My Mooney is only reporting on the peer reviewed science. There have been a number of different papers relating to the topic, all of which seem to come to the same broad conclusions.
I always find it interesting to see who thinks the article is utter bunk and who doesn't however. Especially in light of the ongoing research in the area. (Seriously, it's a great topic, and Google scholar is your friend.)
I suppose it’s a natural topic for me to be attracted to; my entire family is full of shrinks. Group dynamics, observational bias and confirmation bias are all topics I am absolutely fascinated with. They combine to create people like this guy. Otherwise sane, rational and logical people who nonetheless reject some aspect of science because it deeply conflicts with their beliefs. Even in fields they themselves pioneered!
That particular case is sad; people accepting his bunk take on science resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, possibly more. But is climate science – or the hype around renewables – any different?
Climate change is real. Humans are causing it. This isn’t a debate excepting amongst those who must believe it because it would otherwise harm their belief systems. And yet this drags on. And on. And on. The zealotry with which some deniers are attached to the concept is frightening!
The other side is guilty too. Wind power? Are you kidding me? Photovoltaic?!?
Please.
We all cling to our beliefs in the face of hard science. We look for any loophole, any crack, any moral argument or unexplained phenomenon. Seven pages in to this thread, and we’ve still not moved past the basic denier argument of "evolution hasn’t yet explained everything, therefore intelligent design must be considered!" (There’s even a whole bit about "fluorescent cats, therefore god.")
Let’s completely bypass the part where "no biology has yet been discovered which evolution cannot explain." No…the mere possibility that something might exist which evolution cannot explain means that Intelligent Design absolutely must be considered as a valid alternative to evolution!
The mind-warping logic is truly stunning.
We could cover virtually anything. Cell phones causing cancer to vaccines causing autism, to "Fukushima was worse than Chernobyl, and all of Japan will have mutant babies OMG." Climate change deniers to creationists, or economic/political/psychological extremists. It’s all bunk. Life isn’t so black and white as we seem to need to believe.
Science is hard. It’s hard to understand, it’s hard to even dip your toes into the many and varied disciplines that exist enough to even be able to reasonably comprehend how very, deeply wrong most of us are about most things. We all have misperceptions and misconceptions. We all have these ingrained beliefs and prejudices.
One misconception in this area over here can cascade into a lack of understanding here, there and there. Suddenly, you become absolutely convinced in the overwhelming wrongness of everyone else because your entire string of logic makes perfect sense…all the way back to the one tiny misunderstanding somewhere in a completely unrelated field.
Tracking these down is hard. They are usually taught us as at a very young age. Identifying these flaws in our understanding of science is difficult. Correcting them may well be impossible.
So all of us – even the most distinguished of scientists – are vulnerable. Even those of us who know that we are and accept that we are. How then are we to overcome our human weakness and move forward?
I don’t have an answer. The only solution seems to be "in aggregate."
Sometimes what is needed for science to advance is for old scientists to die.
This is why I study this. All of this. People. Group dynamics. Psychology. Astrophysics. Evolutional biology…science in general. I want to correct my misperceptions. I want to learn everything I can learn. I want to know as much about the world as possible so that I might better contribute to it.
I don’t want to be one of those people whose greatest contribution to the species was to simply get out of the way.
The interesting part is that this desire in and of itself provides a source of bias and a perceptual filter through which I filter information.
Some days, its just not worth chewing through the straps…