Guest post by John Goetz
A story appeared briefly yesterday on the CNN homepage titled Ruthless drought in West Timor puts children in crisis. There is no doubt that this particular drought – like so many throughout history – is causing a significant amount of human suffering, much of it being shouldered by children. Having children of my own, including one very young one presently occupying my home, I feel torn inside when I read about or see kids living and dying in such conditions.
Before I clicked on the article to read it in full, a “story highlight” saying the drought was due to climate change caught my eye. I immediately knew the article would not only be heart-wrenching, it would be controversial as well. Seeing that it was posted under the CNN Planet in Peril banner sealed the deal.
The CNN article was one that allowed readers to post comments, and as expected a number of them took CNN to task for claiming this particular drought was caused by Climate Change. A roughly equal number of commenters countered with charges of insensitivity and the turning of blind eyes. Part of me considered commenting that, assuming drought was not a normal condition in West Timor, then the drought was in fact due to a climate that had changed. But of course I am also aware that “Climate Change” is the rebranding of “Global Warming”, not unlike “Death Tax” is the rebranding of “Estate Tax”. The commenters obviously knew this as well, freely substituting global warming for climate change.
One comment in particular caught my eye. The writer was someone who went by the handle of “Marc”, and his response is typical of the type of ad-hominem attacks I’ve seen in a number of other related, but less widely read blogs:
Hmm, so it seems the less-than-stellar scholars on this board disparaging the existence of human caused climate change must also be card carrying members of the Flat Earth Society. How truly noble of you and your tiny-brained ideas.
Other than successfully proving your vast and utter ignorance of science, you’ve achieved little else. Of course you all know more than the dedicated scientists who’ve spent their entire careers studying the history of global climate and the overwhelming volumes of data that now conclusively point to humans as the root cause of impending global climate change.
I bet you also know more than the doctors treating your grandparents’ cancer, the physicists smashing atoms and the biochemists advancing gene therapies to prevent your child’s birth defects. The point is, climate scientists are EXPERTS in their chosen field, just as the experts I’ve listed in the prior sentence. To argue you know more than they, without a shred of contradictory evidence, is sheer lunacy on your part.
Now please get to back to your job and take the customer’s food order, your lunch break is about over.
The reason I fixated on this comment was because I had actually read the article. My guess is that nearly all of the commenters, regardless of opinion, did not read the article but instead read the headline, story highlights, and looked at the pictures. Marc included.
You see, no scientist that I can find has claimed a tie between human caused climate change and the drought in West Timor. Furthermore, CNN did not say a scientist made that claim either. Paragraph four starts with
Maria is fighting to live, wasting away in her remote village where aid officials say climate change has brought on a severe drought in recent years.
That’s right, aid officials made the claim, not scientists. Of course, I am assuming the aid officials are not climate scientists, but I think it is a reasonable assumption.
Marc’s smackdown is one I have seen time and time again. It is a popular tactic of certain posters who regularly bully their way around dotearth and a handful of other, minor blogs (I love dotearth, by the way, and visit it as much as I visit this blog and ClimateAudit). Unless one is a card-carrying board-certified climate scientist then one has no right to dispute the tie between Weather That Causes Suffering and Human Influence On Climate. The rule however, does not seem to work in reverse.
Go figure.
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Isn’t the real message that marc is sending – “Hey, I dont need a brain, I’ve got a concenus instead” ?
Great post. I think this argument falls under the same category as “the debate is over”. None of these kind of statements recognize that there are climate scientists, and many of them that don’t agree that “climate change” is mostly caused by human activity. Back to the point of your post though, I have to wonder what “Marc’s” qualification to make commentary on climate is, and how many peer reviewed theses he’s written. My bet is that he’s just another environazi that wants to control the tone of the debate to meet his own end, and is not interested in the facts about climate at all.
Global warming ™ / Climate Change is not the only place where this approach is now too common. I keep wondering if it’s
1) Inadequate education
2) Poor manners
3) The internet as a moron amplifier
that has caused so many to give up critical thinking in favor of cheering “my side” in almost anything from politics to weather to science. Like most things in this world I hope it works like a pendulum and before I die I can see a new generation of young people who think for themselves and giggle at the old bolsheviks as they regurgitate whatever the nonsense of the day happens to be.
