As I've said before, I don't care if GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz doesn't believe that human beings are causing climate change. It's GM's behavior that deserves our scorn, not the mental states of their executives.
But (per Kate below) the defense of Lutz offered by GM's Tom Wilkinson cannot stand.
God knows what a corporate flack is doing deploying the work of Thomas Kuhn (author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) to defend the troglodytic comments of one of his company's execs ... on an internet message board. Anyone's who's ever read or studied Kuhn knows that ham-handed, pop-culture misapplications of his work are exceeded in number and egregiousness only by abuses of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
And yet. Wilkinson references Kuhn to argue that the theory of global warming is "only a paradigm" and that "paradigms need to be challenged." The alternative, apparently, is a "high-school-level understanding of science" that "assumes that what we know today will be the same forever." Apparently environmentalists could "benefit from a good Philosophy of Science course."
I guess "only a paradigm" is "only a theory" on steroids.
Suffice to say, no one who'd had the benefit of a good Philosophy of Science course would go out in public saying silly stuff like this. What deniers like Lutz are doing is not offering an alternative paradigm -- no climate skeptic questions our basic physical, biological, and chemical understanding of the world. No climate skeptic has pointed to evidence that is inexplicable within the reigning paradigm. Think of it like arguing about why the Red Sox lost -- you aren't arguing about basic ways of viewing the world, you're arguing about which forces and events from your common shared understanding of the world bear the most explanatory power.
Skeptics are arguing within a larger paradigm, and they are failing. While there are many interesting unanswered questions in climate science, the skeptics aren't generally asking those -- they're going after the rudiments, like the fact that human CO2 emissions are driving the process. Those rudiments are well established enough, have enough explanatory backing and evidential support, that rejecting them is evidence of willful ignorance or non-scientific motivation, not brave intellectual independence. (The Renegade Scientist is largely a creature of pop culture myths anyway. Science is collective and incremental 99.9 percent of the time.)
And guys like Lutz don't even deserve that much credit. He's simply refusing to accept the best scientific understanding, not on the basis of any good alternative understanding, but based on the culture-war resentments and anti-regulatory biases of political conservatism.
The reigning scientific paradigm is not The Man, and people like Lutz who question it are not brave renegades. They're politically motivated anti-rationalists. Kuhn's got nothing to do with it.
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Comments
View as Flat
Spence Posted 10:58 am
23 Sep 2008
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cavecanem Posted 12:32 pm
23 Sep 2008
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Steven T Posted 2:04 pm
23 Sep 2008
Rationality is dead. Hyper-real spin rules all. If McCain says war is peace, it must be so. Or not. Who knows? And, really, why even try to sort it all out when there are so many televised fetishes to choose from? One might even come across Lutz on the Colbert Report lauding the sun spot "theory" while insisting that a Volt can get you laid (with a hairy-legged granola chic).
More seriously, Lutz's views are actually pretty mainstream in the American automobile industry. In some quarters he is a full-fledged hero for saying out loud what more PC executives, trade journalists and auto dealers quietly believe: Global warming IS a fraudulent conspiracy against all that is good about American commerce.
Some of this denialism is grounded in highly effective propaganda, but there's also plenty of cognitive dissonance to go around. Human-caused global warming isn't a big problem because if it is the paradigmatic referents of the auto industry must be dramatically changed. It's not just about money and power -- it's also about a fundamental sense of identity. Very psychological. This is a point that many enviros fail to recognize at their own peril.
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Delay And Deny Posted 3:18 am
24 Sep 2008
The problem is SSR not a science argument, it's an argument about the nature of science and how paradigms arise and fall in the scientific community.
In the case of Global Warming however, Kuhn has special applicability, since there is very little real science (physical experiments) involved, and is mostly based on the pre-set notions of the so-called "researchers".
With so little to grab onto, mental concepts that sway with the breezes and models that are tailored to the data reign supreme. Not surprising since even physics has gone down the drain in the same way (String Theory, Many Worlds).
Bottom line, Mr. Lutz is simply balancing the scales.
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Luddhunter2 Posted 8:13 am
24 Sep 2008
Typical of an AGW crackpot to call the kettle black. AGW leaders are irrationally incoherent on their DOOM data, and dogmatic in calling any skeptic over the huge discrepancies in the DOOM data a "denier". Denier = Blasphemer in this usage of the word.
Isn't a hallmark of cultism for cult leaders to make cataclysmic predictions of the end of the world (Al Gore "20 foot sea level rise", and James Hansen - "24-METER rise"!), all the while the IPCC (the most oft-cited "objective" org to study AGW) predicts only 7 to 24 INCHES of rise [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/14/clima ... ]
...get your story straight if your going to get more to join your cult!
Isn't it a hallmark of cultism for the leadership to ignore these massive inconsistencies and discourage questioning the main AGW Fanatic claim: DOOM!!, UNLESS THOU REPENTEST THY BLASPHEMY OF SKEPTICISM OF DOOM!!
Thou shalt not emit carbon! Thou shalt not use energy that is produced by carbon-emitting technology! Thou shalt conserve! Thou shalt recycle! Thou shalt save the planet!
