There has always been a tinfoil hat brigade
unfortunately the internet acts as a force multiplier to them.
Climate sceptic? You're probably a 'Birther', don't vaccinate your kids
A psychologist in Australia - already well known for suggesting that climate "deniers" believe that the Apollo moon landings were faked and that Princess Diana was assassinated - has come out with new peer-reviewed research suggesting that such people also believe that President Obama was not born in the United States, that the …
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Friday 21st September 2012 09:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Yet again more Warmist blathering, as their dreams end in tatters. Shale gas is coming to the UK, Wind farm lunacy is close to ending. The world is not ending and never was, as people realize. Climate Change belief is falling and stagnating.
Warmists can take a seat next to the Marxists, Communists, Anarchists, in the dustbin known as History's losers.
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Sunday 30th September 2012 00:39 GMT FreeBrad
There is no difference between communism and socialism. I wish that the ideology of the left had gone the same way as the mammoth, but unfortunately it isn't; otherwise the three main political parties would not exist. All of them are proponents of big government, public surveillance and authoritarian rule which are key elements of socialism and communism.
How on earth do you think that both communism and anarchism can be dead? they are at opposite ends of the spectrum; And we are a hell of a lot closer to communism than anarchism .
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Friday 21st September 2012 09:16 GMT Chronos
Climate sceptic?
No, I'm just sceptical, end of. Bullshit is everywhere.The first thing I do when faced with one of these "truths" is follow the money. If it leads to one of the usual suspects, well, what's new there?
The best thing you can do for your kids isn't vaccinate them, it's to teach them to question everything.
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Friday 21st September 2012 10:59 GMT kissingthecarpet
Re: Climate sceptic?
Easy to say.
How does your homily translate into action IRL, rather than posting in forums? I don't think you mean "everything" do you? Do you mean just stuff that costs above a certain sum? What about stuff that has no obvious monetary profit motive? Do you teach them to question *you* all the time, and is your answer going to involve coercion? What's the relevance of the answer to a question like "why are you stabbing/shooting me?"
I think that if your children are say, pre-school, its probably better to concentrate on your other, some may say more important parental duties, like getting them vaccinated, educated, fed, clothed, housed etc.
Your statement is so general as to be "I'm for Mum and apple pie".
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Friday 21st September 2012 17:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Climate sceptic?
> How does your homily translate into action IRL etc, etc
I think you need to take the medication.
The OP suggests that teaching the children to think rather than parroting religion (which is pretty much what AGW "science" is at the moment) is pretty important. I can't disagree.
BTW, it is possible to do this *and* innoculate your children.
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Friday 21st September 2012 18:08 GMT Chronos
Re: Climate sceptic?
S: BTW, it is possible to do this *and* innoculate your children.
Precisely. I was prioritising, not excluding.
With regard to the comment upthread, yes, my son does question me and my place in this household. It's his right as an individual to do so and disallowing that would be hypocritical in the extreme. What would also be hypocritical would be to allow him to think that power is fair, so quite often I win by default even if I'm wrong. It prepares him for the real world where this sort of thing is the norm.
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Friday 21st September 2012 12:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
Myths
My favourite myth is the myth that Osama bin Laden "masterminded" the 9/11 attacks. No one has been particularly interested in telling the truth about that one, least of all Osama himself, who soon realised that it was in everyone's best interests for him to take the credit. The sad truth is that he probably wasn't even told about the attacks until after they happened. The FBI have publicly stated that they have no evidence to link Osama bin Laden to 9/11. However, if you read Wikipedia you'll get rather a different story. It seems that many people who know that Osama was not a 9/11 conspirator carefully avoid saying so in public, perhaps so as to avoid offending people. Take Osama's obituary in The Economist, for example, where they link Osama to 9/11 by quoting Osama's claim that he was with the hijackers on the hijacked aircraft, which makes the point quite nicely. I suppose the Osama myth is fairly harmless at this point. In a way I rather like it as a dramatic demonstration of how most of what people believe is total crap, but in most cases it doesn't matter.
However, in the case of climate change, perhaps it does matter.
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Friday 21st September 2012 09:23 GMT Alister
I think you "Full Disclosure" should be twice the size and in bold - it sums up how I feel as well:
"Full Disclosure: Your correspondent is quite OK with the idea that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and further that global temperatures appear to have risen noticeably at the back end of the 20th century - though there is a lot of uncertainty about how much, what they did before records began, etc etc. Nonetheless, I'm personally sceptical - only sceptical, I deny nothing - regarding the accuracy of forecasts and models which predict massively accelerated further warming this century; and also sceptical that anyone knows at all well what the likely consequences of this possible warming would be in terms of sea levels, crop yields etc.
