Sunday, July 13, 2008

Setting the anti-science smear straight

(Yikes! Last post was on Thursday!)

For discussion: Why is it skeptics of climate change (either of the science or the need to do anything) who are always accused of being anti-science, when 90+% of environmentalists, are just as willing to dismiss the economic science that says, "Hey, here's the most efficient way to handle the problem", so that they can go on advocating ridiculously inefficient policies?

2 comments:

Bob Murphy said...

Good question, Silas. I don't know if you had the stomach to read the whole thing, but in this debate on RealClimate, they basically told me, "Our PhDs mean you should shut up about climate models. Your PhD doesn't mean jack."

(It's comment #82 in particular.)

Silas Barta said...

Thanks for the comment, Bob! I read part of that, but not all, when you linked it on aguanomics. I'll try to get more involved when they talk about it in the future. (By the time I saw it, it looked like the discussion was old.)

I intend to point out that even such "obvious" results from climate science, such as "we need to at least reduce the rate of fossil fuel" involve assumptions so hidden that they don't even realize they were assumptions (e.g. about the costs of various options).