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Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by curryja

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thx for spotting this, i’ve been looking for it. Pretty weak tea.


Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by curryja

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Thanks David, this is a pretty good reading. I no longer worry about peer pressure or research funding, which I regard as a major source of bias. At one point (say for 2 years) i fell for the UNFCCC/IPCC ideology; I no longer do. Politically I am independent, and I don’t have any allegiance to any of the U.S. political parties. I go to a lot of effort to illuminate sources of bias.

Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Brian G Valentine

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Ethics Checklist for Climate “Expertise” in Government and Academia:

!. Do all you need to to get your name out there in the media. Say anything you need to. Nobody is going to put you on TV unless you have some impending disaster to “warn” people about.

2. Slander anybody who disagrees with you. Make abundant use of Twitter for that purpose.

3. Make it clear that people don’t like what you say because of your “politics.” Right-wing “nut jobs” attack you because they think your are pandering to “liberal” politics.

4. Government isn’t going to pay you ten cents for things they don’t want to hear.

5. The only qualification you need to be a “climate expert” is agree enthusiastically that AGW is an impending disaster. So if somebody has the same “degree” as you (say in physics), and they have some “denier” smell about them – they’re a nobody mouthing off about things they know nothing about.

sorry I can’t help myself some days

Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Peter Davies

Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Don Monfort

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Judith’s ideology is probably very much like yours and the rest of your crowd, davey. It’s her approach to the science that’s different. She spotted the flaws and the dishonesty in the dogma years ago, and she did free herself from the shackles of institutionalized confirmation bias and the fear of persecution.

You can follow her progress by reading through Judith’s Posts from the Past. See if you can spot the epiphany. There’s a nice cookie in it for you.

A couple more years of the pause, another pathetic Climate Inaction Junket or two and you will lose faith, davey. It will hurt for a while. The way you are hooked, it will be a long while.

Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by beththeserf

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Karl Popper in ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol 1,
cites Plato in The Republic advocating a necessary lie of
the metals in men, a ‘noble lie’ that must be told in order
to maintain Plato’s unchanging hierarchical Utopia, a lie
that hopefully future philosopher kings will come to
believe themselves. (OS Ch8.)

Popper argues that if Western open society is to retain
hard won democracies we need to break the habit of
‘uncritical deference to great men.’

Say, does does that include Tetlock’s ‘experts?’

Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Tom Forrester-Paton

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That’s a big part of the problem for Climate “Science”. Until it is reunited with the scientific method, there will BE no “breakthrough science”.

Comment on Pope Francis, climate change, and morality by Pooh, Dixie

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Well done summary. I had forgotten Gnosticism.


Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Rob Bradley

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When will the silent scientists come out? The problem, as Judith states, goes beyond funding (as big as it is). A lot of scientists are neo-Malthusians where they cannot conceive of growing population, non-depleting resources, economic substitution, and wealth-is-health.

Comment on Pope Francis, climate change, and morality by johnvonderlin

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Gareth,
I was baptized and raised Catholic. Though I left the Church, I still refer to myself as an atheistic Jesusite. I think you are letting the Church off too easy.
I was educated to believe as Pope Eugene IV, (1388-1447 CE) wrote in a Papal bull in 1441 CE titled Cantate Domino.
“It [the Church] firmly believes, professes, and proclaims that those not living within the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics cannot become participants in eternal life, but will depart ‘into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels.’ Numerous other Popes have similar quotes attributed to them. For the Church to change this bedrock dogma in my lifetime makes the issues of abortion, contraception, gay marriage and female priests all seem open to a change too.
I was also educated to believe that any interference in the procreative process was a mortal sin. Though I can’t specifically remember the concept of deliberately timing intercourse to avoid pregnancy being discussed, it would certainly seem to violate the concept of “Be fruitful and multiply.” Pope Paul VI in his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae said: “Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means.”
Do you have any evidence that NFP (other than abstinence) was a historically acceptable dogma? Or is it as I suspect just another late-stage effort to salvage some relevancy, like Harp-and-cloud sharing with Protestants and other undesirables?

Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Jim D

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I didn’t see the op-ed itself, but it looks like Lamar Smith was trying to use the IPCC to rebut Obama’s climate statements. He did not do this accurately according to factcheck.org, but at least he did use the IPCC report for expertise, which is a step in the right direction.

Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Brian G Valentine

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I know a number of “silent” scientists in Government, they think AGW is a colossal farce, I asked them to put their name to the Inhofe list, they declined, “didn’t want the possible retribution.”

Who knows, maybe they’re right. I have had my share of it – with no fun defending myself.

Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Peter Lang

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David Young,

I have not detected any political ideology in Judith’s very long record at this blog. …

One of the underlying correlations here is that those who are left of center tend to regard science as pure and a source of authority. Those right of center are very suspicious of the science establishment.

The only way these can meet is for science to clean up its act and become worthy of respect. … Climate science is too arrogant and ideological to admit [there is a problem]. That’s a big problem.