All that said, it is quite possible that the alarmists are right and the coming decades could see serious sea-level rises, crop failures etc. Unfortunately I'm really, really sceptical about the idea that the human race can support any reasonably advanced and wealthy modern civilisation using only or mostly renewable power. The proposed cure seems likely to be worse than the disease. Furthermore it isn't actually on the table - most of the world's governments don't even offer a serious pretence of trying to achieve it, though they are happy to encourage others to choke their economies to death.
So I'm a sceptic."
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Friday 21st September 2012 11:17 GMT kissingthecarpet
I'm sceptical about sceptics
Isn't yours and Mr Page's stance "I don't know". Being a sceptic implies a little more than I dunno, especially if your default position is merely the status quo.
Are you as sceptical about the current state of the nuclear industry as you are about renewables?
All the "usual suspects" who are happy with the way things are just have to say "Ooooh, are you sure? Maybe you should just not do anything different " with their money-amplified voices to create inertia. If the same amount had been spent on research into renewable energy as on nuclear R&D + power stations that produced no net energy gain, since the idea was first spoken of by scientists, perhaps we would be somewhere different now.
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Friday 21st September 2012 09:30 GMT Caoilte
your skepticism is confused
Because you can't imagine how the human race could beat global warming you refuse to believe in it. That's quite normal. It's not rational, but then few people can think rationally about such an abstract subject.
However, as a tech journalist, I wish you were more inquisitive and read the non-military news. We've just opened super-connectors with Iceland (Geothermals) and Norway (Hydro storage). Siemens (Desertec) is building super-connectors to Morocco where solar concentrators offer a rare-earth elements free method of generating vast amounts of electricity.
Against the Grain just broadcast a really good interview with Gar Lipow on this subject, where he goes into some detail on the technological solutions we already have and how we could pay for them here and in the global south. Simply put, If there was cross-border state investment in expanding the projects I described above we could generate 70% of our energy from renewable sources in less than twenty years.
http://www.againstthegrain.org/program/607/tues-91812-halting-global-warming
Also this week's Analysis explored the topic of political prejudice in some detail and why people have trouble adapting their opinions on these subjects
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mqmyw
Both would be worth while listening to and would offer a lot more of value to you and other readers than the sort of sensationalist pap that I'm more used to seeing in the Metro free-paper.
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Saturday 22nd September 2012 09:16 GMT Caoilte
Re: your skepticism is confused
Exactly,
which is why they need to be balanced by other sources (wind) across a continent wide smart grid (where the productive day is also longer) and storage solutions can be made use of (eg Norwegian water storage, but there are other ways).
The Against the Grain podcast explores this a little bit.
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Friday 21st September 2012 11:22 GMT kissingthecarpet
Re: MMR vaccine deniers?
Yes, but only the crazy New-Agers, not scientists who after all first understood the problems that humans are causing the earth. If a massive science consensus hadn't forced it upon them, not one politician would give a moment's thought to environmental damage of any kind.
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Friday 21st September 2012 12:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: MMR vaccine deniers?
Not entirely correct.
There were/are two types of people (or two objections) to the MMR. The first one was that is causes (or may increase the chance of) autism (based on dodgy stats). To which the reply was, quite rightly, that even if true the risks from not having the MMR jab still outweigh the risks from having it.
However, most people I know who were moaning about the MMR were not talking about MMR vs no jab risks, but the MMR vs individual jab risks. I.e the risks (even slight) from having a multiple jab versus having individual jabs administered at the correct ages (as they used to be). People were complaining that there was (albeit small) and increased risk in illness from combining medicines and that the government were not giving people the choice of the individual jabs (to save money).
But everytime somebody said "don't want MMR" people always assume that they are idiots because they think it means having no jabs at all - not true. Anyway just thought I'd try to clarify things a bit (not sure if I did mind - must be the cocktail of drugs in my system :-)
Full disclosure: I objected to the MMR on the fact that I couldn't get (even if I paid the GP) individual jabs (only a few places offered it) I found one in the end though.The reason I objected is because my spouse had a bad reaction to a 'mixed' booster from a GP in the past (when they had no reaction to the individual initial jabs) , and I was prepared to pay to not take the risk with my kid.
I am not an MMR vaccine denier, but a mixed injection objector - like my drugs, I'd prefer it if you didn't mix them up :-)
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Friday 21st September 2012 12:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: MMR vaccine deniers?
