AGW: Boris Johnson and the Dunning-Kruger effect

One thing that always strikes me about loud mouthed AGW deniers is their total comnfidence that they know more than all the scientific institutions of merit on the planet do, and that their anecdotal pontifications are more important. Prompted by Boris Johnson’s unsicentific outburst in the Torygraph this week that the “Big Freeze” feels like the beginnings of a new mini Ice Age, I was reminded about the Dunning-Kruger effect:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.

Happily though I also stumbled across a more witty and concise version of this issue:

I mean, snow in winter, in the northern hemisphere ? What is so surprising about that ?
One comment did make me laugh:

Wow another example why the public school system really provides the best education money can offer!

Yup, he may have been to Oxford, but that doesn’t give BoJo the education or insight to comment outside his chosen domain of expertise. I wouldn’t go to my dentists for an opinion about my car’s engine for example.

And yet the armchair scientists feel free to condemn and malign the climate scientists, the ones actually practising and publishing the science, day in day out.

The AGW deniers really are dumber than a sack of spanners and they don’t realise they’re being taken for an ideologically inspired ride by a bunch of charlatans who have no scientific training, experience or Evidence(TM).