I don’t care if we are a laughingstock to a bunch of countries whose claim to fame is artists and musicians who died hundreds of years ago. Some of us laugh at you, too. Your countries are slowly dying, culturally and economically.

Good luck

“A Scientist Replies to Christopher Monckton: Abraham v. Monckton.”

Professor Abraham's presentation can be found at: 

http://www.stthomas.edu/engineering/jpabraham/

It doesn’t get better than this. Trump is one hundred percent skeptic, no pandering.

Say goodbye to the fantasy that CO2 controls the planets thermostat.

Seepage: The effect of climate denial on the scientific community

By Stephan Lewandowsky

Professor, School of Experimental Psychology and Cabot Institute, University of Bristol

Posted on 7 May 2015

The article “Seepage: Climate change denial and its effect on the scientific community” just appeared in Global Environmental Change. The article is authored by me and Naomi Oreskes, James S. Risbey, Ben R. Newell, and Michael Smithson.

It is open access and can be found here.

Seepage: The Executive Summary

We initiate our argument with the known fact that vested interests and political agents have long opposed political or regulatory action in response to climate change by appealing to scientific uncertainty. We know from earlier work that uncertainty is no cause for inaction—on the contrary, greater scientific uncertainty should make us worry more, not less, about the potential consequences of climate change. Alas, those actual scientific implications are often inverted in public discourse where uncertainty often invites wishful thinking and hence inaction. In this new article, we examine the effect of contrarian talking points that arise out of uncertainty on the scientific community itself. We show that although scientists are trained in dealing with uncertainty, there are several psychological and cognitive reasons why scientists may nevertheless be susceptible to uncertainty-based argumentation, even when scientists recognize those arguments as false and are actively rebutting them.

Climate scientists have done an admirable job pursuing their science under great political pressure, and they have tirelessly rebutted pseudoscientific arguments against their work. Nonetheless, being human, scientists’ operate with the same cognitive apparatus and limitations as every other person. In consequence, it is important to be aware of the factors that may cause scientists to take positions that they would be less likely to take in the absence of outspoken public opposition. We refer to this phenomenon as seepage.

We highlight three well-known psychological mechanisms that may facilitate the seepage of contrarian memes into scientific discourse and thinking: ‘stereotype threat’, ‘pluralistic ignorance’ and the ‘third-person effect’.

Stereotype threat refers to the emotional and behavioural responses when a person is reminded of an adverse stereotype against a group to which they belong.  Thus, when scientists are stereotyped as ‘alarmists’, a predicted response would be for them to try to avoid seeming alarmist by downplaying the degree of threat. There are now severalstudies that highlight this tendency by scientists to avoid highlighting risks, lest they be seen as ‘alarmist.’ 

Pluralistic ignorance describes the phenomenon which arises when a minority opinion is given disproportionate prominence in public debate, resulting in the majority of people incorrectly assuming their opinion is marginalized.  Thus, a public discourse that asserts that the IPCC has exaggerated the threat of climate change may cause scientists who disagree to think their views are in the minority, and they may therefore feel inhibited from speaking out in public.

Finally, research shows that people generally believe that persuasive communications exert a stronger effect on others than on themselves: this is known as the third-person effect.  However, in actual fact, people tend to be more affected by persuasive messages than they think.  This suggests the scientific community may be susceptible to arguments against climate change even when they know them to be false.

While those potential drivers of seepage are well-understood outside the context of climate science, it is a different matter to show that they have actually affected the conduct of science. In our article, we illustrate the consequences of seepage from public debate into the scientific process with a case study involving the interpretation of temperature trends from the last 15 years, the so-called ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’. This is a nuanced issue that can be addressed in multiple different ways. In this article, we focus primarily on the asymmetry of the scientific response to the so-called ‘pause’—which is not a pause but a moderate slow-down in warming that does not qualitatively differ from previous fluctuations in decadal warming rate. Crucially, on previous occasions when decadal warming was particularly rapid, the scientific community did not give short-term climate variability the attention it has recently received, when decadal warming was slower. During earlier rapid warming there was no additional research effort directed at explaining ‘catastrophic’ warming. By contrast, the recent modest decrease in the rate of warming has elicited numerous articles and special issues of leading journals and it has been (mis-)labeled as a ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’.  We suggest that this asymmetry in response to fluctuations in the decadal warming trend likely reflects the ‘seepage’ of contrarian memes into scientific work.

