Educated ignorance on display...conservative intellectuals debate climate change

[pscot]

There is no issue where educated ignorance is on more perfect display than watching the conservative movement confront scientific evidence of climate change. Educated ignorance is not the same thing as the regular kind of ignorance. It takes real talent to master. George F. Will and Charles Krauthammer are two of the intellectual giants of the right, former winners of the Bradley Foundation’s $250,000 annual prize, Washington Post columnists, and Fox News All-Star panelists. They numbered among the select conservative intellectuals chosen to dine with newly elected president Barack Obama in 2009.

On their Fox News All-Star Panel appearance this week, both men discussed the U.S. National Climate Assessment, which they dismissed with various irritable mental gestures. Their evasions and misstatements, clothed in faux-erudition, offer a useful entrance point to study the current state of the right-wing mind.....


It is hard to dispute this except to note that Krauthammer here has taken a radically skeptical position not merely on climate science, but on all science. His argument implies that no scientific argument merits respect. Given the provisional and socially constructed peer pressure driving the consensus theory of aerodynamics, it is amazing that he is willing to travel in an airplane.....



To watch Will and Krauthammer grasp for rationales to cast doubt on an established scientific field merely because its findings pose a challenge to their ideological priors is a depressing, and even harrowing, study in the poisonous effects of dogma upon a once-healthy brain. They have amassed an impressive array of sound bites and factoids, and can render them with convincing gravitas, and yet their underlying reasoning is absolutely bonkers. The analogy Krauthammer suggests of the rain man — an authority figure possessed of commanding prestige despite lacking even rudimentary analytic powers — turns out to be apt; only he is describing himself.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/

[Jim__]

1. Educated? The people may be well-educated, but their discussion was as dumb as it gets.

Krauthammer talks about Einstein changing all of settled physics. Except, Einstein did not change most of the predictions of classical physics. Using that example leads to the conclusion that the climate scientists are right in their predictions, but they have the details wrong.

[Jefferson23]

2. They either have an agenda or should get their money returned for the tuition college fees.

Their bullshit is pathetic and their credentials are as well...huff puff, dismiss with
style, all the while posing as informed commentators...UGH.