Godwin's Law and the discourse on climate change

[bionarydata]

The Attack on Climate-Change Science: Why It's the O.J. Moment of the Twenty-First Century by Bill McKibben

'Indeed, the IPCC managed to include, among other glitches, a spurious date for the day when Himalayan glaciers would disappear. It won't happen by 2035, as the report indicated--a fact that has now been spread so widely across the Internet

Comments

[lifedistilled]

I like Bill McKibben. I recommend Deep Economy to a lot of my customers.

That said, I don't really have a thought-process about climate change. My natural reaction is to automatically assume guilt on the part of industries and corporations, which really isn't good scientific practice. Layman's science says I should believe that there's climate change occuring, sure, but I don't really know enough of the facts (and don't have a heavy enough scientific background to -learn- many of the facts) to really judge.

Still, I come down in favor of reduced emissions from all sectors, public and private, for one simple reason: Humans do not breathe smoke very well. We have people who die of "smoke inhalation." Pollution - air, water, soil, etc - is necessarily bad. We should do less of it. I'm all for this. Climate change is, at least to this condensed argument, kind of irrelevant. I'm not in either camp - I'm just against pollution itself.

Nazi Moron Scumbag

[lightningtea]

"For a gifted political operative like, say, Marc Morano, who runs the Climate Depot website, the massive snowfalls this winter became the grist for a hundred posts poking fun at the very idea that anyone could still possibly believe in, you know, physics."

This statement pretty much nails it home for me personally. People in general are just so amazingly ignorant about things like, as McKibben points out, basic physics and climatology. I am by no means a "scientist" by the technical definition (though I probably have a stronger scientific background than the majority of Americans) but even with my admittedly meager background, the writing is on the wall. This is an issue. People who do not think it's an issue are idiots.

It nauseates me that a person with the gift of gab is infinitely more influential to the American public than, well, facts.