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Knowledge vs Belief: Are AGW Proponents Gullible?

This post is a mirror of Knowledge vs Belief: Are AGW Proponents gullible? on the outstanding blog Friends of Gin & Tonic . (If you enjoy intellectual sarcasm, FoGT is your blog!) I have received permission from the author to repost here.

A Rant by Gunkl, modified by Dr. Schweinsgruber

Some skeptics consider proponents of what the broad body of science and the IPPC say, that global warming is manmade and real, as true believers: knowledge vs. belief. This is principally true, albeit it is the other way round.

That is because this ‘belief’ that AGW is true is not contained in a confessional framework, which only holds together by a multitude of non-testable additional statements. It is rather a reasonable assumption based on the knowledge of physical laws and empirical observations.

In other words, proponents of AGW do not believe this in a religious sense but in a pragmatic one, based on knowledge.

People who do not believe that AGW is real do this in a dramaturgy that has religious patterns. The opposite of knowing is not not-knowing but believing. Not knowing something can be remedied by knowledge. Just ask somebody who knows that and you know it, too.

Things that are believed in a religious way are being corrected by the normative power of fact because the statement to be believed was formulated without knowing the facts. Is the fallacy obvious and provable, then the believed statement is not revised, however blocked from the harsh reality by a false, protective statement, in which facts should run out of steam. An example is intelligent design.

What does this mean for climate change denial? Climate skeptics believe that global warming cannot be triggered by greenhouse gases because this is physically not possible. But this does not hold water. Science proves that wrong. Now the skeptics could say: ‘Wow, I didn’t know that, I have learnt something. Done deal!’ This would be the case if we were talking knowledge – but this is not the case.

Therefore, an additional statement is attached to the believed item: it is a conspiracy. The physicists are wrong. This statement is supported by the fact that ‘these physicists’ use the elitist language that has been disliked from school days on: the language of maths, which is considered a secret language, but only by those who do not want to learn it. Maths is actually quite a public language. Once a group of people has been caught using secret language, this opens the door for a conspiracy theory.

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