Th_t Cr_zy P_t S_j_k
Would you like to solve the puzzle? If not, go ahead and buy a vowel.
**********
In a short post at The Plank the other day, Michael Crowley wondered how Pat Sajak and especially Vanna White haven’t gone “completely insane” after “all these years”.
I don’t know about Vanna, but Pat does seem to have lost his mind.
In a P.S. to the post, Crowley links to a “Sajak says” on global warming at Pat’s website — yes, he has a website, and yes, he uses it in part to express his opinions on such topics as freedom of speech, the midterm elections, gay “outing,” and the news media. And it seems he’s way over on the right — I had no idea, but conservative and Republican he truly is, and in such a knee-jerkingly reflexive way. He even lavishes praise on Republicans for being such “good losers” after the midterms. (Apparently he didn’t see this — the attack strategies of the House GOP.) And why did Republicans lose the midterms? Because, he seems to think, “Americans like their politics divided”. Oh, right. It had nothing to do with Bush’s disastrous presidency, including Iraq, and with a Republican Party that was corrupt and vicious.
Anyway, no “Sajak says” illustrates the author’s craziness more than the one linked to by Crowley. Pat admits he’s not a scientist — no, really? — but then proceeds to claim that “there are some gaps in the logic of it all that make [him] skeptical and to contend that “the direct link between man and the warming is much more tenuous”. (I’m sure he knows much more than the IPCC, which recently determined in a new report that the reality of global warming is “unequivocal” and that it is “very likely” the result of human activity — that is, that there is at least a 90 percent likelihood that we are responsible.) And that isn’t all. He goes on to accuse “the true believers” — presumably those of us who don’t think global warming is a hoax — of being insincere, of not doing enough “to help reverse it,” and then to trash Nancy Pelosi.
And that’s just one of two successive posts on the topic.
The other one is a response to the IPCC report, and it’s here that Pat gets “Crichton-esque,” as Crowley puts it. The presumptuousness that litters this post is astonishing. He may be just be the host of a popular game show — so popular for so long that its success lies beyond my comprehension — but he sure claims to know a lot more about climatology than, well, you know, climatologists. And so, from his elevated perspective, global warming, such as there is any, is just part a larger cycle of temperature fluctuation. And he’s not alone. There are scientists who, like him, are “unconvinced that man is responsible”. What he doesn’t mention is that those “scientists” are industry-funded propagandists, not disinterested academics. What is truly impressive is that there is now such consensus in the scientific community, not that there is any serious disagreement.
But now let me quote Pat’s conclusion, for it is truly one of the stupidest arguments pertaining to global warming — or, indeed, to any issue — that I have ever read: “There’s also the argument that we should take all steps deemed necessary by this panel ‘just in case’. I say, let’s wait a bit before dramatically adjusting our lives. After all, if we can switch from an impending Ice Age to catastrophic global warming in just 30 years, we should be able, with some effort, to drop the temperature a degree or two in pretty short order.”
What?
Oh, well, if Sajak says… I’m sure we have everything under control. His credentials are so impeccable.
Honestly, though, who does he think he is? What basis does he have for any of this? He thinks we should “wait a bit” before dealing with an “unequivocal” problem that could destroy much of civilization as we know it? He’s concerned about “adjusting our lives,” as if global warming is just some inconvenience?
How truly crazy.
23 Responses to “Th_t Cr_zy P_t S_j_k”
“(I’m sure he knows much more than the IPCC, which recently determined in a new report that the reality of global warming is “unequivocalâ€? and that it is “very likelyâ€? the result of human activity — that is, that there is at least a 90 percent likelihood that we are responsible.)”
You do realize that, as worded above, your statement is false?
If I was a comp teacher I’d send you back to the source material to try again.
I’d like to buy an A
What do you mean I don’t have enough money!!!!
Ughh…I don’t want to spin the wheel (Spins wheel)
God@#*$)@#$()#$()#@$@#$#@$#$7#)@ I knew I would get that stupid “Lose a Turn”
So let’s see, that’s one B-list pseudo celebrity voicing opinions (on an obscure blog no one would have even known about if not linked to here) on the conservative side of issues vs. um, how many Hollywood bigwigs who echo Democratic talking points without having any credible background on the issues?
Yes lets not adjust our lives, after all, it’s not like Global Warming will force us to change anything will it?
Well, unless you live in LA, or San Francisco, or New York, or Jakarta, or Tokyo, Hong Kong, Macau, Barcelona, Athens, Dublin, New Orleans, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Venice….
But other than the minor number of people who live on the worlds coasts we should be fine.
