It's a numbingly familiar pattern in media coverage. The conservative movement that's been attacking climate science for 20 years has a storied history of demonstrable fabrications, distortions, personal attacks, and nothingburger faux-scandals -- not only on climate science, but going back to asbestos, ozone, leaded gasoline, tobacco, you name it. They don't follow the rigorous standards of professional science; they follow no intellectual or ethical standards whatsoever. Yet no matter how long their record of viciousness and farce, every time the skeptic blogosphere coughs up a new "ZOMG!" it's as though we start from zero again, like no one has a memory longer than five minutes.He starts off talking about how "Climategate" has triggered 5 separate investigations, and all 5 have come back in total agreement that there's nothing there to get excited about. Then he gets to the good stuff about how it doesn't matter what the facts are because The Tribe has already made its point, the Press Poodles have dutifully reported the bullshit contentions as if they actually mean something, and a few of us are left wondering if there might be something to the charges after all (kinda the point, y'know?).
So what really got me though is that this phenomenon of staying willfully ignorant has a name - Agnotology.
The lesson we've learned from climategate is simple. It's the same lesson taught by death panels, socialist government takeover, Sharia law, and Obama's birth certificate. To understand it we must turn to agnotology, the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt. (Hat tip to an excellent recent post on this by John Quiggen.)I'm having trouble getting this post wrapped together so it can make the kind of sense to a reader that I think it does to me. (I get a little too amped up when I learn something new like this) Read the two pieces.
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