…when they brook no dissent. Thoughts on the climate echo chamber in the Academy.
One thought on “Questions Of Science”
There are some good comments on the article.
One of the main things that strikes me when any alarmist starts talking is that they really haven’t thought about it very much, despite obsessively thinking about it all day long. They think 2 C is going to kill them without pausing to note that the temperature might have gone up by more than 2C while they were explaining that a 2 C rise is fatal.
They will fly to a climate conference in a city whose climate is 10 C warmer than where they live, yet their brains don’t seem to process the obvious real-world lack of consequences in a 10 C climate difference. If their theory is true, all the locals hosting the conference should already be dead.
So they might say that it’s the change that’s important, not the absolute temperature (see the 2 C temperature rise that occurred while they were talking). Yet they almost certainly live in a big city whose urban heat island effect is likely 2 C or more, definitely man made and relatively recent, and a distinct change from the prior climate and that of the surrounding area. Yet if an unnatural 2 C rise is catastrophic, why are people constantly moving to their city instead of fleeing it in panic? Why are many invasive species thriving outside their natural range due to the less severe winter temperatures in the city?
The alarmists remind me of an interview with one of Saudi Arabia’s ministers for enforcing vice, who caused a stir when he said Saudi Arabia was backwards because Saudis unquestioningly believed that other Saudis would never believe something that wasn’t true, so all Saudis believed the same things, mainly that they must be right about everything or nobody would believe those things.
Now that’s a useful way to wire a child’s brain because it’s unlikely that a child knows more than the generational wisdom of their far more experienced elders, but it’s a really poor way to wire an adult brain that is in theory responsible for figuring out what’s true on really important subjects.
Western universities used to be beacons of independent thinking and questioning a consensus. Now they might as well race camels and throw rocks at the devil because everyone they know does that too, and they feel no need to ask why.
There are some good comments on the article.
One of the main things that strikes me when any alarmist starts talking is that they really haven’t thought about it very much, despite obsessively thinking about it all day long. They think 2 C is going to kill them without pausing to note that the temperature might have gone up by more than 2C while they were explaining that a 2 C rise is fatal.
They will fly to a climate conference in a city whose climate is 10 C warmer than where they live, yet their brains don’t seem to process the obvious real-world lack of consequences in a 10 C climate difference. If their theory is true, all the locals hosting the conference should already be dead.
So they might say that it’s the change that’s important, not the absolute temperature (see the 2 C temperature rise that occurred while they were talking). Yet they almost certainly live in a big city whose urban heat island effect is likely 2 C or more, definitely man made and relatively recent, and a distinct change from the prior climate and that of the surrounding area. Yet if an unnatural 2 C rise is catastrophic, why are people constantly moving to their city instead of fleeing it in panic? Why are many invasive species thriving outside their natural range due to the less severe winter temperatures in the city?
The alarmists remind me of an interview with one of Saudi Arabia’s ministers for enforcing vice, who caused a stir when he said Saudi Arabia was backwards because Saudis unquestioningly believed that other Saudis would never believe something that wasn’t true, so all Saudis believed the same things, mainly that they must be right about everything or nobody would believe those things.
Now that’s a useful way to wire a child’s brain because it’s unlikely that a child knows more than the generational wisdom of their far more experienced elders, but it’s a really poor way to wire an adult brain that is in theory responsible for figuring out what’s true on really important subjects.
Western universities used to be beacons of independent thinking and questioning a consensus. Now they might as well race camels and throw rocks at the devil because everyone they know does that too, and they feel no need to ask why.