looked at the real evidence, not the industry whitewash, there is NO QUESTION. It's not an argument: it's an increasingly-desperate bunch of researchers versus a huge army of highly-paid marketers and professional liars who don't give a damn if the world fries. They'll have spent the money and died; they don't care.
There's a difference between a Skeptic and being sceptical; that's why we adopted the "k" in it. To be sceptical is to doubt; to be a Skeptic is to fight the bullshit of the credulous and the corrupt with facts, reason and logic. Climate-change deniers aren't Skeptics, they're just sceptical, but the thing is, they're not sceptical because the evidence doesn't add up; they're doubters because they're buying the crap disinformation pumped out by the petrochemical lobbyists and so on.
But once they've bought the lie, then like religious zealots, they won't even allow anyone to suggest it's not gospel truth. Mere evidence will not shake this belief.
And if showing people the facts won't persuade them, what the hell will? How many millions of species must go extinct, how many billions of humans must be displaced and die in famines and water wars?
(Nicked from myself in a FB comment)
It's climate-change denialism.
I don't know quite what's causing it, but with my skeptical hat on, it's really worrying me. It's the new homeopathy/intelligent design/pendulum-dowsing; it's not based on reason or evidence, it's based, I think, on a distrust of authority, a resentfulness against the tide of eco-awareness, and the growing feeling that one has to Do One's Bit for the Environment. People seem to be reacting against it.
But there's more to it than that.
As I get more involved in the active skeptical movement, trying to find way to expose the legions of liars, scammers, frauds and charlatans who are making money and exploiting the gullible, it's tremendously vexing to see people swallowing this new brand of patent bullshit.
From where I stand, as a rational thinker with a materialist, monist, scientific worldview, there is an awful lot in the world that can, absolutely & unambiguously, be divided into fact & fiction. Not everything - one cannot prove which composer or poet is better; that is personal taste. But one can prove that homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, dowsing, crystal healing, laying on of hands, etc. etc. do not work, for instance.
It is possible to test the power of prayer, or the reality of reincarnation, or clairvoyance or ESP, and they do nothing at all. Zero. No "maybe", no "mostly", nothing at all.
In scientific research, it is a little different. Science rarely gives "yes" or "no" answers to complex, difficult questions, & those without any scientific training do not understand the qualified answers that it does give, those of balanced probabilities.
The evidence that people do not understand probability is that the National Lottery, for instance, still exists & is profitable.
But in science, it is often nonetheless possible to say "according to all the evidence, this is real but that is not." There often isn't "proof"; it's a question of balancing the evidence for and the evidence against, doing Hard Sums and statistics, and saying "according to the best current evidence, we think this is what's happening." It's expressed in terms of probabilities, in chances of things, in terms of ranges of expected outcomes.
But the punters want Crown Court or Judge Judy or something. They want simple clear answers and proof. Well, tough. Deal with it. There are no such "yes, definitely" answers. But on such things, such fuzzy uncertain results, is built the great edifice of science, that created the computers you're reading this on, the drugs that save millions of lives, the airplanes that carry us around the planet and the space vehicles that provide us with a world that contains GPS units that come free inside cellphones.
So, for instance, in the question of climate change. It is settled; it was settled a decade or more before I was born, settled way back inthe 1950s. It is not controversial, there is no real debate.
What there is, is bullshit. FUD, it's called in the IT industry: Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt. It's been methodically fostered by the oil & other fossil-fuels industries, by politics & by big money, spreading lies & bullshit because they fear for their bottom lines.
The trouble is, nowadays, this big-money BS campaign is a trendy bandwagon to jump on. More and more people I know are doing so. They don't really know about the subject and they're generally not interested in going and finding out, but they lap up any news story or bit of media bollocks that appears to suggest in any way that the world's climate is in fact changing.
This winter, in north-western Europe, it's been the snow, the "big freeze". So one area temporarily goes cold, OMG, global warming isn't happening.
It's drivel. Pure unadulterated balls. Disinformation spread by the malicious, swallowed and evangelised by the gullible.
There was no "big freeze". Go read about the Frost Fairs on the Thames just 200 or 300Y ago to see what the climate in northern Europe used to be like. This was a small temporary fluctuation of the Gulf Stream that chilled us by 5°C or so for a month. It's a glitch, not a big freeze, and it's evidence for climate change, not against it, because we are changing the thermohaline circulation of the oceans, something so huge that we cannot replace it with any technology we have. The Gulf Stream moves one hundred times as much energy as the total output of human civilisation; we can't replace it, but we can break it. Right now, it's faltering, at least in part because of the meltwater from Greenland diluting what should be the extra-salty surface waters. Saltier water is heavier than less-salty water, so it sinks. Water it down with freshwater from melting glaciers, it's not heavier & it doesn't sink. Result, northern Europe freezes.
It saddens & infuriates me to see smart people accepting drivel, nonsense, crap & lies, because they think they're rebelling against the establishment or the government, when all they're doing is buying the paid-for propaganda of the oil cartels.
The thing is, if you actually went and did some reading, educated themselves from the sources and not from the propaganda, looked at the real evidence, not the industry whitewash, there is NO QUESTION. It's not an argument: it's an increasingly-desperate bunch of researchers versus a huge army of highly-paid marketers and professional liars who don't give a damn if the world fries. They'll have spent the money and died; they don't care.
There's a difference between a Skeptic and being sceptical; that's why we adopted the "k" in it. To be sceptical is to doubt; to be a Skeptic is to fight the bullshit of the credulous and the corrupt with facts, reason and logic. Climate-change deniers aren't Skeptics, they're just sceptical, but the thing is, they're not sceptical because the evidence doesn't add up; they're doubters because they're buying the crap disinformation pumped out by the petrochemical lobbyists and so on.
But once they've bought the lie, then like religious zealots, they won't even allow anyone to suggest it's not gospel truth. Mere evidence will not shake this belief.
And if showing people the facts won't persuade them, what the hell will? How many millions of species must go extinct, how many billions of humans must be displaced and die in famines and water wars?
(Nicked from myself in a FB comment)