It is useless to argue reasonably with deniers.

They have reasons other than logic for their opinions and beliefs, whether as a protection against literal interpretation of the bible (evolution vs. Creationism/”Intelligent Design) or to protect big business who finance the deniers.

(see “Is America allergic to global warming?” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2041576/Republican-denialism-grows-climate-change-splitting-voters-party-lines.html)

If one remembers all the money spent on confusing the issues around the detrimental effects of smoking, then the global warming “debate” makes more sense. It is not in the energy industries’ best short term gain to support scientific fact, so scientific facts and conclusions must be questioned and confused.

The solution is to stop arguing the truth, it won’t be heard by deniers.

The solution is to work like hell to get younger, and also Medicare/Social Security dependent elders, i.e. the statistically more liberal voters to vote and elect a more reasonable congress to pass reasonable scientifically respectful legislation.

At least Obama won’t veto scientifically accurate legislation. Right? Right? Like the clean air standards issue? Right?

Why are you even bringing politics into this debate? Politics and science don’t mix.

Phil did not bring politics into it. That’d be the politicians who are lying about science who’ve done that. Perhaps you should write to your representatives and ask them to keep their noses out of science instead of whining at Phil.

I also wouldn’t get so offended when people are skeptical about science, even science changes from time to time.

Two points here:

First, scepticism is fine, but the point of view of many Rep candidates is not scepticism – it is denial. A sceptic is open to being persuaded by the evidence. The evidence on – for example – AGW and evolution is overwhelmingly that the scientific consensus is correct. Even if we are wrong in some way, our present understanding is at least a good approximation to the truth. In the case of evolution, a very, very good approximation. We know this because of the amount of study that has been done so far – if our ideas about how the world works in these fields were wrong, we would already know by now. Thus, anyone still claiming to doubt the reality of these phenomena is not a sceptic – they are a denier (or have been duped by the deniers).

Second, science does change from time to time, but so what? It changes from wrong ideas to right ones (or at least, those that are more closely in accord with all the evidence). And some ideas are so firmly supported by all of the relevant evidence that it is unreasonable to continue to doubt them. The only reasonable position to adopt in such cases is to assume that they are true unless evidence comes to light to cast doubt on them. You seem to have no problem with assuming that quantum mechanics is true (or, at least, you have no problem with using a device that uses our understanding of quantum mechanics as part of its fundamental operation). Why not so also for evolution and AGW?

Frankly, I am getting bored of people claiming to be “sceptical” of the science when what they really mean is one of the following:

1. Evolution contradicts what my church leaders have told me, and my faith is not strong enough to survive if my church leaders are wrong, so I therefore reject evolution.
2. If I accept AGW as real, then I’ll have to start feeling guilty about all of the damage I’ve done to the environment so far in my life, and will have to make some changes to do something about it, and these are things I don’t want to do, so therefore I reject AGW.

The deeper version of (2) is “my corporation makes billions annually by selling coal / oil (delete as applicable) to be burnt for its energy. Acknowledging the truth of AGW will hurt my bottom line, so I will do everything I can to keep at least some doubt in the minds of as many people as I can.”

A 2010 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analysed “1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers”.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_controversy#On_the_assertion_of_consensus

The abstract of the PNAS paper is here:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.abstract

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

Put a batch of yeast in a container of sugar/water and they will quite happily breed until their own waste (alcohol) kills them.

Actually, Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a lot more cunning than that.

Once their bacterial rivals are undetectable (i.e., after the alcohol has killed them off), they switch from metabolising sugar into alcohol to taking in the alcohol they previously excreted and using it as a carbon source. This is one reason why the Carlsbergensis strain is so valuable (it is more amenable to doing what we want it to do).

Could not the Earth be said also to belong to dolphins, orang-utans, lemurs, iguanas, bees, sequoias, kelp, diatoms, Euglena, Staphylococcus etc.?

They’re welcome to challenge us for dominance. Until then, no.

I’ve had an additional thought about this comment.

You seem to be saying that, simply because we can exploit the Earth and everything that lives on it, we therefore should do so. What is so unreasonable about respecting other forms of life, and perhaps even granting them a right to exist?

I am not a history expert by any means and this may not be true: but I believe the russians refused to teach generations of children about specific aspects of molecular medicine and biology which were not accepted in the country at the time. According to the fictional book Contact i read by Carl Sagan at least. And that this caused a significant set-back for russian students who sought to become global leaders in an amazingly complex area of molecular and biological science. I do not know if this is true or not…However

Yeah, look up “Lysenko”.

IIRC, he was the top biologist in the Stalinist USSR, and he denied evolution. Denial of evolution therefore became the party line. Lysenko’s agricultural policies led to widespread famine in the USSR before he was kicked out.

They’re welcome to challenge us for dominance. Until then, no.

Staphylococcus (for example) already outnumber us by about 1,000,000 to 1. How much more dominant could they get?

I believe the first paragraph explaining the importance of teaching Evolution, among other subjects being essential to the development of mankind through the development of our next generations education to be amazingly exact.

