Everyone here compares climate denial to other left wing bugaboos: 'creationism' 'ancient science' 'earth is the center of the universe'
So why not compare to things where the left wing is wrong?
Why not say, "if we're not going to give equal time to one thing where science is settled (climate change), we also shouldn't give equal time to..."
1. Economic fact: Minimum wage hurts low earners
2. Economic fact: Free trade is almost always good
3. Economic fact: Unions hurt the poor
So is climate change really something you care about, or is it just another tool to be deployed in the left-right debate?
The left brings climate change - their settled science - the right brings anti union policies - their settled science. Each side has heterodox scientists, each side has the vast consensus of professionals on their side. Yet only one topic gets a zillion upvotes on HN, only one topic gets extensive coverage on our favorite media aggregators.
I've seen argument and published studies against (1) so you're not off to a good start. These are clearly not points of view that would get 97% of economists agreeing on, are they?
Plenty of blogs say climate science is not a science. Climate scientists say otherwise.
Plenty of blogs say economics is not a science. Climate scientists say otherwise.
What exactly differentiates one statement from the other ? Aside from the fact that one is popular opinion and the other is not (although that's debatable and differs by person and by region).
I've always had mixed feelings regarding man-made climate change, seeing it as a marketed mainstream show. For me, this broad, somewhat blind, frightening threat is the ecological equivalent of the idea of terrorism.
I can't help myself to think that there are a lot of other ecological issues, even more critical, and affecting our societies today. Water/soil pollution for instance does kill millions of people a year.
People are scared by the carbon dioxyde they exhale, while they eat polychlorinated biphenyl and a thousand more toxic chemical compounds on a daily basis.
I don't think anyone wins when you remove/censor contrarian views.
> I don't think anyone wins when you remove/censor contrarian views.
I agree, and I don't think the solution is to silence discourse, but to hold everyone to the same high standard.
If you publish a paper that gets citations like the rest of the scientific community, then I heartily defend your bid to be heard on BBC, climate change denier or not.
Do you think equal time should be given to all opinions on scientific issues that are not backed by evidence? Should we teach Christian creationism next to evolution? Should we teach about the balance of humors next to germ theory?
A rather grubby device for argument! What kind of evidence do you think is provided by a stasis in warming (no one is now denying this stasis!) when all the climate models predict warming? Models provide zero evidence; they only offer predictions. And they have all failed.
No one suggests there has been no warming at all and a measure of this will reasonably be due to CO2 emitted by man. The argument is about the extent. It's also about spending billions (follow the money! Who, specifically wants to stop that?) to 'prevent' a rise in temperature. Using IPCC figures, it can be shown that whatever Britain does (to take an example) even if it went back to the stone age, the effect on global temperature would not be measureable. Meanwhile the old and poor die in the winter while their increased charges for power subsidize useless wind turbines.
"By 2030, the benefits of these three sets of sector policies would include 94,000 premature deaths avoided annually and GDP growth of $1.8 trillion-$2.6 trillion per year," according to the report. "The policies would avoid 8.5 gigatons of CO2-equivalent and almost 16 billion kilowatt-hours of energy saved, roughly equivalent to taking 2 billion cars off the road. Together, these implementing these policies could represent about 30 percent of the total reduction needed in 2030 to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius."
Who benefits from climate reform? Rich People.
-people with beach front property.
-Green energy producers whose products are otherwise not economically viable.
-People with "green" businesses that can sell Rec credits.
Who is harmed? Poor people.
-Higher fuel prices
-Higher food prices (fuel is the big input, and warming creates more farmland-- think Canada and Siberia)
Wow. Just a raft of unfounded assumptions there. For example, warming won't necessarily create farmland in Canada (much of the topsoil in Canada is very poor anyway) but will certainly destroy vast amounts of farmlands in warmer countries ... along with devastating the oceans as a food supply (via acidification). Everyone loses with a warming climate.
So it is possible that releasing CO2 by burning huge amounts in huge amounts in the air may be changing climate. I am not arguing that it is, but arguing against "we should not be scared because we exhale it".
>while they eat polychlorinated biphenyl and a thousand more toxic chemical compounds on a daily basis.
Sure, but they don't come close to what climate change can do. If they can be linked to mass deaths, I am sure people will get more scared of those than they are now.
Back on topic, Is the statement "It must be safe because exhale it" deserving of equal airtime?
I think this is a dangerous precedent for media coverage of science.
If there is any doubt in your mind, you never read what Feynman had to say about Millikan's experimental results for measurement of elementary charge. Some scientists cheat at science, so they can be more popular. And this is why we don't trust conclusions until after they are independently repeated.
