The fraud of faux certainty
I’ve been featuring the issue of climate change, or more specifically mammade climate change, quite a lot lately. Not because I believe it’s untrue. I don’t. I have no belief about it at all. As anyone who reads this will know I agree with Robert Anton Wilson that “belief is the death of intelligence”.
The problem is I don’t believe it’s true either. Or rather I can’t see how the science behind it has been shown to be comprehensive or robust enough to warrant it being considered “settled”. And that obviously puts me on the opposite side of the fence from the vast majority of the media and major political lobbies, all of whom, from Greenpeace to Goldman Sachs are trying to convince us that AGW is a thing. And a thing we need to spend shitloads of money on and accept punitive legislation about. They scream about the danger from every news portal and every press release. And they have an audience of billions listening to their side of the story, and their insistence that the world has to “believe” or die.
So, since I don’t believe in AGW, and since I think “belief” expressed as blind faith in anything is bad. I feel a need to add my little voice as a small weight on the other side.
Not to convince anyone that AGW isn’t real. Please, don’t think I’m saying that.
What I’m saying is – we don’t know. Because in scientific terms that is the only truth there is about this right now. We don’t know. No one currently knows.
And it’s the fact that the Warmists are trying to make people believe they do know that makes me mad and uneasy.
It’s fine to campaign for something. Fine to try and get your point across about something you think is important. But it’s not fine to lie about it. And it’s especially not fine to use scientific half-truths and ludicrous simplifications to try and convince people you are talking science when you’re really talking belief.
It’s like a Jehovah’s Witness coming to your door and telling you 97% of scientists agree Jesus is really pissed off.
It oversteps a boundary of ethical and moral responsibility.
Right now there’s a kind of fraud being put across.And the fraud isn’t AGW – whatever some extreme skeptics might be saying. The fraud is the claim of certainty where there is none.
And that’s why I’m talking about it as much as I am.
(cartoon by Josh – www.cartoonsbyjosh.com)
Quid Sapio's Climate Stuff 
At one level you are quite right. We don’t know enough about the complex atmospheric processes which govern climate (and even the word ‘climate’ is not a properly defined item) to know whether man is having no effect, some effect, or a vast effect on it.
However, belief is actually not as bad as Robert Wilson paints it. Humans cannot operate without belief. Belief is the reason you cross a bridge or get into a car without carefully checking all the engineering aspects of it first. Belief can certainly be wrong, but humans rely quite a lot on belief in their day-to-day life. We call this ‘experience’. And a mature human is often quite good at sorting out things which it is practical to believe in (such as the sun rising tomorrow), and impractical (such as an email telling me that I can have a large sum of money if I just send some cash to this address). We call people who are bad at making these distinctions ‘credulous’.
There are some things which should ring warning bells in a mind. People trying to tell you not to think about something, but just accept it. People trying to stop you listening to the other side of an argument. People calling you derogatory names if you don’t agree with them. All these are classic ‘hard sell’ techniques – often associated with out-and-out fraud.
And it is my belief that the proponents of AGW are displaying all of these traits. I have checked out comparatively few source records, but what I have found supports the sceptical position. This also accords with my experience about fraud. Consequently, although I don’t ‘know’ that the AGW hypothesis is wrong (no one does), I believe it to be.
I would not say that my belief was ‘blind’. I am certainly open to new assertions or data – from both sides. For instance, clear evidence of a ‘tropospheric hot-spot’ would be a major indicator to me that CO2-driven atmospheric warming was happening. But, until such data arises, I will continue to believe, based on my experience, that AGW proponents are making largely fraudulent claims.