Article Tags: Lord Monckton
I try to answer as many enquiries as I can from people who want to discuss “global warming”. I wrote this letter in reply to a “global warming” fanatic who, it is not unfair to say, had never actually thought about the superstition to which he subscribes. Perhaps this letter will make him think a little more and believe a little less.
Dear Enquirer, – Thank you for taking the trouble to write to me. If I may, I shall highlight various passages from your letter in bold face, and then respond to them seriatim in Roman face.
“I am not a climate scientist, and so I can only go by the overwhelming consensus amongst scientists that man-made climate change is occurring and that it poses a grave threat to humanity.”
First, science is not – repeat not – done by consensus. Aristotle, in codifying the dozen worst fallacies to which mankind is prone, described this one as the “head-count fallacy”, or, as the mediaeval schoolmen called it, the argumentum ad populum. Merely because many people say they believe a thing to be true, they do not necessarily believe it to be true and, even if they do, it need not necessarily be true. Abu Ali Ibn al-Haytham, the astronomer, mathematician and philosopher of science in 11th-century Iraq who is credited as the father of the scientific method, said this –
“The seeker after truth does not put his faith in any mere consensus, however broad and however venerable. Instead, he subjects what he has learned from it to scrutiny using his hard-won scientific knowledge, and he verifies for himself whether it is true. The road to the truth is long and hard, but that is the road we must follow.”
Source: sppiblog.org