Anyone who wants to debate a science denier often needs a thick skin, especially concerning topics like global warming. They often hurl words like leftist, socialist, communist, fascist, sheeple, useful idiot, and worse at you. Though why a political ideology is used as an insult still is something that I don’t understand. At most you’ll get a slightly annoyed roll of the eyes from me when you label me as something that I’m not.
But the one that truly puzzles me is when I’m accused of having a religious like faith in science. Science isn’t a religion, certainly not when you accept the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW). To me it’s climate science denial that looks more like a faith position.
Continue reading Climate Science Is Based On Evidence, But Science Denial Is Based On Faith
Climate science deniers tend to be quite touchy when you call them a climate science denier, or denier for short. In my case this has even led to someone threatening to sue me for libel because I used the term climate science denier in a private email. Which wasn’t even aimed at them, I just used the term to describe the type of arguments that were being used.
The term also is quite simple in its origin, it means that you deny something. I use the term to state that climate science deniers dismiss or even flat-out deny the evidence climate scientists have found. You have similar versions of the term denier for those that reject the science behind vaccinations, AIDS, Evolution, etc.
I expect climate science deniers to not respond well when you use the term, that’s why I only use it when it’s truly earned. What I didn’t expect was that the usage of this term would lead to Dr. Roy Spencer writing the blog post ‘Time to push back against the global warming Nazis‘ (archived here):
Continue reading Roy Spencer, In Denial About What Science Denial Means
Not everyone might be aware of this but Dr. Roy Spencer is someone who believes in Intelligent Design. He has often defended his support of Intelligent Design and his rejection of the Theory of Evolution quite vocally. Something I mentioned briefly in one of my blog posts.
That Spencer rejects the Theory of Evolution and replaces it with Intelligent Design brings into question his ability to assess evidence in a detached way. This because Intelligent Design is nothing else than the attempt of dressing up creationism (religion) in a lab coat to make it seem more legit. Which might sound harsh but it is an accurate description, anyone familiar with the book ‘Of pandas and people‘ will be well aware of that.
I’m writing about this as Ethan Epstein made the following remark in his article ‘What Catastrophe?‘ (on page 3):
Continue reading Dr. Roy Spencer, Please Keep Your Religion Out Of Science
The cold in the United States had the climate science deniers going all out to cast doubt on the simple fact that our planet is warming and we are the main cause for that. With folks like Trump saying some interesting things:
Of course, a single weather event in one place cannot be used to show that our planet isn’t warming; after all it’s called global warming for a reason.
Continue reading Roy Spencer On Record Cold And Global Warming
In that particular blog post he mangled the latest IPCC report and the science that it is based on. Most of what he said was simply not an accurate representation of what IPCC does and the science used for the latest report. I expected better from someone who does climate research.
Although the article is quite hard to address as he barely mentions any sources for what he’s basing his claims and arguments on. And he does make a lot of claims about climatology and the IPCC.
To show I’m not taking anything out of context his entire blog post is quoted by me, with my responses to the point he’s making below the quote. I’ve kept my responses as short as possible, which means I’ll be referring you to a lot of other sites/pages for further information.
But before I begin I’d like to point out that any bolded or emphasized text in the quotes is by Dr Roy Spencer. I copied the text as is from his blog so that I don’t distort what he’s saying. That being said lets begin:
Several months ago Cook et al released a paper in which they analysed the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
What they did in that study is examine 11,944 abstracts from 1991 to 2011 that included the words “global climate change” or “global warming” in their abstract. What they found after analysing these abstracts is that among those that expressed a position on global warming, 97% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.
When they asked the authors of those papers to rate their own papers they again found that 97% stated that humans are causing global warming. They also contacted 8,547 authors to ask if they could rate their own papers and got 1,200 responses. The results for this again found that 97% of the selected papers stated that humans are causing global warming. They did this to determine that there wasn’t any sort of inherent problem in their rating system and this seems to indicate that.
For anyone who is aware of other studies that did something similar these results weren’t a surprise. As studies like Oreskes 2004, Doran 2009 and Anderegg 2010 showed similar results. It’s the very reason I just shrugged at these results and mostly watched everything play out from a distance. To me they just didn’t seem that interesting, or that they would generate a lot of controversy.
Continue reading Cook’s 97% Climate Consensus Paper Doesn’t Crumble Upon Examination
Climate science deniers tend to be quite touchy when you call them a climate science denier, or denier for short. In my case this has even led to someone threatening to sue me for libel because I used the term climate science denier in a private email. Which wasn’t even aimed at them, I just used the term to describe the type of arguments that were being used.
Several months ago