Finally, we offer ways in which the scientific community can detect and avoid such inadvertent seepage.

Seepage: Some FAQs

http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyseepage.html

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Okay mineguy, lets debate Jim Steele and his LandscapesandCycle conviction

I received a dismissive, yet challenging, comment from a "mineguy," he claims he can "take down" my arguments with ease.  

Okay Mineguy, I'm game.  Bet you can't! 

I invite you to choose from any of my Jim Steele Critiques (I include the list after my response to your revealing comment.).  Then in a rational constructive manner, point out my errors and produce some evidence to support your opinion - I'd be happy to learn from you, if you can produce some rational defensible evidence.  

Here let me give you an example of how it's done:

 At 3:44PM, August 28, 2016, mineguy's comments: 

“A brief read indicates this WUWTW site is another of the group-think anthropogenic true believers who are incredibly organized to dispute, disparage, and ‘take down’ any sane and objective contrary argument against that line of propaganda. 

Find it at "LandscapesAndCycles"

...

It would be great if others shared their own examples and thoughts.

(* yeah, I’m sure there’s a better term waiting for me to find it)

_________________________________________________________________

Okay mineguy, lets debate Jim Steele and his LandscapesandCycles conviction   September 1, 2016
http://whatsupwiththatwatts.blogspot.com/2016/09/about-jimsteele-landscapeandcycles.html

I received a dismissive, yet challenging, comment from a "mineguy," he claims he can "take down" my arguments with ease.  
Okay Mineguy, I'm game.  Bet you can't! 

I invite you to choose from any of my Jim Steele Critiques (I include the list after my response to your revealing comment.).  Then in a rational constructive manner, point out my errors and produce some evidence to support your opinion - I'd be happy to learn from you, if you can produce some rational defensible evidence. 

Here let me give you an example of how it's done:

 At 3:44PM, August 28, 2016, mineguy's comments: 
 A brief read indicates this WUWTW site is another of the group-think anthropogenic true believers who are incredibly organized to dispute,           disparage, and ‘take down’ any sane and objective contrary argument against that line of propaganda. 
 Find it at "LandscapesAndCycles"

~~~~~

“Group think” -  What’s that even mean in this context?  
You could just as easily complain that, me trusting that men landed and walked on the moon is the result of group think.  
What's wrong with group think based on facts?

... and so on . . .

Sure, the guy's a drive by, but he's been shut down.  And if he comes up with something, that'll that will just give me more rope.

What's the point, exposing their phoniness.

_______________________________________________________________________

Real world usefulness???

I'm shock at the crap that goes unopposed on YouTube and I keep wonder where are the thousands of students who know better, and who spend plenty of time within the media - why can't they devote a little time to confronting these YouTube liar in the comments section.  It's a joke if just a few people are out there doing it.  Then I think of all those college students who understand this stuff and could come up with responses in short order.  Why isn't it happening.  Why has that medium been given over to contrarian brainwashing?

who knows if a "climate" question will come up

but he is always good value for a laugh/cry, if only to peer into the rabbit hole

no not climate change denial - but a film based  on the court case, fought in London's High Courts of Justice between the American historian and academic Deborah Lipstadt and the British historian David Irvine.

David Irvine was notorious for "denying" the Holocaust - Irvine sued Lipstadt when she called him out on his denial

David Irvine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Irving

The trial

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_v_Penguin_Books_Ltd

The article

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/03/david-hare-nothing-but-the-truth-about-a-holocaust-denial

this quote caught my eye

"As Lipstadt says in my screenplay, certain things are true. Elvis is dead. The icecaps are melting. And the Holocaust did happen. Millions of Jews went to their deaths in camps and open pits in a brutal genocide which was sanctioned and operated by the leaders of the Third Reich. There are some subjects about which two points of view are not equally valid. We are entering, in politics especially, a post-factual era in which it is apparently permissible for public figures to assert things without evidence, and then to justify their assertions by adding “Well, that’s my opinion” – as though that in itself was some kind of justification. It isn’t. And such charlatans need to learn it isn’t. Contemplating the Lipstadt/Irving trial may help them to that end."

GOP's 2016 Platform wishful thinking over substance.

Calling out Trump's Rev. Burns and GOP absolutism