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After a 239 post exchange on Facebook, an alarmist gets the last say.
Mark Ruscoe, of Asheville NC writes.
Anthony,
Reading your latest post regarding the lengths to which “tauntology” is used by the alarmist crowd, I wanted to forward something from a long FB thread I’ve been involved in for the last 8 months or so.
I’ll also preface that besides having biological science degrees and enjoying a long career in health care, I’m a climate nobody. So it surprised me how exercised global warming disciples could be out here in the hinterlands when their faith was questioned.
This was occasioned by the Typhoon Haiyan last year, when one of my (many) liberal friends linked it as a sign of our warming planet. It piqued my decidedly non-climatically oriented interest, so I decided to delve in a bit. Lo and behold, thanks to your site and others, I found that events such as that have actually declined in the past several years. I made note of this, and expected not much more.
Little was I prepared for the onslaught to follow. One thing led to another, and I spent much of my winter brushing up on the climate war. I engaged my local FB friends in what I took to be honest skeptical debate.
In particular, one of my antagonists proved unappreciative of my arguments or my sources. Especially, so it seems, yours.
After 239 posts to this particular thread, I felt as if I had made a sufficient skeptical scientific case, and decided that enough was enough. I announced that I was through.
To which my antagonist got the final word:
“…I’ll also give you this: You and your fellow deniers are wrong, and you will be on the wrong side of history. In 50 years you will be scattered with the witch-burners, the white supremacists, the birthers and the creationists who illustrate the limits of the human mind and the danger that come (sic) with them. You’ll be crammed into historical footnotes that students around the world will chuckle at for those five minutes you are mentioned. I wish you could be around to see it, if for no other reason than to hear you bray frantically that Anthony Watts is still right.”
They are locked into what they believe. Truth or facts don’t matter. Worse they use propaganda to back up their already false statements and false science. Once the person is locked into their ‘system’ of belief nothing will shift them, it doesn’t matter what you present to support your argument, they will not be moved! This is fact.
John F. Hultquist says:
“Maybe this: You now know, and perhaps others have learned, that for many people the climate cause has become a religion. Science and religion are fundamentally different. I think it is important to note that science issues are argued with essays, religious issues are settled with guns.”
I see statements like this often and it bothers me. It gives way to much credit to “science” and far too little to “religion.” Science and religion are both institutions of mankind, setting up a process of which we use to answer questions. Science is a process we use to study our surroundings and religion is a process we use to answer questions that tend to extend beyond our physical surroundings. Both are actually closer in essence. This comment takes the end actions used by the people themselves and attributes them to the institution, which I believe is a fallacy.
Manmade global warming is proof and point as you have scientists who have not followed the scientific process and followers that do not care to understand and challenge even the basics, so they resort to blame and violence, both of which are historical attributes of mankind, which can be channeled through any institution (politics comes to mind for some reason). The same happens in religion, if you set up a rigorous doctrine and you push your theologians to study and train under disciplined guidelines and processes, then you end up with people debating and writing essays and studies as honorable men, who then lead the followers and edify them. Otherwise you end up with catastrophes such as the Crusades and more recently, exact and false predictions of “end times.”
Right now science is treated more like some almighty entity and not a process by which to study, which is why we teach our children the studies themselves instead of the means of study and the proper way to perform that study. I think the blame game and violent nature we see these days are more attributed to lack of self-control and humility, which is why it shows up in scientific, political, and religious avenues.
To the people wondering how these people will be doing 20-50 years down the road and reality has diverged even more from The Models That Be: it’s very easy to foresee.
We’ve been there before, actually.
I have long kept a close watch over the soviet/Mao/khmer/Castro apologists back in the 60s. I’ve also taken note of the neo-malthusians of the 70s. Half a century down the road, they’ve basically grown weaker and weaker, with a main base eroding slowly at first and then faster and faster, abruptly leaving just a core basket of nutcases on the day the Wall was teared down by Berliners. A core that grew more radical as reality assaulted their beliefs harder and harder. Nowadays there is but a handful of them “first-day true believers” left and they have become absolute parodies of the very caricatures of them that we would draw back then. “In denial” and “delusive” does not even begin to describe them. I liken that mental illness to a form of senility: the neuron pathways have become burned, etched-in far too long to rescind, so something else has to give way: perception of reality does.
The sad thing is, the main base has simply moved to something else to fill in the void. AGW has replaced Mad Cow Epidemic has replaced Ozon Layer Gone has replaced New Ice Age Now has replaced Mass Starvation Inevitable. Every single time, the Numbers Are Irrefutable and You Are Evil for confronting it.
As with all great scientific truths it goes:
– Experts promptly dismiss the theory as garbage, won’t discuss further
– Core expert group mounts devastating rebuttal to theory, proclaims case is closed
– Experts call for government intervention as the very foundation of science, wisdom and knowledge is threatened
– Experts generously admit they knew theory was right all along
Even if our theories are false and our facts are contrary to nature, it’s still the right thing (TM) to do!
The TAO of Liberalism.
A man cannot serve two masters, nor can he have liberals for friends.
Re Eustace comment earlier, It occurs to me, that if the alarummist type is outraged merely by
encountering contrary opinion, unleashing the whole 9 1/2 yards of Socratic method would
only purpulate them into a howling rage, worthy of the great Fawlty one.
