What distinguishes proper skepticism from fatuous doubt? In some part comes down to who is expressing the sentiment. That is, who the person is determines if they are a legitimate skeptic or someone borrowing the title to disguise dismissive rhetoric. I don’t have sufficient training in the necessary physics and math to be a legitimate skeptic about the Higgs boson, the theory behind it or the experimental proof of its existence. I’m never going to have that level of understanding either. So I don’t opine about it. I’m entertained by it, but that’s as far as my engagement with the matter can go.
Too much of what we see called skepticism about climate science is expressed by people who are as unqualified to discuss the matter as I am to discuss the Higgs Boson.
Climate science deniers tend to be quite touchy when you call them a climate science denier, or denier for short. In my case this has even led to someone threatening to sue me for libel because I used the term climate science denier in a private email. Which wasn’t even aimed at them, I just used the term to describe the type of arguments that were being used.
The term also is quite simple in its origin, it means that you deny something. I use the term to state that climate science deniers dismiss or even flat-out deny the evidence climate scientists have found. You have similar versions of the term denier for those that reject the science behind vaccinations, AIDS, Evolution, etc.
I expect climate science deniers to not respond well when you use the term, that’s why I only use it when it’s truly earned. What I didn’t expect was that the usage of this term would lead to Dr. Roy Spencer writing the blog post ‘Time to push back against the global warming Nazis‘ (archived here):
Continue reading Roy Spencer, In Denial About What Science Denial Means
The floods in the UK has triggered a storm of utter nonsense about what does and doesn’t help to prevent or reduce flooding. One of these claims is that dredging rivers will help with preventing flooding or at least will make them less severe. This is wrong.
I live in The Netherlands and we’re a country with a very long history fighting against the ocean and our rivers. It’s because of our constant battle with water that we have a vast network of defences, a lot of resources to help during a crisis, and contingency plans when things do go wrong. But despite all that nature still sometimes surprises us, it has learned us to never underestimate her. We got two such lessons in 1993 and 1995 courtesy of the river the Meuse.
I don’t often write about religion as I don’t mind it as long as you’re not either pushing it on others or attacking science in the name of it. As an atheist I might consider it an unsupported position, but it’s called faith for a reason. The most you’ll get from me is a shrug or me rolling my eyes if it’s a particular strange belief. But sometimes the religious say or do something that just doesn’t go down well with me; this time it actually got me quite angry.
Before I go into what this was there’s something you need to know about me. I have a disease called X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy, as it’s a bit of a mouthful this is often abbreviated to X-ALD. It’s a metabolic disease caused by a mutation on the X chromosome, people who have it can’t produce a certain protein. Without it very-long chain fatty acids — a type of saturated fats — cannot be transported to the mitochondria in cells and metabolised. This is problematic as fats do not dissolve in water so your body cannot get rid of them, these fats then will start to accumulate in cells and organs.
Continue reading Suffering, Euthanasia, And The Passion Of Jesus Christ
I get the occasional email asking me to help out with something. This time it was an email from Mike Haseler who is the chairman of the Scottish Climate and Energy Forum. The name of this organisation sounded interesting to me considering the subjects I tackle. I got even more interested when it was mentioned that this was to gather some information about the public debate about climate change.
But I always do a background check on the party that’s asking me to help out with something, no matter how small the request is or the amount of effort required on my side. Who you affiliate yourself with does matter if you want to be taken seriously. When I did a cursory check of the contents on their website any good feelings I might have had about this organisation evaporated.
Normally I’m not the type to defend Prince Charles thanks to him having some questionable views on science. For example his staunch support of homoeopathy as a viable medical treatment. Telling anyone that homoeopathy works is extremely dangerous and he’s been justly criticised for lobbying for it.
However, I have no trouble commending someone when they do get it right. One example being his recent statements about climate science deniers:
Continue reading Prince Charles And The Headless Chicken Brigade
That Alexa isn’t good at giving reliable statistics is well known in IT. Any website like Alexa that tries to estimate traffic to a website in a similar way via indirect measurements will encounter the same issues it has. Those that work in IT often know what those issues are and know what the consequences are for the data that’s gathered via those methods.