If someone were to produce real, verifiable experimental data that defied the political consensus, they would be blackballed from explaining them on BBC.
Bill Nye has to keep debating because the available data are not so unambiguous that princes and paupers could each reach the same conclusion independently, even with all their personal biases. He even debated Ken Ham over the origins of species, after all. True scientists must have the courage to stand up and repeat, over and over, what they have found--via collection and analysis of evidence, defended before their peers, and verified by their rivals--to be the truth, as long as there is even one person that still doubts. And the purpose is not to browbeat that last man into submission, but to assist them in devising an experiment sufficient to quell that doubt.
Silencing the ongoing debate, even if one side or the other is obviously delusional, is completely contrary to the spirit of science. With science, anyone is allowed to question anything, and the worth of the question is determined by the evidence gathered, not by an editorial board.
I think there is a general misconception about what this shift in approach by the BBC means and why it is significant.
Scientific debate does not unfold in the same way as political debate, where it is plausible to have two, equally valid "sides" to compare with "benefits" and "disadvantages". Scientifically defensible conclusions drawn from repeated experimentation are complex to understand, difficult to explain to the layman, and require rigorous experiment design and adherence to statistical methods. These are not bite-size headlines, and that is why responsible news sources would do well to coach their proclamations very specifically.
Proper scientific dissent sounds more like "your results were not repeatable in my lab setting to the same degree of certainty" and not at all like "you scientists are liars with an agenda paid by the political establishment".
The BBC is not shying away from covering valid-but-unpopular research. It is simply choosing not to seek "opposing opinions" that are unsupported by statistically valid methods of research.
I would agree with that. It's an extremely rare science that has only 2 sides. Real science should be seen as a bunch of teenagers arguing about the best superhero, only with lots of data and formulas and the like. Convincing someone of some theory's truth does not happen more than once a year at most universities (except maybe with grad students). And there is money involved in that convincing, make no mistake about that. There has to be. And of course, the discussions last for centuries.
Climate science has lots of sides in reality. There are many, many problems and the only thing that's really quite agreed upon is that we've had warming for 150 years. Yes that it's has something to do with increased levels of co2 is pretty agreed upon, but not what caused what, for example, or how much of a feedback loop it is (see further on).
Keep in mind what climate science is. Essentially it's a very, very new kind of science. We are measuring reality, using statistical "best fit" rules, and assuming they represent natural laws that will continue in perpetuity. And then, of course, mix that in with what we know to be true (e.g. locality of changes), until you arrive at something that vaguely looks like reality.
And like any science "the consensus" is "whatever works". Now keep in mind that this is not necessary works in the traditional sense. It is that, but there is some truth to the fact that climate science is getting a lot of funding within academia (one part of it is, as usual, and it's not the part improving the statistical methods)
But of course, there's lots of problems here
1) is this approach valid at all ? Getting statistical approximations of laws and treating them as holy cows ... (e.g. one could make the observation that the IPCC ARs, as far as we know, are wrong. If you go back to 1990, take AR0's "95%" values for global temperature for their best fit ... well, we're outside of that range. Same for AR1 and AR2 and pretty close to the edge for AR3, so it's not like there are no reasons to question the whole thing).
2) does statistics apply to climate variables at all ? Specifically temperature is a big problem here. (Statistics cannot be -correctly- applied to variables that don't follow the central limit theorem. Correctly is in there because most of statistics can be blindly applied to any time series, it just doesn't predict anything. There is the small issue that there was some historical work stating that statistics won't work on climate, and nobody's bothered to revisit that. Temperature is gasses does not follow the central limit theorem, so measuring the "average" temperature of a gas is not possible in the general case).
3) Even if this approach works, it doesn't predict stuff it hasn't seen before, because of how it works. This is not science that's coming from first principles (and even that has limits to how far it applies, e.g. extreme cold or heat). But climate science is worse than other sciences where this is done because the theory is really only based on the values seen. The problem here is what consists of a "new" situation ?
If temperature were to determine what is "normal" then we've been in a new situation at least a few weeks on a yearly basis for 150 years now. And likely there is some point where it really will be a new situation.
There are known problems with this approach as well, like it is considered "normal" that this theory, being based on 150 years of data, predicts unbounded warming. Given the method, I agree that this is normal, but it's also obviously wrong. No matter how far in the future, climate is never going to warm to 1000000 degrees surface temperature, even though the climate models do predict that will happen. A learned rule that has been "trained" on only-ever-warming climate keeps going up.
4) And of course, the popular explanations for climate change are wrong. Climate science DOES NOT claim that increasing CO2 exhaust will cause the athmosphere to heat, well it does, but that part is not having much effect at all.
