Gored to Death
I'm over Al Gore, and I'm over climate change.
I've been over it all for a while, but watching the first half of the Academy Awards last night (because who aside from filmmakers could possibly sit through the whole thing!), I've decided I'm really over it, in a huge way. There's nothing quite like Hollywood sycophancy to create that sick feeling in the stomach, so here's to Leonardo DiCaprio for making (I hope) millions of sick-feeling sceptics across the world with his fawning butt kissing (I wasn't aware one could fawn and butt kiss at the same time, but now I've seen it, I know it is). And there's nothing that convinces me more of the need for scepticism than a movement that insists that scepticism is dangerous. Thus, when a movement creates a term like 'climate change deniers', with all the evil subtext implied, they immediately create a new enemy -- me.
The difference between a denier and a sceptic is very important, and it's a classic propagandist tactic to blur the line between the two. A 'sceptic' implies someone who has not yet been convinced either way, because he's keeping an open mind, and refuses to jump to conclusions simply because the surrounding mass hysteria insists that he should. A 'denier' implies someone who has a closed mind, because he denies an obvious truth. The problem, of course, is that in very few complex global issues, particularly in something as mind boggling complex and evolving as the science of planetary weather systems, does there exist anything that could be called 'obvious truth'. There is plenty of scientific scepticism out there still, if you care to look (and despite the efforts of many to insist it doesn't exist), just don't expect to see it publicised in the current hysterical mood. In previous eras, 'obvious truths' have included the earth being flat, the earth being the center of the solar system, and the earth having been made in seven days. Just because everyone believed these truths in their day didn't make them any more true. Thus, to try and crush open minded scepticism with the rhetorical tactic of branding all questioners as 'deniers' is pathetic, and should be opposed by free thinking people everywhere -- and by climate change believers most of all. I'm equally sceptical of claims of big corporate polluters that all that carbon released into the air doesn't do any harm. But just because I'm sceptical about that, doesn't mean I have to abandon scepticism of the opposing extreme.
In the pursuit of knowledge, scepticism shall always be more important than belief. Too many well intentioned climate change believers have forgotten that.
UPDATE: Janet Albrechtsen puts it more buntly here.
UPDATE 2: My pal and fellow Pyr author David Louis Edelman seems to agree.
UPDATE 3: On Dave's blog, a commenter casts doubt on my suggestion in comments that scientists in the '70s were warning of a coming ice age. This article from The Guardian in 2001, from Dr Alison George of the British Antarctic Survey makes interesting reading on that subject.
I've been over it all for a while, but watching the first half of the Academy Awards last night (because who aside from filmmakers could possibly sit through the whole thing!), I've decided I'm really over it, in a huge way. There's nothing quite like Hollywood sycophancy to create that sick feeling in the stomach, so here's to Leonardo DiCaprio for making (I hope) millions of sick-feeling sceptics across the world with his fawning butt kissing (I wasn't aware one could fawn and butt kiss at the same time, but now I've seen it, I know it is). And there's nothing that convinces me more of the need for scepticism than a movement that insists that scepticism is dangerous. Thus, when a movement creates a term like 'climate change deniers', with all the evil subtext implied, they immediately create a new enemy -- me.
The difference between a denier and a sceptic is very important, and it's a classic propagandist tactic to blur the line between the two. A 'sceptic' implies someone who has not yet been convinced either way, because he's keeping an open mind, and refuses to jump to conclusions simply because the surrounding mass hysteria insists that he should. A 'denier' implies someone who has a closed mind, because he denies an obvious truth. The problem, of course, is that in very few complex global issues, particularly in something as mind boggling complex and evolving as the science of planetary weather systems, does there exist anything that could be called 'obvious truth'. There is plenty of scientific scepticism out there still, if you care to look (and despite the efforts of many to insist it doesn't exist), just don't expect to see it publicised in the current hysterical mood. In previous eras, 'obvious truths' have included the earth being flat, the earth being the center of the solar system, and the earth having been made in seven days. Just because everyone believed these truths in their day didn't make them any more true. Thus, to try and crush open minded scepticism with the rhetorical tactic of branding all questioners as 'deniers' is pathetic, and should be opposed by free thinking people everywhere -- and by climate change believers most of all. I'm equally sceptical of claims of big corporate polluters that all that carbon released into the air doesn't do any harm. But just because I'm sceptical about that, doesn't mean I have to abandon scepticism of the opposing extreme.
In the pursuit of knowledge, scepticism shall always be more important than belief. Too many well intentioned climate change believers have forgotten that.
UPDATE: Janet Albrechtsen puts it more buntly here.
UPDATE 2: My pal and fellow Pyr author David Louis Edelman seems to agree.
UPDATE 3: On Dave's blog, a commenter casts doubt on my suggestion in comments that scientists in the '70s were warning of a coming ice age. This article from The Guardian in 2001, from Dr Alison George of the British Antarctic Survey makes interesting reading on that subject.
