Guest Post by Thomas Fuller
If you type ‘the planet has a fever’ into Google, it will return 3,120,000 results. And none of them are about Peggy Lee. Or even Aerosmith’s later song with the same name.
It’s famous because Al Gore said it. But what does it mean? I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to deconstruct the misleading use of symbols in climate communications–so far we’ve looked at polar bears, Antarctic ice and sea level. This is a related exercise, but it’s about mental images.
If you’ve got a fever, you’re sick. You need to do something. (I still can’t remember–is it feed a cold and starve a fever or vice-versa?) This is exactly what Al Gore said when he addressed Congress in 2008.
“The planet has a fever,” Gore said. “If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say, `Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it’s not a problem.’ If the crib’s on fire, you don’t speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action.”
I don’t know if he was the first, but he certainly wasn’t the last. The phrase has been picked up and bandied about everywhere.
But Earth is not human. Anthropomorphizing it really means we can’t talk about it accurately and honestly. It doesn’t breathe, go to the bathroom or watch TV.
To say it has a fever means that you know what the right temperature is. Do we know that about this planet? That’s a serious question, by the way–I’m not being rhetorical. I haven’t seen anyone say that the global mean temperature cannot exceed 17 degrees Celsius or we melt like the Wicked Witch of the West. Typing ‘best temperature for Earth into Google returns 26 million results–and slightly fewer answers. Most of them are variations on ‘I don’t know.’
To compare a planet to a sick human really reduces the level of discussion you can have about it. Especially if objecting to the question gets you labeled a flat-earther denialist.
But it’s an effective way of controlling the discussion and the agenda. Once you say something like that, the immediate question that pops into peoples’ minds is ‘How do we cure the fever?’ How do we fix this indeed?
When the issue is framed in this way, we don’t even discuss climate change or global warming any more. We start defining what type and level of medicine we need.
It’s brilliant corporate communications. It takes command of the issue, defines the parameters of legitimate discussion and cuts the ground from underneath people who would even question basic assumptions. Absolutely brilliant.
And absolutely despicable. A debate born from scientific discovery with consequences that will affect every living soul on this planet gets hijacked for a silly game based on an inadquate metaphor. And it is done intentionally, to paint opposition as those who want the planet to stay sick.
There are variations that are every bit as bad. Some say those skeptical of part or all of the science are like smokers waving away the X-rays the doctor brings of their lungs. Or like people with high cholesterol justifying their next cheeseburger.
Those could actually be worse, as they imply death by inattention and ignorance. And, like the simpler fever, it changes the conversation and our perception of those engaged in it.
A lot of people want to talk about global warming in ways that don’t involve science. They use analogies, metaphors and plenty of hyperbole. They say that it’s because we don’t understand science.
I think instead it’s because the science is inadequate for their cause. Not that it’s wrong, not that it’s stupid. It just isn’t finished yet. We’re still in the data gathering phase, having developed new tools over the past 30 years. We’ve found defects in previous data collection methods, most famously by our host here.
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D. Patterson says:
September 11, 2010 at 8:40 am
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Thanks D., that was an excellent post!
With regard to the feeding or otherwise of a cold or a fever I must admit that I have found that the liberal application of a decent single malt whisky is most efficacious. Food is not required!
This would seem the appropriate time to break out my gorehog rendition again, or is it a groundgore? Either way, Punxatawney Al emerges again.
http://i632.photobucket.com/albums/uu44/themaverickone/Punxatawney_Al_Hi.jpg
Feel free to use it if you want. I’m going to try to embed it here below, likely to no avail due to my inherent lameness.
[IMG]http://i632.photobucket.com/albums/uu44/themaverickone/Punxatawney_Al_Hi.jpg[/IMG]
@ur momisugly D. Patterson says:
September 11, 2010 at 8:40 am
You forgot to mention the possible atmosphere loss when the moon was formed via something big and hard hitting the earth.
TomT says:
September 11, 2010 at 8:40 am
Thank you for bringing up something I’ve asked several times. What is the earths normal temperature?
Obviously: the average temperature of 1950-1980
And who determined what the normal temperature is?
Michael Mann
And what is the criteria they used to figure out the normal temperature?
well placed thermometers in a nice, neat gridded network spread out world wide /sarcoff
@fuller
You’re getting a bad rep for making stuff up as you go along.
There are 161,000 hits on Google for “the planet has a fever” not the 3.1 million hits you claim in the first line of your article.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS382US382&q=%22the+planet+has+a+fever%22
The best thing I can say is you’re a google illiterate if you don’t know the difference in results between searching for an exact quote or all the words outside of quotes.
Next thing, in the same sentence is a claim that none of these google hits refer to Aerosmith’s “song by that name”. Well technically that’s true and if you add “aerosmith” to the previous search you get 60 hits (about half of them links to this article) and a quick perusal of the rest of the hits (which is an absurdly low number for any any Aerosmith song title) you’ll find that none of these actually refer to a song by that title because, your second mistake in the first line, Aerosmith recorded no song by that title nor had that in any song lyric. The Aerosmith song is simply entitled “Fever” and there is no reference to the planet in the lyrics.
I’d like to stop reading your error laden articles but they hold the same kind of quality that a passenger bus plunging over a cliff has. You know you don’t want to look at the tragic results but something compels you to do it anyway.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+planet+has+a+fever%22+aerosmith&hl=en&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS382US382&ei=lxyMTLX9HoSClAfi-Lhg&start=0&sa=N
Lastly, STILL in the same sentence is the false claim that Aerosmith has a song named “the planet has a fever”. The title of the song is “fever”.