What it really predicts is that a little bit of warming will cause more warming. E.g. little warming -> more water vapour -> more athmosphere insulation -> a little more warming. Feedback loop. Now repeat for water, methane, co2 itself (non-human co2), co, ... That, not human co2 exhaust, is what is claimed to be causing global warming.
What I also don't understand is how climate agreements are considered reasonable. Lowering co2 output will only slow down the warming, it won't stop it even if humans stopped co2 output entirely. Which brings the question : what do all these climate accords achieve ? They achieve nothing, even if they somehow magically start working. A delay of a decade at best, maybe two or three if you're wildly optimistic.
It may mean that cooling will work similarly (yes the theory does not predict cooling ever, but any sane human being knows perfectly well that the planet will cool again no matter what we de, look at the 1 million year temperature graph if you're not convinced). If it works like the warming did, then once it starts cooling a little bit (like 0.1 degrees should easily do it), that by itself will cause more cooling. So the graph will reverse at some point, and the reverse, the temperature drop, should be as unstoppable as warming has been.
5) Now the kicker is when will this reversal happen ? Historically it has been up to ~3 degrees warmer than it currently is, and then we consistently saw rapid declines of about 10 degrees ("rapid" meaning a millenium or so, but with most cooling happening in 2-3 centuries). This has happened dozens of times in the past. Problem is, we don't know what causes it. For a few cases we can point out simple things that change at the hinge point, but they never explain a 10 degree drop.
It is pretty unique that we have had a temperature rise at anything but the very last years of an interglacial. Usually when the temperature was warmer than it is now, it shot up to warmer than it is now at the end of an ice age, and then stayed high for millenia, to suddenly drop again.
But we are at the end of an interglacial. An ice age is "about" to start (again look at the 1 million year temperature graph). Now when will that happen ? Well, somewhere in the next few thousand years would expected. But if you did what climate science does, you take historical lengths of interglacials and create a 95% confidence interval, we're already in that interval (though early times, not yet at the mean, the mean is about 280 years in the future, with a standard deviation of a little over 3 centuries. But there certainly have been interglacials shorter than the current one, meaning there would be nothing remarkable in the graph if it started today).
> Silencing the ongoing debate, even if one side or the other is obviously delusional, is completely contrary to the spirit of science.
A news outfit does not have the power to silence scientific debate. Real, productive scientific debate does not occur in 5-minute talk show segments. That's just entertainment. Scientific debate occurs in less glamorous venues, such as conferences, journals, and labs. And it involves a great deal more time and technical detail than what you get on a news show. News organizations don't control those venues.
Now, one can of course raise valid concerns about process in the scientific community. Much has been written along those lines as of late. But that's entirely separate from the BBC's policy, and out of the scope of this discussion.
News influences politics. Politics influences public policy. Public policy influences funding. Funding influences research. Research influences news.
A news outlet does have the power to silence debate. Ask any "true Scotsman" libertarian (viz. not Paulians or Tea Partiers) during any election season. Ask Occupy Whatever about why no one actually addressed their grievances. Ask any number of people with legitimate but unheard issues why 24-hour news channels will choose to report deeply on shallow topics rather than broadly on a wider variety. Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone haven't accumulated vast media empires because they want your voice to be heard by more people.
The actual scientific debate is not going to appear on air. The news segments would simply get people interested in learning more and contributing in some way. If you shut the consensus contrarians down now, you may be stifling future climate efforts, because the research industry has to continually struggle for funding for anything that does not have a direct and obvious military application. Any mention of science on radio or on television or in popular fiction is an advertisement for more science. The crackpots and loons give the scientific establishment an acceptable target to talk down to that will not offend the general public. That informs the public while recruiting them emotionally.
It is a rhetorical tactic, essentially making a strawman of an actual person, and not true argument, but I'm not certain rational, scientific personalities realize that the majority of research is ultimately funded by folks who couldn't tell the difference between a beaker and an Erlenmeyer flask if you make them watch Breaking Bad from start to finish. Someone has to be the pitchman for legit, non-politicized research. Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking can't be the only science celebrities.
You really do want as many actual researchers in front of the cameras as you can get, so you can find out who can both defend a thesis before their peers and effectively convey understanding to laymen. You want people to be able to name more professional theorists and researchers than Kardashians. It doesn't advance the body of knowledge, but it helps pay for salaries and equipment, and helps fill the education pipeline to keep retirement and emigration from endangering ongoing work.
Everyone has a vested economic interest in his own career.
Every industry has participants who are just in it for the money. But that doesn't mean some of those people are not also passionate about research and scientific integrity. On television, truth doesn't matter. All that matters is whether you can command people's attention.
