You mean I don’t seem to have accepted it as gospel, quite a different thing. The conference was ostensibly about an important issue, but that was just a blind for its apparent real purpose, and you seem not to have noticed.
Let’s face it. You aren’t really talking about the difference between, say, 88% and 97%. You’re really talking about “global warming is a Chinese hoax” or something similar.
You can try to understand my point of view if you pay attention to my flat-earther analogy. Suppose that instead of 7 global warming deniers at this conference there had been 7 flat-earthers. Would you still think it was a perfectly legitimate conference about reproducibility in science, or would you think the organizers had a hidden agenda?
What? Argue about global warming? Why, when I’ve pointed to authors who can do it with so much more knowledge than I can? My function here is only to deny the lie (initially spread willfully, though doubtless believed innocently by many afterward) that there is no disagreement among climatologists. As long as all readers here know that there is some disagreement among fully qualified and published climatologists about how much human activity contributes to global warming, I’m content to leave the actual detailed arguments to the climatologists.
Nope. I’ve said that I accept the figure for how much the earth has warmed in the past 150 years. I’ve said that some of that warming, perhaps even the majority of it, may have been caused by CO2 emissions. I just don’t like to see debates about how much curtailed by bullying, shouting down, etc. The moment a dissident scientist is treated as a heretic, what is happening is not science, but something uncomfortably like religion. And many climatologists have reported being treated as if they were not scientists with technical criticism of models to be discussed in a dispassionate way, but heretics departing from the True Faith about global warming, heretics who were the enemies of humanity and wanted to see all the seacoasts of the earth flooded and all the farmland scorched away. And they’ve seen calls by politicians to have their arguments labeled as “spreading false news” and made criminally culpable – meaning that dissenting from majority scientific opinion would land you in jail. This is not the way science proceeds; it’s the way an Inquisition proceeds. It’s this mentality that I’m opposing.
I haven’t made a single technical argument against the “consensus,” and I haven’t said the consensus was wrong; I’ve said only that some of the people defending the consensus – some scientists, some politicians, some journalists, some culture warriors – have been behaving very badly.
Anyhow, this subject is not about global warming, but about the “cancel culture,” and not all discussions about the “cancel culture” involve global warming skeptics, and, as usual here, the subject has been diverted from main issue to a subordinate one. And further, the reaction to anything I post is that it’s all wrong. Not a single person here has said that there are any good points in the article, that it raises any issues of significance worthy of citizen concern. It’s this one-sidedness, this knee-jerk reflexiveness, that turns so many conversations here into a rehearsal of the dogmas of the like-minded.
You’re trying to make it about that, but the rest of us aren’t having it. There’s no “cancel culture” to be seen here, just somebody outing a false flag operation and somebody else trying to obscure what happened.
(I just made a mistake in replying and had to “cancel” my reply, so that makes me feel guilty of Canceling). Interesting to hear the other side on this one – I had suspected something was smelly.
One strange thing about the announced topic is the “crisis of reproducibility” issue. One major source of reproducibility problems is when people use ordinary significance testing and publish those experiments that came out significant. For example with a P=0.05 threshold, we expect that, of 1000 ineffective possible antibiotics tested, 50 will show significant sign of killing bacteria. If the field is having trouble finding new antibiotics, it mght be that when 1000 researchers try to find new antibiotics, few of the putative antibiotics will work. So there would then be, say, 98% nonreproducibilty. Is that a “reproducibility crisis”? Of course, there is as well genuine fakery and incompetent statistical analysis.
I see that in this case there are more serious issues as well. The Wall Street Journal generally has very sober-minded news articles and a total wackaloon editorial page that accepts wild conspiracy theories, as long as they’re on the right side of the political spectrum. And I note that this is an Opinion piece (written by one of the conference’s organizers), not a story by the WSJ news staff.