We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The alchemy is settled! The words “climate change” have taken on occult significance.
Chant “the science is settled, the science is settled, the science is settled” over and over again, whilst arranging an arcane pattern on the ground with a ritually blessed hockey stick inscribed with the words “Gaia” and “Al Gore”, and if you do that on a solstice, the spirit of Karl Marx will appear!
There is no other explanation for some of the gonzo articles that get written.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Just the other day Yahoo had a big headline and blurb about walruses crowding on to some beach with large numbers being crushed to death and with the obligatory claim that warming and lack of sea ice was responsible. Almost immediately, a scientist that studies walruses issued a statement that the phenomenon was recorded as far back as 1604, that it was not unusual in the least and that the author of the Yahoo article was not a scientist but a, IIRC, Greenpeace activist. It’s as if the internet doesn’t exist for these people. At least, that’s the only explanation I can come up with for them to have the audacity to put their name on so easily falsified propaganda.
The jury is still out on whether the internet helps expose falsehoods or whether it helps propagate falsehoods by helping people stay in echo chambers. It’s great that the internet can help you expose the falsehoods of people you oppose, but how many people put the same effort into testing the statements of people they support? Not many, I’ll wager.
Harking back to an earlier post, this is another reason I don’t use Google. By it’s nature, Google is a powerful tool for enhancing confirmation bias.
Ah, yet another reason to love global warming. Two girls for every boy.
‘The science is settled’ Super, so no more funding is needed for climate research. We can agree on that, can’t we?
Lee Moore,
that may be so, but they’re all bat shit mad i.e. no oxygen is getting to their brains as the shit that surrounds them sucks oxygen out of the air.
When I said on the other thread that all that Obama and Merkel are able to fight is global warming I meant also this
That article might well have added “and if you buy kippers on a Tuesday it will not rain” such was the veracity if it’s scientific value.
Paul makes his standard comment that if they really cared about C02 emissions they would be ardent supporters of the development and application of nuclear power.
And they (the “Climate Change” establishment) mostly are NOT ardent supporters of the development and application of nuclear power.
Tedd, the jury is back in and returned a verdict: like any other tool, the internet can work both ways, depending on the user and his agenda. But I do very much agree with you about Google.
Oh, and y’all can add this to your collection of things-that-global-warming-is-guilty-of.
Well, for my pains, I actually read the article. And thought, there’s an easy way to validate the theory. They’re proposing it’s extremes of temperature affecting the fetus. Fair ‘nough. But you don’t have to take the temperature extremes to the people. You can also take the people to the temperature extremes. They getting the same phenomenon with couples take beach & skiing holidays? Should be more noticeable. Won’t be one degree but more like ten.
Definitely worthy of both ears and the tail. ;^)
“‘The science is settled”.
But what does the word “science” mean, via. (mis)”usage”?
Perry, something for your reading list:
Here
Alisa:
I apologize, I didn’t mean to create a false dilemma. What I meant was that, most probably, the two effects are not precisely equal but, so far as I know, no one has definitively determined which is greater. In my more optimistic moments I hope that people will tend to use the internet to improve their own thinking (as opposed to merely critiquing the thinking of other people). But then I also once thought (before Google) that search engines would result in people learning Boolean algebra, so my ideas on such matters are obviously not to be trusted.
It did warm my heart to see how many people in the comment section ridiculed that piece on ISIS, though.
Strictly speaking, the author of the gonzo article left open an escape patch: he wrote “climate change” not “anthropogenic climate change”.
Except that even so he is wrong: what the study investigated was weather, not climate.
My thought exactly. Except that there hasn’t been any warming for over a decade so we shouldn’t keep our hopes up.
Not necessarily: skiing can be sweaty work, especially Viking skiing (or “cross country” skiing as some people call it).
Plus, people often take a sauna after skiing.
(There are also ways to keep cool at the beach.)
