ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI
See preceding page for earlier posts (addenda) today, 4/30/17...
To continue with a topic which has become a 'burning issue' of the day - and needlessly so: Here is the latest objective proof that for many ultra-libs today, climate catastrophism has become, so it appears, the supreme religious dogma in their atheistic life, a dogma which must never be opposed, indeed cannot be opposed, they believe, and about which they will not show any tolerance at all.
INTOLERANCE AT ITS UGLIEST from people who have loved to preach about free speech, but it is increasingly clear from the daily news chronicles of events around the United States, that they believe free speech only applies to themselves and those who think and speak like they do, while they will do - and have done - everything but kill (so far - and God forbid!) to keep others who do not think like they do from ever being heard in any way.
People are furiously canceling
their New York Times subscriptions
after publishing an op-ed
disputing climate change
by Sonam Sheth
Business Insider
April 30, 2017
The
New York Times decision to publish a debut op-ed column by the newly-hired Bret Stephens, a notable
denier of anthropogenic climate change, has sparked an uproar from the paper's subscribers, who are furious that the
Times decided to publish a column that is contrary to
much of the modern-day scientific consensus on the dangers of global warming.
[Note the writer's inherent bias that he does not even bother to hide! Consensus-schmensus! When Sheth and his fellow climate catastrophists choose to look at only one side of a legitimate scientific question, that is no consensus at all but an obviously biased view.]
In his column, Stephens compared the "certitude" with which Hillary Clinton's advisers believed she would win the 2016 election to climate scientists' repeated warnings about climate change risks. As evidence, Stephens said that inaccurate polling data during the 2016 campaign proves that science can miss the mark in other fields as well.
"There's a lesson here. We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris," Stephens wrote.
Stephens's column evoked a swift and angry response from many of the paper's subscribers, who promptly canceled their subscriptions and bashed the Times's decision to hire Stephens as a writer.
Stephens's column also prompted backlash from those within the scientific community, like Stefan Rahmstorf, the head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Rahmstorf sharply criticized the Times's decision to hire Stephens, as well as Stephens's column, in a letter to the executive editor.
"I enjoy reading different opinions from my own, but this is not a matter of different opinions," Rahmstorf wrote. He added that in its defense of Stephens, "The Times argued that 'millions agree with Stephens.' It made me wonder what's next — when are you hiring a columnist claiming that the sun and stars revolve around the Earth, because millions agree with that?" [Another sample of the stupidity that passes for 'rationality' among climate-change bigots!]
The Times has said it hired Stephens as part of an effort to "further widen" the range of views it brings its audience, editorial page editor James Bennet told the Huffington Post on Friday.
Bennet added that there "are many shades of conservatism and many shades of liberalism,"and the Times owes it to readers to "capture a wide range." He also said that it's "terribly unfair" to label Stephens a climate denier.
"There's more than one kind of denial," he said. "And
to pretend like the views of a thinker like Bret, and the millions of people who agree with him on a range of issues, should simply be ignored, that they're outside the bounds of reasonable debate, is a really dangerous form of delusion." [Words I did not think to read from a Times editor. But the fact that Stephens was hired to begin with is Bennet's bona fides. I certainly hope the rest of the Times editorial board stand with Bennet and will keep Stephens on - or will we read tomorrow that as an apology to its offended readers, the Times must reluctantly announce Stephens will no longer write an op-ed column for them.]
Stephens has written in the past about his belief that
climate change, statistics about rape on college campuses, and institutionalized racism are "imagined enemies." [Aren't they? Like 'fake data'-supported climate catastrophism itself?]
Here is the Stephens column. A useful preliminary:
CERTAINTY - the quality of being reliably true. [objective]
CERTITUDE - absolute conviction that something is the case. [subjective]
A certainty is reliably true inherently - it does not depend on whether I believe it or not. A certitude is merely my opinion bout something, which may correspond to a genuine certainty, or to its opposite.]
Climate of complete certainty
by Bret Stephens
Op-Ed Columnist
APRIL 28, 2017
When someone is honestly 55 percent right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60 percent right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God.
But what’s to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he’s 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.
— An old Jew of Galicia
In the final stretch of last year’s presidential race, Hillary Clinton and her team thought they were, if not 100 percent right, then very close.
Right on the merits. Confident in their methods. Sure of their chances. When Bill Clinton suggested to his wife’s advisers that, considering Brexit, they might be underestimating the strength of the populist tide, the campaign manager, Robby Mook, had a bulletproof answer: The data run counter to your anecdotes.
