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.
I found these words by a commentator on a different blog:
“Put your hand on a burner, it hurts. Take your hand off a burner, it doesn’t hurt. Repeat for 650,000 years. Now put your hand on the burner and leave it there. Those are all of the “facts” I need. When CO2 goes up, heat goes up and right now we are off the charts UP. When you heat up ice, it melts. End of story.”
IMO, this is a terrific example of the sheer appeal of AGW. All the complexities, the vast scale , the multitudes of factors all interacting with one another in the still barely understood processes of the Earth’s climate, reduced to one simple equation, on a par with “With Jesus = Heaven, without Jesus = Hell.” (Okay, that’s actually two equations.)
I’ve also been told off a few times for questioning the scientific utterances of the climate scientists (The Magnificent 2500) . In the same way that an unseasonably cold day doesn’t signify anything but an unseasonably warm day is a sign of global warming, as a GW sceptic I don’t have the right to draw my own conclusions and must abide by the scientific “consensus”. But my GW-believing friends can look out of the window at the sinister birds, bees and green shoots of an early Spring and draw as many wild conclusions as they like, so long as they are along the lines of “We’re doomed.”
My favorite take on the Chinese winter was the headline of unprecidented climate shift in China which made the startling claim that China’s coldest winter in fifty years followed on the heels of its warmest summer in 55 years. Obviously this is due to CO2 induce Climate Change.
One very difficult canard to nail is the suggestion that the Earth is “warming up”. As I understand it, the mythological “global temperature” is the average temperature, not the maximum. As I and others have often said, Tmax plus Tmin divided by two gives Tav. Tmax plus (Tmin plus2) divided by two give a new higher average temperature of Tav plus one. But the Earth is no hotter insofar as the maximum temperature is concerned, so where’s the problem?
A bigger potential problem is that some well-meaning but mis-guided genius will actually think of a way to seriously reduce the CO2 concentration and put it into action, as Richard Branson has tried to encourage. Then we’d all be screwed.
Hey John, I have a great picture from a children’s weather book printing in the early 90’s about global cooling. If anyone is interested, I’ll post it. Truly funny.
REPLY: Yes please let’s see it!
Thanks for the great post John!
However, you did miss something extraordinarily galling about that CNN article, which I posted yesterday on my (significantly less-trafficked) blog.
The original title for that article — which may have affected the first few comments, and which CNN pulled after only a few minutes — was, ahem:
CLIMATE CHANGE MAKES ISLAND KIDS BONY, STUNTED
I kid you not! Check the cache, or do a google search on that phrase.
Reply from John: Wow, you’re right. Incredible!
http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b19/mateosinatra/weather_facts.jpg
[…] WattsUpWithThat posts a terrific response to one of the article comments on CNN.com. WattsUpWithThat is apparently […]
I disagree that “climate change” is a re-branding of “global warming.” They are not the same thing. “Global Warming” refers to the average change predicted to affect the entire planet, where as “climate change” reflects the fact that, because of evolving climate and oceanic circulation in light of global warming, not all areas will be affected equally.
Although I doubt it’s a canonical analogy, one can think of global warming as a “cause” and climate change as its “effect.”
Can’t resist – saw this headline in Drudge this morning:
PSYCHIATRISTS have detected the first case of “climate change delusion”
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23991257-25717,00.html
My sister, a dead to rights conservative, believed in AGW lock, stock, and barrel. I am a liberal and never believed it. Our education was in conservative NE Oregon. So you can’t blame education for her belief. You certainly can’t say she believes it because she is a conservative (which logically destroys the “liberal” bashing as well). So what is it? According to her, it is because that is what she has heard on TV and in the papers (even the conservative newspapers here in NE Oregon).
Here is a possible culprit and it has nothing to do with political views or public education, or your mother: You can fool some of the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people most of the time, you can fool most of the people, some of the time, you can even fool most of the people most of the time, and you can even fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people, all of the time.
So can we PUULEASE dispense with the right/left/teacher bashing? It never fails to show up in every blog. The matter at hand cannot be boiled down to such nonsense. To post such simplistic blame statements lowers us to the same level as the AGW CO2 argument and indeed makes us look like flat landers.
agreed 100% Pamela. I’m quite liberal (heck, I’m even one of those Kos kiddies!), and fairly skeptical of AGW and the gloom and doom. There are lots of liberal skeptics and lots of conservative believers and as Pamela says, you can’t just boil (heh!) it down to left/right etc.
I like the term lukewarmer anyway to describe myself.
Pamela Gray,
Good point. On the other hand it wouldn’t be wrong to say that the right/conservative public tends to be more open to antiAGW thought. The Sierra Club and other movements which take all human growth and exploitation as evil are most definitely left.
