Paul Krugman breaks down his hate-mail box
Nothing gets me as many crazed emails and comments as any reference to climate change. The anti-global-warming people are just filled with hate for anyone who suggests that maybe, just maybe, the vast majority of scientists are right.
Since Krugman doesn’t read this blog I can safely offer him a challenge — Give me one example in which your writing about global warming suggested that `maybe, just maybe’ the vast majority of scientists are right.
More likely whatever you have ever written about this issue suggests that for certainty, real certainty, the vast majority of scientists are right about human-made global warming and its long-run consequences and that everybody who says differently is a flat-earther idiot.
3 comments
December 9, 2009 at 4:39 am
Paul Goldberg
On October 17th, Krugman wrote in his blog:
That mentioning of “risk” and “uncertainty” makes it look to me as if Krugman does in fact acknowledge the possibility that the scientists are wrong. And his support for action on climate change is based on the precautionary principle, rather than certainty that any action is needed.
December 9, 2009 at 11:58 am
Eran
Hmm… I think you do to Krugman what the freakonomics dudes did to Weitzman: take him out of context. Krugman’s post is about whether or not we should defer costs of fighting global warming to future, richer, generations. He takes it for granted that global warming is happening, and that it will continue if we do not `act’. The uncertainty and risk is about whether we are facing an immediate catastrophe, and this uncertainty is part of the scientific consensus (AKA vast majority of scientists), or at least Krugman and Weitzman present it as such. I don’t think he says anything that acknowledge the possibility that this consensus is wrong.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/weitzman-in-context/
December 11, 2009 at 10:24 pm
brxtux
I appreciate your request but your cynicism is misplaced: The burden of proof is not on Krugman or the scientists he trusts. The scientists have already met their burden by building the best models.
The scientific consensus was not reached because there is a cabal of dastardly men sitting in a room. It was reached because there are multiple lines of evidence and multiple models that support the common hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change.
So, therefore, the burden of proof is on the detractors to provide a rigorous, not disproven, complete model that explains the observations better than the consensus models. If they cannot do so and the detractors are intellectually honest, then they have to admit “maybe, just maybe, the vast majority of scientists are right.”
I agree that Krugman is a bit cocky here. He probably should have said “put up or shut up” rather than engaging in an ad hominem. Nevertheless, as far as the science and the defense of the scientific process is concerned, he is in the clear and in the right.