-Frank McDonald in the Irish Times
“Evidently due to this e-mail conspiracy, Arctic sea ice is at historically low levels, Australia is on fire,
the northern United Kingdom is underwater, and the world’s glaciers are disappearing.”
- Brad Johnson
"I think geoengineering can and should be discussed but not based on stupidity and misinformation."
- a comment on "Superfreakonomics"
Every scientific theory either rises to the level of consensus or else it is abandoned. Every single one. Consensus implicates a consilience of evidence and a preponderance of evidence for the best explanation. Consensus is how science works, and it is the difference between truth as we know it and poorly supported speculation we don't.
- anonymous ("ali baba") Via Ill-considered
“Political reality must be grounded in physical reality or it's completely useless.”
Hans Joachim "John" Schellnhuber
The right target for both mugging little old ladies and carbon dioxide emissions is zero.
Ken Caldeira
“Stop blaming the scientists and stop blaming the press. Blame the lies and the lying liars who tell them.”
Tamino
“They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. …Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences. ... We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now.”
Winston Churchill via Paul Gilding with a h/t to Lou Grinzo
Stewart Brand
Greg Craven
"Any jackass can kick down a barn but it takes a good carpenter to build one."
Lyndon Johnson
"I do not consider a liberal necessarily to be a leftist. A liberal to me is one who--and it suits some of the dictionary definitions--is unbeholden to any specific belief or party or group or person, but makes up his or her mind on the basis of the facts and the presentation of those facts at the time. That defines what I am. I have never voted a party line. I vote on the individual and the issues."
- Barack Obama
- Hans Joachim Schellnhuber
My understanding of economics is quite complete, thank you.
- some guy on the internet
“The largest corporate carbon polluters in America, 14 years ago, asked their own people to conduct a review of all of this science. And their own people told them, "What the international scientific community is saying is correct, there is no legitimate basis for denying it." Then, these large polluters committed a massive fraud far larger than Bernie Madoff's fraud. They are the Bernie Madoffs of global warming. They ordered the of the censoring and removal of the scientific review that they themselves conducted, and like Bernie Madoff, they lied to the people who trusted them in order to make money.”
- Al Gore, testimony to US Congress
““Increasing personal evidence of global warming and its potentially devastating consequences can be counted on to be an extremely effective teacher and motivator. Unfortunately, such lessons may arrive too late for corrective action.””
- Elke Weber, Columbia U prof of business and of psychology
“The clearest message from the financial crisis is that our current model of economic success is fundamentally flawed. For the advanced economies of the western world, prosperity without growth is no longer a utopian dream. It is a financial and ecological necessity.>”
- UK Sustainable Development Commission Report (h/t Econospeak)
“A grown-up body politic will acknowledge its children, and let them play with their credit ratings and their hedge funds and their cap pistols, in a well-supervised back yard so that the adults can get down to what adults are meant to get down to; the pleasurable socializing of their resources and the passionate coupling of their best ideas.”
- Garret Keizer, in Harper's Magazine, April 2009
“Much of the media is wedded to the ‘we report, you decide’ mentality, in which the role of the journalist is to serve as a mouthpiece for their interviewees. There is little critical analysis, no arbitration as to the actual validity of arguments ... But this of course favors the arguments of the ridiculous, who are lent extra legitimacy by being placed in the same category as parties with actual credibility.”
- Joel from Inwood in a comment at Climate Progress
“We’re big. We’re really big. So far, humans have changed carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by an amount equal to what nature was capable of doing over at least the last million years.
...
“Big climate change is a done deal,”
- James White, Director, Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado at Boulder, quoted by Tom Yulsman (see link)
"To borrow a distinction that Greg Bear was making at length at Boskone, the problem is not that traditional media don't deliver enough information. The problem is that they don't deliver enough knowledge. ...
They're providing tons of information, but it's useless information about stupid stuff. "
- Chad Orzel
The target audience of denialism is the lay audience, not scientists. It's made up to look like science, but it's PR.
- David Archer
- David Archer
- Simon Baron-Cohen
Probably the weakest reason for mistrusting us climate scientists is the idea that we are in it for the money. When I was a starving grad student, I told a dignified lady from rural Mississippi that I was doing climate modeling. She was briefly taken aback. After a beat, she gathered her wits and politely replied "Oh, that must be... lucrative".
"Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us."
- Jerry Garcia
- Jerry Garcia
I don't believe in reporting anymore. All I can think about when I hear a reporter is "who bought this and who are they trying to sell it to?"
- James McMurtry
"...the publication of research papers is the true test of a modern scientist." No, no, no!!!!! This is wrong in so many ways! So Ivory Tower thinking that leads to all other science careers being dubbed "alternative careers" and looked down upon - a nasty, vile way of thinking.
- Bora Zivkovic
intellectual health to know when science really is science"
- Amanda Gefter (h/t DOK)
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