For reference, here’s a graph of SST around Timor: http://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov/tmp/nomads/orders/3796/meta/IMG25437.png
China just had it coldest winter in 50 years and that has been a driver to food shortages in SE Asia. Imagine the headline that wasn’t – China’s coldest winter due to global warming! What’s it going to take to end this debacle? Btw, I haven’t seen a blip of a new sunspot on SOHO in weeks.
Bruce,
Schools today take such great pains to point out that they teach critical thinking, when in fact they simply criticize those people and ideas they disagree with and call that process critical thinking.
I do like the term “moron amplifier”.
Bruce H
My guess is that it is all three at once.
@floodguy – I am not a pro solar physicist or a meteorologist (I write computer software), but I am hoping to read some informed opinions soon on Cycle 24 and what the quiet sun could imply for us.
What kind of nasty coincidence would it be if we had a solar driven cool down at the moment when so much is being fretted on it getting warm. My Scottish blood makes me love the cold, but for most folks in this world it’s much better to be warmer than normal than colder than normal.
If mother nature wanted to put some icing on that cake, she could light off a Pinatubo or larger scale eruption some time this year to give us some upper atmosphere ash to boot.
And, Congress is going to have hearings next week attempting to correlate the Midwest floods to “global warming” even though, as readers of this blog well know, the earth is cooling.
Was watching a Hitler Channel, er, History Channel show today about ancient climate. Of course they had to go on about how CO2 caused the Cretaceous and Jurassic periods to be “cooking the Earth”, and that these were times when the Earth was “seriously out of kilter”.
Hmm. Is there a large label on Antarctica which says “Keep at 287 Kelvin for best results” Or “Keep in a cool, dry place”? Why would any period in the Earth’s history be “out of kilter” and any other period be the perfect optimum? It was another example of scientists speaking in absolutes. According to them, the ONLY reason the Earth was warmer then was due to high CO2 levels. No other reason was given. They also didn’t mention how life thrived during those times, except for photosynthesizing plants to provide us oil today. They really don’t know why any given time is warmer or cooler than any, especially one hundreds of millions of years removed.
John Goetz says: Now, now, I thoroughly enjoy the History Channel.
History bulges with examples of scientific pronouncement that was subsequently proven false. (I won’t bore the reader with a dreary list.)
The point is that citations of scientific certitude are one of the worst arguments one can bring to bear in favor of a new theory.
Hey John G, nice post.
REPLY: Ditto that, – Anthony
As an electronics instructor, I can agree with the term “moron amplifier”. But, if I may use electronic terms, there seems to be a group of “common emitters”, ie, people who continue to tell the same story.
But like a common emitter amp, their output (CAGW) is 180 degrees out of phase with the input.
The fact that aid officials cite AGW as the cause of the problem illustrates how everyone is latching onto that particular gravy train.
As for that commenter and his ad hominem attack, I’d hate to be his child and develop an illness and have him take me in to the first doctor he came across for treatment. Would he, in blind faith to the doctor’s pronouncement, agree to a proposed course of treatment without ever questioning what was being done and why? Would he never seek a second opinion?
Regarding Marc, he seems to be one of the Kos kiddie brand of leftist. His is a typical approach; it’s a derivative of the enlightened speaking to the benighted. (For those of you who aren’t familiar with these terms, use google.) This of course is underscored with the sneering assumption about the job of those he takes aim at. Kos brand leftists believe that the right is comprised of NASCAR loving, trailer dwelling, gap toothed, mouth breathing morons who go to family reunions for dating opportunities and otherwise wholly unfit for the oxygen they waste. Marc believes the std Kos assumption #21 that the Left is educated and the right is not.
And then of course Marc invokes argument from authority, calls it a day, and is completely unaware of the irony. The mind truly boggles at such a display.
I am not a Scientist, but I have spent the last five years extensively researching the subject of AGW and have come to the conclusion that “AGW Believers” are mostly “Uninformed Idiots”. They are nothing “Sheep” following a “Green Religious Cult” driven by the real crooks, the “Political Money Grabbers”. If the AGW crowd would just spend a few hours looking at the last the 1000 years of Climate History Trends of this Earth instead of believing the hype being feed to them by the “Political” driven “Enviromentalist/Money Nuts of the World”, there wouldn’t be any concern about AGW. The Earth has been much hotter and much colder in spite of man and it will do it’s thing, despite man. Sure we can do things better, but mans actions have “zilch” influence on the climate. IMHO!!!