A better experiment would be to keep the husband’s testicles in ice-cold water as often as possible — if the couple desires a son.
At the end of the day it does not matter whether the “consensus” is correct or not – according to Auguste Comte [the philosopher who coined the term “altruism.”]
All that counts is that science should have the same goal as ethics, namely – Humanity – a humanity which must be loved, known, and served.
Comte’s called his “science” the positivist religion.
Ayn Rand was not a fan.
While I’m at it ‘anthropogenic’, is another bullshit term, literally meaning ‘giving rise to people’, not ‘given rise to by people’, cf. ‘carcinogenic’, things that cause cancer. See also ‘iatrogenic’ for alleged ‘physician caused illnesses’.
Bullshit for science, bollocks for language. The clarion call of the Left.
An interesting quote from Matt Ridley, via cafe Hayek:
This actually is the real poison of the AGW thing. All their bs about changing light bulbs and driving more efficient cars is one thing. But the real damage done is the deep undermining of science. If this article is a fair representation of the referenced article it would be laughed out of a middle school science fair were it about any other subject. I judge middle school science fairs, really, this is D grade work.
I mean it is an insult to any listeners intelligence even to explain why it is so wrong.
If this is what passes for science now, god help the future. I think we are justified in worrying about the rising temperature of worldwide hysteria, leading to cataclysmic consequences, like rising levels in the ocean of ignorance, massive flooding of stupidity, and a worldwide poisoning of the atmosphere of liberality and good sense which will undoubtedly lead to widespread poverty and death.
I subscribe to a number of “skeptical” podcasts, and whilst I enjoy and agree with the content, the most disturbing trend is how they consistently refuse to be skeptical about climate change conjectures, the only common ground is that many are run by left-leaning individuals and it’s the only thing I can point to that causes this wilful and negligent myopic attitude. The “scientific consensual fact” of CO2 causing warming and possibly leading to a global catastrophe is well debunked not only by the scientific methodology itself, but the events that happen every day, we get more CO2 but no more warming, we get more polar ice, we get more snow, the seas refuse to rise as predicted. What follows is alternative conjectures that cannot escape from the underlying leftist narrative that bigger government intervention and regulation is needed, so now they just make things up and obfuscate. Many “denier” sites now have large comical lists of what climate change is said to cause, and what excuses are now being given for the “pause” or the lack of predicted effects of CO2 “pollution”. It’s starting to look a bit Daily Mail.
I am sorry Tedd if the tone of my comment could be read as too serious – sometimes a smiley can go a long way 🙂 I don’t think that you and I are in any substantial disagreement, but I’ll be happy to be further corrected.
Dom, from your quote of Matt Ridley:
Actually no, it isn’t. One does not multiply the probabilities of all those distinct and highly improbable* events, but rather one tries to calculate the probability of a coincidence thereof – that coincidence being a distinct event in and of itself, with its own probability possibly independent from those other probabilities.
*Highly improbable as per Ridley’s speculation I presume, with which I personally have trouble disagreeing.
Alisa and Tedd,
What internet social media and forums are doing is allowing various mindsets to coalesce into coherent ideologies. This is an advantage for colloquiums centered on rational pursuit of understanding and tolerance of ‘heretics’ over colloquiums that center around consensus based doctrine and dogma.
While it will take time and there will be many apparent setbacks, ultimately the cumulative failures of doctrinal dogmas and the cumulative successes of critical rationality we lead reason to prevail. Not to say that the assaults of the faith driven conquerors won’t do a lot of damage on the way to their defeats.
Here’s to hope, Mid.
I’m afraid we have lost. The Bull runs so deep in our culture that the ‘fix’ is thoroughly in. It doesn’t matter if conclusive proof was published tomorrow that CAGW is hysterical and wrong the faithful would continue to believe and they are so deeply embedded in every level of public life now that nothing short of a ‘purge’ would rid society of them.