I noted on the Fox New site a story that the glaciers around Mt. Shasta are increasing “in spite of global warming” but all others in the U.S. are shrinking, and some will soon vanish. Kilimanjaro could be ‘ice free’ in a few years.
Didn’t al-Gore claim that had already happened?
Some of our glaciers in Colorado apparently didn’t get this news…
When we take the car in, do we let the ‘expert’ do whatever he feels needs doing? I don’t know about Marc, but I’d bet he checks the bank account, weighs the age of the car against the next years’ cash flow, etc.
When we get a physical or a diagnosis for some complaint, do we just go with whatever the ‘expert’ thinks reasonable? I kind of think we get the care we demand, and odds are Marc does as well.
Marc is likely to be deluding himself and not a great many others. I don’t trust you because you do as you say, but it makes me take a closer look.
Paul said (23:30:48) :
“But of course I am also aware that ‘Climate Change’ is the rebranding of ‘Global Warming’ ”
It’s called “moving the goal posts,” and the climate deceivers do it all. The. Time.
It’s like telling someone they’re going to come down with pneumonia… then seeing the guy get the shingles, and telling him, “I warned you!”
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?
Even worse is the deliberately false statement that CO2 is a “pollutant.”
Whatever happened to proper scientific debate on the subject?
The BBc in the UK is appalling with its Greenwash every day.
They were showing electric cars and mcycles the other day saying how green they were and didnt use petrol. How do they think the electricty is generated? more than likely fossil fuels will be burnt.
If I saw proper proof of AGW which convinced me then I would be happy to accept it but I havent. All I see is spin hype and lets try and scare each other a bit more. In a nutshell it seems to me that the world got very slighlty warmer during the last qtr of the century, the amount was so small that it would not show up on most heating systems or air conditioner controls. It appears 1998 was an unusal spike as was 1934 in temperature terms. During the last 10 yrs the temperatures have not increased and presently show some signs of dropping back. I would love to see a TV programme based on legal proceedings where both sides of the argument were given EQUAL time, cross examination of experts allowed by Barristers and the jury at the end votes on it. To do the subject justice it would need to be at least 2 hrs.
[…] Source: wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com […]
I have noticed that the politicians set the CO2 reduction goals for 25 or 30 years in the future. It seems to me, they do not have the snow balls to take the heat for destroying their nation’s economies on their watch. It will be even more interesting to see how the public will react several years from now when it is undeniable and settled science that climate change (caused by global warming) is a fraud. Will ALGORE me taken out and flogged?
After several “Five Year Plan” failures, Castro told the Soviets to make their predictions far enough in the future that they wouldn’t be around to explain why they didn’t happen.
The CO2/AGW crowd obviously took notes.
“Global Warming” refers to the average change predicted to affect the entire planet, where as “climate change” reflects the fact that, because of evolving climate and oceanic circulation in light of global warming, not all areas will be affected equally…one can think of global warming as a “cause” and climate change as its “effect.”
So, global warming is just an average warming over time (caused by humans of course, and as measured by cherry picking the time period), and the resulting climate change can be anything AGWers want it to be. How convenient.
The key takeaway from this post should be this: there is BIG difference between “climate change” and “manmade climate change.”
Casual (uninformed) readers of the term, including Marc, make the assumption that all climate change is caused by humans. “Climate realists” recognize that most is not.
Commenters like “Marc” drive me nuts. They are present on all blogs about all topics, and they’re also the guys who “reply all” to SPAM forwards with a rant about something completely unrelated to the original email.
“There will be an ice age, change your ways” … became …
“oh, ok, no ice age, um … there will be global warming, change your ways” … became …
“oh, ok, so maybe it isn’t warming, um … there will be climate change, change your ways”.
Bearing in mind that many will not look at the detail only the title, the title has to be incapable of disproof.
And as for “moron amplifier” I’m sitting here saying “I wish I’d said that” and then reassuring myself: “you will FatBigot, you will.”
“…boring scares of nuclear power, GMOs or maybe electromagnetic smog”
Speaking of magnetics, and this is a serious question, but, I have been reading that the magnetic poles have been moving, predominantly, the North pole is reported to be moving accross canada at the rate of a few KM’s per year. In my reading of this, there are apparently results that show a weakening of the magnetosphere around the pole by 25%. My question is this, could this weaking of the earths magnetics be a candidate for the changing climate? My assumption is that if the field is weaker, more radiation will pass through possibly causing some atmospheric changes. Does this assumption stand up at all with what you guys know? I’m just curious.
Many thanks…
“…the deliberately false statement that CO2 is a “pollutant.” ”
Yeah, I noticed this dirty word being banded about too. I think it must be part of the spin campaign to make it sound new and even more dangerous from before.