Just like advertisements for prescription medication, the goal is not a direct sale. The goal is to convince the viewer to learn more from someone well educated in the field. And then get their money.
My hypothesis is that opportunities to challenge establishment thought increase as new sources of funding flow into an industry. For software, more funding means more startup failures, and more disruptive tech that somehow avoided failure. For research, more new funding means less reliance on the university hierarchy or government grant proposals, and enough new publications that not even Elsevier could possibly swallow all of them.
Were every network to start doing what the BBC is, their unfounded opinions would cease to be heard, Bill Nye wouldn’t have to keep debating them, and maybe, just maybe, they’d all just go away.
Not bloody likely. Now you've just put them in the same group as the other conspiracy theorists, and given them the additional (legitimate) ammo that "the establishment is censoring them".
For any given fringe view that the media properly marginalizes, some people will go on believing it. But that doesn't mean the number of believers (or undecided people) will stay the same. It's quite possible, and in my view probable, that reducing airtime from fringe views will substantially reduce the number of people who hold or lean towards those views.
You're at least partly right, but I would argue the conspiracy types are already well acquainted with "alternative" news sources (infowars, Coast to Coast, random bloggers...).
Additionally, (and this is just a personal feeling), but something about top-down "reducing airtime from fringe views" feels very wrong. Who decides what a "fringe view" is? By that rubric, Creationism is perfectly legitimate since it's widely held.
I think we'd all be better served, morally as well as practically, by letting the loons be loons and let people make their own decisions rather then trying to explicitly control who gets airtime. Bring on the denier and let them get annihilated in a debate against someone who knows what they're talking about. This has the benefit of not invoking censorship boogeymen (which may or may not actually exist) and doesn't hand over the "we're being oppressed" card to them.
Climate change scepticism is not a fringe view, but moderately widely held. It is hard to believe that those people will suddenly support environmentally literate policy. They will just switch to a different set of trite anecdotes to prove why nothing should change.
Sorry, I meant "fringe" conspiracy theories. Otherwise my point was kind of off topic to bring up. Imagine if that "vaccines cause autism" crowd didn't get air time. Perhaps they wouldn't get personal exemptions.
In fairness, and quite unfortunately, I don't think we can call climate change deniers a "fringe." A substantial proportion of the American public denies climate change in one way or another, be it denial of anthropogenic climate change, denial of climate change altogether, or dismissal of the significance of climate change. I don't have the latest figures in front of me, but in the not-too-distant past, deniers polled as a slim majority.
The tide seems to be turning, but until quite recently, it was an article of faith (literally, on occasion) among many conservatives that climate change was a liberal-media bogeyman. This was true even among the more respectable conservative publications and commentators, and not just the wackos.
> In fairness, and quite unfortunately, I don't think we can call climate change deniers a "fringe."
In terms of science we can.
In terms of politics or society we can not, but we can distinguish political reporting from science reporting, even on a scientific issue which has political implications.
Sure, but I was responding specifically to the idea that the denial camp (amongst laypeople / GenPop) is a "fringe." In some ways it's dangerous to think of it as such. It's a significant movement with some significant capital behind it, from energy companies and other lobbies.
By no means am I suggesting it's a legitimate movement or a non-fringe movement amongst scientists, or that it deserves equal airtime. The viewpoint is largely bunk. Its adherents, however, are legion.
As "fringe" was defined in the context used upthread in the phrase "fringe conspiracy theorists", it means specifically "ones that don't get [presumably, mainstream] media attention". So, the discussion here is largely about making climate change denial into a fringe by that definition.
There certainly are other senses of the word "fringe", some of which they fit, others of which they don't.
I guess this dates me as an old guy, but it seems like there could be an interesting back story for the terminalology change from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change". Who was the group that first started advocating for this? When did it first appear in print in a scientific journal? When did it first appear in a newspaper or on a TV show? When did it first in a government or UN document? When did politicians start using it?
There's a paper by Alan Robock titled "Internally and Externally Caused Climate Change", published in the journal of the American Meteorology Society in June 1978, and an earlier paper, "Climate Change Over the Polar Ocean" by Vowinckel and Orvig, published in Meteorology in January 1966, and, best yet, an even earlier paper, "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change", by Plass, published by Johns Hopkins University ca 1955 and funded by the US Office of Naval Research. The latter paper can be read here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2153-3490.1956.... (there is a "get pdf" link on the right.)
This has got to be the stupidest claim in here. What the fuck. But maybe I'm wrong. So ok, so you've made a claim. Do tell how I can reproduce climate change ? I do not have a spare planet to fuck around with.