Mark,
As far as Climate Alarmists are concerned, they have a need to believe, they want to believe and g**d***it, they’re gonna believe no matter what. Even when you go to the great lengths you did, to spell it out clearly by presenting them with the facts. The best they can do is to claim you are wrong.
You could make exactly the same claim he signed off with, against him. His is an act of faith and not scientific proof. Indeed, we’ll see who has the last laugh in fifty to a hundred years from now. You or him? Well, I’m laughing at that one now.
James in Perth says, ”Climate alarmism is a mental illness.” Yes. There’s madness in their method.
If Global Cooling begins in earnest, will we burn more coal, to create more CO2, to warm the Planet?
I think it best to not call leftists “liberals”. Liberals believe in liberty. Leftists do not.
It hurts my brain every time I hear the term “Liberal” used in that way.
There are some democrats who are liberal. There are some Republicans who are liberal. But mostly, the main parties function to promote ideology at the expense of liberty.
philjordan replied to my comment and asked, “according to your first link (parents legally married), I come down to the years 52-86, and that only one parent was a citizen (natural). It states that [Obama’s] mother had to have lived in the US for at least 10 years, 5 of which were after age 14. And that alone qualified his citizenship. I think it is clear that she (his mother) did live in the US the requisite time…”
No, she didn’t live in the U.S. the requisite time. Stanley Ann Dunham, was born November 29, 1942, and Obama was born August 4, 1961, so Dunham was only 18 years, 8 months & 5 days old when her baby (the future President Obama) was born. That means only 4 years, 8 months & 5 days had elapsed since her 14th birthday, which is less than the 5 year minimum needed to qualify her baby for citizenship on that basis.
@Dave Burton – I appreciate the information. I was not aware of her age.
We are not “deniers” or “skeptics” we are “realists” because our beliefs are based on real world data, not a computer model or a show of hands.
probono wrote, “I read somewhere that plants are growing 14% faster due to elevated CO2…”
The improvements in plant growth rates from elevated CO2 levels vary from one species to another. All crops benefit, but C4 plants like corn benefit less than C3 plants like wheat, rice & soybeans.
Overall agricultural productivity is considerably higher at 400 ppm than 300 ppm CO2, and it will be higher yet at 500 or 600 ppm. If you look at plant growth rates in response to CO2 enrichment & depletion, that conclusion is inescapable.
Greenhouses are commonly run at ~1500 ppm CO2, to improve plant growth.
America’s most illustrious living scientist, Prof. Freeman Dyson, told Paul Mulshine of The Star Ledger / NJ.com that, “about 15 percent of agricultural yields are due to CO2 we put in the atmosphere.”
In fact, that’s a conservative estimate because, Prof. Dyson told me, “I like to be more cautious in my public statements.”
(Note that “15% of [current] agricultural yields” means a 17.6% improvement over what yields would be without anthropogenic CO2.)
I would say “at least 15%“, for two reasons:
1. Bunce (2012) finds that the Free-Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) methodology results in an underestimate of the agricultural productivity improvement from higher CO2 level, as also explained by Prof. George Hendrey.
2. The intuitive reason that, as decades pass, natural selection will cause plant phenotypes to adjust to environmental changes, enabling them to better utilize higher CO2 levels, compared to what shorter-duration studies measure.
Scientific American began using articles written by their staff journalists in the 1990s while also reducing the content written by frontline researchers. It was worst mistake they ever made in my opinion, but perhaps SA could not have survived in any other form. Perhaps the market for general readership articles with deep content in slickly published magazines began to vanish in the 1990s and is now essentially gone.
Whenever faced with a ‘warmist’ trying to convince me that the world is in danger from CO2 emissions I just ask, ‘what is the actual % of CO2 in the atmosphere?’
Answers, so far, range from 10% up to 60%… When I confirm it is 0.04%, and have they heard of the organisation called 350.org (most have) I just suggest that the answer is the nearly same, but in different units. They either walk away or change the subject.
Folks, thanks for your comments. Even more chilling than my antagonist’s final passage were the several times throughout the debate when he suggested I didn’t even deserve the right to an opinion. In a sense, it was worth engaging this further as I felt the vituperative, desperate
nature would not be lost on other participants in the thread (even though, given the orientation of most of them, they never made note of it).
I should also say that, as basic as my understanding of climate science is, I get the the scientific method and consider myself versed in logic. This gentleman’s grasp on the science was truly poor, and virtually all he could offer was repeated ad hominem.
However insulting the tone of much of the 239 post exchange, I nevertheless valued the experience. First, I took none of personally. It was merely a reflection on the state of his level of knowledge and intolerance for debate…nothing else. Which is always valuable to expose. Second, I remain fond friends with other left-leaning participants in the thread, and have hopes that the experience will prompt positive change for them as they see how silly comments can become when taken to the extreme.
Cheers.
FB is useful because many “friends” do not know that there is another side to this story. That fact is news.
Umm, why are you quoting me? I was referring Mosher’s drive-by, not the OP.
I guess thats what happens when somebody questions the Global Warming dogmatic psuedoecotheocratic beliefs.