Paul Krguman on climate change

Discussion in 'Political Opinions & Beliefs' started by SixNein, Jun 9, 2014.

  1. SixNein

    SixNein New Member

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    He created a very good article on the topic of climate change:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/o...d-climate.html?ref=opinion&smid=tw-nytopinion

    Although the effectiveness of the right wing echo chamber is very debatable, Krugman makes several good points. My favorite is the following:
    I do think it applies more broadly since I've been in scientific debates with liberals over topics like vaccination or GM Foods. And for the most part, they typically act with the same kind of hostility that conservatives show with topics like climate change, evolution, or say net neutrality.
     
  2. PatrickT

    PatrickT Well-Known Member

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    It's always nice to hear from the Enron Shill. Isn't the Enron Shill the guy that published a textbook saying unemployment benefits discourage people from looking for work and then when the leftists were extending unemployment benefits, again, said they did not discourage people from looking for work. It's so nice to see leftists ethics in practice.
     
  3. SixNein

    SixNein New Member

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    Do you even bother reading a post before replying with unrelated gobbledygook?
     
  4. Taxcutter

    Taxcutter New Member

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    The point of Post#2 is that Krugman is no more credible than a wino.
     
  5. Hoosier8

    Hoosier8 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Wow, the first paragraph is totally unsupportable except for his third issue. Pure sensationalism. What is it the libs say? "He isn't a climate scientist!"
     
  6. SixNein

    SixNein New Member

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    Paul Krugman is an economist (a very influential one at that), and the subject is on a economic treatment of action on global warming.

    - - - Updated - - -

    He won a Nobel prize for his work in international economics.
     
  7. Rainbow Crow

    Rainbow Crow New Member Past Donor

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    I agree with some of your anecdotes, but the left wasn't always this hostile about climate change. They only became hostile like this recently (regarding something that has a time frame reaching into 2100) and that was because they had to admit their more dramatic models were wrong. This hostility, where they call people who disagree with them things like "anti-intellectual" is not an advancement for them, it's actually their response to their own failures. It is the name calling you get from a retreating force.

    The only thing really clear right now is that no one can prove what is going to happen in the future.
     
  8. SixNein

    SixNein New Member

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    When a vast majority of international scientists come to the same conclusion, one should take the conclusion seriously.

    What is striking about your argument is how its formatted. Some liberals argue with me about vaccinations. I point to the widespread support in the medical community, and they reply in a very similar fashion. They use different words of course, but it is the same anti-expert attitude. They point to bull(*)(*)(*)(*) research that they don't understand, and they gleam the abstract for political purposes even when the paper contradicts their claims. I've seen quite a few people do that on climate change as well.

    I have to agree with Dijkstra, the hippy nonsense from the 1960's harmed education.
    https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd06xx/EWD641.PDF
     
  9. happy fun dude

    happy fun dude New Member

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    That's because it is anti-intellectual. The intellectual approach for scientific dispute involves the scientific method. You run your tests, do your studies, collect your data, make your conclusion, and then publish it independently in a scientific journal. This is what you see that appears to indicate that the climate is changing. And if you dispute such findings, or find fault, then you can challenge it, directly to the scientists. They can evaluate how sound the findings are, and in this case, we have about 97%.

    Conversely, insisting that this science is incorrect, yet not offering the proper corrections to the journals, and instead arguing to the layman in order to effect political policies is quite anti-intellectual. Never mind what the experts say, just listen to me!

    I took meteorology courses in college, but didn't finish the degree. But I learned enough. And the one thing I learned was that climate and weather are both extremely complicated systems. And because seeing the future is impossible, scientific predictions can't possibly be perfect, or even always close, but it doesn't change their scientific nature or obvious plausibility as is the case here. Just like you would only defer to certain people to give you surgery, or defend you in court, you should naturally defer to the judgement of the scientific community for matters like this. I have no reason to doubt them, because of how strong the scientific process is.
     
