Sceptics
In The Bible, Doubting Thomas famously put his hand into Jesus’ wound and had a good grope around to convince himself that the son of God had truly risen from the dead.
He was the only sceptic among the Disciples, the only one who didn’t rely on blind faith. He demanded evidence of an improbable event. For this, he copped it a bit. According to John 20:29:
“Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
Continue reading "Be a bit sceptical about the new breed of doubters" »
Every generation has its doomsday scenario. When my mother was studying for what she quaintly calls her “matriculation” in 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis broke out. She downed her pen in protest. What was the point of studying, she told her unimpressed immigrant parents, if nuclear war was about to break out?
By the end of that decade, concerns over nuclear bombs were defused by The Population Bomb, the explosive book by Stanford University Professor Paul Ehrlich which warned of mass starvation and all kinds of chaos due to over-population.
That threat waned too, at least in the public mind. As eventually did the Y2K bug, mad cow, mad bird, mad pig and mad everything else. And now, it seems, climate change is waning as a serious threat in the public estimation.
Continue reading "Climate change won’t happen overnight, but it will happen" »
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RyaN says:
@fml: Why if the effects are completely miniscule and not worth bothering. In time our technology will change to emit less pollution for our own health and renewables are almost a guarantee. Running around like a complete bunch of morons telling us we are all going to die, making heaps… Read more »
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Caveman says:
When carbon dioxed levels were way higher than today the world was covered with megaflora and megafauna - obviously hotter is better anyway Read more »
This week, scientists announced that hey, you betcha, they’re darn nearly almost kinda totally sure that they’ve confirmed the existence of a thing no average person can see or hear or feel.
And the world said, okey dokey, we pretty much believe you. Not exactly sure what all this means or how it affects us, but hey, we’ll buy it. You’re the guys in the lab coats, after all, and we’re the ones stupid enough to wear cargo pants. Therefore, or “ergo” as you guys would put it, you must be right. Right?
Hands up who’s guessed where this thing’s heading…
Continue reading "We must be mugs for accepting the hoax boson" »
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Big Bang Sceptic says:
@braunman “Apparently there are a lot of scientists cursing the moment that the higgs boson became known as “the god particle”.” Isn’t that the definition of irony? Higgs-Boson underpins a cosmological paradigm that postulates creation ex nihilo. The Big Bang theory is just a rehashing of the Book of Gensis,… Read more »
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Higgs forever says:
Why do we accept it, you ask, with obvious confusion in your tone? Because these guys are actually looking for, and slowly, painstakingly finding, proof. No ****ing consensus, no mucking about, actually looking for - AND PUBLISHING - both results, conclusions, and opinion on it’s meaning. Consensus is for politicians… Read more »
There is a great line in the Dan Brown novel, Angels & Demons, when Robert Langdon is speaking with the Camerlengo in the Vatican regarding the existence of God.
Langdon says, as an academic, he’ll never understand God, and his heart says he’s not meant to. Without wanting to be too melodramatic, this sums up my feelings towards climate change.
To be frank, I’d love to believe in climate change. It’s a popular idea, and it’s one that, if you can discuss it using lots of long-winded terminology, you can often sound very intelligent.
Continue reading "PUNCH: It’s just too hard to understand climate change" »
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nba basketball says:
Every time I come back here again and don`t get disappointed..! Read more »
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Anita23Avery says:
It is cool that people are able to receive the credit loans and that opens up new possibilities. Read more »
The world - largely thanks to the internet - is getting overloaded with more pseudoscience, psychobabble and outright bullsh*t than ever before, and we need a groundswell of logical thinking to fight it.
Skeptics used to come under fire because people saw skepticism as inherently negative.
(It’s hard to work out whether that was because the critics just didn’t know the difference between cynicism and skepticism, or were just fundamentally ignorant of the philosophy of science.)
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Eran Segev says:
@Chemist: So climatologists and other scientists are part of the conspiracy to hide the truth from the public in order to save their jobs. How lucky we are to have the brave geologists, who are committed to science and won’t budge. Oh, wait! Perhaps it’s geologists who are simply out… Read more »
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chemist says:
re: Eran. Geologists are sceptics because they think in terms of billions of years. They know that climate change is constant and often extreme. Geologists are also aware that their is absolutely no correlation between climate and atmospheric composition over the past 600 million years. In the past it has… Read more »
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