Bishop Hill Climate cuttings 51
Apr 21, 2011 Climate: Cuttings I'm pretty busy at the moment, so rather than write anything, I'm just going to round up a few interesting links:
Shub shares my interest in the "official sceptics". His latest article looks at a critique of the movement from one of its members.
Robert Bradley Jr, writing at Master Resource, takes a long hard look at the symbiosis between BP, government and environmentalists.
Also following the money is Garth Paltridge, looking at how consensus can be bought and wondering where the independent advice is. Of course this used to the the role of the Royal Society, but they have taken the government shilling too, with inevitable results.
A shale gas well has apparently "blown", leaking fracking fluid into a river. Emma Pullman at Desmog says it's a disaster, others think otherwise.
Subscribers to the global warming hypothesis are very excited at the moment, the object of their interest being this article by Chris Mooney. The great communicators is looking at yet another cod-psychology piece about why sceptics don't believe what they are told.
The subscribers are having a bit of a fallout among themselves, with the vexed question being whether greens have more or less money to spend than big oil. A report by Matt Nisbet was rebutted by Joe Romm (who broke the news embargo in the process). Much shouting followed. Pielke Jnr and Keith Kloor watch on.
Pielke Jnr looks at the IPCC's new policy on conflict of interest and finds much to admire.
Reader Comments (11)
Independent: Earth Day and Facebook aim to attract a billion acts of green
I do believe facebook is a force against civil liberties... my personal opinion... ignore that and just consider that now facebook is an overtly activist green organisation.
People think I am just old-fashioned when I say I have no wish to participate...
I see the Guardian is fretting over fracking:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/20/fossil-fuel-lobbying-shale-gas
I think that the work that Chris Mooney is describing is more than cod psychology. That of Kahan in particular has an interesting intellectual history. The model he uses goes back to the anthropologist Mary Douglas, and was used by researchers like Aaron Wildavsky (definitely a libertarian) to critique the green movement of the 1980s. One driver of Douglas's ideas was her field work in Africa where she found two tribes next to each other in identical climates, yet one viewed nature as inherently benign and the other saw it as hostile. The answer, she argued, lay in their different belief systems. The Mooney article gives a skewed view at the start but does go on to note that greens too have their 'blinders'. The reality is that it is hard for any of us to have an unbiased view of the world. That's why we need openness, flexibility, scepticism, provisionality etc in our political and science systems.
Ok. I'll bite. What is "cod psychology"? (British slang for Americans...please help?)
I don't think I could take myself seriously enough to join a 'sceptics' group or association. My life experiences have taught me that any group of like-minded people tends to become very similar in outlook to a one-make motoring club - insular, silightly arrogant about the group's choices and the very opposite of sceptical.
I don't think I could take myself seriously enough to join a 'sceptics' group or association. My life experiences have taught me that any group of like-minded people tends to become very similar in outlook to a one-make motoring club - insular, silightly arrogant about the group's choices and the very opposite of sceptical.
Wow! The repeats are a worry.
Orson @ 10:36.
See freedisctionary definition 3.
Or enter 'cod latin' in a search engine.
It's fake, fraudulent, etc.
Orson - "cod " is a slang expression for hoax, parody, nonsense. Origin unkown according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
The Chris Mooney article dealt with a group of people who thought they would be destroyed by aliens on a certain day. When their predicition didn't come true they changed their story. Excuse me, doesn't that remind him of some people we know? And when their predictions failed they offered lame excuses, probably like George Monbiot's (I bet he regrets this), "This is what global warming looks like" when we're up to our butts in snow for the third winter in a row.
Peter Crawford - I guess you noticed that the Concise Oxford Dictionary is also COD. Creepy eh?