February 26, 2010

The affable, stuttering skeptic and the grim, concise Jeremiah.

Will Wilkinson and Mark Kleiman are talking about anthropogenic global warming, but in this quick clip, they could almost be talking about anything. They are 2 really distinct types in the big human conversation about what is true:

14 comments:

traditionalguy said...

Real science NEVER proves anything is true (Gravity maybe an exception). It can only "indicate" something. First the trial lawyers in John Edwards, followed by the political propaganda Artists in Al Gore, have diligently written their own fake science disipline complete with University Departments, Books deemed the bible on the subject by eminent academics with Phds, and seminars and publications carefully immitating a real science...and voila, the 90% of the people, like will Wilkinson, who admit their lack of education on a "new science" react by bowing down and agreeing to whatever sacrifice the new gods in town demand. Fetal Distress syndrome was a total fabrication that destroyed Obstetrics as practiced, and so is Warmist CO2 syndrome . Never let these liars get away with pretending that there has ever been any genuine science involved. Wrestle from the top and not from the bottom!

MikeR said...

Yeah, I felt that way through the whole bloggingheads. Kleiman says, If the error bars are big, we should be yet more concerned to take action, because that means it could be even more disastrous than we think. Will just sounded confused, so I'll respond:
No, Mr. Kleiman. When skeptics (and believers) say it's very uncertain, they mean that the models are not good enough yet to be trusted. That means we have no way yet to decide what we should be doing or how much. Certainly none of the models has been at all successful in predicting the last decade. Study it some more till we have models that can predict the future in a testable way.

From Inwood said...

Will Wilkinson sounds like every Liberal I know thinks Bush 43 sounded.

And at cocktail parties, Bar-B-Qs, whetever, in my answer to the guy who said, succintly, "Bush 43 hates the old, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breath free" I probably sounded like Will here.

BTW "affable" is a Preppy racist put down of Irish Americans like moi in the Northeast.

David said...

As a general proposition, it's the Democrats who scorn Republican policies by claiming that it's all much more complicated than that.

I'm sure that Kleiman refers to them as Laffer curve deniers.

I'm Full of Soup said...

Mark Kleiman is a professor of public policy. Does the country really need "public policy" majors? Aren't they the same mofos who designed all these bankrupt entitlements and aimless govt boondoggles?

Anonymous said...

I have to go shovel several inches of global warming from the driveway.

Peter

Anonymous said...

"I have to go shovel several inches of global warming from the driveway."

Maybe you could just rent out Al Gore and run his mouth up and down your driveway a few times. Why shovel when you can melt and let gravity do it's thing?

Henry said...

Kleinman: "The deniers don't need to convince everybody they're right; they just need to convince everybody that it's complicated."

Sweet Jesus in a basket, it IS complicated. It is unbelievably FUCKING complicated -- and that's the BEST you can say about the science. The politics and the economics are beyond complicated. They are occult bordering on criminal.

If the scientists don't own up to the fact that the science is COMPLICATED than in no way under the sun do they deserve credence or respect.

Kleinman states, in a nutshell, why most skeptics are skeptics. He just doesn't know it.

Jeremiah, my ass. It is a religion. If the skeptics own the complications, then they own the science.

Michael McNeil said...

Real science NEVER proves anything is true

True.

(Gravity maybe an exception).

Gravity is no exception. Science cannot “prove” that the Sun will rise tomorrow (or that it's out there at all); nor that gravity — even if it exists as a natural phenomenon now and in the past, and our explanations for it are more or less correct — will continue to function tomorrow, or in the next millisecond for that matter.

It [science] can only “indicate” something.

Not exactly. Though science cannot prove theories are correct, it can disprove theories. And on the “last man standing” principle, a theory that robustly resists disproof vis-a-vis its competitors eventually attains a stature where it is provisionally presumed correct, at least until an even more robust successor (e.g., Einsteinian gravitation versus its Newtonian predecessor) is discovered.

traditionalguy said...

Michael NcNeil...You said it so much better. Thanks. And the indications are for no CO2 affect on warming the Atmosphere. But can the last desperate attack Meme of the propagandists calling CO2 "Carbon" get it taxed to clean the world from ugly and dirty carbon? Stay tuned. P. T Barnum Science is alive and well.

LonewackoDotCom said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
LonewackoDotCom said...

I had a very curious coincidence with Will Wilkinson. As described at the last link, I wrote a satire of libertarians that I sent to Reason Magazine hoping that they'd fall for it. Through some remarkable coinkydink, a couple weeks later a serious proposal similar to my satire appeared at Reason.

Now, I don't know whether Wilkinson came up with the idea on his own or what. But: his serious proposal was basically the same as my satire.

P.S. He also openly supports joining the U.S., Canada, and Mexico into one country.

P.P.S. For balance, Kleiman is the "schmuck" I referred to here.

Bruce Hayden said...

As to complicated - pretty much every warmist who posts here to prove that there is AGW, links to extraordinarily simplified versions of some of the science involved. I remember one a week or two ago, with six points, starting with the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, then piling one simplified hypothesis upon another, concluding with QED.

The Crack Emcee said...

"They are occult bordering on criminal."

Why, Mr. Henry, I do believe you're flirting with me,...