Jon Jay Ray @ Greenie Watch
Michael J.I. Brown, an Australian astronomer with a big chin, has an amusing article. As is usual with the Green/Left, it's only when you know what he does NOT say that you can see the hollowness of his argument. He creates a false dichotomy where the only alternatives for exploring knowledge are academic journal articles and public debate between non-scientists.
So what does that leave out: Perhaps the most important thing is the unreliability of what is reported in the academic journals. This is the subject of an agonized debate among academics at the moment after as many as two thirds of journal reports were found to be unreplicable. And one of the factors in that debate is an admission that scientists sometimes deliberately fake their results to make them interesting enough for publication. Clearly, anyone who relies on academic journal articles as a sole source of truth is leaning on a broken reed.
The second thing Prof. Brown leaves out is that not all public debates are ill-informed. You can have fruitful public debates about a topic between people well versed in the available evidence. That occurs routinely at academic conferences. Such debates can be very beneficial in ensuring that all parties have a balanced view of their field. But there have been few debates of that kind over climate.
Knowledgeable skeptical scientists and scholars have repeatedly challenged Warmist believers to such debates but the Warmists run away. They know that people like the formidably well-informed Lord Monckton will make mincemeat of them. So if astronomer Brown is mourning the absence of such debates, he can look to his Warmist colleagues for the lack of them, not skeptics.
Monckton has even produced his own climate model, one that has better predictive skill than the pathetic GCMs used by Warmists. Warmists have of course "replied" to Monckton's paper but the fact that the reply is laden with ad hominems tells you how good their science is. Even I could comprehensively debunk their reply if I had to, but some of the things I would say are here. There is a better discussion of the paper here, including a rejoinder by Monckton. Whatever you conclude about Monckton's model you have to see that he is in the great British tradition of the independent scholar, a category of enquiry not acknowledged by Prof. Brown.
And given that there is no monopoly of knowledge anywhere, why cannot discussion of publicly available data be fruitful? Prof. Brown is very hostile to the way in which journalist David Rose pointed out that publicly available climate data showed a drastic recent fall in global temperature.
This threat to their beliefs energized lots of Warmists and much scorn was heaped on Roses's article.
The findings were said to be unrepresentative. But they were not. Various authors have now pointed out other lines of evidence that lead to the same conclusion.
Prof. Brown's article regurgitates the early criticisms of the Rose finding as if it had not been refuted. He fails in an academic's basic duty to keep up with the relevant literature on his topic. And the relevant literature is no longer all in the academic journals. Bodies such as NOAA and NASA regularly report climate data publicly and that data is available to anybody who wants to point out features in it.
And you don't need to look hard to see how contrary to Warmist claims some of it is. I am only a humble social scientist but for most of this year I have been pointing out that CO2 levels observed at Cape Grim and Mauna Loa plateaued for the entire recent warming period -- showing that the warming was due to El Nino, not CO2. That finding has now found its way into the academic journals but you read it here first.
It now needs to be taken into account by Warmists. But they will ignore it as they usually do with inconvenient climate facts. The warming concerned was a huge subject of fake news from Warmists, who almost totally ignored El Nino and preached climate Armageddon. Prof. Brown seems to be much against fake news so how curious it is that he has ignored that bit of very fake and obviously fake news.
Brown's entire rant is the very cherry-picking he deplores. It is a highly selective coverage of the relevant facts that ignores facts that do not suit him. It is an extended outpouring of abuse with only the most glancing scientific references and a total lack of epistemological sophistication. It is a polemic, a Gish gallop in fact. It is not nearly a scientific treatise. It is Brown who has embraced pseudoscience and its deceptive tactics in a post-truth world.
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