By Kip Hansen – Re-Blogged From WUWT
Judith Curry recently highlighted the 9 October 2020 Wall Street Journal piece by Matt Ridley titled: “What the Pandemic Has Taught Us About Science”. [ It is annoyingly paywalled, so Dr. Curry offers extensive excerpts at her own blog, Climate Etc. ]
[ Full version of Matt Ridley’s piece is available at his own website here. — h/t to Malcolm Robinson]
By Dr. Judith Curry – Re-Blogged From WUWT
The scientific method remains the best way to solve many problems, but bias, overconfidence and politics can sometimes lead scientists astray
It’s been awhile since I have been so struck by an article that I felt moved to immediately do a blog post. Well, maybe because today is Saturday and it is one day after the landfall of Hurricane Delta, I actually have a half hour to do this.
Matt Ridley has published an article in the WSJ What the pandemic has taught us about science, that is highly relevant for climate change as well as for Covid-19. It is excellent, I agree with and endorse every word of this.
The paper is behind paywall; Dan Hughes kindly sent me a topic of the text. Here are extensive excerpts
The Week That Was: September 19, 2020, Brought to You by www.SEPP.org
By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project
Quote of the Week: “It is one thing to impose drastic measures and harsh economic penalties when an environmental problem is clear-cut and severe. It is quite another to do so when the environmental problem is largely hypothetical and not substantiated by careful observations. This is definitely the case with global warming.” – Frederick Seitz, Introduction to Fred Singer’s Hot Talk, Cold Science (1999)
Number of the Week: 64%
NO TWTW NEXT WEEK: There will be no TWTW the week of September 26. TWTW will resume the weekend of October 3.
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By Kip Hansen – Re-Blogged From WUWT
There is yet another new threat to an important right that Americans and all freedom loving peoples hold dear – the right to express one’s opinions on important societal issues in open public forums. In the 1960s, I, and many others, fought this fight on university campuses all across America. This fight was called the Free Speech Movement.
Today, university campuses are the locus of a new, and sadly misguided movement, the Anti-Free Speech Movement. Some refer to it as “Cancel Culture”, which is ill-defined, but in essence, by whatever name, it is a movement spurred by the pernicious idea that one group of people should be able to dictate what other people are allowed to say, what opinions they are allowed to express, what they can write and the very words they are allowed to speak. Writers and speakers that do not fit into a very narrow window of what is deemed “acceptable” by the Twitter-mobs are shouted down, dis-invited, slandered, libeled, subjected to calls for dismissal from their employment and have their very lives threatened.
It’s been ten years since I addressed this issue in a specific blog post, so I thought it would be useful to revisit it. I mention it from time to time, but it is so important, it bears repeating and remembering.
Over and over again.
I continue to strive to simply these concepts, so here goes another try. What follows is as concise as I can make it.
By Kip Hansen – Re-Blogged From WUWT
The internet information pipe is gushing out information faster than most people can handle. It is increasingly difficult to sort and strain that information flow to find the bits that are important for one’s work. One of my many filters is the continuing series of blog posts by Judith Curry, titled “Week in review – science edition”, in which Dr. Curry lists science articles, studies, blog posts and the like that “caught her eye” in the preceding week(s). She not only lists pieces that have added to our knowledge base and represent “a lot of progress in climate science” but she includes interesting bits that relate often to the philosophy and practice of science in general. Her suggestions lead to her readers pulling the threads and offering follow-up sources of ideas. One of those follow-ups, offered to us by Climate Etc. reader “Faustino” led me to an article on Quillette.com (“a platform for free thought”) titled “Motivated Reasoning Is Disfiguring Social Science” written by Chris Ferguson.
Chris Ferguson is a psychologist who serves on the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association (APA). This council, he tells us:
By Joel O’Bryan, PhD – Re-Blogged From WUWT
From NPR on-line, there is this news item:
“People Strongly Against GMOs Had Shakier Understanding Of Food Science, Study Finds”
January 26, 2019 7:00 AM ET
“People who most intensely oppose genetically modified food think they know a lot about food science, but actually know the least, according to a peer-reviewed paper published in January in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.”
Re-Blogged From Black Eye Politics
Big Tech is one of the biggest enemies to conservatives.
They regularly silence them and rig the system in favor of the left.
And a tech company was just caught red-handed trying to fix the election.
By Dr. Tim Ball -Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com
It is 28 years since Channel 4 in the UK produced The Greenhouse Conspiracy. It covered almost all the skeptical critiques. They are still valid, but now they are time -tested. Sadly, even today most people would not understand what was said in the movie and how it disproves the claim of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Encouragingly, there are some signs that the continued efforts of the global warming skeptics are influencing public opinion, but overall little has changed. The public is in a holding pattern, knowing something is wrong but not reaching a final understanding for several reasons including that:
