{"id":30840,"date":"2018-02-11T14:31:54","date_gmt":"2018-02-11T19:31:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=30840"},"modified":"2018-02-11T14:31:54","modified_gmt":"2018-02-11T19:31:54","slug":"how-to-use-critical-thinking-to-spot-false-climate-claims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=30840","title":{"rendered":"How to Use Critical Thinking to Spot False Climate Claims"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 id=\"page-title\" class=\"page__title title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.desmogblog.com\/2018\/02\/10\/how-use-critical-thinking-spot-false-climate-claims\">How to Use Critical Thinking to Spot False Climate Claims<\/a><\/h3>\n<article class=\"node-12619 node node-blog node-promoted view-mode-full clearfix\">\n<div class=\"field field-name-field-bimage field-type-image field-label-hidden\">\n<div class=\"field-items\">\n<div class=\"field-item even\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.desmogblog.com\/sites\/beta.desmogblog.com\/files\/styles\/full_width_blog_image\/public\/blogimages\/question-mark-cat-graffiti_credit-Gillian-Maniscalco_creative-commons.jpg?itok=FZBQldag\" alt=\"Cat graffiti with question marks on a wall\" width=\"826\" height=\"620\" \/><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"new-horizontal-social-bar clearfix\">Much of the public discussion about climate science consists of a stream of assertions. The climate is changing or it isn\u2019t; carbon dioxide causes global warming or it doesn\u2019t; humans are partly responsible or they are not; scientists have a rigorous process of peer review or they don\u2019t, and so\u00a0on.<\/div>\n<div class=\"field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden\">\n<div class=\"field-items\">\n<div class=\"field-item even\">\n<p>Despite scientists\u2019 best efforts at communicating with the public, not everyone knows enough about the underlying science to make a call one way or the other. Not only is climate science very complex, but it has also been targeted by deliberate obfuscation\u00a0campaigns.<\/p>\n<p>If we lack the expertise to evaluate the detail behind a claim, we typically substitute judgment about something complex (like climate science) with judgment about something simple (the character of people who speak about climate\u00a0science).<\/p>\n<p>But there are ways to analyse the strength of an argument without needing specialist knowledge. My colleagues, Dave Kinkead from the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project and John Cook from George Mason University in the <span class=\"caps\">US<\/span>, and I published a paper yesterday in <a href=\"http:\/\/iopscience.iop.org\/article\/10.1088\/1748-9326\/aaa49f\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Environmental Research Letters<\/a> on a critical thinking approach to climate change\u00a0denial.<\/p>\n<p>We applied this simple method to 42 common climate-contrarian arguments, and found that all of them contained errors in reasoning that are independent of the science\u00a0itself.<\/p>\n<p>In the video abstract for the paper, we outline an example of our approach, which can be described in six simple\u00a0steps.<\/p>\n<figure><span class=\"player\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/XAp1Foj7BzY?wmode=transparent&amp;start=0\" width=\"440\" height=\"260\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/span><figcaption><span class=\"caption\">The authors discuss the myth that climate change is natural.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><strong>Six Steps to Evaluate Contrarian Climate\u00a0Claims<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Identify the claim<\/strong>: First, identify as simply as possible what the actual claim is. In this case, the argument\u00a0is:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The climate is currently changing as a result of natural\u00a0processes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How to Use Critical Thinking to Spot False Climate Claims Much of the public discussion about climate science consists of a stream of assertions. The climate is changing or it isn\u2019t; carbon dioxide causes global warming or it doesn\u2019t; humans are partly responsible or they are not; scientists have a rigorous process of peer review [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[3193,141,2956,4041,5317,18483,369,18484],"class_list":["post-30840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-carbon-dioxide","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-science","tag-critical-thinking","tag-desmog-blog","tag-false-claims","tag-global-warming","tag-peter-ellerton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30840"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30841,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30840\/revisions\/30841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}