Saturday, December 12, 2009

Zombies and window dressing

Ben Goldacre makes several useful points about popular reactions to climate change including the following:
* The public know that evidence-based policy is window dressing for the government, so now, when they want us to believe them on climate science, we tend to be suspicious

*contrarians use 'zombie arguments', which survive to be raised again, for eternity, no matter how many times they are shot down.
Myles Allen notes of journalists on the CRU hack:
Even if they were reporting on Berlusconi's sex life they would be more careful...But it's only climate change.
Clive James, perhaps suffering from road rage, tells us that 'science is never settled'. Would that apply to evolutionary theory, Clive? To the germ theory of disease? To the heliocentric model of the solar system?

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