gravy’s Recent Comments

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  Show me a doctor who denies the HIV AIDS

  connection, and I`ll show you someone who isn`t a qualified medical doctor.

  Almost nobody denies the earth is most likely warming. What they disagree about is what is responsible: Methane, the sun, naturally occuring Co2, man-made, Co2, water vapor, farming, deforestation, etc etc, and to what extent each has an impact. They are all pretty much agreed upon to have a certain amount of influence on temperature. Nobody is pointing at little green aliens or anything equally ridiculous as being responsible. They are disagreeing about mutually agreed upon factors.

  What to HIV/AIDS connection deniers point to, voodoo? God`s revenge?

  IOW, your analogy is wrong.On 'Consensus is collusion'--Is climate science maturing, or should we reach for our tinfoil hats? posted 2 years, 6 months ago 8 Responses

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  Sad debate

  I am concerned about the environment,especially locally here in Japan and China, however I have to say I`m very concerned about the state of debate on global warming.

  Statements like the one above do little to actually prove anything:
  "It is a little ironic that the same people who distrust the surface record so happily embrace this even-more-convoluted exercise in data processing!"

  This is basically admitting that in fact all of the data is too complex for anyine to interpret with certainty, and therefore undermines the whole argument behind the crisis theory.

  As a skeptic about everything, and former philosophy major, i see basic flaws not in the science, as I am no scientist, but the way of arguing that global warming is a crisis.

  The problem is that the onus is on the global warming crisis side to prove their point, not the skeptical side.

  Science draws on philosophy for its fundamental proof methodology. In philosophy, the argument that god exists because i can think of him does not wash because it is unprovable. the global warming crisis argument loses out because of this same problem.

  Double standards like the following just will not wash in convincing reasonable skeptics like myself:

  1. Data that crisis proponents point to is complicated but reliable, whereas data that skeptics point to is complicated and therefore unreliable.

  2. There are always regional fluctuations in global temperature, and the ones that support our argument are reliable evidence, whereas the ones that undermine it are just exceptions that prove the rule.

  3. There is consensus in the scientific community on global warming. All of the scientists, no matter how many, who disagree with the consensus somehow, do not undermine the consensus argument, but rather are quacks or paid by the oil companies. This is regardless of the fact that global warming crisis proponents have billions of dollars in research grants.

  The last point bears further comment. Studies that support the crisis theory will get more money, and be published more often than studies that show conflicting evidence or nothing at all.

  And finally, the mere premise of this series, "how to talk to a skeptic" shows how dogmatic the crisis proponent argument has become. Proponents of the crisis view, possessing less than smoking -gun evidence have to resort to converting the skeptical unwashed.

  The whole situation is starting to resemble the pre-Iraq invasion rhetoric spouted by the White House. Dissenters are traitors. With us, or against us.

  Again, I applaud any efforts to clean up the environment and make it better for our children, but I fear that this particular issue has been hijacked, not by true humanist environmentalists, but rather hard-core anti-capitalists of the luddite kind, which is fine if that`s truly what they want. But then they shouldn`t try to pretend their goal is saving the environment.On 'The satellites show cooling'--No, they don't posted 2 years, 6 months ago 15 Responses