Tuesday, February 23, 2010

True Sceptic Blasts 'Denialists'

This is a great article, sceptic Mark Boslough of the Committee for Sceptical Inquiry takes an unshrinking broadside at the massed ranks of psudo-sceptics. Worth a read!!!

Science, however, has ground rules. Those who don’t follow the rules are entitled to their opinions but cannot legitimately claim to be participating in a scientific debate. One rule that must be followed for scientific results to be accepted is that they must be subjected to review and published in a scholarly scientific journal. This is a necessary but insufficient condition (nobody is compelled to accept the conclusions of a paper just because it has been refereed). ... The first thing I do when I read an editorial or blog entry is check to see if the supposed science has been published in scientific literature. If not, I don’t see why I should bother to read what nobody could be bothered to put through scientific peer review. My reasoning is not that such material is necessarily wrong, but without any scientific review I have no assurance that anyone has checked to see if the equations are right, data sources correctly cited, figures properly attributed, or other workers’ conclusions fairly represented. ... Having lost the scientific debate, denialists have now resorted to hacking into a computer system and stealing private correspondence to distract those who prefer controversy to science.


A reminder of the science for non-scientists posts I've been doing that link back to this and also the points made that denalists are not sceptics and why.

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