Dave's Archives

Tag: denialism

  • Don’t mock George Brandis

    He’s trying to be intellectual. In fact, today’s xkcd comic about free speech is delightfully well-timed, considering yesterday’s remarks by George Brandis about free speech in an online magazine called Spiked. The magazine quotes Brandis as follows: He isn’t a climate-change denier; he says he was ‘on the side of those who believed in anthropogenic global…

  • Fred Singer’s climate consensus denial

    So I read with some bewilderment [1]In the naïve sense of one who expects intellectual honesty. a recent article by Professor S. Fred Singer on climate change. It jumps around a bit but mostly tries to attack the idea of scientific consensus. Singer’s logic leads from platitudes like this: Scientific veracity does not depend on fashionable…

  • Straw alarmism

    So much is said in the political catastrophe surrounding climate change that I can’t quite imagine anyone keeping up with it. However, rbutr has informed me that one particular pseudo-anonymous article at something called the “Independent Journal Review” (or “IJReview”) could do with a closer look, and so I shall oblige. The IJReview discusses James Lovelock’s…

  • Curing viral misinformation

    A great deal of mischief is caused, regularly, by viral misinformation. Factoids that support one side of any controversial issue are rapidly copied and pasted many times over (the “echo chamber”). By the time anyone manages to marshal the truth into a coherent response, it’s too late — the lie has convinced enough people for…

  • Qualifications required to debate AGW

    Until recently, I was a little confused by some of the standards being applied to the protagonists of the political debate on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). However, I’ve now drawn up a handy flow chart to help resolve the confusion. (Click on the image for a slightly larger version.)

  • Gaming the birther denialists

    In news from America, Donald Trump has “accomplished something that nobody else has been able to accomplish” – the final clinching proof that the sitting US President was, in fact, born exactly where he said he was. What a marvellous achievement. Clearly, in deference to such awesome influence, said sitting US President, having just been…

  • Paul Nurse on climate change denialism

    “Science Under Attack“, by Paul Nurse for BBC Horizon (via Hot Topic).

  • Dams might be the new controlled burns

    The Queensland flood disaster continues in tragic and dramatic fashion, though Sri Lanka and Brazil have it even worse. However, there is a yet more pressing concern in some quarters. You see, this isn’t just about lost lives and property, but about the future of market economics. The real question is: how can we blame this…

  • Who is Dennis Ambler?

    Continuing on (a bit) from my [intlink id=”1426″ type=”post”]last post[/intlink], I’m going to examine another of Dennis Ambler’s articles for the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI). This one is mostly a long rambling swipe at lots of different and very accomplished individuals, and not (as in the other case) an outright attempt to reinvent the…

  • Consensus Bashing

    The Science and Public Policy Institute certainly does provide a lot of hilariously twisted commentary on climate change. Two years ago (January 2009), Doran and Zimmerman (D&Z) published a paper based on Zimmerman’s masters thesis. Unsurprisingly, they found that the vast majority (97%) of climate scientists think climate change is real and human-induced. This kind of…