Discussion on Marginal Revolution:
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Max:"However, I think global warming is just a big excuse for getting a totalitarian state, or rather a facist state (if you look at Kyoto especially)." That is what we call a conspiracy theory, and I wonder where you got your data on Kyoto. Dan Brown? Nah, probably Michael Chrichton...
Jim: "It is my understanding that the last 7 years we have been on a cooling trend." Where on earth did you get that "understanding" from? Come on, it's not so hard to come across graphs showing the instrumental record. I don't see any downward trend there, particularly not in the last seven years. And anyway, to do the same we did these seven years - have you heard of something called latency? You don't push around immense things like the climate quickly.
scm: "And I can't figure out why Tyler or anyone for that matter thinks global warming is significantly anthropogenic." Well, if I were you I'd take some time to find out, because it is the scientific consensus, you know? realclimate.org stands as the suggestion. Those people have publication records as long as a bad winter, and they do answer both stupid and deep questions.
Eli: "Remember that in the 1970s everyone was fussing about global cooling." Some newspapers were. Natural scientists as a group certainly weren't. What tabloids did in the seventies (worry about "nuclear winter") is an extremely bad reason to disregard today's expert opinion.
Mace: "Another problem with global warming: the Leftist-enviromentalist proposed solutions don't involve markets, just more government and less freedom."
Kyoto is a market-based solution (or rather, a step towards one). And you know, cap and trade has been very successful in other areas. Are these ideas leftist-environmentalist? Most policy proposals from environmentalists (as opposed to suggestions of what you can do yourself) are market based, as far as I can tell.
Keith:"I'm deleting Marginal Revolution from my bookmarks list. Mr. Cowen, you've become part of the idiot herd."
Well, to you Cowen (as Keith won't be reading this), you still have the arrogance and camaraderie of your profession, which apparently makes you value Kling's opinions on climate models more than the climate scientists'. But that does not quite make you part of an "idiot herd" of economists, in my opinion. If I can put up with Kling (I read econlog too), I can certainly put up with you.
Oh I'm getting tired of this. One last one :
Jeffrey Smith:"Who pays for the production of an argument, and the ideological bent of its producer, is irrelevant to its evaluation. Many climatologists sort into that field because of their ideoglogical beliefs." There's a difference between having a vested interest and being an advocate. Coby Beck has a good article on the difference, and on this part of the climate debate in general.
But I would like to point out that funding does matter.
Knowing that a person has an economic interest in promoting a certain view may reduce the value of his statements, because we require more independent verification before we can trust them. That is why many scientific journals demand that contributors notify of any conflicts of interest they may have. Note that we say conflict of interest, because we assume that in addition to his interest in a certain view winning approval, the scientist has a sometimes conflicting interest in finding out the truth.
But in other areas we have seen paid advocates deliberately spreading information they know to be false. These people don't seem to have a conflict of interest, because they just have an interest in promoting a certain view, at all costs. When asked directly how much it would cost to get him to promote Linux instead of smearing it, Ken Brown of the Alexis de Toqueville Institute answered "we can talk about that". There are some people like him, who believe that ideas deserve all the protection they can buy, like the accused in a court. They see themselves as a sort of lawyers for ideas.
(They are wrong, though. Different rules apply for ideas. They don't deserve an assumption of innocence, for one thing!)
These people spread noise. They are paid to ignore criticism, make headlines, give an impression of controversy where none exists. Since honest people have a limited amount of time and resources to answer their campaigns, assigning less weight to their opinions is legitimate and reasonable. So is ignoring them. We do that to blog trolls, and it applies here as well.
My time in answering the most obvious misinformation is short, and it will soon be up. I hope everyone takes care to be critical of people with a conflict of interest, and be most skeptical of paid advocates like the CEI. Paid advocates on both left and right often strive to associate themselves with ideas or people their target audience likes ("Competitive enterprise" and Alexis de T, I am sure people here can think of the left equivalients).
I ask you all: Don't be fooled by that. Don't uncritically accept the opinions of people who say they agree with you, especially when they go counter to practically all experts in the relevant fields.
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I was going to write a personal reply to a poster named John Hill, but when I saw that his adress started with jshill I thought better of it :-)
Posted by vintermann at May 31, 2006 10:44 AM