Conspiracy theory – History for losers

So says David Aaronovitch in Voodoo Histories – and he is absolutely right. (For the benefit of new readers, David Aaronovitch is an old favourite of mine but let’s not digress; unless you want to)… In 2007, the American Physical Society (APS) decided to get off the fence and endorse the need for action to mitigate AGW; and 260 of its 48,000 members (by conventional maths that is just over 0.5%) have subsequently complained. Unfortunately, simple maths was apparently insufficient reason for influential British sceptical politicians like the Rt Hon Peter Lilley MP to choose to ignore such protests. On the contrary, he highlighted this protest in Parliament citing it as legitimate reason to question the scientific consensus that human activity is indeed affecting global climate. The Institute of Physics (IOP) got into a similar mess after asking Energy Consultant (founder of Crestport Services) Peter Gill (just possibly prejudiced in favour of the continuance of “business as usual”?) to compile a highly sceptical submission (e.g. claiming that “Unfortunately, for many people [AGW] has become a religion, so facts and analysis have become largely irrelevant”) to the Parliamentary Select Committee investigating the UEA/CRU email scandal. The whole fiasco left the IOP looking very foolish indeed. And yet, these losers will not (it seems) give up. As a first step towards realising their folly, they could all do a lot worse that read Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science because the continuing existence of AGW denial can only be explained by the fact that its proponents are guilty of one or more of the fundamental mistakes Goldacre highlights in his book (see my previous post yesterday). Furthermore, he is therefore right to conclude that… “You cannot reason someone out of a position they did not reason themself into”.