Guess what. The planet is not alive. But people can die. The best thing to save people is TECHNOLOGY AND WEALTH. So you can build a stronger house, and have a TV to warn of storms, and car to evacuate when they come, and enough money to stay in a hotel until the storm passes, and enoguh to buy insurance to replace your house if it is destroyed. That is survival. Going Green is going towards DEATH, not away from it. THAT has been empirically proven, you little green socialist egalitarian anti-technology turd-eater. That's where we will end up if we follow the green logic, right back in the cave, hungry, cold, and picking edible bits out of the turds of bears, who will rise to the top of the food chain because of Ludd policies that reverse evolution.
You're a parasite, Roberts. Though you hate technology, I hope you use birth control, because we don't need more Ludds dragging us down. Just so I'm ready to return to cave life, what kind of leaves work best for ass-wiping?
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GreyFlcn Posted 8:29 am
24 Sep 2008
...get your story straight if your going to get more to join your cult!
IPCC: The projections do not include uncertainties in climate-carbon cycle feedbacks nor the full effects of changes in ice sheet flow, therefore the upper values of the ranges are not to be considered upper bounds for sea level rise.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/11/18/123840/77
-David Ahlport
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GreyFlcn Posted 8:33 am
24 Sep 2008
What makes you think climate change advocates are against technological innovation, and deployment?
http://greyfalcon.net/geoenergy.png
http://greyfalcon.net/solarenergy.png
http://greyfalcon.net/egs
http://greyfalcon.net/ausra
Meanwhile of course, you have the issue of "level market playing fields".
http://greyfalcon.net/coalptc.png
http://greyfalcon.net/nuclear
-David Ahlport
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GreyFlcn Posted 8:34 am
24 Sep 2008
http://greyfalcon.net/electriccars.png
http://greyfalcon.net/plugins7
http://greyfalcon.net/quickcharge3.png
http://greyfalcon.net/10xrange
-David Ahlport
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Luddhunter2 Posted 8:51 am
24 Sep 2008
1.From your Gristmill link:
"Because understanding of some important effects driving sea level rise is too limited, this report does not assess the likelihood, nor provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea level rise."
This could not have been written by a self-respecting scientist. The "best" estimate is ALWAYS based on "understanding" what the hell you're studying, that is, by a peer-reviewed and repeatable procedure for generating predictive algorithms. So this was written by an advocate who is spinning the scientific conclusion (to divert the target audience's attention from reading the actual prediction) to appease the AGW leaders (not scientists) who NEED the DOOM scenario to get attention and money.
2. "The projections do not include uncertainties in climate-carbon cycle feedbacks nor the full effects of changes in ice sheet flow, therefore the upper values of the ranges are not to be considered upper bounds for sea level rise."
Again, more apology for not getting the DOOM answer the leaders wanted. These desired feedback factors are POSITIVE feedback factors that are simply not supported by the geological record. (see climate-skeptic.org for more on this positive feedback fudge factor that the alarmists rely on).
3. A night burglar with a decent dayjob is still a thief. If you advocate banning or regulating existing technologies without a credible proof of danger, no matter how altrusitic and self-flagellating your motivation, or how many alternate technologies you support, you are a LUDD. You hurt more than help. You are a thief of technological freedom by use of scare tactics and perhaps junk science. You are parasitic. I am spraying you with Ludd-formulated RAID now:
SSSHHHHHHHHHH...SHH...SH... oops, all out. Gotta go back to Costco for another case.
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GreyFlcn Posted 9:36 am
24 Sep 2008
Can you find me even one significant scientific institution in the entire world which says that manmade actions aren't a primary cause of the warming we've seen in the past few decades?
Because I'm pretty sure you can't.
http://greyfalcon.net/whatwouldittake
______
That said,
Lets say we entirely ignore global warming.
Poof Gone.
_
Could there possibly be another major reason that we don't want to keep putting billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere?
http://greyfalcon.net/carbon2
Like say, avoiding a major collapse of sea life in the ocean?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080521105251 ...
http://royalsociety.org/document.asp?id=3249
-David Ahlport
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Luddhunter2 Posted 10:18 am
24 Sep 2008
How we horrible humans, the scourge of Mother Earth, might be causing small temp leanings upward is a much different question.
Your claim of temp rise in the last few decades is technically correct, but not significant.
http://dreadnaught.wordpress.com/2007/08/09/warmest-year- ...
Notice in the NASA link there are several negative deviations from the mean since 1960, and the spike in 1998 is on par with other outliers like 1934 and 1921. This data is not scary, Count Floyd (SCTV reference).
Not enough to chike an economy over.
Sea life impact is yet another issue. I'm not for killing plankton, but again, not an imminent catastrophe. The oil-funded psychos in the Middle East are enough motivation for me and other tech types to support and work on alternative technologies, but I don't want a subsidy, and I don't want to ban existing tech to make mine more desirable. I want it to succeed in the market on its own merits.
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Biodiversivist Posted 11:15 am
24 Sep 2008
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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