John Goetz and others, my advice is to target the worst offender and go after them with detailed fact based and referenced rebuttals. I’ve been around online forums a lot longer than most and I assure you this works. Nobody likes being shown to be an ignorant fool.
And BTW, this goes for AGW critics whose arguments are flawed or based on bad science. Many people come to this blog to be educated and we have a responsibility to rebut bad sceptic arguments, just as much as bad AGW arguments.
“But of course I am also aware that “Climate Change” is the rebranding of “Global Warming” ”
I’ve also noticed recently that “CO2” seems to be rebranding to “Greenhouse Gas”, particlarly used in the G8 summits. Anyone else notice this or is it just me?
“it’s a derivative of the enlightened speaking to the benighted”
Very true, catches the tone perfectly. JG is right to notice how common this tone and this sort of abusive rant is. One sometimes has the impression that there are a fairly small number of people, probably operating under multiple aliases, who don’t get out enough, and spend their days at a keyboard spewing out endless variations on this sort of rant on climate blogs. It has almost nothing to do with climate – it could be about politics, the Titanic, UFOs, anything.
They don’t realize they are not simply ineffective but are actually making converts in the other direction. The way it works in real life most of the lay public tend to judge scientific propositions on public policy not on their intellectual merits, but on the conduct of their proponents. This sort of thing is going to make more AGW skeptics than any number of heavy stat posts full of R code on CA.
Paul,
The AGW crowd has already dug their hole, and there’s no way out for them. The planet is supposed to get much hotter, period – they’ve told us time and again. So if the earth cools, there will be no way for them to get away by rebranding.
The catstrophe I see them using later on is: ocean acidification due to CO2. But I also don’t see them getting away with that one either. In the future I suspect they’ll have to accept going back to the boring scares of nuclear power, GMOs or maybe electromagnetic smog.
Never forget – they said the planet was going to fry. Anything else makes them wrong.
China is making plans for tough emissions cuts but President Hu Jintao is adamant that the west, which has been “polluting the air for centuries” must act first to reduce emissions and exchange financial and technical support.
While China is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse its leaders assert that the country is only just catching up after two centuries of industrialization in the West.
Chinese policy makers are worried that an implosion of climate change – intensified by by human-made global warming – could dry up rivers in the arid north and intensify flooding in the south.
Floodwaters released from a swollen reservoir in southern Guangdong province caused a 300-meter bridge in the Baiyun district of Guangzhou to collapse, and recent unusual rainfall in Beijing killed three.
“How we cope with climate change is related to the country’s economic development and people’s practical benefits. It’s in line with the country’s basic interests,” Hu informed the central committee of China’s ruling communist party.
“Our task is tough, and our time is limited. Party organizations and governments at all levels must give priority to emission reduction … and drive the idea deep into people’s hearts.”
Chinese authorities told Daily Planet media that strategies were being worked on to encourage companies to optimize energy use, recycle resources, increase forest coverage and use water resources scientifically and efficiently.
Your trees make a difference at http://www.EarthCharterFoundation.com
For more global warming, climate change news updates, please visit http://www.DailyPlanetMedia.com
fred – funny you should mention UFOs:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2261941/British-UFO-sightings-at-%27bizarre%27-levels.html?source=newswidget
Malcolm Robinson, founder member of Strange Phenomena Investigations, added: “There has been an unusual number of sightings recently. Some experts believe it could be linked to global warming and craft from outer space are appearing because they are concerned about what man is doing to this planet.”
The perfect example of a “news” item killing two birds with one stone. Upsetting that it comes from the only newspaper in the UK to consistently debate, and usually debunk, the fiasco of AGW.
When I stopped laughing I came back to my usual dark thoughts on this – the way the science is being set around the policy is proof enough to me that there is a massive agenda invisible to the majority.
We have a fight on our hands. Waiting for Nature to prove the envirobots wrong is not a good strategy. Amongst other things a badly timed eruption could set the general public’s enlightenment back by a long spell. The last thing we need is for the next couple of years cooling to be masked. The shrill bleating will return in 2010 when it warms up again globally for a whole year. After that is when the cold sets in for a loooong time.
CO2 being re-branded as a Greenhouse Gas? Seems to me it’s increasingly being referred to in the media, quite ludicrously, as “pollution”.
I thought ‘Global Warming’ was supposed to increase humidity and rainfall in the latitudes of West Timor (dengue fever and all that).
Wow, two good terms in one blog entry: “moron amplifier” and “Kos Kiddies”!