[Vision2020] Institute for Public Accuracy: "Media Miss the Forest for the Burning Trees"

[Donovan Arnold]

Paul,
 
You are not a logical or rational person. If 99 out of a 100 mechanics tell you that your car won't start because of a spark plug, do you argue they are all wrong because they don't know everything about your car? 
 
Why behave any less rationally when it comes to experts and your planet?
 
Donovan J. Arnold
 

From: Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com>
To: Joe Campbell <philosopher.joe at gmail.com> 
Cc: Moscow Vision 2020 <vision2020 at moscow.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, July 4, 2012 8:16 PM
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Institute for Public Accuracy: "Media Miss the Forest for the Burning Trees"

On 07/03/2012 05:42 PM, Joe Campbell wrote:
> So, Paul, why believe that smoking causes lung disease if you don't
> believe that human carbon consumption has an impact on global warming?
> 
> Joe

First, I'm not saying that carbon consumption is not having an impact on global warming.  I'm saying that the size of the impacts compared to the more-or-less unknown natural factors is unknown and that the feedbacks from warming in general are unknown, among other things.

There are plenty of reasons, both scientific and not, that make me skeptical of global warming.  Although everyone will assume I'm just grasping at straws because of my deep-seated urge to deny everything (probably has to do with my relationship with my mother), I humbly present a smattering of them for your enjoyment:

1.  On the face of it, the idea is extraordinary.  Humans, even with our vaunted civilization, are small potatoes compared to the forces of nature.  The only reason our carbon footprint even makes a dent compared to natural forces has to do with the small amount of CO2 in our atmosphere.  We've had far less of an impact on the water cycle, for example, or with oxygen levels.  Not saying that it isn't possible, but there is automatically a bar that has to be gotten over which smoking causing lung disease doesn't have.  It should be common sense that inhaling smoke multiple times a day for years can have a deleterious effect on the lungs, even without bringing in carcinogens.

2.  There are some obvious questions that aren't being answered because of the focus on human impacts.  For example, what caused the earth to heat up immediately following the Little Ice Age?  If we do not know, how can we say with any confidence that human-induced climate change is to blame instead of the same natural processes still at work?  What causes an ice age to start, and what brings us out of one?

3.  The climate is complex, with multiple feedbacks of unknown strength and unknown feedbacks of unknown strength.  The sign of the combination of feedbacks isn't even known.  Climate models cannot be that accurate, given the above, yet they are seen as gospel.  Even when they make different assumptions and model things different ways.  As long as they project a warmer future, they are added to the model average and used as proof that global warming will kill babies and cause frogs to rain from the sky.

I imagine that the mechanisms for lung disease from tobacco are relatively straight forward.

4.  Some of the major players in the spotlight on the side of global warming are environmental activists with an agenda, as opposed to being objective scientists just following the data.  For example, Timothy Wirth (Senator from Colorado and leader of the negotiating team for the Kyoto treaty) held a hearing on global warming at the capital.  He called the Weather Bureau to find out what day of the year was usually the hottest in DC, and scheduled the hearing for that date.  His team then went in the night before the hearing and opened all the windows in the room in which the hearing was to be held, causing the air conditioning to fail to keep up with the heat.  All so that it could be hot and muggy when James Hansen gave his spiel about the dangers of global warming.  (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/interviews/wirth.html)

The anti-tobacco campaigns, with all their sheer propaganda, do seem to be run by political activists, but that may be coincidental.

5.  Major climate scientists also appear to have political agendas. Michael Mann and his "hockey stick" come to mind, trying to erase the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, using dubious statistics, all so they could show that current warming was "unprecedented". All this from a few bristlecone pine trees.

I haven't heard of any of these kinds of shenanigans from scientists studying the link between tobacco use and lung diseases, probably because the links were relatively straight forward.  Not so much the case with global warming / global climate change / global climate disruption.

There are more, but that gives you the gist of it.  But hey, it's just me being contrarian, right? So please, move along.  Nothing to see here.

Paul

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