Health skeptic dismayed by climate skeptics (again)

At the moment I should be studying for exams, and yet I feel this compulsion to keep posting for my readers (who now number in the ones, and thats counting those who got here accidentally by googling "strippers" and "bend over". Suckers.)

The internal dialoguing between me and the medical part of my brain (which has taken to speaking in the voice of Keanu Reaves circa Bill and Ted) has been going something like this:

Me: Yo! Cardiovascular risk factors and the pathophysiology of proximal muscle myopathies. Get on it! An whats mianserin?

Brain: Dude. I don't know. I wanna drink beer and fantasize about that pathologist you think has been checking you out. He's, like, a total NILF.

(FYI: For those of you familiar with the concept of MILF, a NILF is a Nerd I'd Like to....oh, you get the picture.)

Not that my standards are that high or anything, when normal females were extolling the virtues of, say, Johnny Depp, I was mentally drafting a mash note to the actor David Thewlis. And Mr. Paua has been such a bunghole for the past year that at the moment I would probably go home with a Young Liberal if they said I had nice hair.

David Thewlis: Phwoar...

Regardless of my personal desire to go rock in a corner until the exams go away, I must press on with the quasi medical themed posts. So here we are, for the readers!

Riffing on the topic of born-again medical skeptics who think that AGW skeptics are giving them a bad name, I discovered this opinion piece from the desk of the Melbourne Age health editor.

While on the one hand he was examining (at great length) his own biases and arrogance he had uncovered during an email exchange with a mother scared of the swine flu vax, he also mentions he has been pondering this:

About climate change, and the (to me) bewildering refusal of the sceptics to accept that there is a scientific consensus, and that dissent in and of itself does not make a genuine debate.

Cheers, mate. You call yourself a science or health journalist and yet don’t seem to recognise the essential oxymoron that is the term “scientific consensus”. You spend half the article pulling your own man bits over how:

It is up to me to decide who is a crank — otherwise I would be wasting my readers' time. My job as a journalist is not to deluge readers with unverified information. It is to report verifiable facts, and filter out the rest — this is the standard that our profession is held to, and I take it seriously.

If that’s the case, how on earth have you missed the many, many verifiable facts out there in regards to the skeptical view of Anthropogenic Global Warming?
Maybe it’s because:

I'm a reporter, my training replies. That's what I do. Work out what I think the truth is, and tell people.

Ohhh. I getcha. You’re just working with your beliefs, not a scientific methodology, and that’s what the other journos are doing, and so you live in this happy world where you don’t have to allow yourself to be exposed to another, challenging viewpoint. That’s not science, and it’s not balanced journalism either.

Brain: Journo, dude. You, like, suck.

I know you are, but what am I?

Before the term "skeptic" was co-opted by the climate crowd it was much beloved of the medical sect. Being a medical skeptic was generally a byword for putting the boot into homeopaths and was considered to be a fairly acceptable medical pastime, along with getting frisky with the polo ponies and driving a BMW. (I kid, I kid). Lately, however, I have noticed that there is a logical chasm occurring in the medical skeptic crowd that you could drive a naturopathic formulary through.

On the one hand they are still busily congratulating themselves on their medical skepticism, whilst on the other hand loudly proclaiming that "..thanks to climate change sceptics, the word is being associated with people who disagree with accepted scientific evidence - not exactly the look skeptics are going for" whilst sticking it to alternative medicine virtually in the same breath.

It would appear that medicine, like many scientific disciplines, has lost sight of the fact that science is a methodology, not a belief system. Self identifying as a "scientist" is not a protective charm against scientific evidence or hypotheses that you don't like.

Additionally, lack of evidence is not lack of efficacy. Sure, I agree that Vega test machines seem like a load of merde, and don't even get me started on Chiropractic, but I am enough of a scientist to recognise a phenomenom (even if I can't spell it) first and suspend my disbelief long enough to go looking for the evidence later. Not only is this upholding science as a discipline, its kind of a useful attitude to have if you want to further your knowledge. In the example of "alternative medicine", if people are reporting effects, investigate it rather than dismissing it out of hand as a "placebo". Thats how we got artemisin, bromhexine and salbutamol, among other things. In the case of "climate science", if history dictates that malarial outbreaks have occurred in the arctic circle, think twice before you start yodelling about a supposedly climate-related increase in vector borne disease.

So don't be so quick to label every unexplained outcome as a "placebo effect", as that implies that you have an exhaustive body of evidence to draw on to exclude the other possibilities. If you don't have any evidence either way, then you can't call it a placebo until you do.

Similarly, don't proudly proclaim yourself a bigger-better-faster-skeptic than everyone else, if you are elevating AGW alarmism to the level of a belief system. Skeptical science means suspending your disbelief long enough to have a dispassionate and rational look at the the available evidence, not a born-again mandate to stick it to the unbeliever.