When I was a kid, body temperature was 98.4 F. When Centigrade/Celcius came along that equated to 36.9 C. Some clowns decided that 36.9 was too difficult for people with years of education to remember so they arbitrarily made it 37 C and changed 98.4 F to 98.6 F.
If we can’t even trust the no-marks to get our body temperature right, we haven’t a prayer they’re ever going to get a global average right…
@fuller
If want to analyze a legitimate iconic expression relating to Al Gore try this one which gets (full exact phrase) 3.6 million hits on google… LOL
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS382US382&q=%22crazed+sex+poodle%22
Good question.
As I’m sure you realize …ever since the U.N., and nearly all governments and their agencies realized that almost all energy sources involve the release of CO2 and that this would be a nearly inexhaustible source of taxation/income for them if it [CO2] could be transformed into a “bogeyman.”
There is no limit to governmental appetite for spending other people’s money.
“Communicating Global Climate Change”
“The Science is Settled”
“Global Warming is Real and Humans are Causing it”
“Overwhelming Scientific Consensus on Climate Change”
Those are some of the phrases used in the propaganda war.
Can anybody think of others?
Can anybody invent some phrases supporting a sceptic point of view?
I think I’ve found a way to influence G**gle for such phrases!
…..meanwhile, ALGORE is “feverishly” attempting damage-control when the veil was lifted on his scam (Climategate) by blaming the veil-lifters (all of US)– how dare we expose his carbon-trading scam for the swindle and fraud it is, based on government-sponsored propaganda, which also makes it a tax-funded fraud as well? DEMAND A REFUND BY VOTING APPROPRIATELY, THIS NOVEMBER– VOTE THEM ALL OUT!
PJP says:
September 11, 2010 at 8:18 am
On “forcing”: I agree entirely. its a meaningless word (in any scientific context other than thos involving mass, acceleration etc.)
Personally, I would reject any paper I reviewed for publication if it contained that word. it shows sloppy thinking…..
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I absolutely hate that word. The other word I can not tolerate is “robust” neither word has any place in a scientific paper.
Seems to me GAIA prefers a temperature about 6 to 10C lower than present – In other word ICE AGE. Graph
Is that what Gore, Hansen, Jones, Mann and the rest want, for us to cool poor GAIA down to her preferred ice age temperatures??? Get rid of the majority of humans investing the biosphere like lice? Sometimes I think that is the real goal of these humanity haters.
The term I was familiar with prior to encountering climatology was “drivers,” not “forcings.” The term was evidently chosen for its emotional impact; i.e., its use is evidence of a propagandistic motivation in “climate science.”
I have always been led to believe that it’s:
“[if you] feed a cold [then you will have to] starve a fever”.
From my experience, that seems to make sense to me.
Since the establishment of the Earth’s curent and third atmosphere, it has generally maintained air temperatures about 10C warmer than present with atmospheric concentrations of about 1,000 to 2,500 ppm of carbon dioxide. The exceptions have been during the occurences of the ice ages at which time the temperatures are about 10C or a little more lower as they are at the present time and the most recent 1 to 20 million years of the present ice age. These ice age intevals represent only a samll percentage of the Earth’s total existence, the existence of the third atmosphere, or the Phanerozoic Eon in which metazoan life proliferated.
In the normal course of events, it is to be expected that the present warm interglacial period would soon end anytime between now and the next thousands of years, and the full effects of the ice age and lower temperatures would resume for another 180,000 thousand years more or less. Upon the end of the present ice age in the next million or more years, the global temperatures would return to normal or about 10C higher than present temperatures, the Arctic Circle would experience a cool temperate climate, and the Arctic Sea would once again have no icecap. These normally warmer conditons could last for tens of millions or a hundred million years or more if the past patterns were to continue as before.
In the meantime, there is ample opportunity for Alarmists and doomsayers to blow both Hot and Cold for many many years to come, so long as they have a credulous audience.
DaveF says:
Thomas Fuller:
“Is it feed a cold and starve a fever or vice-versa?”
I remember it as, “Feed a cold and drown a fever.”
Best wishes, Dave.
I love it! I’ll have to try drowning my next fever… (Anyone got a heating pad I can borrow? 😉
FWIW, I learned why one ought to starve a fever, I believe. I once had a 105 F fever and as I was growing some corn then, made a corn chowder to tide me over (simple to make, easy to consume, even with a sore throat).
Bottom line is that at about 30 years old I ended up with a significant allergy to corn (that I’d eaten my whole life with no problems).
My thesis is that with the immune system hyped up and looking to pound ANYTHING foreign, it latches onto any alien proteins around and goes nuts on them.
So now when I get a fever, I only eat foods I positively hate and never want to eat again and completely avoid any of my favorite foods 😉
E.M.Smith says:
September 12, 2010 at 2:44 pm
“My thesis is that with the immune system hyped up and looking to pound ANYTHING foreign, it latches onto any alien proteins around and goes nuts on them.”
That is OT but very important. I discovered the same thing years ago but I’ve not seen it mentioned anywhere. Is there a name for getting a new allergy while having an allergic reaction? That explains why some people become allergic to almost everything in their homes.
As every mother should know, new foods should be introduced in tiny amounts to a baby, or the baby may become allergic to that food.