Bill McKibben (TheNation.com, 2/25/10) has a good analogy that explains the success of global warming deniers:
The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it. The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial….
The Dream Team of lawyers assembled for Simpson’s defense had a problem: It was pretty clear their guy was guilty. Nicole Brown’s blood was all over his socks, and that was just the beginning. So Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Kardashian et al. decided to attack the process, arguing that it put Simpson’s guilt in doubt, and doubt, of course, was all they needed. Hence, those days of cross-examination about exactly how Dennis Fung had transported blood samples, or the fact that Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman had used racial slurs when talking to a screenwriter in 1986.
If anything, they were actually helped by the mountain of evidence. If a haystack gets big enough, the odds only increase that there will be a few needles hidden inside. Whatever they managed to find, they made the most of: in closing arguments, for instance, Cochran compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler and called him “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, and the personification of evil.” His only real audience was the jury, many of whom had good reason to dislike the Los Angeles Police Department, but the team managed to instill considerable doubt in lots of Americans tuning in on TV as well. That’s what happens when you spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be.
Similarly, the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt is in some ways a great boon for those who would like, for a variety of reasons, to deny that the biggest problem we’ve ever faced is actually a problem at all. If you have a three-page report, it won’t be overwhelming and it’s unlikely to have many mistakes. Three thousand pages (the length of the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)? That pretty much guarantees you’ll get something wrong.
It was a pretty solid piece, but McKibben would do well to avoid coming to Al Gore’s defense, wouldn’t he?
He’s a convenient straw man for the deniers, but his green rep is as fabricated (see http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/25-4) as their charges of climate science manipulation, isn’t it?
In the article the author said “the immense pile of evidence now proving the science of global warming beyond any reasonable doubt”.
According to an article I just read called “75 reasons to be skeptical of “global warming” at the link ( http://joshfulton.blogspot.com/2010/02/75-reasons-to-be-skeptical-of-global.html ) there are many problems with the “evidence” used to support the man made global warming argument.
And by the way, did you know that Al Gore is listed by the Tennessee Environmental Protection Agency as the No. 1 polluter in the state of Tennessee? He, on his property, receives royalties of about $100,000 a year from a tin mine on his property which is cited by the Tennessee Environmental Protection Agency as the No. 1 polluter, putting tremendous toxic poisons into the water and streams of Tennessee.
Oh god, a denier here of all places.
Puleez, let the scientists do science, let the bloggers blog and the talking heads talk.
But i will put my backing on the science rather than the other 2.
Instead of addressing any specific scientific points brought up in the linked article that challenge the credibility of the IPCC, and their so called “evidence’, much of which they have had to retract in the past, you choose to take the low road and go straight to name calling.
Your reaction is more like someone who is emotional about an attack on their religion. Why not discuss the points in the article? What are you afraid of?
Perhaps they’re afraid that having a scientific debate with “a writer and comedian from around Boston originally” is a waste of time?
Ok, the writer of the blog is a comedian from around the Boston area. He has basically consolidated 75 points of potential weakness in the man made global warming theory into one article. No he did not do the science himself because he is not a scientist, but he is a writer and he obviously did some research to find the information presented.
Does that invalidate the points presented? Probably not. At least investigate the points presented and then determine if any of the 75 points have merit.
Let’s say someone goes to a doctor and he’s told that he has a fatal disease and he’ll die unless he has surgery. He goes to doctor after doctor and they all tell him he’ll die without surgery. He’s told that there are countless studies published in respected medical journals that have found that people with symptoms like his will die without surgery.
But there’s people he finds through Google with no medical credentials–they are, perhaps, writers or comedians–who say that the doctors are all wet–that there’s no reason he should get surgery. They can’t point to any studies to back up their claims, but they give him plenty of “common-sense” arguments for why surgery can’t be the right answer. Doctors, if he asks them, will tell him that these reasons do not make medical sense, and will direct him to any number of books that attempt to explain the doctors’ research to the layperson.
But he doesn’t read the books recommended by the doctors, and instead decides that the comedians and writers understand medical science in a way that every doctor has overlooked. Somewhere, he’s heard, there’s a doctor who agrees with the comedians, and therefore he thinks the comedians’ argument is probably every bit as valid if not more so. And that makes him feel good, because he’d prefer not to have surgery. No more gloom and doom!
I put it to you that “accepting truth” is not how one would best describe this fellow’s approach to being diagnosed with a fatal disease.
You’ll find that the GW deniers all use the same modus operandi, they cherry pick data from studies, they outright lie, they draw wrong conclusions from the data. They don’t do their own research, rather they look for needles in haystacks.
Have a look at some vidoes this guy makes, debunking the deniers
http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610#p/u/0/w9SGw75pVas
Hi Oh God, there you go again with the name calling and lumping everyone who doubts the theory that global warming is man made into one stereotypical group. Isn’t that the same thing that racists do.
You say that all “deniers” outright lie and cherry pick data. It appears from the many retractions that the IPCC has had to make, that the IPCC lies and cherry picks data.
Jim, your argument that if the majority of doctors tell someone something that goes against their common sense, that they should believe the majority of doctors (the stampeding herd) and not the minority of doctors who disagree with the majority, has a problem. In the past, the majority of doctors used to belive that bloodletting was an effective medical treatment, and now the majority of doctors and our common sense know that is not true.
