There’s a spectrum of beliefs from normal debate to starkly crazy. The posts mainly analyze the belief that P&G was involved in satanic cults, which I’d call starkly crazy. On the other end, a belief that the tree ring data wasn’t properly analyzed and a desire to get the data and analyze it better or differently could be “wrong” in some sense but is pretty much inherently not crazy, since it will tend to get worked out in debate.

I guess my touchstone is the underlying process. I’d say the process is trending toward the crazy end if it is strongly directed toward creating or maintaining epistemic closure (a hot topic recently, see Jim Manzi for a recent post on epistemic closure and global warming denialism, or google the phrase for a huge and interesting discussion). Conversely I’d say the process is trending toward the sane end if it leads to constructive engagement between those who disagree, and produces debate based on independently checkable, relevant information. Of course any real discussion will have multiple currents but usually it isn’t too hard to tell what direction things are flowing in a given case.

The global warming debate specifically involves some pretty crazy currents, and also a lot of pretty sane currents. Your comments seem to be referencing specific data related issues that I guess will (or at least can) be hashed out over time, so I’d tend to say they are not pulling us toward the crazy.

Having read the above, and being a global warming skeptic from way back, and seeing that you and yours are trying to understand a person like me, someone with ‘crazy beliefs,’ perhaps I can enlighten you. Or perhaps as something from a crazy-belief person, you will simply delete this response. Here goes anyway.

I am a scientific person – I have a Master’s in Physics. I am for saving the environment. Pollution is bad, and should be controlled in some manner. What I and other scientific people like myself can’t stand, what we go ‘crazy’ about, is the abuse of science in the name of global warming. Childish hyperbole regarding the rise of oceans, the imminent extinction of penguins and polar bears is irritating, especially when it’s given a scientificish patina. But the gross sins of manipulating data into the hockey stick graph, asserting that change in climate is unnatural, and cherry-picking tree ring data, crosses the scientific line and then some. Lies like that are deeply offensive to those of us who revere Science. If the globe is warming, then use real science to show it. No real scientist would ever start off his argument by saying “the debate is over.” Only P.R. people use that tactic.

I’m ambivalent about “no world of objective reality”. These folks often seem to manage pretty well in some pragmatic domains — for example some of them run companies, not just by posturing and getting favors (like George Bush) but by actually making good decisions. Less competent ones can probably drive in traffic, make change in a store, etc. So somehow they make pragmatic decisions that depend on some respect for “objective reality”.

On the other hand I don’t want to give them too much credit. I’m tempted to believe that they pick and choose where to rely on “objective reality”, and where to take a radical constructivist posture, while of course denying they are doing any such thing.

Obviously I don’t yet understand how to draw the right lines here.