  10. AmericanNationalist

    AmericanNationalist Well-Known Member

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    I find your response ironic: "You shouldn't listen to yourselves! You should listen to Scientists!" Based on the same Fallacy of Authority. The reason that's a fallacy is that authority isn't always earned, but given. People aren't always qualified but promoted. And the biggest reason it's a fallacy is it assumes authority is unflappable or that those in authority are somehow non-political.

    Two things: That 97% number is distorted based on the number of surveys(And the participants therein) as well as Academic Journals. So it's not truly 97% of the community, but rather a specific group of jerk-off scientists. The number's a lot less overwhelming with context.

    Secondly, here's where the politicization comes in: "The climate's changing!". Well, no duh. This is an easily observable fact, meant to try to restore damaged credibility. The question becomes two-fold: Can you prove beyond reasonable doubt that it's caused by Humans? And is there any realistic solutions?

    The first question is critical, as all graphs have failed miserably to explain this, comparing the present earth and its changes to the past eras and blindly making the assumption that it was caused by Human Beings. What about the Asteroid belt? We weren't around when dinosaurs went poof, so we didn't cause that. What about Natural causes of warming?

    Nope, can't politicize that so it's generally left alone LOL. But what about "solutions"? Usually comes in the gravy train of government grants, etc. Which means we citizens have to foot the bill. Indeed, Al Gore's made millions off this. But what about the Earth? What about "The Threat"? Oh, wait, nothing's been done? Of course not! It'd end a very profitable gravy train. So they pretend, make "dire warnings" and get all the more richer.

    It's not anti-intellectualism to deny this theory. It's literally to save us billions from pseudo-theocratic "scientists" and their political allies.
     
  11. Rainbow Crow

    Rainbow Crow New Member Past Donor

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    People don't offer the "proper corrections" to journals because no one has gotten it correct yet. The supposed 97% consensus on AGW is pretty meaningless if they can't correctly predict the rate or the amount of warming, isn't it?

    You might tell me that they have it right this time, with their latest models. Why should I believe that they have it right this time? Some of these people have been making alarmist climate models that were proven wrong since the 1970's. That's nearly 40 years of widespread failure to predict the course of the climate. They failed again just recently too, so why should I assume that this time, when they happen to be getting a little hysterical, that they have finally gotten it right?

    Seems to me that you are dressing up an appeal to authority as rationalism. I won't defer to a scientist who fails to get results just because he's a scientist.
     
  12. Rainbow Crow

    Rainbow Crow New Member Past Donor

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    I do want to add that, ten years from now, if they can show they created a climate model that was actually correct, I would be more willing to listen to them then. I just believe that titles and education are no substitute for being right.

    I guess a lot of leftists don't believe that, though. Climate change models are consistently wrong but the left insists that this time they are right and therefore we should overhaul our entire civilization (somehow without hurting our standard of living). It's sort of similar to how Obama is clearly a bad president but people insist, in the face of consistent failures, that he's secretly really a good president. I was never really happy when I was a liberal, forcing myself to mentally compromise on just about everything.
     
  13. For Topical Use Only

    For Topical Use Only Well-Known Member

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    The biggest issue with 'listening to yourselves' is the degree of misinformation which that enables. It's a kind of Fallacy of Popular Authority, you see, which tends to propagate inaccurate belief like the presumption that 97% of scientists agree that AGW is the cause of climate change whereas the 97% figure actually relates to the number of scientific peer reviewed papers (out of some 12k studied) which point to AGW being the driver of climate change. This mistaken assumption is anti-intellectualism at work and is about as clear an example of why 'listening to ourselves' falls over, lands flat on its face, and makes dumbed-down buffoons of even the most eloquent participant.

    Because the Fallacy of Popular Authority has become so wedded to this anti-intellectualism what happens thereafter is scornful dismissal of an accurate understanding via a pseudo-theocratic belief system. A pseudo-theocratic belief system which can't even accept and adapt to what, precisely, a simple figure relates to.