Just so we're clear what will not be accepted as an answer : here is an experiment as to how the greenhouse effect behaves in a gas volume. You see a greenhouse effect starting at zero concentration. 90% of the effect is visiable at 300ppm. 95% of the effect is visible at 350ppm. (co2 forcing is exponentially decreasing, and levels off at around 350ppm to eventually converge (at 100%, or 1000000ppm) to about 6% higher than it is at 350ppm) [1]
And yet athmosphere temperature is not behaving like this at all. Warming is accelerating, not slowing down (350ppm was reached in 1990, currently at 415-420). Yet warming is accelerating. Given that this is pretty much the only experiment you can do without a spare planet, and it obviously is very different from observed behavior, this will not be accepted.
So do tell : how to reproduce climate change ?
Alternatively: what is the conclusion if "steps leading to said truth" cannot, in fact, be reproduced ?
[1] IPCC AR3, Chapter 6: Radiative Forcing of Climate Change. (section 6.3.4) Total Well-Mixed Greenhouse Gas Forcing Estimate
>Options: A) The scientific method B) Organized religion.
So my comment was re: scientific method, "To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning"[1]
Not an advocation that global warming is provable in a closed environment - simply that climate data can be gathered and interpreted in a way that's reproducible.
Also, as you mentioned, warming is accelerating. The most common and destructive claim of climate change deniers is that our current conditions are part of a natural, precedented fluctuations in the earth's behavior. Reliably obtainable scientific data suggests otherwise.
> Alternatively: what is the conclusion if "steps leading to said truth" cannot, in fact, be reproduced ?
Then it can't be taken as fact, but as as tentative, fallible suggestion. This is where most religion diverges from science, which is the point of my previous comment.
This is absolutely not what is meant by reproducible. But the problem is that climate science fails even your relaxed standard.
> Also, as you mentioned, warming is accelerating. The most common and destructive claim of climate change deniers is that our current conditions are part of a natural, precedented fluctuations in the earth's behavior. Reliably obtainable scientific data suggests otherwise.
No I mentioned that experiments and actual observed data diverged. Yet you don't even care that this happens.
Reliably obtainable scientific data suggests otherwise ? Ah ... let's take this claim, shall we ?
If you take IPCC AR0, AR1 and AR2, take their "best" prediction and 95% interval for the global temperature anomaly you will note that we are currently outside of that 95% interval.
So these theories made 5 predictions (in the 6th report you will not find a prediction anymore ...), and every testable prediction they made failed within the decade (the last 3 reports don't have data for a decade available yet).
So while I'm not defending climate deniers here, can we please keep these little details in mind ? This is what you describe as "reproducible" and this is what things like the Kyoto accords are based on.
Like reproducible, reliable means something entirely different in my book.
> Then it can't be taken as fact, but as as tentative, fallible suggestion. This is where most religion diverges from science, which is the point of my previous comment.
As I said climate science does not satisfy this standard. I hope you can see that this casts doubt on just how different from religion it is ... especially popular opinion on the matter.
Here's how climate science works:
1) we see something very strange happening to measures of temperature in the last 150 years
2) let's do experiments ... they don't match reality
3) let's do statistics on these measurements ... doesn't work (in fact Chaos theory was based on this work) (this is 1960-1970)
4) Let's ignore our findings in 3, take invalid statistics, make "best" approximations of how the data evolved in the last 150 years only and treat the result as gospel
5) Since the error bars on those "best" approximations are extremely inconvenient, let's just ignore them.
6) statistically inferred rules that are inferred over a warming period only show that it will keep warming ! And of course they do show a limited correlation between co2 increase and warming.
7) We actually don't have any better theory, so let's actually use this. Let's erase normal error bars theory (because they give unreasonably large error bars, far bigger than the observed changes), and just run our model 100 times and where 95 time it ends up that must the be 95% certainty interval, right ?
8) Half the world catches up to it and it becomes a defining theory of politics. So now make sure half the world's idiots make idiotic claims in favour of this theory, the other half make equally idiotic claims against it.
Let's give a bit of a summary here. Mathematically speaking, climate science is a load of bull. There are so many problems with it, it's bad, bad, bad, bad theory. Very bad. There is no reproducibility. There are serious problems with the measurements they start with. Their "cherry-picking" of statistics theory, and regular mixing in of nonsense is ...
So why is it the "consensus" ? Well, very simple : it's by far the best explanation we have for the observed warming.
But given just how this theory works, let's not pretend it is anywhere near "reliable", not the measurements, not the theory, it is also not "reproducible" at all. It's merely the best we got.
