Assessing "Scientific" Claims

In my exploration of “Friends of Science,” a website that asserts that the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change is flawed and that climate change is driven instead by the sun, I had a hard time taking any of their research or claims seriously simply because I already know where I stand on the “issue” of climate change. Naturally, I automatically found “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic,” more convincing by default. While, as other classmates have already stated, neither site does a particularly stand-up job of presenting the science behind their claims (mostly because neither seem to embrace a sense of scientific “objectivity” that seems key to any scientific argument), I think that my immediate tendency to find “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic” slightly more convincing speaks volumes to the way that the internet has changed the way that the public forms an opinion.

In an ideal world, the internet would function as a democratic forum for the exchange of ideas in which the truth could ultimately be deciphered through intelligent debate, the internet is instead a place where people go not to challenge their own ideas, but to reinforce them. The “facts” and diagrams and “academic support” that both of these websites provide for their respective audiences are not scientific because they do not make any attempt to look at the data that they provide objectively. Rather, both sites cherry-pick articles to fit their particular arguments and interpret the data according to their views. When there is no effort made at debate, no attempt to reach a conclusion from the data instead of using data to prove a preconceived conclusion, how can this be called “science?”