I am not a history expert by any means and this may not be true: but I believe the russians refused to teach generations of children about specific aspects of molecular medicine and biology which were not accepted in the country at the time. According to the fictional book Contact i read by Carl Sagan at least. And that this caused a significant set-back for russian students who sought to become global leaders in an amazingly complex area of molecular and biological science. I do not know if this is true or not…However

It is easy to imagine and has been countlessly documented that lore/religous law/lies/beliefs/ and many other mutant variations of “reality” have outweighed solid proof for as long as man has recorded history.

The truth must always be told. If the fossil record is proof among other things it should be taught. If a man or a woman or a child believes in something divine it should be discussed. All elements of human Life need to be discussed.

A pointless exercise is assuming you have one, and another pointless exercise is to believe that you know what has absolutely baring or no baring on ANYONES life at all whatsoever. Because there are A LOT of anyones.

And Nigel #146, thank you for the rundown. Its important to know and correctly define the working elements of a position with so many “unknowns”. I hope they are precise enough.

“The evolution vs. creation debate is a pointless exercise that has absolutely no baring on anyone’s life at all whatsoever.

“Oh, and carbon dioxide is PLANT FOOD!!!”

————————–

1. Evolution underpins all the biological sciences, including modern medicine. If it’s not taught it will make a huge difference: an entire generation of kids will grow up indoctrinated with false, pseudoscientific garbage beliefs, unable to participate in advancing human knowledge and understanding of the world we live in nor in creating new benefits for humankind. That’s hardly of no significance “to anyone’s life at all whatsoever”.

2. CO2 is used by plants, but the comment completely ignores huge parts of basic reality. Like that CO2 causes the global temperatures to rise (that’s just basic physics) and that with such increases in temperature there will be more desertification, which means fewer places plants can grow, which means less CO2 absorption, which means the whole problem will get worse, and worse and worse. And along with it huge amounts of biodiversity will either perish or migrate (mostly perish), including due to the acidification of ocean water that CO2 causes. CO2 might be plant food, but the plants we have aren’t even able to take up all the CO2 we’re producing, and the result is environmental devastation, and evermore research continues to show.

Deciding what to do about the climate should be a priority, agreed. But the reason the climate change deniers are deniers has little to do with the desire for debate. After all, they ignore basic aspects of reality and commonly regurgitate terrible fallacies over and over again.

Rather, what I believe is happening is that deniers fall into two camps.

The first is obvious: those who have an interest in burning fossil fuels, like Exxon (who funded the CEI’s “CO2 is life” propaganda and who pressured Bush Jr. to oust the IPCC chairman in 2002, as leaked White House documents reveal). Exxon are just an example; too many others to mention…

The other bunch of deniers have their opposition rooted in ideology. This is why ideologies, and religious beliefs, can be so destructive. Ideologies and religion get people to assume a priori something about the world, irrespective of whether there is any evidence for it. Such assumptions, being a priori, will not budge after this point, irrespective of evidence, facts, logic…

To take an example, imagine some die-hard libertarian. The a priori assumption is that always and in every conceivable situation government influence on individuals is immoral or pernicious. This assumption is unshakable. It follows that since governments attempt to influence people, governments are immoral and pernicious. And from this it follows that their attempts to influence people over climate must be immoral and pernicious,and also deceitful (what else to expect from an immoral government, right?). Therefore, irrespective of any scientific evidence, climate change is simply either plain wrong, or a hoax/conspiracy. Add to this that governments finance scientific research and the whole nonsense picture is complete: governments are paying scientists to lie in order to control the populace. And that’s exactly what the libertarian deniers (e.g. Ron Paul) claim.
After this, I think that probably the personal determination of each denier to be right about this makes them far more likely to believe and vehemently assert anything at all they hear that sounds like a plausible (to them) ‘debunking’ of climate science. So they repeat pseudoscientific nonsense all over each other.

Note that the promotion of science could undermine the thing in two places. Firstly, science stresses the importance of examining evidence before coming to believe anything about the world. That directly opposes the a priori ideological or religious assumptions deniers make. Secondly, a more scientifically literate population will be more resistant to the pseudoscience, whose PR effects have been devastating; it has stalled many an attempt to pass imporant, urgent measures to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Finally, I’ll just point out that it’s possible for one individual to belong to both camps. He/she could deny climate for ideological reasons and profit from it personally as well.

Luke

I mean, really, what is the big deal? The Earth is getting warmer and its cause by human activity. It’s seems like a simple enough idea.

If you want a political or philosophical debate, then debate on what, if anything, we should be doing about it. Now you have an actual debate.

This is mirth-making. There are hundreds of people raising doubts about global warming. There’s even a professional cadre that, collectively, is being paid millions of dollars to spread such doubts. The good news is that there aren’t as many people, or as much money, as there were a few years ago.

But, when it comes to scientifically verifiable doubts, the picture is far different. You can be sure that if anyone had any solid objection, he would be listened to. In fact, if his objection proved true, he probably would wind up with the world at his feet.

So the absence of any such disproof of global warming should tell you no one has any information that will hold up to scientific scrutiny.

Based on history, I can assure you that it will cost a lot less than people though it would going in. Part of the reason for this is that fixing global warming fixes other problems too. But part of it is because certain people hike up their estimates of the cost so far that they can fairly be called fearmongers.

