Global Warming Orthodoxy (1 Viewer)

flappinghippo

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I read this article a while ago:
Cold, hard facts take the heat out of some hot claims

Imagine if the American government agency responsible for temperature records had announced a fortnight ago that it had overestimated annual temperatures since the year 2000. Imagine if, at the time of correcting this error, the hottest year on record was mysteriously altered from 1998 to 1934. Imagine further that if you considered the 10 hottest years on record after these corrections, the hottest decade changed from the 1990s to the 1930s.



I feel as if it all started with scientists crying, "wolf!". Then some people started looking at the evidence and saw, wait, maybe they're right, there's the wolf. Then more people. It becomes more mainstream, but also, more hysterical. Headlines left and right start painting an apocalypse, the more alarming predictions are published. This is scientifc consensus! Dissidents to the theory are dismissed as mercenaries of oil companies and strongly looked down upon. Rhetoric supporting the theory is gobbled up and adds to its strength. Its popularity grows as people join the movement and pressure governments. Somewhere in the middle, somehow, the cry turns to "40 THOUSAND WOLVES! WITH FRIKKEN LASER BEAMS ON THEIR HEADS!"

Now, before I go on, I'm sure a lot of you believe global warming to be happening right now. I do too. Let's not discuss whether or not it's happening; ice caps are melting, all the signs, yadda. Let's instead discuss the orthodoxy that has arisen, its collective stance on dissidence, of people who preach anything but environmental apocalypse. It seems like scientific integrity (ie. to doubt) has been lost to the hysterics of a populist, activist movement.

Everyone would remember the Great Global Warming Swindle, aired on the ABC a few months ago? It "highlighted recent research that the effect of the sun’s radiation on the atmosphere may be a better explanation for the regular swings of climate from ice ages to warm interglacial periods and back again". It did a lot more, namely looking into the movement; scientists compete for limited funding and tend to receive it if they relate it to global warming; whole livelihoods depend on proving the theory exists and become passionate voices; a large social activist movement left looking for something to protest about after Vietnam. Also, it looks at the proposed consequences of global warming; that tropical diseases such as malaria will spread to higher latitudes (it points to mass epidemics resulting in thousands of deaths in Russia due to malaria long before global warming started.)

When it finished the host segued into an interview with its creator, raising some good points (the show was revised 3 times, many glaring errors highlighted), but hardly letting the guy talk. Then a bunch of scientists presented how wrong some of the graphs were, and how misleading some of the implications were. There were some very devious uses of titles of some of the 'scientists' interviewed.

They had a panel of speakers at the end talking about this show. Basically one fat bald guy, former CEO of BP, refused to stay on topic and instead sprouted the "The time is now for action, and together we CAN do it." rhetoric every time it was his time to speak. One scientist with glasses seemed to have his shit together and stringed one bit of evidence after another saying global warming is real to anyone that even farted in the wrong direction. The audience was made up of regular, inarticulate, unfit-for-TV types, like this one guy who flailed his arms and kept yelling something unintelligible about carbon-14. The two older guys seemed to me the most interesting, one quote being along the lines of, "Why wasn't the Stern Report subject to this much scrutiny?".

Basically, they addressed all the technical errors GGWS made (rightfully so), but completely ignored everything else. They never got to the whole populist movement part. The tropical diseases part. Why didn't they focus on the parts the documentary got right?

Even An Inconvenient Truth has allegedly made at least 11 false or unsupported claims. Where is the intense media scrutiny?

Finally; here's the afterword to Crichton's book State of Fear: Why Politicized Science is Dangerous.

Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out.

This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.

I don’t mean global warming. I’m talking about another theory, which rose to prominence a century ago.

Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.

These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.

All in all, the research, legislation and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.

Today, we know that this famous theory that gained so much support was actually pseudoscience. The crisis it claimed was nonexistent. And the actions taken in the name of theory were morally and criminally wrong. Ultimately, they led to the deaths of millions of people.

The theory was eugenics, and its history is so dreadful —- and, to those who were caught up in it, so embarrassing —- that it is now rarely discussed. But it is a story that should be well known to every citizen, so that its horrors are not repeated.
It's time we stop this and ponder where we actually want to go.


Focus: Do you think the global warming theory is overly politicised? How so?
 
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Serius

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could you add some sort of focus statement for the discussion? i have no idea where to go with this one.

If it was something along the lines of

"Discuss the problems or merits about politicizing scientific theories and the consequences of such actions"

Theres a few other good examples against it, like social darwinism where blacks were thought to be inferior.

Oh and yeah, a real embarrassing one for the history people, the widely popularized dinosaur brontosaurus never actually existed, but after they announced it was a mistake it was too late and the fictional dinosaur was allready on stamps, in major textbooks and imprinted on society.


Any situation which leads the common idiot to say something like "Global warming is happening right now, cant you feel how hot this year is compared to last year" [yes i have had real people say this to me] is probably publicized far too much. Global warming theory proposes a few degrees average difference over decades, not a few measly years.

A few good ones though are that people pretty much unanimously believe in the big bang theory[which can also be a bit of a negative when alternative theories are presented. alternative scientific theories to clarify. none of this intelligent design or purposeful bang or whatever those Christian fundies will come up with] evolution, gravity, the earth being a globe rather than flat etc etc.
 

Serius

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Yeah i was freaked out about that when i found out. Its something we learnt about as kids, then when i hit highschool i never heard about it again and that dinosaur wasnt in any books.
 
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katie_tully

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Global Warming hysterics annoy me. A lot. That is my response coz I have nfi what the point of this thread was...
 

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