The main issue that Alexa has is that it gathers the data it uses via users that installed the Alexa toolbar (or a toolbar that passes information to Alexa). This has as a result that demographic, used browsers, and even the country visitors are from influence the statistics that Alexa gathers about a website. This can introduce serious artefacts and biases into the collected data and basically makes Alexa data worthless. At best it can give you an idea about how well a website is doing, but that doesn’t mean that what you’re seeing matches reality. I’ve already written a far more detailed blog post about how Alexa works and why you never should rely on the data it provides; it’s just too unreliable.
The blog post that I wrote about Alexa were all sparked by Anthony Watts using Alexa data to claim he’s doing better than his competition. His website is certainly big and it could very well be the case that he is outperforming his competitors. But Alexa is not the tool that you can use for determining if you are doing better than your competitor.
Continue reading This Is Why You Shouldn’t Use Alexa
The past couple of weeks my website wasn’t exactly stable with it often going offline for a couple of minutes. It wasn’t uncommon that my website wasn’t reachable for half an hour or more. To resolve these issues I had a chat today with my hosting company and my website was going down thanks to DDoS attacks. Although these weren’t…
Not everyone might be aware of this but Dr. Roy Spencer is someone who believes in Intelligent Design. He has often defended his support of Intelligent Design and his rejection of the Theory of Evolution quite vocally. Something I mentioned briefly in one of my blog posts.
That Spencer rejects the Theory of Evolution and replaces it with Intelligent Design brings into question his ability to assess evidence in a detached way. This because Intelligent Design is nothing else than the attempt of dressing up creationism (religion) in a lab coat to make it seem more legit. Which might sound harsh but it is an accurate description, anyone familiar with the book ‘Of pandas and people‘ will be well aware of that.
I’m writing about this as Ethan Epstein made the following remark in his article ‘What Catastrophe?‘ (on page 3):
Continue reading Dr. Roy Spencer, Please Keep Your Religion Out Of Science
One of the things that completely baffle me is how climate science deniers can reject evidence.
Of course I’m not referring to not taking something at face value or wanting to verify something before you accept it. What I’m talking about is that they reject evidence even when it’s very obvious that it shows that they are wrong. It also often doesn’t matter how small the mistake it, they will still reject it.
One of these examples is a quote from a recommendations document written by the KNMI IPCC delegation that contained advice for the IPCC on how it can improve its procedures. This included recommendations for improving their reports and how results are communicated. Something that the IPCC asked for and the resulting recommendations from the KNMI aren’t shocking.
However, one passage was a bit confusing as to what they meant by it:
What distinguishes proper skepticism from fatuous doubt? In some part comes down to who is expressing the sentiment. That is, who the person is determines if they are a legitimate skeptic or someone borrowing the title to disguise dismissive rhetoric. I don’t have sufficient training in the necessary physics and math to be a legitimate skeptic about the Higgs boson, the theory behind it or the experimental proof of its existence. I’m never going to have that level of understanding either. So I don’t opine about it. I’m entertained by it, but that’s as far as my engagement with the matter can go.
Climate science deniers tend to be quite touchy when you call them a climate science denier, or denier for short. In my case this has even led to someone threatening to sue me for libel because I used the term climate science denier in a private email. Which wasn’t even aimed at them, I just used the term to describe the type of arguments that were being used.
Normally I’m not the type to defend Prince Charles thanks to him having some questionable views on science. For example his staunch support of homoeopathy as a viable medical treatment. Telling anyone that homoeopathy works is extremely dangerous and he’s been 
That Alexa isn’t good at giving reliable statistics is well known in IT. Any website like Alexa that tries to estimate traffic to a website in a similar way via indirect measurements will encounter the same issues it has. Those that work in IT often know what those issues are and know what the consequences are for the data that’s gathered via those methods.
One of the things that completely baffle me is how climate science deniers can reject evidence.