What’s the bottom line? The dangers of
With few exceptions, climate deniers and
global warming and climate change are becoming more visible. We need to act on climate now with Positive Vision #1. It is late but it’s not too late. We need to be optimistic.
right-wing denier media use pseudo scientific tricks, rather like prosecuting attorneys, grasping at straws. Many deniers practice the pseudoscience of scientific form without real
There is no alternative. In acting to mitigate climate change, we can make the world a better and safer place for us, for our fellow human beings, and for our descendants. We
content, what the famous physicist Richard Feynman called Cargo Cult Science. Common violations of scientific practice and scientific ethics by contrarians include unrepre-
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sentative cherry picking of data, demands of unattainable precision from mainstream science, advancing alternate conjectures for which the evidence is at best flimsy, pushing
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irrelevant red herring assertions, falsely generalizing from isolated unrepresentative cases, ignoring contrary evidence, making bumbling mathematical errors, and
Appendix The climate contrarians / deniers / faux skeptics: What you need to know
misquoting mainstream science. One particularly ludicrous claim by contrarians is identifying themselves with Galileo. Contrarians generally do not admit mistakes. The
A few maverick climatologists, some scientists speaking out of their fields of expertise, and others with no credentials have politicized climate science, providing fodder for the
contrarian media concocts false accusations of climate science, of which contrarians themselves are guilty. The untrained public cannot tell the difference.
climate disinformation media machine. The fossil fuel industry, right-wing media, and libertarian think tanks often pay these people. One of the most colorful is
Selected stolen emails of climate scientists with no significance were quoted out of context and made into an industry of propaganda about the so-called and dis-
Christopher Monckton, who has a British accent but no scientific credentials at all, who gives talks for right-wing groups grotesquely distorting climate science, and who was an
credited "Climate gate"; numerous investigations concluded there was nothing actually wrong.
"expert witness" on climate for Congressional Republicans. Usually contrarian papers are low quality and are not published, or are published in obscure jour nals. Some
An error on one obscure page in the middle of 3,000 pages of three 2007 IPCC scientific reports was blown out of proportion and used to attack the whole IPCC institution and climate science itself.
published contrarian papers left a trail littered with abuse of peer review, editor resignations, and even plagiarism.
What about proof, uncertainty, and action? Climate deniers mischaracterize science by
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