Friday, September 13, 2019

Ignorance: willful, motivated, or lazy?

As I'm sure many of the people that will read this know there is a far too large group of people that call themselves skeptics, and are pretty good on most topics, that don't accept anthropogenic climate change.

One of them posted this meme in a Facebook comment on a Skeptical Inquirer post about the increasing public acceptance of the science and importance of climate change.


There are several things wrong with this, and I'm not even going to mention the grammar (well, not any more than I just did).

This is NOT what climatologists claim to be able to do. They claim to know what some of the details of the CLIMATE will be like in the future. So there are TWO major errors here. 1) It is CLIMATE not weather that is being modeled. 2) The predictions aren't for a specific year but for trends of the climate in the future.

So this brings me to the question that is the title of this post. I'm going to accept that the people making this claim are actually ignorant of the errors they are making. Have they actually never come across this simple explanation? Are they unable to accept this explanation because of motivated reasoning? Or are they just too lazy to think about it? Have I missed another possibility?