    The notion of 'proving anything beyond reasonable doubt' is another example of the Fallacy of Popular Authority. It works as well as we can hope for when we want to find an individual guilty of a crime but it has no place in honest science. The job of science is never to prove anything beyond reasonable doubt. Science is about probability not proof, which is something the anti-intellectual don't buy into given their adherence to pseudo-theocratic belief.

    Inaccuracy and stupidity can be politicised so the truth about things like the 97% figure isn't taken on board but instead is consigned to the trash and said to belong to the 'other' side. I put 'side' in quotation marks to denote the accurate and un-stupid reality that there aren't two sides, there are only those who understand and ranged against those who understand are some various scattered idiots bleeding-out stupidity, inaccuracy, and anti-intellectualism via their pseudo-theocratic belief system. All fully paid up members of The Church of Fallacy of Popular Authority. Thankfully the aware pay them about as much serious attention as the Westboro Baptists.
     
  14. Hoosier8

    Hoosier8 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Doesn't make him any less gullible than anyone else.
     
  15. PatrickT

    PatrickT Well-Known Member

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    A. Paul Krugman is a shill for the liberals.
    B. President Obama won a Nobel Prize, too, didn't he? Perhaps Obama and Krugman won their prizes for the same reason.

    Paul Krugman's work, for which he got the prize, were completed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But, he got the award in 2008 after he firmly established himself as a reliable shill on the far left. He had published his columns in a book called The Great Unraveling. In 2007 he published The Conscience of a Liberal. Then he got a Nobel Prize in economics in 2008. Interesting timing. Not as interesting as Obama's Nobel Prize for, well, being even farther to the left.

    Paul Krugman is very influential with the other leftists. They run in packs.
     
  16. Wizard From Oz

    Wizard From Oz Banned at Members Request

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    Paul Krugman won his award for a very clear and definite contribution to the understanding of economics. He theorized a concept that now dominates international business. The economy of scale.
     
  17. PatrickT

    PatrickT Well-Known Member

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    I've always wondered why Barack Obama won a Nobel Peace prize when he'd never done anything. So, I went and looked.

    "Prize motivation: "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples"
    http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/obama-facts.html

    And, the Nobel Committee cited his field as:
    "Field: arms control and disarmament, world organizing"

    Now that's funny. Obviously, they gave Barack Obama his Nobel Peace prize for his politics. And, Paul Krugman got his for the same reason.
     
  18. For Topical Use Only

    For Topical Use Only Well-Known Member

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    I've never seen any far leftist support for Krugman anywhere. He seems a bit of a darling among the US chattering classes, though.
     
  19. Taxcutter

    Taxcutter New Member

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    Taxcutter says:
    So did Hussein Obama. The Nobel prize has become debauched.
     
  20. Hoosier8

    Hoosier8 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Aussie Joseph Banks on Climate Change 1918

    “It will without doubt have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.”
     
  21. Wizard From Oz

    Wizard From Oz Banned at Members Request

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    You do know more than one prize is given each year. The peace prize is not the only thing up for grabs
     
  22. Taxcutter

    Taxcutter New Member

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    Taxcutter says:
    Clearly, some years the prizes should not be awarded if the best they can do is Paul Krugnman and Hussein Obama. By awarding the prizes to obvious losers devalues the prize.
     
  23. Wizard From Oz

    Wizard From Oz Banned at Members Request

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    So you feel Paul Krugman's economic theories are not worth award the prize. Feel free to present your credentials as to why you are right, and the manufacturing industry world wide is wrong
     
  24. bwk

    bwk Well-Known Member

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    Not that you would supply us with a counter argument to Krugmans of course.
     
  25. bwk

    bwk Well-Known Member

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    They don't. And it's not likely they will. Willful ignorance mentioned by Krugman is so true.
     

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