Also, as others have pointed out upthread, doing nothing about global warming will cost a lot more in the long run. Look up the Stern Report from 2006; it’s online. It found that doing nothing will be about five times as costly.

They’re welcome to challenge us for dominance. Until then, no.

Keep an eye on those bees, though. Shifty little b@stards…

That came up in a survey when Howard Stern was still on terrestrial radio. I think at one point slightly more people listening claimed to hate the guy than like him, and when asked why they listen to someone they dislike, they said, “because I want to hear what he says next.”

Here’s where we get into philosophical territory. Personally, I believe that, yes, the Earth is “ours” (I know ownership is a human abstraction, but it’s not like anyone else has claimed the planet, unless perhaps that claim is on file at the local planning office on Alpha Centauri) to do what we choose with. Of course, I also believe that if we choose to make it a barren hellscape, that’d be criminally negligent, not to mention monumentally idiotic.

There are several different answers to this.

1. We are borrowing the planet from our children.

2. What about all the other organisms that live on Earth? Could not the Earth be said also to belong to dolphins, orang-utans, lemurs, iguanas, bees, sequoias, kelp, diatoms, Euglena, Staphylococcus etc.?

3. What about the mice? (Yes, this is a literary allusion.)

Just to be clear, Rep. Paul accepts evolution as a biological process. After all, he majored in biology before attending medical school.

And if he understood his lectures, he should not accept it as a mere “biological process”, but as the unifying cncept that explains every other part of biology.

When he was asked during the 2008 election cycle about his views, he said he doesn’t accept it as a theory,

So, he is anti-reality after all.

with emphasis on the fact that evolution has been used to support a worldview without a creator,

This is a strawman. Evolution means a creator is not necessary to explain the diversity of life that we observe, taking the existence of life as a given. Abiogenesis research attempts to explain how life began, but evolution will have occured even if life on Earth was started by a creator-god.

Very few, if any, atheists have ever suggested that evolution supports the notion of no god. What evolution really did was permit it (prior to 1859, the complexity and diversity of life was often cited as “evidence” for a creator-god).

in the sense of abiogenesis or spontaneous existence (“something” from “nothing”).

More strawman argumentation. Evolution does not need the absence of a creator-god to be true. Darwin himself, in On the Origin of Species tacitly assumed that life on Earth was divinely created, but as one or a few forms in the distant past.

He elaborated on his position in his latest book:

“No one person has perfect knowledge as to man’s emergence on this Earth. Yet almost everyone has a strong religious, scientific, or emotional opinion he or she considers gospel.

This is an outright lie.

That we descended from an ape-like ancestor is as close to fact as anything ever gets. In terms of the fine details, however, scientific opinion is divided and tentative. Conversely, there are some deeply religious folks who are convinced that the sequence of events that gave rise to humans probably matches what science has discovered. The official position of the Anglican Church, for example, is that of theistic evolution (that evolution was essentially god’s toolkit for arriving at the present diversity of life). In the interest of brevity I’ll leave this point there, but there’s plenty more to it than this.

The creationists frown on the evolutionists, and the evolutionists dismiss the creationists as kooky and unscientific.

Well, this is kind-of true, but it fails to acknowledge that – as far as anyone can tell – the findings of science are true. And even if evolutionary theory is in some way wrong, we have enough evidence to know with confidence that it is at least a good approximation to how biology works.

Lost in this struggle are those who look objectively at the scientific evidence for evolution without feeling any need to reject the notion of an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator.

Not really. This includes some of the most involved figures in the “creation vs evolution” argument. They have hardly been “lost in this struggle”. I don’t remember any names off the top of my head, because to me it doesn’t matter whether someone is religious or not, as long as the argument they make is right. Creationists invariably make wrong arguments.

My personal view is that recognizing the validity of the evolutionary process does not support atheism nor should it diminish one’s view about God and the universe.”

This is just a weasel phrase, without any real meaning.

Evolution permits atheism without supporting it. However, accepting that evolution is true (or at least a good approximation to truth) means that Occam’s razor leads one to at least a position of functional atheism (either the assumption that there’s probably no god, or the assumption that whether or not there is a god, it is irrelevant in day-to-day life). The only position of believing in a creator-god that is consistent with what we have discovered about reality is that of theistic evolution, and more specifically the “hands-off” version of theistic evolution in which an omnipotent and omniscient creator set everything up in the beginning and has had no subsequent need to tinker with creation.

Solving the question of the origin of man is not going to fix the economy, or end any of our wars, or close any of the 900 military bases we’ve built in over 150 countries.

Did anyone ever claim it would?

The evolution vs. creation debate is a pointless exercise that has absolutely no baring on anyone’s life at all whatsoever.

Two words for you – antibiotic resistance. (Not the only reason, but it’s a reasonable starting point.)

Oh, and carbon dioxide is PLANT FOOD!!!

So what? It has been shown that, while photosynthesis increases at modest increases of [CO2], larger increases of [CO2] actually decrease the rate of photosynthesis.

And never mind that the rate of plant growth is almost always found to be limited by some factor other than available CO2.