Nitpick: I think organized religion (a group of people) could be more easily compared with "the scientific establishment" (also a group of people) instead of with "the scientific method" (an abstract idea).
I've known a few people who have actually suggested that we start doing this.
People think athiesm is far too prominent, but I think we live in a time in history that will be viewed as more dogmatic than any other. "Science" is no longer a method of discovery. It's now a new God.
More like astroturf dissent is no longer going to be subsidized by a stupid journalistic policy. Yes it's a victory for real science. If climate deniers want to debate the real science that door is wide open as always.
From the article, it looks like the BBC reporters were actually going out of their way to ignore the opinions of interviewed scientists and went to fringe groups to gain a contrary opinion. If a contrary opinion is so difficult to find maybe that would have been the better report.
Dissenters should be given air time proportional to the quality of the counter arguments they put forward. "Nuh-uh" isn't a very strong counter argument.
But science isn't about someone agreeing with a theory. If you can disprove a theory, great. Otherwise no one really cares about your flawed arguments.
But science isn't about someone agreeing with a theory.
Those who advocate blocking dissent with theories in the name of science would disagree. Apparently, it's more important that people agree with a body of work that is largely impenetrable than it is to question it or disagree with it.
But who is talking about blocking dissent? Not giving airtime on the BBC is blocking dissent, now? Should they also give airtime to the flat-earth society?
The BBC is not a scientific journal, it's a mass-media organization. It's not its job to promote every little scientific theory.
I didn't downvote, but your comment is not pertinent.
The post to which I replied ironically stated that this is "a great victory for science", to which I responded that these people are not really participating in science (but rather playing politics).
Your comment on banning Songs of Praise seems to imply that I'd like all non-scientific TV to be curbed or banned, which is a straw man argument.
I have read US history and not once did religiously motivated dissent to scientific consensus result in the advancement of science or the advancement of any other measure of human progress.
Religiously motivated dissent is, by a large measure, what started what became the US, and the importance of dissent is ingrained deeply in the ideological base of the US republic. Also, you can read on abolitionist movement and their religious motivations (science was playing racial theories with gusto at that time and continued for some time even after the slavery was abolished). So your rosy picture of triumphant march of science against the forces of darkness is somewhat misguided. But the point is not even that - the point is the cheerfulness with which people meet the proposition of quelling of the religious dissent is positively frightening.
Religious dissent has no empirical anchor. Religious truth endlessly changes and shifts amorphously with time and culture. Religions splinter and fragment, all the while furiously denouncing the other's moral depravity.
Science, on the other hand, holds provisional truth, tests, makes predictions and steadily converges.
As for slavery and racism, one would expect that social and cultural forces would be the primary drivers for beliefs about races. Only secondarily would religion and/or proto-science be used to justify those beliefs, unless or until either system developed rigorous empirical means capable of supporting or undermining those beliefs. Christians supported slavery by using biblical references to Ham's descendants being cursed to be servants. Attempts to use science to support racism and slavery were used as well, of course, but flawed in the way the practice of science itself was flawed at the time.
Neither religion nor science can claim any credit for ending slavery, that credit can only go to evolving social views. Steven Pinker argues that increased empathy for slaves and moral revulsion for slavery was catalyzed by a number of best-selling autobiographies of slaves. The growth of empathy, the rejection of slavery and gradual but steady rejection of all forms of violence in societies is well documented in his "Better Angels of Our Nature".
True. But what of it? Not everything in life should or can have an empirical anchor, it is only a tool, and with limited usability at that.
>>> Religions splinter and fragment, all the while furiously denouncing the other's moral depravity.
Not all religions denounce each other's moral depravity, far from it. As for splintering, so do scientific schools or art schools or sports teams or companies, what's wrong with that? It's the market of ideas, like any other.
>>> As for slavery and racism, one would expect that social and cultural forces would be the primary drivers for beliefs about races.
As if religion is something that is orthogonal to social and cultural forces instead of being integral part of it? If you read _why_ religious abolitionists were abolitionists, you'll see plenty of purely religious reasons for that. Of course, not all religious people were like that - there's dissent in science, and dissent in religion, people love to dissent and the question of racism was not an exception.
>>> Attempts to use science to support racism and slavery were used as well, of course, but flawed in the way the practice of science itself was flawed at the time.
Science at the time was no different than science today. It wasn't flawed in any specific way it is not flawed now, and we did not do anything different today than we did back then. People changed, and some things that were done back then are not considered fit to be done today. But it's not because science discovered something different - it's because the morals changed. And science has very little to do with morals, unfortunately.
>>> Neither religion nor science can claim any credit for ending slavery, that credit can only go to evolving social views.