5 Comments:
I am highly sceptical of on opinion on scientific matters seemingly formed by watching entertainment awards show.
There is pretty good evidence that global ocean tempratures are increasing. And there is pretty credible eveidence that there is ice melting that has been around for a long time. And the link between climate and ocean temperature is reasonably well accepted. So which part of the entire global warming/climate change do you have a issue with?
Hi Andrew
You are of course asking me to prove a negative, which is the other rhetorical advantage of the believers!
I don't argue that the climate isn't changing. Of course scientific studies find that the climate today is changing. The thing is, the climate has always been changing. I read a lot of things from a lot of places, and don't bookmark anything so I can't point back to it, but I've read, for example, that from the 1940s to 1970s, global temperatures were decreasing, and scientists were warning about the approaching ice age. In the past two thousand years there have been hotter periods than this one, as natural, cyclic variability. And just recently, an Australian science TV show had results from seabed deposits that measured rainfall over hundreds of thousands of years, and found that this present drought comes at the bottom of a long drying trend that's been going on for a few thousand years, well before we had anything to do with it. Previous dry or wet cycles have also been thousands of years long. I also read that many glaciers now shrinking have in previous centuries been much shorter than they are now, that many glaciers around the world are still growing, that antarctic snowcover is actually increasing, and Greenland icemelt isn't as bad as previously feared. Etc, etc, etc.
So of course the climate changes. But claiming that we're the sole cause of current warming, and that turning your airconditioner off for an hour on a weekday will help fix the problem, seems simplistic.
Oh, I'm no where saying that the climate isn't something that is in a state of flux. The corollary that not doing anything til we have concrete proof seems also a bit trite. I mean if the is a risk shouldn't we at least attempt to remidate it.
I'd also like to point out that unlike those previous incidents we have a slightly higher global population so our tolerance to any catastrophy tends to be slightly diminished.
I am concerned that by the time there is conclusive evidence that the economic cost of any action is going to be much much larger than if we act now.
I think that's a fair concern. But my concern is that I'd like the debate to get serious. Asking people to just cut back on energy consumption isn't going to work, and all the stats show that sure enough, despite all the worry, power consumption is going up pretty much everywhere. Kyoto solves nothing because all the Kyoto signatories are now projected to miss their emissions targets by about the same margin as they were going to before they signed it... and now even the emissions trading scheme in Europe is going broke.
I don't know if you're Australian or not... in Australia we're having a debate about nuclear power, which is correctly identified as the primary 'clean' energy alternative, but the supposedly green opposition won't have a bar of it because of nuclear waste... which is clearly a problem, but if climate change is as serious as they say, is a miniscule problem by comparison. So they're saying if we don't do something it'll be a disaster, but in the meantime we're not prepared to tolerate the comparitively minor problem of nuclear waste, and I don't think they can have it both ways -- it's either an emergency or it's not.
I'd love to see more work put into renewables to make them more commerically efficient, but at the moment they're still far too expensive, and if any country's businesses and homes had to pay those prices, the economy truly would go bust, and no politician will ever do that... there may be a way to change that, and I'd like to see economists, business leaders etc working on it with the scientists to make renewables more competitive, but I don't see those proposals being put forward much. (I read a while ago some local environmentalist praising a Scandanavian nation (forget which) for burning so little coal, but neglected to mention that the reason for it was that most of that nation's power came from dams and nuclear power stations, neither of which that environmentalist would support in his own nation).
And finally for long term dreaming there's ITER, the big global nuclear fusion project (google it, it's pretty cool) but that's many decades off yet, and I've the nasty suspicion that all that bureaucratic centralisation will have the same affect on nuclear fusion research as NASA's had on space exploration -- making it take ten times longer and a hundred times more expensive than it should be.
Instead of addressing these issues, I see environmentalists saying 'use less power' (isn't working), 'sign Kyoto' (isn't working) 'use renewables' (won't work at present save on a small scale), and that's about it. I'd love for all of these things to work, and maybe five years ago, I was optimistic that they might. But now, I'm sceptical.
I'm from Western Australia. I am very aware of the Nuclear Power debate. I am sceptical of claims that nuclear waste can be safely stored for the time frames that it needs to be. Basically because if the people making those claims are wrong, they aren't going to have to answer for it.
Also it's a problem that keeps on accreting, because the more power you produce the more waste you accrue and unfortualtely it just doesn't go away. I belive the US is currently having difficulty finding adequate storage for their waste.
Europe is quite odd, because it's such an interconnected grid that when the wind is blowing in Germany, uncommon as that might be, berlin pulls power from France.
Also I believe a lot of the costings for nuclear power rely on the Government indemnifing the plant operaters against any accidents, so they don't have to pay for there own insurance, though I'm not a hundred percent sure on the accuracy of that.
Also you need smaller plants, in WA at least, as the larger more cost effective ones, produce too much power.
Oh by the way apparently jarrah offcuts are a renewable source of energy ;-).
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