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Year 3, Month 7, Day 21: Red Scare Edition
Never heard of Dennis Byrne before, but he’s left a big floater in the Chicago Tribune’s bowl:
As surely as stink follows a garbage truck, the deadly national heat wave brought forth predictable and terrifying scenarios from global warming alarmists.
Triumphantly, the alarmists proclaimed that global warming (or climate change, or extreme weather, or whatever is their latest rendition of Earth’s frightful fate) was back high on the list of everyone’s worst fears.
Told-ya-sos flowed. Denunciations of global warming “skeptics” and “deniers” were renewed. The threadbare mantra — “the science is in, the debate is over” — was re-energized.
Reliably, a Washington Post story about Colorado’s destructive wildfires waved away fact with speculation: “Lightning and suspected arson ignited them four weeks ago, but scientists and federal officials say the table was set by a culprit that will probably contribute to bigger and more frequent wildfires for years to come: climate change.”
And thus the unconscionable corruption of real science by global warming propagandists continues unabated. It’s unconscionable because they are using the loss of life and destruction of property as a prop to get you to believe that the worst is yet to come. It’s unconscionable because making such predictions is not what real science does. For all the condemnation about “anti-science deniers” on the right, the truth is that actual anti-science folks are the ones on the left using bad science to try to scare the bejabbers out of us.
(facepalm). Sent July 10:
One of the cardinal principles of science is that good theories provide verifiable predictions.
Several decades ago, climatologists began predicting what would happen to Earth’s weather as the greenhouse effect intensified. While a few researchers considered the possibility of global cooling, the vast majority agreed that rising atmospheric concentrations of CO2 would trigger chaotic weather patterns, with regional and local effects including heatwaves, droughts, and intensified storms. When they pointed out that these phenomena would have negative impacts on humanity, they were ignored, censored, and derided by politicians and media figures.
Now, after a decade of record high temperatures, those dire predictions are coming true. The “alarmists” Dennis Byrne derides include the US Armed Forces, the CIA, and insurance companies all over the world.
Paul Revere was an alarmist, too. If he’d been living in Concord in April, 1775, Mr. Byrne would’ve turned over and gone right back to sleep.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots morons Republicans
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Year 3, Month 6, Day 24: If There’s A Hole Behind Your Face, Why Not Rent Out The Empty Space?
The STUPID is really thick on the ground in North Carolina. The Charlotte Observer for June 13:
With virtually no debate, the state Senate on Tuesday nixed restricting development on the state’s coast based on global warming science.
Lawmakers passed a bill that restricts local planning agencies’ abilities to use climate change science to predict sea-level rise in 20 coastal counties. The bill’s supporters said that relying on climate change forecasts would stifle economic development and depress property values in Eastern North Carolina.
The bill has sparked outrage in some circles. It was ridiculed this month on the television show “The Colbert Report.” Despite the controversy, it has repeatedly cleared every hurdle in the GOP-led legislature. In the Senate Tuesday, the only comments were a few brief remarks in favor of the measure as a victory of common sense over alarmist research.
The practical result of the legislation would be that for the purposes of coastal development, local governments could only assume that the sea level will rise 8 inches by 2100, as opposed to the 39 inches predicted by a science panel.
This story will never get old. Sent June 13:
It is easy enough to mock the ludicrous attempts of North Carolina politicians to legislate measurement, and certainly the property owners and residents of coastal areas will need something to laugh about after four or five decades of steadily rising sea levels. But it is also important to recognize that this is part of a long-standing battle: ideologically-driven conservative politicians — versus facts and experts.
Republicans have embraced anti-intellectualism with steadily increasing fervor for decades. Science, once extolled as the source of American technological might, is now viewed with fear and suspicion. Nowhere is this more evident than in the GOP’s rejection of climate scientists — whose inconvenient predictions have a habit of turning into inconvenient realities.
A Bush administration official once mocked writer Ron Suskind as a member of the “reality-based community,” noting, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” While the North Carolina legislature has learned Karl Rove’s lesson well, the Atlantic Ocean may not be so obliging.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: assholes creationists denialists idiots morons
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Year 3, Month 4, Day 1: Do You Know Where Your Fools Are? I Do.
Three actual scientists are heard in the pages of the Tennesseean, arguing against the newly introduced legislation that would require all kinds of silly-ass nonsense to be taught equivalently in science classes:
Almost 90 years ago, Tennessee became a national laughingstock with the Scopes trial of 1925, when a young teacher was prosecuted for violating a state law forbidding the teaching of evolution. With the passage of two bills, House Bill 368 and Senate Bill 893, the Tennessee legislature is doing the unbelievable: attempting to roll the clock back to 1925 by attempting to insert religious beliefs in the teaching of science.
These bills, if enacted, would encourage teachers to present the “scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses” of “controversial” topics such as “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” As such, the bills are misleading, unnecessary, likely to provoke unnecessary and divisive legal proceedings, and likely to have adverse economic consequences for the state.
It is misleading to describe these topics as scientifically controversial. What is taught about evolution, the origin of life, and climate change in the public school science curriculum is — as with all scientific topics — based on the settled consensus of the scientific community. While there is no doubt social controversy about these topics, the actual science is solid.
This one was a bit long, but they had a 250-word limit, so I let myself go a bit. Maybe there’ll be another paper with the same article tomorrow, and I can cut things down. Sent March 26:
The difference between social and scientific controversy is simple: the former is based on opinion, the latter on facts. Since opinions change with each successive generation, we can safely say our species will keep generating new social controversies for millennia to come.
Science, on the other hand, builds knowledge incrementally through a process of rigorous testing and analysis. A scientific controversy is created either by a new fact that doesn’t fit the accepted consensus understanding (as J.B.S. Haldane famously said when asked what could falsify evolutionary theory, “Fossil rabbits in the Pre-Cambrian”), or by a new theory that offers a more robust explanation for the facts that already exist.
Neither of these criteria are met by the arguments of climate change denialists. Their cries of “teach the controversy” are disingenuous; shall we teach the medieval theory of humours, phlogiston, or the “luminiferous aether”? These were all controversial in their time, and all have been disproved and relegated to the scrap heap of history.
Rather, the individuals fighting genuine education on climate change do it for simple and selfish reasons: they don’t wish to be inconvenienced. The corporations funding elaborate misinformation campaigns about global warming do it because they don’t wish to surrender their profit margins.
The scientific consensus is unambiguous: if we continue our profligate consumption of fossil fuels our CO2 emissions will trigger a runaway greenhouse effect, with consequences including rising sea levels, droughts, and extreme weather. Unless we change our ways, our descendants will indeed inherit the wind.
Warren Senders