Putting 2 and 2 together, hopefully getting 4

I’ve been long bothered by serious people espousing ideas not well correlated with reality, as representing reality, and telling us not to believe our lying eyes or instruments. This is in a context of (catastrophic) AGW (call this CAGW). I don’t have any dogs in that race, nor in fracking, which uses hydrological mechanisms to extract hydrocarbon fuel precursors from underground reservoirs. I am very interested in sound science, and sound policy derived from either sound science, or as close to intelligently constructed policy as we can make. I have no use for those pushing an agenda which rests upon theories which do a very poor job of, or completely failing to, accurately predict things (CAGW). First off, this takedown of the language used by CAGW proponents, by Beowulf-contributer RGB is epic. The points he makes are extremely eloquent, and directly to the point. Further he gets extra points for noting that CAGW has all the hallmarks of a Feynman defined cargo-cult science. The question I’ve been puzzling about has to do with why so many, otherwise very intelligent people find themselves under the belief system of CAGW, predicting doom, destruction, and advocating for dubious at best, and ruinous at worst policies? Carbon sequestering is a great example of this. In some cases, I think a “follow the money” mantra may explain some of this, but there is likely more. Some people are influenced possibly less by that, and more by ideology. So how can they actually ignore real empirical evidence that contradicts at worst, and does not support at best, their desired representation of the world (in terms of CAGW)? Here’s where the 2+2 bit comes in.

This could be nothing, but I wonder if its an explanation. An article on /. pointed to fracking controversy, where the people opposed to fracking appear to have the ability to ignore evidence which tends to contradict their viewpoint. They call it Motivated Reasoning. I did some quick google surfing on this. That’s when I had my “ah-ha” moment.

That is, the reasoning processes used tended to reinforce the desired outcomes. This is interesting. I wonder if this is the mechanism that CAGW proponents use to ignore evidence of their theories abject failure to accurately predict that which they are the most alarmist about. Maybe I am reaching too far with this. I would like to believe that some other mechanism, other than pursuit of money or power, could be responsible for their rejection of empirical evidence.