I do not support climate change and I think there are good reasons for not supporting climate change, rising sea levels alone would mean the relocation of coastal cities, harbors and other infrastructure.. While climate change supporters might point out that a longer growing season in some climates is beneficial. The fact is that it is both the the supporters and deniers of climate change that link to blogs like WUWT or Steven Goddard. So if you want to give me a label at all then at least make an attempt to be accurate.
Hate is an emotion that would negatively affect me more then the person I would hate. It has no purpose in life other then cloud the issues.
However like you, I strongly oppose censorship and also try to check the sources for accuracy, I agree there is a lot of "crap" out there, like the irrelevant claim that CO2 is fertilizer.
Now you dismiss science as propaganda, while you are linking to blogs like WUWT or Steven Goddard. The irony is of course that what you are doing is by definition propaganda! [1] (The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.)
For example take a look at Steven Goddard, he is clearly politically motivated. His rants about gun control are not only propaganda, they are contrary to the facts when he is trying to link gun control to Nazi ideology. [2] The fact is that the Nazi's mostly deregulated gun ownership restrictions and automatically granted party members gun permits [3] The Nazi concentration camps were used at first to imprison union leaders and political opponents including liberal democrats [4] large scale imprisonment and extermination of Jews and gypsies came later. He compares the violent crime rate between the USA and the UK and claims that the UK has a higher violent crime rate [5], while the fact is that the murder rate in the USA is more then 3 times as high. [6] If that is not propaganda, what is?
Don't get me wrong I have no problem with you reading Steven Goddard's blog, it is his blog and he can write whatever he wants and he even has the right to lie. And you, like every one else have the right to believe the lies, however a skeptical person would check the reliability of his/her source and ignore the ones that are shown to be outright lies. And a responsible reporter would ignore known liars rather then propagate the lies.
For example Fox news argued in court they have the right to make up the news as they see fit showing they are willing to do so for profit [7] and it should be no surprise that they are wrong 93% of the time when it comes to climate change reporting. [8] Again you are free to watch Fox News, I find Fox News, like Steve Goddard, a waste of time as they have proven they can not be trusted and I would end up on the net trying to check their claims anyway.
If you are interested in information, there are lots of good sources out there. Sadly the Oil Drum which had a lot of very good inside information contributed by engineers working in the energy sector is no longer updating their websites.
In the wide world of Climate Change blogs, people often use SourceWatch in preference to thinking. Here there seems to be just a few blogs that are beyond the pale. It does not stop them quoting from SkepticalScience, though or even on occasion DeSmogBlog which shows an interesting logic.
I have always thought that you if you wrote in a Guardian blog that Steve McIntyre said that 2 + 2 = 4 some readers would explode as a result of the contradiction!
The problem is that Steve Goddard exposes some interesting temperature adjustments, for instance, that the .edu sites just don't mention. Is Goddard just making it up or are the adjusytments happening but people are turning a blind eye?
The "establishment" blogs and the MSM simply do not ask the difficult questions. Without blogs like WUWT and RealClimate some things would never be revealed. For instance, which .edu or .gov blog pointed out that the Cook et al (2013) paper was based on data that said that only 0.3% of climate paper abstracts claimed that man was mainly responsible for Global Warming? How many of those outlets also pointed out that the authors won't release the data so others can check?
The strategy seems to be, dismiss some blogs out of hand then play the plausible deniability card.
You practically gave the answer yourself though I'd change it to 'all the articles are rubbish'.
The main problem with sites such as WUWT, Goddard etc is that they are mostly written by amateurs and, more importantly, read by amateurs. Thus, if the writer commits an error it almost never gets picked up by the readers but instead gets copy-pasted into the 'denier echo chamber' as if it were an undeniable fact with the same scientific value as peer-reviewed science.
There are many examples of WUWT, Goddard and related sites' posts which are utter nonsense, cherry-picks or even blatant lies and often one does not even have to be an expert scientist to spot these. Just a genuine 24/7 bit of skepticism is often enough to spot where an article is (fundamentally) wrong yet rarely do these errors get picked up by the selectively skeptical readers of these blogs.
You seem to answer your own question, at least in part when you say "most of the articles are rubbish." Like Ottawa Mike and a copy and paster said, "Critical thinking is tough." There is clearly a significant percentage of the population that buys into the rubbish you cite, and that illustrates the problem of critical thinking to which the aforementioned have referred.
As a layman, I check a lot of different sources for scientific information and generally stop regularly going to the resources that either a) reflect obvious breakdowns in logic or are b) clearly basing their arguments on political bias. I apply the same rationale to the questions and comments of participants here and do my best to just ignore the people who waste bandwidth. Not always successfully...and there are a few regulars here I check because they're always good for a laugh. Or a snort.
Really, I'd have to say that of all the participants here, there are only two skeptics who spring to mind at the moment-you and Ottawa Mike. Some other people have called you both deniers but I don't see much of that, maybe that's where my critical thinking skills fall short. Of the rest of the opposition crowd, most of them just present themselves as nasty people who just don't have anything better to do than try to get other people's goats and have no real interest in the science. And when they do get somebody's goat as they usually do at this point, blah blah blah. Patience has run out for the folks who constantly quote the rubbish you refer to...aside from that, the general tone of a lot of the commentary is such that if someone talked like that to my face, I would just punch them in the nose and be done with it. Thankfully that doesn't happen much in real life. At all, in fact-at least to me personally. But on the internet, people behave differently...sometimes, they're doubtless just broken down shells of humanity who wouldn't be worth punching in the nose once you saw them in real life.
Is censorship the answer? I don't think so, but it would be nice if the level of science education was better in the general population, which it obviously isn't. I don't know if you would call me a climate change 'supporter' or not, but I certainly dislike it when people link to rubbish and believe in their sophomoric little hearts that they have unlocked the secrets of climate change, although I tend to express my disdain in hoots of derisive laughter which only I hear.
Interesting question about the polar vortex earlier, BTW. Nothing I could add to the discussion there, unfortunately, other than observations that were already made.
Personally, once I've noticed that a source has lied to me, I quit paying attention to them as a source. It is hard enough to figure out if what someone is saying makes sense without having to filter for lying while I'm at it.
Because they are blogs. they are unsupported thoughts. Look up David Icke to see what rubbish can be put online and on blogs. The problem with blogs, even when they show sources, is that they often take those sources and skew the meaning or the data. Using blogs and so on to make your point on a scientific basis is not something those interested in science do. I don;t even use skepticalscience as a source. I use sites like the following:
https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/
http://forecast.uchicago.edu/lectures.ht...
http://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoi...
And so on. also there are two courses on coursera.org that begins today.
Energy the Environment and our Future - Richard Alley
Climate Change in Four Dimensions - 5 different instructors
Sign up for them. Take them. They are free.
Unsupported thought, that is hysterical. These are the kinds of people that need tags on irons telling them not to iron their clothes while wearing them, why packs of desicant need a do not eat label, they need study to tell them the 5 second rule is a joke, they're the kinds of people who seek to destroy a journal rather than see opposing views in print.
Because there is little evidence that you ever read legitimate sites. You read propaganda sites and spread propaganda.
They are to science what the tabloid magazines in the grocery store check-out line are to investigative journalism.
hate it when you link to a blog like WUWT or Steven Goddard, I read Watts most days, and most of the articles are rubbish, but some are good and show the sources, and can lead you on to researching subjects/studies you might not have known about.
Is it because they fear people will stop believing their propaganda, would they prefer censorship.
It's in the handbook. Critical thinking is tough
It's in the handbook. Critical thinking is tough.