Everything is evidence to them. They are now like a man walking in to a bookies with a slip of paper saying he bet on Man City to win the FA cup final and expecting to collect even though Liverpool won. Society is now at the stage where the media would simply say Liverpool did indeed win, claim the match coverage is CGI’d, and campaign for the man to get his winnings, and say everyone else is a liar.
Nothing, short of direct evidence of systematic fraud and conspiracy would make the MSM interested in changing their minds on this story. And even that wouldn’t dent their belief in the ‘issue’.
No we have not. And why do I think that?
…because the MSM is no longer the only game it town, and as time goes by that will be ever more evident. Just look at the trend lines.
In short, fuck ’em, they are bleeding to death. The growing disjunction between widely held scepticism of AGW in the population at large, and the prevalence of warmist cultism in media and establishment circles, is not an indication of their victory, it is an indication of their waning ability to ‘form opinion’ outside the media bubble and true believers. The politics will catch up eventually. I am totally with Midwesterner on this.
“I’m afraid we have lost.”
Well, no. Fashions and fads come and go. People once hunted witches, or believed Jews are poisoning wells and causing black plague. In due course a new superstition will take over, and the CAGW belief will fade.
Indeed, they have not quite finished fucking things up, but they too are on the way out. Looking back, the warmists of this era will be seen as the eugenicists of the previous era.
The CAGW hysterics may be “bleeding to death”, but in their death throes they will cause a lot of damage. These people will not acknowledge the intellectual vacuity of their cause; they are too deeply invested in it. Witness this Letter to the Editor published by the Wall Street Journal just a few days ago, from two purported “scientists”. The continue to believe (or to maintain in public, anyway) that the “science is settled” even if some of the finer details haven’t been quite worked out yet. But that uncertainty doesn’t matter, and it certainly “shouldn’t be an excuse for policy inaction” because “time is a luxury we don’t have.”
These people are incorrigible.
Here: http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm is a (n allegedly) complete list of all the things caused by Global Warming – according to gonzo articles.
Well, that article is stupid, and almost certainly coming from the political elite. One of the things I have noticed though, is that we are at a disadvantage when we assume that everyone who talks about climate change is talking about global warming. Some people who talk about climate change are talking about the sorts of things that happened to the Fertile Crescent- and we all know that is now desert. The good sort of environmentalists want to build soil, plant trees, and generally become anti-government when they notice how often the government is in their way.
I have the same problem, I’m a particular fan of the S[c]eptic’s Guide to the Universe and I’ll be listening and enjoying it until suddenly they’ll slip in a line about “global warming deniers” and my mood slips and I just wait until they change the subject. During one episode they even made reference to people trying to hijack the sceptic name for nefarious purposes like the vaccine-autism people and “global warming deniers”. Such a shame too, I really do enjoy the programme, just wish they’d keep those remarks to themselves
Now we learn that the deep ocean is not harboring all that excess CAGW heat after all. Not to worry, though: “Study coauthor Josh Willis of JPL said these findings do not throw suspicion on climate change itself.” That’s because (mirabile dictu!) all that heat is actually hiding in the upper ocean instead. It’s just that we just never noticed it before.
These people will not stop, and they have no shame.
Laird,
All that CO2 is warming the atmosphere and ‘acidifying’ the oceans (at the same time naturally), by the Climate Change Quantum Effect, one molecule of CO2* can be in two places (or more) at once. I just need $10,000,000 grant funding** for my research team for the next 10 years to work on the proof to make my theory a law. Please don’t ask me for the pH of seawater, it varies, or compare the mass of the oceans with the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
*Other greenhouses gases are available.
**No polar bears or walruses were harmed in the making of my grant application.
Mr Ed, that certainly sounds plausible to me, but you’re going to have to work out how Bell’s Theorem fits in to your hypothesis. Go get that grant!
This was so good, I felt I had to share it here (on topic but a little late to the party).
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5790561&cid=48093763
Magnificent! pwned!