That detail comes from
Shattered, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s compulsively readable book on Clinton’s 2016 train wreck. Mook belonged to
a new breed of political technologists with little time for retail campaigning and limitless faith in the power of models and algorithms to minimize uncertainty and all but predict the future.
“Mook and his ‘Moneyball’ approach to politics rankled the old order of political operatives and consultants because it made some of their work obsolete,” Allen and Parnes write about the campaign’s final days. “The memo that one Hillary adviser had sent months earlier warning that they should add three or four points to Trump’s poll position was a distant memory.”
There’s a lesson here. We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris. From Robert McNamara to Lehman Brothers to Stronger Together, cautionary tales abound.
We ought to know this by now, but we don’t. Instead,
we respond to the inherent uncertainties of data by adding more data without revisiting our assumptions, creating an impression of certainty that can be lulling, misleading and often dangerous. Ask Clinton.
With me so far? Good. Let’s turn to climate change.
Last October, the Pew Research Center published a survey on the politics of climate change. Among its findings:
Just 36 percent of Americans care “a great deal” about the subject. Despite 30 years of efforts by scientists, politicians and activists to raise the alarm, nearly two-thirds of Americans are either indifferent to or only somewhat bothered by the prospect of planetary calamity.
]B]The science is settled, we are told. The threat is clear. Isn’t this one instance, at least, where 100 percent of the truth resides on one side of the argument?
Well, not entirely. As Andrew Revkin wrote last year about his storied career as an environmental reporter at
The Times,
“I saw a widening gap between what scientists had been learning about global warming and what advocates were claiming as they pushed ever harder to pass climate legislation.” The science was generally scrupulous. The boosters who claimed its authority weren’t.
Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the Northern Hemisphere since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. To say this isn’t to deny science. It’s to acknowledge it honestly.
By now I can almost hear the heads exploding. They shouldn’t, because there’s another lesson here — this one for anyone who wants to advance the cause of good climate policy. As Revkin wisely noted, hyperbole about climate “not only didn’t fit the science at the time but could even be counterproductive if the hope was to engage a distracted public.”
Let me put it another way.
- Claiming total certainty [i.e., certitude] about the science of climate change traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong.
- Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions.
- Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.
None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences.
But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.
I’ve taken the epigraph for this column from the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who knew something about the evils of certitude. Perhaps if there had been less certitude and more second-guessing in Clinton’s campaign, she’d be president.
Perhaps if there were less certitude about our climate future, more Americans would be interested in having a reasoned conversation about it.
BTW, if the ultra-lib necessarily anti-Trump maniacs were truly consistent in their views, then they ought to protest every media outlet that reports on Donald Trump and calls him President Trump - which would have them protesting perhaps 99.5% of all American mass media. Who collectively and individually would, of course, lose their raison d'etre, if they did the unthinkable (and realistically impossible) by failing to acknowledge an immutable historical fact they have to deal with in every aspect of their life daily for the 3 years and 9 months left of Trump's presidential term.
Their raison d'etre is, of course, to bring in revenue, and rightly so, for any business undertaking as all the media companies are. conventional or digital. However, as purveyors of information, they also have the primary duty to report all facts about all sides of any issue insofar as they can be reliably established, and to report all facts objectively first, not to report facts instantly filtered through and colored by editorial bias.
To ignore and distort facts about any side that may not represent what the particular media outlet stands for, is a dereliction of media's primary journalistic obligation.
Of course, the ultra-libs cannot protest how their own media are reporting on Trump because the reporting and commentary are invariably, predictably and unconditionally anti-Trump - the ultra-libs would lose the relentlessly singular focus of their lives right now if they did not have the echo chamber of the anti-Trump media to confirm and fuel their anti-Trump odium. The anti-Trump media have become their indispensable daily waker-upper and tonic, ahead of their Starbucks latte. A fatal addiction as damaging to their psyche as jihadism is to Muslim extremists.
Now, there are many things I do not like at all about Donald Trump - as a person and as President - but I am certainly grateful that he was elected, not Hilary Clinton whom I find despicable in every way. And for all his often-misplaced bluster and unfortunate egoism, I do approve the direction he is taking for the country. And if all he did in his first 100 days of office was to successfully name a man like Neil Gorsuch (ad multos annos!, God grant) to the Supreme Court, that to me is achievement enough for his early presidency, because it is an action that will mark the social and political life of the USA for decades to come.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 30/04/2017 22:24]