When this pseudo-scientific “documentary” was first broadcast on British television to an audience of 2.5 million in 2007, real scientists were appalled. The British Antarctic Survey released a statement that “any scientist found to have falsified data in the manner of the [film] would be guilty of serious professional misconduct."
OK, life has been complicated over the past two weeks and I haven't yet had a chance to finish my comments on the claims being made in Superfreakonomics. Hopefully I'll be done and post my comments by the weekend. For now I just want to call attention to this posting to the Huffington Post. The relationship between partisan political debate and invocations of science and scientific authority is something I'm thinking a lot about lately, so more interesting to me than Grandia's post are the comments it has elicited.
For me these comments exemplify how the authority of Science operates as a kind of ambivalent political good, alternately cited and challenged, particularly by self-proclaimed climate change skeptics and deniers. Many deniers interpret the claim that there is a scientific consensus on the subject of anthropogenic climate change as either a direct attack on free speech, or even as evidence of conspiracy. When presented with claims of consensus, or with the idea that anthropogenic climate change models are scientifically certain, those sympathetic to the skeptical or denialist argument often invoke a common-sense notion of fair play, such as poster humpfree who asks, "If the film is so "loopy" and notoriously inaccurate, why not air it? Anyone lending it an ounce of critical thought should be able to see through the lies. Right?" Grandia's response, and poster ManUTd1989's retort are also representative of the rhetoric structure of this debate. I hope to (soon) have a lot more to say about this rhetorical structure in an upcoming post.
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