In the past most scientists used to believe the earth was flat while a minority believed it was round, and those few that believed the earth was round were ridiculed and attacked. Now with greater technology we all know that the earth is round. There are many examples of this in history. The majority is wrong in many cases, hence the term, the blind leading the blind.
Science wasn’t even a field back in the day when people thought the earth was flat.
Western Europe was governed by monarchs and the Church in a feudal system.
To claim that “scientists” thought the earth was flat is a complete fabrication.
Persons whom were involved with “scientific” pursuits, often had their work shutdown by the Church. Anatomists, for one example, early astronomers as another.
If the GW deniers should have any merit, let them prove it with scientific evidence.
It’s ironic that AC (give us a name, please) would talk about “flat earthers”, isn’t it?
Science evolves. Science around global warming, around climate change, has evolved, just as medical science has evolved. AC’s point about what was once accepted medical theory actually discredits his argument, doesn’t it?
The research proved bloodletting was a crock. The research on climate change has likewise evolved to prove humans are causing it. That every “t” hasn’t been crossed and every “i” dotted is the nature of science. As I believe McKibben says in his piece, we should cringe at the comment that “the science is settled.”
Science should never settle. It should always test and retest as new intel comes to light. But, just as it’s now known unequivocally that smoking causes lung cancer, it’s know known that the shit we put in the atmosphere is killing us and the planet.
All the hows and whys may not be known, but we don’t have the luxury of debating how many goddamn angels we can fit on the head of a pin, do we? We have to do our damnedest to stop strangling our biosphere, and hope to hell we can reverse the damage before it’s too late.
The funny, and frightening, thing is that some corps *want* climate change to be accepted as an indisputable fact, because they see beaucoup bucks in “green energy” (whether it’s “green” or not).
Denial or acceptance – in the end, this is all about money to the Powers That Be ™, isn’t it?
For the rest of us, it’s about our very survival.
Hi Doug,
Thank you for some intelligent comments as opposed to taking the less mentally strenuous route of name calling and categorization like the previous poster. I agree with almost everything you say in your post, but I would like a little clarification if possible.
When you say “the shit we put in the atmosphere is killing us and the planet”, can you please name specifically what it is that we are putting in the atmosphere that is killing us and the planet. I agree with your statement, I just would like to know what specifically you are referring to.
By the way, I agree with you that the science is not settled. There is much science that sais that CO2 may not be the primary cause of climate change. There is no agreement on the cause. There are many scientific theories.
Natural Changes in water vapour: http://www.physorg.com/news11710.html
CFC destruction of ozone layer: http://omsriram.com/GlobalWarming.htm
Cyclical variations in the Earth’s orbit: http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/106922-0/
The Sun: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/06/army-vs-global/
Man may contribute to climate change, but there is no agreement if man’s contribution is significant, there is no agreement on the PRIMARY cause of climate change, and there is also no agreement on if climate change would be catastrophic.
I don’t want to be played off the other folks here, okay? You seem to be enjoying what you consider tweaking noses, and it’s not only annoying, but just plain foolish, given the circumstances humanity finds itself in.
I’m not a climate expert – no one here is. Read the McKibben piece – I think he puts the case well.
In the end, nothing I or anyone else says will convince you. For whatever reason, you’ve chosen to cast your lot with the corporations who reap vast profits by poisoning the air and water. In the end, we will all pay for that – many millions already are through drought, famine, flood and the loss of their land to rising sea levels.
I don’t know why you’ve made that choice. Regardless of your concern for others, self-interest should dictate a different view.
That’s all I know to say. Roll your eyes at it if you wish. I’ll go with whatever faculties of reason I have tell me makes sense.
I was not joking when I said your comments were well intelligent and that I agreed with most of what you said.
Just because I showed that there are many different scientific theories for what causes climate change does not mean that I side with the corporations.
I care deeply about the environment and I care deeply about my fellow man. I agree that large profit motivated corporations in partnership with bought off governments are the primary cause of our air, water, and land pollution problems. There are many poisons being dumped into the environment by large corporations, but carbon dioxide is not a poison. Carbon dioxide is a necessary life giving gas that plants and trees need to grow.
I just don’t accept the premise that carbon dioxide is THE problem, and I certainly don’t accept the premise that paying trillions of dollars in carbon taxes to the corrupt governments that were complicit in poisoning our environment is the proper solution.
Each one of those arguments are thoroughly discredited by peer reviewed SCIENCE.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
By the way, very interesting article on Wikipedia regarding the Myth of the “Flat Earth” during the Middle Ages of Europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth
“The Myth of the Flat Earth is the modern misconception that the prevailing cosmological view during the Middle Ages saw the Earth as flat, instead of spherical. During the early Middle Ages, many scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. By the 14th century, belief in a flat earth among the educated was essentially dead. Flat-Earth models were in fact held at earlier (pre-medieval) times, before the spherical model became commonly accepted in Hellenistic astronomy.[1].
According to Stephen Jay Gould, “there never was a period of â┚¬Ã…“flat earth darknessâ┚¬Ã‚ among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology.”[2] David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers also write: “there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth’s] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference.”[3]”
I thought this would be of interest:
Fresh Evidence Global Warming Is Man-Made
by John von Radowitz
The Herald Scotland
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/03/05-5
Accept, what is your response to Oh God’s link? I am curious at other objections – although I highly doubt there is anything credible.