Again, if you talk about social views, religion is much closer to what we understand by social views than science.
>>> gradual but steady rejection of all forms of violence
I would be hard pressed to find any scientific and empirically supported argument for rejecting violence and increasing empathy. In fact, if you look in the empirical examples from the nature, abhorrent violence and terrifying behavior is the regular occurrence. However, if you look at religions, you can find plenty of argument for empathy and non-violence. Of course, not in all religions, but at least you can find some sources for these ideas there, while you find very little in the empirical science. Same goes for other ideas that underly most of western society, such as Protestant work ethics, or rule of law, or concepts of law and justice, etc. You may dismiss the religion as stupid superstitions, but be careful not to throw out the whole civilization we're living in that was built on the same basis.
>>>I would be hard pressed to find any scientific and empirically supported argument for rejecting violence and increasing empathy. In fact, if you look in the empirical examples from the nature, abhorrent violence and terrifying behavior is the regular occurrence.
See "Who's Afraid of the Naturalistic Fallacy?" by Oliver Curry for the prevailing view on morality and evolution (in the absence of religious assumptions). No naturalist is looking to nature for morality, we look to our values as beings designed by evolution for sociality, and the argument is as sound as it was back when Hume made it.
http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/ep04234247.pdf
>>>However, if you look at religions, you can find plenty of argument for empathy and non-violence. Of course, not in all religions, but at least you can find some sources for these ideas there, while you find very little in the empirical science. Same goes for other ideas that underly most of western society, such as Protestant work ethics, or rule of law, or concepts of law and justice, etc. You may dismiss the religion as stupid superstitions, but be careful not to throw out the whole civilization we're living in that was built on the same basis.
But why has violence decreased and so much moral progress made while secularism has also increased? Attributing the good to religion even in part just won't work. It seems, rather, that religion is just another cultural phenomena being shaped and changed by more powerful and influential factors in human moral evolution, as Pinker argues in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature
It wasn't religion dissenting with science though, was it? It was one bunch of religious people wanting to not be suppressed by another. The fact that Quakers went to the new land and started oppressing the natives is no triumph of religion over science.
It was not a triumph of religion over science, and nobody said it was. What was discussed is oppressing of religious dissent and cheering to it from the commenters above.
Asserting a policy of not publishing an opinion is quite different from a legislative edict to make an opinion illegal. Just because your opinion is legal does not mean I have to listen to it.
"Another sort there be who, when they hear that all things shall be ordered, all things regulated and settled, nothing written but what passes through the custom-house of certain publicans that have the tonnaging and poundaging of all free-spoken truth, will straight give themselves up into your hands, make 'em and cut 'em out what religion ye please: there be delights, there be recreations and jolly pastimes that will fetch the day about from sun to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream. What need they torture their heads with that which others have taken so strictly and so unalterably into their own purveying? These are the fruits which a dull ease and cessation of our knowledge will bring forth among the people. How goodly and how to be wished were such an obedient unanimity as this, what a fine conformity would it starch us all into! Doubtless a staunch and solid piece of framework, as any January could freeze together."
If someone has an opinion, it should be free to be debated. The only way we can fight ignorance in science is with public debate. If someone wants to deny it, fine (otherwise it's not science) but put the hypothesis on the table and let people actually test it and debate it publicly.
The proves only that the BBC has various political opinions and agendas and is not an unbiased source (as many people surely quote).
For ref, not a denier. I hold no opinion (a perpetual state of 'mu') because I haven't read any papers on the subject. I refuse to confuse media and science.
Edit: the down votes proving that rationality doesn't come anywhere near this discussion...
I think this in the same vein as "We don't interview a psychic every time there is a murder".
If you want the BBC to be unbiased, then you could make the argument they have previously being biased towards climate change denial, given that a 50/50 interview on TV is not representative of the ratio of scientists who believe/don't believe in climate change.
Two things. First, if a vanishingly small number of people hold a particular opinion, reporting on that opinion in mainstream journalism distorts the perception of how marginal that view is. Standard journalistic practice is to get "both sides" of a story.
So, if there is a story on climate change, the standard practice would be to find someone to say "it's not a problem". The problem with that is the reader gets the impression that there is more disagreement in the scientific community than there actually is. This practice makes the article inaccurate. That's what they're trying to fix.
Right but it shouldn't be subsidized and given an artificial equal weight with a vast scientific consensus of experts. That's misleading which is the opposite of what journalists are supposed to do.
