Noted Asshole Jordan Peterson, A Self-Appointed Climate Expert, Walks The Path Of Zombie Lies

[hatrack]

EDIT

Since December, Peterson has been on something of a crusade publishing four interviews – each more than 90 minutes long – collectively amassing more than 2.2m views on YouTube alone. The titles of Peterson’s latest offerings give a flavour of the content. “The World is not Ending”, “Unsettled: Climate and Science” and “The Great Climate Con”. Last year Peterson came in for scathing criticism from climate scientists after claiming climate models were mostly useless. Peterson had badly misunderstood how models work, they said, with one saying: “He sounds intelligent, but he’s completely wrong.”

The criticism appears to have done little to discourage him from wading in even further. Peterson’s popularity among conservatives and, judging by many of the comments he receives, his almost God-like status among his fans, is helping to expose new audiences to old arguments on climate change. One interview with retired MIT meteorologist Prof Richard Lindzen – a well-known veteran of contrarianism among climate science deniers – ran under the title “Climate Science: What Does it Say?”.

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Prof Steve Sherwood, of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, described several of Lindzen’s arguments as “very old zombie points” that were never fair “and have become much less true over time.” For example, Peterson argued – and Lindzen agreed – the “putative contribution of carbon dioxide to global warming” might be swamped by the margin of error of the contribution of another important greenhouse gas – water vapor. “That’s really sad if that’s true,” says Peterson.

“That’s not true,” says Prof Piers Forster, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Leeds. “For more than half a century laboratory measurements, balloon measurements and detailed radiative transfer calculations have been able to calculate the greenhouse effect of both CO2 and water vapour to within a few percent.” Sherwood adds the effect of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere was “not putative,” but rather was “measurable from space and guaranteed by simple physical principles that has been understood for well over a century and have been used successfully for many decades in all sorts of technological applications such as infrared sensors and telescopes.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2023/feb/02/jordan-petersons-zombie-climate-contrarianism-follows-a-well-worn-path

[Dalton555]

1. As a Jungian, he is a mystic anyway

All of his ideas in psychology come from Carl Jung, a white supremacist misogynist anti-gay extremist who basically was a mystic. Carl Jung believed that symbols had magical power, he believed that people inherited racial memories from their ancestors, he thought that events in different places were linked by a magical power that he called synchronicity, and generally speaking Carl Jung was opposed to science. It's weird for Peterson to suddenly pretend that he knows things about science. Ugh.

[Joe Cool]

2. He's a psychologist, not a scientist.

He needs to stay in his lane.

[Delphinus]

4. And the fact

he is a psychologist is scary in itself.

[mn9driver]

3. Exxon must have some extra money to spread around Denierland.

Since they reported record profits for last year.