Why can't climate skeptics get basic facts straight?

They're not the least bit interested in facts, science, or reality. Their entire goal is to misinform people in order to prevent or delay carbon regulation. It's in their best interest *not* to get the facts right, because the facts are against them.

As Physics Nobel Prize winner and energy secretary Steven Chu recently noted, deniers have an asymmetrical standard. Their side is allowed to make an infinite number of egregious errors and not lose any credibility (see Christy, Spencer, and Lindzen, for some key examples), but any minor error by AGW realists is treated as proof that the entire AGW theory is wrong (see the Himalayan glacier error in IPCC WG2, for example).

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=An6ol...

Can you imagine if GISS had screwed up their global temperature analysis as badly as Christy and Spencer screwed up at UAH? We'd never hear the end of it. Yet deniers treat UAH as the gold standard and constantly disparage GISS just because they don't like James Hansen.

We can't trust these people - they're completely divorced from reality and intent on misinforming people. Several (*cough* Meadow *cough*) have even admitted as much.

I should preface my comments by saying that it is politically incorrect to beat down the cognitively challenged, but I can be an arrogant politically incorrect SOB at times. If the PC police come, I am prepared to go down in a hail of bullets. Getting basic facts right and understanding more complicated science are different issues. A grade 4 student has sufficient cognitive development to retain an amazing number of facts. Applying multiple concepts to solve a problem is an ability that many people never acquire. One of the problems that I pose to my new students (I take gifted high school students into my lab during summer holidays to encourage careers in science) is: d/dx is drives x km and notices n mosquitoes on the windshield of area A inclined at an angle alpha. He gets out of the car. How many mosquito bites does he get? How many Purple Martins does he see? A few figure it out in an hour, many take a day, a few keep trying for a week, and some never get it. Skeptics don't exhibit the ability to solve problems that require a synthesis of different scientific concepts in the answers provided so far in YA. Consequently, the inevitable conclusion is that skeptics are also incapable of recognizing inconsistencies in 'facts' that they receive from dubious sources. Rather than analyzing information and drawing correct conclusions about the veracity of their sources, skeptics merely recite by rote incorrect information with the same fidelity as their grade 4 counterparts. If Joseph Goebbels were alive today, his heart would be warmed to see the mass media principles he pioneered put to effective use in the energy lobby's disinformation campaign. Off on another tangent, did I miss something about Chinese in Greenland in my history classes? Did the Chinese irrigate their rice patties with water from melting glaciers in subtropical Greenland during the MWP? Can a skeptic give me a reference besides C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?

They don't want to get the facts straight because if they did, they would have to change their minds.

And there is nothing "Freudian" about their use of projection. This is a well established technique in the Attwater-Karl Rove-Rush Limbaugh-Pat Buchanan-Daily Mail school of political rhetoric. Accuse your opponents of doing what you are doing yourself. Find less than a handful of misstatements in a 1000 page document, make headline news out of them, and then accuse the climate scientists of cherry picking. Mis-state what people have actually said, and then accuse THEM of lying.

Wake up. We are not dealing with people who play fair. The dupes don't know the difference between what is true and what is false, and the manipulators don't care.

(Example right here: I'm sure RichardH really believes that the glaciers aren't melting, because someone, who knew just what the score is, spun that lie from an overstated estimate of just how fast they're going)

Well you don't say How big is Big. There's certainly been none so big at making the headlines around the Globe since Katrina.

Sceptics don't have the monopoly on lying, misinformation or ignorance.

There as just as many careless about the deatils and about confirming their facts on the other side, though statistically it's probably many more.

Most who aren't sceptics aren't supporters of AGW either.

They're not stupid, they just don't have the time to take a view and so accept the 'concensus', until they realise it can no longer just be taken on-trust.

The record of global hurricane / cyclone activity has been declining for some time and was recently very low, this even led to some well respected scientists to conclude there is no evidence to support a link between hurricane activity and "global warming" (see paper below). I trust the experts on these matters and the data that supports their conclusions. Whilst there are still storms occurring, there has been a clear decline and the link to warming has been falsified.

Are you suggesting that we hold professionals to the same standards as amateurs. Saying that the mistakes made by the IPCC are the same as those made by amateurs is laughable.

Edit: You still do not get it. You are the ones who keep mentioning the gold standard of acceptable sources. It has to be peer reviewed. Then the IPCC goes and sites sources that was not peer reviewed. This was no "mistake". Using acceptable sources in a scholarly work is so basic, that it is beyond comprehension that anyone can make such a "mistake." Especially people how have completed Ph. D. They did not even do it once, but more. No doubt about it, this was no mistake. This is alarmism. Or to paraphrase Al Gore, an appropriate use of overrepresentation of the facts.

And by facts do you mean statements like "global warming has been accelerating over the past years."

ahaha, if anyone goes to yahoo answers to become enlightened, then they deserve to be lied to.

There are few people here who are qualified to make any factual statements on global warming (and I am not qualified by any stretch of the imagination). The only thing people do in this section is regurgitate bias information that they search for in the web.

Most people who are skeptics are impossible to turn. What I've seen for global warming people, they are either too scared to believe it, or are very right wing in politics. As for storms, well they must not be watching the news much... or at all.

So which is it? Does global warming cause more and stronger hurricanes or less? Since the science is so overwhelming it shouldn't be a tough question to answer.

Who doesn't get their facts right???

How about "the glaciers are melting, the glaciers are melting!"

I keep hearing and reading this nonsense, none of which is backed up with facts. Whether it Algore or his friends at the IPCC it's just not true.