A friend, "--," asked me:
I still find myself caught up in a minute measure of ambivalence on the topic of the global warming crisis. Although I have read and viewed much on the Internet on this subject (both pro and con), there is one (only one) article which is giving me pause for thought. I wonder if you have seen it. It is an article published in the Corbett Report on September 28 (Episode 282). Here it is:
http://www.corbettreport.com/?s=global+warming&x=0&y=0
The above article, presented by an Internet voice for whom I have some respect, stands in contrast with your own. As a person interested in examining all sides of the issue, I was happy to have a chance to learn of Mr. Corbett's views -- though not certain how to deal with some of the points he tried to make. I wonder, if you have time to view this video, what your responses might be.
I replied:
Hi --,
My favorite professor in college was a fellow who taught psychology but whose main contribution had been an article he had written (which became a classic in statistics) exposing the fraudulence of the then-standard use of the standard "test of [statistical] significance," which was the "95% confidence level," which he showed to be widely abused and misinterpreted as if it were what everyone thought it was and as if it meant what everyone thought it did -- which it does not.
So, now, you are referring me to James Corbett, who tries to pick on climatologists for the subjectivity of their "likelihood scale," and who promises to say why next week.
Right off the bat, I get that "phoniness odor" in my nostrils; I usually smell it from a huckster, but things don't always (just nearly always) turn out phony when they smell that way; so, maybe he's not just a poseur.
But, then, I click on his this , which has #2 linking to this ("2000 years" being the right answer according to this , which links to this ) which spurs me quickly to checking this , which includes this sentence, "Spencer [who is Corbett's authority] is a signatory to An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming, [24] [25] which states that 'Earth and its ecosystems -- created by God's intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence -- are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting', [26] " which causes me to dismiss him as being a non-scientific "scientist," because there is no infallible Scripture in the view of any authentic scientist: the epistemology itself, which is science, is the exact opposite of faith (which is the opposite epistemology), and therefore cannot take anything at all (including the Bible) on the basis of faith.
So, I don't care whether someone is accepted by others as being a scientist; I have an epistemological definition for what a "scientist" is, and anyone who doesn't think like one isn't one, in my view.
That would have to include Corbett, too, because, if a person thinks like a scientist, then that person would shun ever citing as an authority on anything a person who doesn't understand what "science" means. And, since I find Corbett in my very first spot-check of his allegations to be doing precisely that, I have no interest whatsoever in searching to find yet more documentation that he is a creep who either knows that he's fraudulent, or else is too stupid to know that he's a fool of Big Oil and its many minions .
The only question I still have about him is whether he's a fraudster, or instead just a sucker of fraudsters; but, either way, I am done with him.
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