Aperson called Proctor wrote: “Agnotology is the study of general or even systemic ignorance and its cultural production arising from a basic lack of knowledge, from selective choice, and from an intentional attempt to deceive.”

In other words, you believe stupid things because you are not educated enough to not believe. Hold that thought.

Now I quote from physicist Richard Feynman: “This long history of learning how not to fool ourselves – of having utter scientific integrity – is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of . . . The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Feynman also talked about ‘cargo cult science’: “In the South Seas, there is a cargo cult of people. During the World War, they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So, they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas – he’s the controller – and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they fol- low all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.”

The cargo cults real facts to suit a wrong theory. The facts are right but the aircraft do not and will never come.

Urban legends are when a supposedly real, believable thing is untrue. A classic example is: “People were dying in a hospital intensive care unit on Sunday mornings at about 11:00. It was so mysterious that some feared something supernatural was going on. They finally decided to stake out the intensive care unit one Sunday morning when the part-time Sunday cleaner showed up, unplugged the life support equipment and plugged in his vacuum cleaner to clean the floors.”

Not true. Not only not true, but impossible – unplug life support equipment and just see how many alarms go off (also see how fast the ward sister gives you a klap). However, people have told me that it’s true. This is true systemic ignorance.

Cargo cult science is the effective ‘cherry-picking’ of suitable facts to support a generally untrue theory. Let me give you an example: The global sea levels are rising – true or false? Well, probably true. Sort of.

Three satellites, Topex/Poseidon, (launched in 1992), Jason-1 (launched in 2001) and Jason-2 (launched in 2008) provide satellite altimetry readings which have made it possible for global sea levels to be measured. In addition, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the University of Chicago have produced their own graphs of sea level rise. The satellite measurements give sea level rises of 40 mm from 2002 to 2013. The IPCC gives a rise of 25 mm from 2002 to 2013 and the University Chicago 26 mm over the same period.

Jason 1, Jason 2 and Topex measurements have an accuracy of plus or minus 5 mm. So, what we have, in effect, is a predicted sea level rise of 2 mm to 4 mm per year, plus or minus 5 mm.

Is sea level rise going to threaten low-lying cities? Well, we leap to the publication US Today, which states: “If global warming continues at its current rate through to the year 2100, at least an additional 1 100 cities and towns will be mostly under water at high tide in the distant future.”

Let’s see. From now to 2100 is 87 years. The total rise, at the present rate, will be at worse about 350 mm. The height of two rungs of a ladder. And the towns are built that close to high water? Are you kidding? This is true cargo science and the result of systemic ignorance arising from selective choice and a basic lack of knowledge. Next week: What about global temperature increase?