Let's make it perfectly clear.
Andrew Wakefield wanted people to be scared of combined vaccinations, so he could sell his secretly previously patented single vaccines, thus diverting huge amounts of money from to his own bank accounts.
People were NOT afraid of combined vaccinations before his self-interested efforts.
This scheme failed, and the fraudulent published research was outlined in the BMJ, which was why he was struck off from the Medical Register and cannot now practice medicine in the UK.
He is now skulking in the US, presumably he only speaks English, otherwise he would be inflicting himself on some other more innocent nation somewhere else.
N.B. He is also not permitted to practice medicine in the US, as he doesn't have a licence to practice medicine there either, although it may possibly appear that he would like people to think so.
Now, if I had said this, say 4 or 5 years ago, people would be shouting me down, proclaiming him as the New Messiah, trust me, he isn't even close.
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Friday 21st September 2012 13:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: MMR vaccine deniers?
Perhaps the downvoter would like to take a look here
http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.d22
a key phrase that may interest you is the following:-
" in no single case can the medical records be fully reconciled with what was published. This means that the MMR scare was based not on bad science but on a deliberate fraud"
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Friday 21st September 2012 09:34 GMT Mog0
You count engineer as a scientist?
"As usual, we would advance our preferred term, "boffin", for an actual real scientist (physicist, engineer, archaeologist etc) to differentiate from the trick-cyclists, sociologists and other marginal eggheads."
Engineers are not scientists, they are a whole different stream of profession in their own right. I am personally a software engineer and am proud of the term, which means that companies like BT calling their techs who come round to your house with a screwdriver "engineers" annoys me after I spent 4 years at a top university studying to become an engineer.
The best description of the difference between an engineer and a scientist I've come across is, an engineer learns in order to build things and a scientist builds things in order to learn. The overall aim is different. Science is about learning and engineering is about building something useful (using knowledge that has come from science).
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Friday 21st September 2012 13:51 GMT Alister
Re: You count engineer as a scientist?
@Mog0
>>>>"As usual, we would advance our preferred term, "boffin", for an actual real scientist (physicist, engineer, archaeologist etc) to differentiate from the trick-cyclists, sociologists and other marginal eggheads."
>>Engineers are not scientists, they are a whole different stream of profession in their own right. I am personally a software engineer and am proud of the term, which means that companies like BT calling their techs who come round to your house with a screwdriver "engineers" annoys me after I spent 4 years at a top university studying to become an engineer.
From the passage that you quoted, Lewis is saying that the term "boffin" should be used to describe scientists and engineers, etc, rather than those of the alleged sciences like phsychology. He is not, to my mind, suggesting that you call engineers scientists, anymore than you would normally call archeologists scientists.
And I find it laughable that you think that four years at Uni makes you a better "engineer" than someone who works on hardware using real tools...
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Friday 21st September 2012 14:58 GMT Keith Langmead
Re: You count engineer as a scientist?
There are plenty of proper engineers who'd scoff at you calling yourself an engineer. In any other profession it takes more than just going to Uni for 4 years to call yourself an engineer, you have to be properly accredited as well. It's only within IT that we get to blindly call ourselves engineers, and I believe the other professions hate us for it since it devalues the work they do.
IIRC while they might just be doing screwdriver jobs in your house, proper BT engineers have to do a LOT of training to get that title, and are arguably more entitled to use the name than a programmer.
Hell, I've spent 12 years actually working in and with computers, but just coding on them, and I still feel somewhat uncomfortable about being referred to as an IT "Engineer", though most people can at least understand that term compared to something like Sys Admin.
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Wednesday 26th September 2012 08:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: You count engineer as a scientist?
Agree 100%.
I''m not an engineer, neither are programmers (a perfectly respectable profession), nor are sales people sales "engineers" .
I get the feeling companies would call you Grand Vice Rear Admiral of Servers if they thought your ego needed massaged and it would fool you into taking a shitty wage, especially if you weren't formally qualified and they thoguht they could get away with it....
And people calling themselves "President" in companies, isn''t that sailing pretty close to the wind, legally? Are they tempted to order themsleves a replica police uniform and wear that in the office too? ;)
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Friday 21st September 2012 09:38 GMT David Barr
The science is fine.
And really. The science is fine. It's the 'research' that cherry picks from other bad research. It's the news articles written by gibbering morons, it's the catchphrases that do gooders spread, it's the well intentioned nonsense that teachers fill children's heads with that I have a problem with.
The true parts of climate change are not an issue. The rubbish that has surrounded it is.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