Have you actually read the report, Michael? The actual report, and not the Policymaker’s Summary, that was written by IPCC bureaucrats?
Since they haven’t actually released the report yet, I find it unlikely you have. Besides, they’ve already said they’re editing the report to fit the “conclusions.” You heard that right–they’re editing the RESEARCH to fit the CONCLUSIONS. Science, that is NOT.
Tully, according to this your statement is not true in the slightest.
CS- I thought the conservatives were arguing that it annoyed them that whenever a liberal’s transgressions were brought to light, the response from lefty commentators was “but Bush is even worse”. Isn’t your argument on this issue exactly the same? Instead of arguing the merits (or lack of them) of Sajak’s position, you are trying to switch over to opinionated lefty nutcases from Hollywood.
Great quote from an article from Arnold King:
ht: Instapundit
I was just trying to say that I don’t put any stock in the opinions of the Hollywood left and I give the same amount of weight to Sajak’s opinions. It seems to me that Michael is simultaneously saying, “Sajak has no credentials to talk about this issue” and, “Let’s engage in a debate to counter his statements on the issue.” It’s just not a worthwhile discussion, IMO. To seriously discuss the global warming debate, I’d suggest that people actually discuss the evidence.
Kritter I dont see that in her post at all. What I see is her saying what most of us on the right believe. The right is fair game. The left is not. The left screams louder then the right.
Karl Rove and his hate mongering and yet its the left calling the right Hitlerites, HERR, Oberfuhrer, Komrade…..and on and on and on. But somehow its the right thats full of hate.
So when Pat Sajack who professes not to be a scientist says hes skeptical of global warming he is dubbed and absolute idiot by the left and this is the precise point the right makes. Whenever we do or say anything that is in contravention to what the left believes we are called names, assailed and basically villified for our beliefs.
However if the right does that to the left its the most evil form of Karl Rove hate mongering. Someone asked me to post my neoconservative views. I did. I was then rebutted with you are Franco, Mousolini, Hitler all rolled up into one. Yet if I respond with the same kind of tactics opposing this persons personal beliefs then I am a hate mongering Karl Rovian Clone.
There is no shame on either side.
mikkel, if you had bothered to read the first comment in the link you posted, you would have realized that Tully is indeed correct. What has been released is merely a summary for policy makers (i.e. non-technical folk). The actual report, with actual data to back up its conclusions, won’t be released until April. When it is, we can discuss the merit in that 90% certainty of a discernable human impact to global warming.
mikkel, using a dedicated-interest blog as a citation fails to impress. Especially when it actually confirms what I’ve said–the language of the reports is being modified at the behest of bureaucrats. The plain language from the IPCC itself:
The report is being edited to conform with the summary. Politics. Science works the other direction.
To seriously discuss the global warming debate, I’d suggest that people actually discuss the evidence.
Amen, C Stanley. When I received my review draft last May, I was required to commit to nondisclosure of details until the official publication date. But others must be less scrupulous about following their non-disclosure agreements, as the complete review draft can be found here.
Before the 2004 election the “Vote or Die” campaign was on my campus and unfortunately I was forced to walk past Leonardo DiCaprio rambling on my way to class. I was subjected to the worst two minutes of speech possible and his vapid and ignorant talk was made worse by the fact that he was on my “side.” If I hadn’t been working with scientists I probably would have thought the whole global warming thing was a nutcase thing too.
I don’t remember what he said, but it was actually worse than the time I heard a girl say to her friend, “You should stop buying vinyl and get CDs. Vinyl is made out of petroleum, which is oil. CDs are plastic.”
Anyway, I think the Hollywood left wing is the worst possible thing that could have happened to the global warming campaign but in general the situation seems completely intractable. The scientists I’ve read on the internet and talked to personally are completely bewildered because a) they don’t know how to convince ordinary people b) the situation has decades long lag time so it’s impossible to separate the science from policy c) the policy prescriptions are very radical and d) they’re honest enough to admit that there is not a 100% chance that they’re correct.
I’ll go out on a limb and say from a scientific standpoint, the two things that are the most well researched and critically questioned in the history of science have been evolution and global warming. They’re the only two things that have had thousands of scientists working across all disciplines and since there is no definitive experiment (say unlike in physics) there is constant re-examining rather than acceptance that someone is right.
