Climate deniers are already pretty good at presenting nonsense arguments in science to deny the existence of human-cause climate change ----- but they can always do better.
One of the best of the old school deniers at slashing and smearing opponents was the world-famous paleontologist, George Gaylord Simpson , one of the eternal deities of the "Darwinian Heaven".
One of the most effective torpedoes ever aimed at the idea of continental drift was Simpson's 1943 claim that he had studied the evolution and spread of the mammals better than anyone else and that evidence showed no sign of continental drift.
Wegener was long dead by then so he couldn't defend his thesis - but his chief supporter, South African Alexander Du Toit, tried his best.
Tried, by agreeing wholeheartedly with Simpson's claim.
Agreeing wholeheartedly and then asking "and your point is ??"
He agreed because he showed that both opponents and supporters of continental drift had long ago agreed that mammals only emerged after the last major drifting apart of today's continents , so they offered no proof one way or another about events before their emergence.
I've said it before : the best work Naomi Oreskes ever did about climate change denying was her earlier, lesser known, work on continental drift deniers. I am willing to bet my farm that many geologists were involved in both : both equally wrong.
Consistent in their wrongness, if in nothing else !
GG Simpson was a past-master at bogus arguments to destroy his opponents
Simpson had put up a totally bogus argument, in other words, in one peer-reviewed prominent journal in one field of science, to smear a scientist in another field.
Now Fred Singer and his ilk might "point with pride" to their unequalled ability to smear other scientists by illogical scientific arguments but are they truly worthy of this bold claim to scientific infamy ?
Come on Freddie : pull up your socks, learn from the best, er, worst : GG Simpson ,past-master of sleeze....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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