When chat goes bad
It’s great having random guys who admire themselves a lot telling us all what’s what and collecting millions of fans for doing it, but, that said, I can’t help thinking there’s occasionally a slight downside. Like when they tell us what’s what about Covid or climate change.
As podcaster Joe Rogan faces condemnation from medical scientists for spreading misinformation about vaccines and Covid-19, another interview by the controversial host this week has become the subject of mockery — this time among climate scientists.
Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson appeared on “The Joe Rogan Experience” on Monday, making false and generalized claims that the modeling scientists use to project climate change and its impacts are flawed.
See this is where the “random” comes in. Joe Rogan isn’t a medical researcher, and Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson both are not climate scientists. They’re not the right people to be “challenging the conventional wisdom” or whatever the fuck it is they think they’re doing. I like to challenge conventional wisdom myself, but I don’t go around telling neurosurgeons they’re doing neurosurgery all wrong.
“Such seemingly-comic nihilism would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous,” Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, told CNN.
“Similar anti-science spread by these two individuals about COVID-19 likely has and will continue to lead to fatalities. Even more will perish from extremely dangerous and deadly weather extremes if we fail to act on the climate crisis. So the promotion of misinformation about climate change is in some ways even more dangerous.”
This is what I’m saying. They’re famous and popular and all, but that doesn’t make them medical or climatological experts. They shouldn’t be leveraging their fame and popularity to play Anti-science Geniuses to their adoring fans, especially when getting it wrong is literally fatal. There’s a lot at stake in both climate science and medical science, so amateurs should stay out of it, all the more so when they have huge audiences.
Mann said that Peterson’s claims were “nonsensical and false,” and seem to boil down to the idea that climate science is so complicated that scientists could never model it or understand it.
“Such an absurd argument leads to a dismissal of physics, chemistry, biology, and every other field of science where one formulates (and tests—that’s the critical part Peterson seems to fail to understand) conceptual models that attempt to simplify the system and distill the key components and their interactions,” Mann said.
“Every great discovery in science has arisen this way. Including the physics of electromagnetism that allowed Peterson and Rogan to record and broadcast this silly and absurd conversation.”
There’s our solution. Peterson and Rogan should tell us the physics of electromagnetism are beyond human ken therefore recording and broadcasting are impossible therefore they’re giving it up to go live in isolated cabins in Maine.
I listened to Mann in an interview the other day, in which he said that as science advisor to Don’t Look Up it was a thinly veiled allegory to climate change. DiCaprio said he based his character on Mann. People want to look everywhere but up when it comes to climate change.
Peterson for some odd reason is highly respected in some circles, mostly as a contrarian but little as an actual scientist. What he writes seems like it makes sense if you come in to it only from ignorance of his subjects.
Ah, the old argument from incredulity. It works on the rubes but it’s still bullshit.
Climate is everything? Well, it’s certainly a soft evening breeze in the summer, or the hard pelting of rain on a March afternoon. But is it the sound of a lover’s voice in the morning, or the glimpse of a shooting star, or the stupidity of people who think they know more than the experts?
So there is uncertainty about how much warming we can expect from adding X amount of CO2 to the air.
That strikes me as *more* reason to move to non-fossil energy wherever practical.
For a thorough discussion of the plusses & minuses of the various options for getting off fossil fuels see:
http://www.withouthotair.com/
Jordan Peterson talks in long arcs that include hypothetical positions, so from the video clip above, posted on CNN, I cannot learn what he was saying. I can only learn that CNN was denouncing him.
Jordan Peterson vs Peter Jordanson also shows Peterson on The Joe Rogan Experience, edited creatively to be funny. I cannot learn what he was saying there either.
WaM, yes, climate is those things. Why? Because life on land did not exist until we had a climate suitable to life on land. Our atmosphere supports so many of our activities that if we mess it up too badly there will be no lover’s voices, no one to glimpse a shooting star, and no stupidity of people who think they know more than the experts. (One of those would not be missed.) All those things, and more, presuppose a habitable and hospitable climate.
As for how Jordan Peterson got so idolized, I’m currently reading the book Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates. If you ignore the few places where she shoves TiM in with women, it’s a very good look at modern misogyny. And she devotes quite a lot of ink and paper to Jordan Peterson.
iknklast,
Well, yes, of course those things presuppose a hospitable climate, but that doesn’t mean that climate is those things. JP claims that “there’s no such thing as climate–climate and everything are the same word.” That’s obviously an absurdity, both as a claim in itself, and as a characterization of what climate scientists think.
Per NASA:
So no, those other things aren’t climate.
I will accept that…with some qualifications. No, they aren’t climate, and as a scientist (and I teach Earth Science), I do know what climate is and what it isn’t. But in a very real sense, it is in fact everything, because everything relies on it…so in the sense of discussing climate change, it is so important that we can in that sense say it’s everything. In a concrete sense, no, of course it isn’t.
@ #7 Read “Men Who Hate Women” last year. At times, as a man, it was tough going. Quite a few notes and page marks in it, and will read again this winter because I am sure I missed some stuff.
It goes quite well with some other book I read about god hating women, must give that a re read too.
Others from last year’s reads include Kate Mann’s “Entitled”, Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s “Jesus and John Wayne”, and Julia Baird’s “Media Tarts”.
Some of these books almost make me want to trans to female as men seem like such fucking arseholes!
Back to topic, todays read will be Mann’s “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars” . Hopefully the science will be at a level I can follow.
Here in Oz, we have a federal election anytime between now and May. The right wing incumbents are trailing in the polls and looking like being tossed out, so are trying to make themselves look like the real deal.
The Great Barrier Reef is dying. Our “Environment Minister” has spent the last 3 months trying to stop it being listed as endangered. But now the government has decided to “do something” by allocating $1 billion over 10 years. They could save that billion, and help the reef at the same time by eliminating the $10.4 billion annual subsidies to fossil fuel companies.
Roj, or even just reducing that annual subsidy by a billion.