Mikkel,
That’s about the best summary of the situation that I’ve heard. The problem is, that even if scientists have become involved in the political debate strictly out of concern that there isn’t enough time to stay out of it and let the policy makers come around to it in their own time, they are STILL subverting the pure science aspect of it. Don’t have time to find the link now but there was one leading scientist that admitted outright something like “sometimes you have to scare people first.” And on point (d), perhaps the scientists are honest in their internal discussions, papers, etc, but they aren’t exactly correcting the media that reports on the vast consensus of opinion as though that correlates with scientists being 100% certain.
Tully do you have any specifics on what is being edited? For all I know, the “changes” consist entirely of using the agreed upon verbiage (say testing the 90% limit….which I’m actually not sure what that 90% means since it’s not the typical confidence limits that’s for sure) to retest the projections and make sure they are accurate. These things happen all the time. In fact my collaboration has looked at respiration in a way that is far more mathematically rich and sound than anyone has and we’re discussing how we should craft the verbiage so the clinical meaning matches the mathematical instead of the present situation where the same words mean different things in each discipline. Of course that would require us to reexamine our data to make sure that the conclusions are consistent with our new vocabulary.
Anyway, the “dedicated-interest blog” (cough…most widely respected blog amongest climatologists themselves) flat out says how this assessment is about political policy because of point b) in my previous comment. It’s literally impossible to separate the two, which is something that I’m not sure has come up on such a large scale in history and something that the scientific community seems unprepared for. I think there needs to be a lot of discussion on how scientific research can be properly integrated into political policy, but this will be very tough as even scientists across disciplines have a very hard time relating to each other.
I’m not on their editing team, so how could I know? They haven’t released those specifics. And even if I were, I suspect they’re subject to the same non-disclosure agreements attached to reviewers. Love that transparancy…
But I’ve supplied the link to the draft report. Feel free to go and review some of that primary meta-summary work. I urge following it back into the base research articles and publications, and reading through the methodology and footnotes and caveats of same. I also suggest comparing the modeling assumptions to actual observational data.
CS the problem is that the vast majority of scientists are extremely insular and work from a different set of assumptions in their meanings. A coworker told me he drives his wife crazy because he’ll never say he is certain about something in their personal lives and explained that to her (business and engineering background) when she is “sure” about something she means 60-70% sure and everything about that is absolutely certain. For him, “sure” means 85-90% and he’s never certain because he might be wrong.
So when the word “scientific consensus” is used, and you scan the literature and find that in the last five years (I believe that was the time scale, not certain) there wasn’t one article doubting global warming in a peer reviewed article, then to scientists that means they are super duper sure.
The quip back is “well they won’t get as much money if they aren’t alarmist” which is kind of funny because if people actually knew what got funded they would know that grants that go against the current wisdom are tougher to get but much more lucrative because there is something new to add. There is no way there could be a global conspiracy amongst scientists because they’re all fighting for their own money, and we literally spend as much of our time trying to figure out how other scientists are wrong as we do figuring out how to fix it. (Actually the scientific community — even many of the parts under the DOD — is the one of the best examples of capitalist theory in practice.)
The problem is that a handful of scientists want to be celebrities and go down in history and often they are the ones that create false impressions. The South Korea scientist that was single handedly counted on for developing his country’s program is an example of terrible scientific practice because he was working “out of the loop.” It’s not suprising that he falsified data and was unethical when he was under so much pressure.
In the same vein, there are a few scientists that probably feel like it’s their job to get the world to listen about global warming and have made quotes like the one you cite…and I would be extremely skeptical of any of their research until it was well accepted by their peers (and don’t forget, also rivals).
Finally, most of the science that is consumed by the public has historically been “finalized.” Throughout school and college almost all science is taught as fact and “experiments” are actually demonstrations that show that the widely accepted abstraction is accurate to describe the demonstration. Science is inherently an abstraction and simplification of reality, and it stumbles along trying to both do a good enough job that it is immediately applicable and critical enough it can always become better. Global warming and evolutionary sciences are some of the first times that the public has been able to really see the scientific process of trying to develop an explanatory model.
I think that ignorance amongst the public how the process works has really hurt the quality of discussion and a big reason for that is that most people seem to expect there to be clear answers because they are used to measuring things and plugging them into formulas. I admit, when I started working in the field I was astonished about how different it was from my perception. In reality, all those formulas had competing models that they had to prove superior to, and the argument about whether they were succificently representational of real life is often more complex than the development of the models themselves. The complexity is such that at some point we have to rely on the experts. A layman (or scientist in another field) can certainly be critical and ask great questions (of which there have been a few like “how do we know the increase isn’t caused just by increased solar activity?” “why is the energy radiation equation different from the accepted black body constant?” “do we have enough data points to say that we’re outside normal variation?”) and help break or improve a model but in my experience it’s sometimes impossible to see whether the response is valid because it involves very specific reasoning that’s outside my domain of expertise. But since I raised the question, I know that other experts in that field can now use it to attack the science and try to get their own two-bits in or use it to make a better model.