I agree 100%,

I’d add to this: “Those right of center are very suspicious of the science establishment.” Bring a great deal of experience and expertise from real work operations, negotiations, diplomacy, business, finance, engineering, economics, policy advice, and more. The Left of centre tend to be from academia, public sector and other tax-payer funded employees. The right of centre are appropriately sceptical and seem to be doing what science should be doing – but don’t have the massive government funding to put up satellites and build, operate massively expensive computer games.

Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Don Monfort

Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by curryja


Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Jim D

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I am not a subscriber, so I don’t get to see it until some embargo time is over, I guess.

Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by genghiscunn

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Ethics of academia: John Roskam, IPA, on Lomborg’s appointment:

… The reaction of university academics to the Abbott government’s decision to provide $1 million to fund a branch of Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus Centre at the University of Western Australia demonstrates all that’s wrong with Australia’s universities. Their culture tends to be distrustful, insular and choked in unthinking intellectual uniformity. That’s why the number of Australian researchers who rival Lomborg’s global renown can be numbered on the fingers of one hand. Probably the closest any Australian comes to having anything like Lomborg’s international standing in the field of philosophy and policy is the ethicist Peter Singer now at Princeton University. (Singer who supports infanticide in some circumstances was voted one of Australia’s most outstanding public intellectuals. He’s also been awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia, the country’s second-highest honour.)

Instead of welcoming a world-class public policy thinker coming to Australia and to their university, academics and students at the University of Western Australia are outraged. The vice-president of the university’s staff association talked of having the funding revoked, while the student guild launched a ‘Say No to Bjorn Lomborg’ campaign.

Lomborg’s problem is he’s a climate “contrarian”. As the The Guardian newspaper has helpfully pointed out a climate “contrarian” is someone who is not a climate “denialist” but who nevertheless says things that “infuriate” people who believe climate change is the world’s most serious and urgent problem. And the reason we know Lomborg is not a “denialist” is because the university’s vice-chancellor says so. At a meeting last week of 150 angry academics the vice-chancellor attempted to placate his staff by reassuring them Lomborg most definitely wasn’t a “denialist” and his institution “had a history of defending its climate change research staff against the most extreme views of climate change deniers”. (There’s no record of the vice-chancellor defining what he meant by the term “denialist”. Presumably his university doesn’t employ any.)

Lomborg believes humans are causing the climate to change and he believes it’s a problem. But he also believes that much of the money spent on fighting climate change would be better spent on overcoming malaria and HIV/Aids and assisting the 700 million people on the planet who don’t have clean water. These views apparently make Lomborg unfit to hold a position at the University of Western Australia. As yet it’s not clear what Lomborg would have to believe to satisfy the staff and students of the university.
In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom examines how the teaching of humanities has been affected by postmodernism and moral relativism. For Bloom, what’s even worse is that so many academics think the same things and they won’t tolerate anyone disagreeing with them. …

http://ipa.org.au/news/3285/walking-into-a-climate-of-conformity

For the record, I think highly of Lomborg and lowly of Singer.

Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Mike Flynn

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Experts don’t need ethics. In general, they suffer no adverse personal consequences if they are mistaken.
If a person is deprived of liberty for many years, or even executed, on the basis of expert testimony later shown to be erroneous, the expert feels no compunction to return their fee. No accountability whatsoever.

Two experts with two different opinions, both get paid. Ethical? Moral?

Might just as well waste billions of dollars following the expert climatological advice of a mammalogist to build desalination plants. Surely, that couldn’t really happen, could it?

Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by mosomoso

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Is it possible to exaggerate about Australia’s climate charlatans, Brian?

Our national broadcaster’s chief science communicator some years back:

“Robyn Williams: Well, whether you take the surge or whether you take the actual average rise are different things.

Andrew Bolt: I ask you, Robyn, 100 metres in the next century…do you really think that?

Robyn Williams: It is possible, yes. The increase of melting that they’ve noticed in Greenland and the amount that we’ve seen from the western part of Antarctica, if those increases of three times the expected rate continue, it will be huge.”

This was stimulated by Tim Flannery’s earlier remarks: “Picture an eight-storey building by a beach, then imagine waves lapping its roof.”
“Anyone with a coastal view from their bedroom window, or their kitchen window, or whereever, is likely to lose their house as a result of that change, so anywhere, any coastal cities, coastal areas, are in grave danger.”

The year after that last comment Flannery bought Hawkesbury real estate four or five metres from the edge of tidal waters. Five years on, after claiming evidence of dangerous sea level rise was even more solid…he bought the place next door! (Shortly after that he told journos things weren’t quite so bad, and his properties were okay for this century.)

Then there’s the $90 million given by the Labor government for Flannery’s geothermal dream. People in a better mood than me might like to check the progress of Geodynamics, which, but for our Flannery-inspired desals, would probably rate as our greatest air-swing in the climate bungles.

No, this is not a Jerry Lewis movie. Flannery and Williams actually exist.

Comment on Ethics of climate expertise by Pooh, Dixie

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Thomas A. Edison:
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
“Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.”

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/3091287.Thomas_A_Edison

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