That's the problem with media like BBC - airing the view point becomes "subsidizing", and which opinion gets discussed and which is not becomes matter of centralized public policy instead of matter of private preference and market of ideas. Yes, this is the opposite of what journalists are supposed to do - instead of being free agents in the market of ideas, they become essentially a part of executive branch in enforcing public policy. Not a good development.
"which opinion gets discussed and which is not becomes matter of centralized public policy"
Not really. Should they stop and give equal time to the Flat Earth Society every time they show a picture of a spherical earth?
If climate deniers want to continue to get anything like equal time they should earn it, not be granted it. They were granted equal time for a long time, longer than they deserved. Now, after several decades of firing blanks while the evidence supporting anthropogenic global warming and climate change has continued to snowball, deniers have been demoted. Expect to see more and more such demotions unless they start backing up their astroturf and propaganda efforts with real science.
>>> Should they stop and give equal time to the Flat Earth Society
You seem to miss the point. The point is not who deserves and who does not deserve access to the market. The point is the whole questions stated like this is a problem. Everybody should have access to the market, that's the point. If FES wants to be on idea market, let them be there. If nobody would buy their goods - their imaginary idea store would wither and fall into disuse. That's how it should be done, not by some committee that decides who gets equal share of centralized resource and who does not. You talking about "being demoted", that assumes centralized external control of who is promoted and who is demoted. Right now you laud this model because you sympathize to the point being promoted and despise the point being demoted. But this model is inherently not healthy, as it has control of what is discussed and what is not in the hands of the central power and not in the hands of the people. I was thinking people on HN would get why such centralized system is problematic, but looks like the cheerleading for their team obscures their vision.
> You seem to miss the point. The point is not who deserves and who does not deserve access to the market. The point is the whole questions stated like this is a problem. Everybody should have access to the market, that's the point. If FES wants to be on idea market, let them be there. If nobody would buy their goods - their imaginary idea store would wither and fall into disuse.
The BBC is not "the idea market". The BBC is a participant in that market (a distributor that spends resources picking up ideas from idea suppliers, packaging them and bundling them into consumer-focussed idea-delivery products -- shows -- and delivering them to consumers.)
The issue isn't whether the climate denial should be banned from the market, the issue whether the BBC is wrong in a decision to stop stocking it.
By being a special national public tax-funded corporation, BBC is a huge part of idea market, at least in the UK. In fact, by claiming that airing those views is "subsidizing", the parent post acknowledged it. Since UK residents have no choice about if to pay the tax or not, they are essentially forced to support one ideas over the others as a matter of public policy. If BBC were a private corporation without tax financing, of course that would not be a problem.
Journalists arent supposed to involuntarily spread goverment mandated propaganda. If the vast scientific consensus isnt able to make their point even to journalists and have to force them to print state mandated "truth", then maybe, just maybe their point isnt defensible in the first place.
It is hard to sell "we need global socialism or we're all gonna die!" when your whole argument amounts to "when I press this button, the computer predicts the future". Appealing to empty formalities like peer review, consensus and other social-engineerable groupthink mantras simply doesnt cut it if you want money, which is what the warmists are primarily after. They want insane amounts of money and the only way they prove it is by repeatedly asserting their authority to the point that now journalists have to be bullied into obedience.
If someone holds the opinion that onions are actually evil aliens sent from the planet Zorlax to colonize the earth, should we also given them equal airtime? You need to draw a line somewhere, otherwise the airwaves will be full of nothing but crazies and their pet theories.
I’ve never actually seen Songs of Praise, but I would hope that it at least features some good music from time to time. At least that’s enjoyable to listen to.
Not the point. When there is limited air time, it is unfair to give 50% of the time to those whose opinion is supported by <2% of experts in the field.
Well if 97% of those professionally qualified to test it have one opinion, wouldn't it be prudent to hear the opinions and data for the 3% who don't? Sometimes the 97% can be wrong. A classic example of this is the scientist who determined that ulcers within the stomach are caused by bacteria and not stomach acid. His opinions were beaten down by everyone doing research into how to curb stomach acid. As to the climate issue, I have no opinion as I haven't looked at the evidence myself.
That doesn't mean they're right or proposing different hypothesis' is suddenly forbidden. That's not science.
Aristotelian physics was superseded by Newtonian Physics.
That's science.
I'm not suggesting that anyone will come up with a different conclusion but there's no excuse for this stupid dogma and religion getting in the way of rationality.
> That doesn't mean they're right or proposing different hypothesis' is suddenly forbidden. That's not science.
While I agree with you on principle, it would be awkward to give precisely 99.93% of the airtime to scientists who agree we have an impact in global climate change and dividing the rest among all the possible explanations (from the "it's a natural phenomenon" to "God is doing it" and even the "we are not sure the climate is actually changing").