In my personal experience, 20-30% of scientists are most concerned with their interpretation being accepted. The rest are most concerned with the truth and constantly questioning. The overlap is what produces strongly pitched models that have tons of critical eyes. That said, tons of mistakes are made (and sometimes lie unnoticed for decades) so of course people should be nitpicking. I just haven’t read any objection that has come close to dramatically altering the conclusion.
It’s standard to prohibit reviewers from disclosing anything until the final version is released. It’d be fishy if they prevented them from talking about the review process after it was released or the information wasn’t properly sourced.
I buy an ‘E’!
What do you mean, no hit?
There’s ‘Pet’ and ‘creazy’, right?
Excuse me pls, ‘creazy’ isn’t a word?
That’s ‘creazy’ like crincly!
Whaaaaat?
F***, this game sucks!
What an effin’ load, mikkel. The same old regurgitated cheerleading and dogmatic logical fallacies, and false-to-fact at that. I have linked to the draft report. It’s a scientific debate, and yet the proponents of massive anthropogenic forcing continually attempt to squelch all dissent and disagreement, even allege it does not exist. Yet it does. In spades. Deal with it in terms of science, and not propaganda and BS logical-fallacy straw-manning.
It’s no good whining, as you do, that folks just don’t understand the science, that it’s too complicated for them. Any student who’s done any serious dynamic modeling or statistical study construction is well aware of the pitfalls of same, and can follow the dismissal of error factors and find the bad assumptions that are glossed over in the IPCC meta-compilations. Anyone who has ever taken a close look at SDIC and chaos problems is most acutely aware of it. Anyone who has ever studied the probability variations involved in dymanic iterative modeling of complex open systems would just shake their head and laugh–as I have.
Most of the scientists involved in the basic peer-review research upon which the IPCC report is built are straightforward about the limitations and inherent shortfalls and uncertainties of their research. Those caveats magically disappear and turn into certainties in the IPCC compilation process. They disappear because the IPCC is a political body, not a scientific one. Putting politicized scientists into the process does not make that process any less political.
The logical fallacy of argumentum ad populum is continually trotted out in the form of the “scientific consensus” chatter point. It’s usually backed up with Oreskes‘ flawed and deceptive “study.” But as Bray and others have noted, other research shows no such consensus, and find major flaws in Oreskes’ methodology.
Bottom line–the evidence for the claims made in the IPCC Policymaker’s Summary is clearly insufficient to support those claims at the levels of certainty claimed, or even close. It’s not a “settled” question. (Nor is it, as some would wish, an excluded one.) But the Church of the Apocalypse is indeed doing its best to silence the heretics. The rush to judgement is political.
For an indication of how it all stacks as “science,” REAL scientists encourage debate and debunking and ongoing study. Which side is trying to stifle debate, and which is trying to encourage it? Uh huh.
Tully, will you please quit trying to pretend you really care about the science? You are a rabid partisan. This much is quite obvious from your web site. It’s also obvious from your post. Those who you disagree with aren’t real scientists. Ooooh, it’s so good to know someone who’s on the board that determines these things and to read his enlightened opinions.
You write:
That’s possibly the silliest statement made in this thread. How many students fit the criteria you mention. Virtually none. A completely statistically insignificant number of people have ever taken part in that kind of exercise. It proves absolutely nothing about the statements concerning people not understanding the science. It is a sad truth that the overwhelming majority of our population understands nothing about science, having forgotten what little they did learn in one semester, maybe two of high school biology or whatever low level science class they took to meet their minimal requirement. And none of those classes taught them one thing about how real research works. If you post something that far out of touch with reality why should anyone care about your opinion on the subject? I’m not trying to “stifle debate” any more than anyone else. I’m just pointing out that your opinion on the subject is even more politically motivated than the people you criticize and while you’re perfectly welcome to rant and rave on, I know where your opinion should lie compared to others and I consider it pretty useless.
Slate has an interesting piece on the quantification of scientific opinion used in the IPCC’s policy highlights:
(my emphasis)
It is an interesting point of view, and should probably be addressed before anyone makes categorical statements using the IPCC numbers.
And for those of you who didn’t follow the link that IM provided here’s a clarification of what was meant by “less honest”.
In other words they are not misrepresenting any facts to the public but presenting them in a way that they hope will make them be taken more seriously. How awful of them.