Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Climate mafia, statistics and groupthink

Three posts today that I wish to string together into one theme.

The first speaks to the existence of a climate mafia that has taken over the climate debate and sought to suppress both debate and dissent. The specifics are from Australia but the symptoms are more universal.

The second throws cold water on the claims of veracity from that same climate mafia, using the data supplied by the IPCC to illustrate that the assertion of dogma is not substantiated even by the consensus science it is based upon.

And so to the third post that answers the only remaining question: why does the mafia exist within a seemingly objective field of scientific enquiry? Or, why do so many academics and commentators persist in with the AGW myth despite clear empirical evidence that contradicts its premises and conjecture?

Motl suggests that science operates within the realm of bounded rationality. "Science" is reserved for areas where scientific method is necessary for understanding. "Science" is not necessary within areas of axiomatic political dogma:
  • The case of global warming and equality is completely analogous. The left-wing believers are ready to use the scientific method to analyze all kinds of small questions and phenomena. For example, they may scientifically study the gaugino masses or the squirrels in New Jersey that almost no one outside their narrow field cares about.
  • But in their viewpoint, science has its boundaries, too. When it comes to the fundamental question such as "should the government remove all inequalities between the people?" or "should the government regulate?" or "should the government pay huge and increasing money to the Academia?" or other questions that could directly influence the previous three, there is no room for a scientific debate. The debate is over before it started. These are pre-determined dogmas. "Wrong" answers would make all of their life and work meaningless.
Now, for strictly personal reasons, these three posts are invaluable. For some time I have had to field a perfectly reasonable question from students in my courses:
  • if what you are telling us is the truth, why do so many other professors persist in believing something you have just shown us to be false and/or exaggerated?
The answer is disarmingly simple: my ideological perspective is different from theirs. Thus, I frame the central questions differently, my prevailing constructs are different and my answer to problems, logically, also differs from theirs.

Stasis is premised on command and control, compliance with authoritarian dogma and collective accountability. Dynamism is predicated upon freedom of choice, self-determination and individual responsibility.

Stasis and dynamism are alternative ideologies. One is not more moral than the other: they represent alternative perspectives in the determination of morality:
  • stasis is defined by the collective ...well not all of the collective, just those who are smart enough -- you know, those pigs who run the Farm that all the other animals inhabit -- where science can be an inconvenient truth easily displaced by the correct post-modernist dogma.
  • whilst dynamism is defined by the individual acting as an independent, free-thinker ...which does require political and economic freedom, the whole democracy thing and then requires that people actively engage in the practice of thinking and taking responsibility for their lives.
Stasis pre-dominates because people are (variously) lazy, intimidated, trusting in authority, oppressed or lacking in self confidence and/or esteem. What they are not, generally, is un-educated. Rather, they have been both mis-educated and indoctrinated with the prevailing dogma or predominant paradigm.

Once again, here are Penn and Teller.

And, those leading the world into the church of stasis dogma are the intellectuals, for whom science is a tool of elitist control and intimidation.

If it sounds like a mafia and looks like a mafia, perhaps it is a mafia.